Will We Choose to Win in Iraq?
STUNTZ, WILLIAM J.
Will We Choose to Win in Iraq? The war is frustrating. That doesn't mean we ought to get out. BY WILLIAM J. STUNTZ Thirty-eight years ago, American politics was rocked by another politically...
...Then, as now, liberal Democrats competed for the allegiance of an increasingly powerful antiwar left...
...But those who did appear to have died in vain...
...have both written columns basically endorsing the current John F. Kerry view of the Iraq war: that it William J. Stuntz is the Henry J. Friendly professor at Harvard Law School...
...Our side in Iraq holds elections...
...To be sure, more American boots on the ground might mean more American body bags...
...The Iraq war is different in every relevant respect...
...We are fighting all three enemies in Iraq today: Baathist insurgents under the leadership of dead-end Saddamites, bin Ladenesque insurgents under the leadership of Zarqawi's successors, and Shiite death squads under the leadership of Sadr and his associates...
...So far, Iraq has cost one-twentieth that number...
...the ones who are already there are doing net harm...
...According to Michael Barone, the gold standard in political commentary, many of the voters who pulled the lever for McCarthy were dissatisfied with Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam war not because they believed the war was wrong or wasteful, but because they believed America was losing it...
...After all, everyone wants one of those two outcomes...
...And there is a sure-fire test of whether or not victory truly is impossible: See whether a rising number of American soldiers in a given city or neighborhood tends to produce more violence or less...
...That isn't near-victory...
...it's total defeat...
...All three are dangerous because all have imperial ambitions...
...And the Bush administration's decision not to ramp up the number of soldiers in Iraq probably rests on a judgment that public opinion would not tolerate that course of action...
...All three reasons seem to apply to the Iraq war...
...Those New Hampshire Democrats who ended Lyndon Johnson's presidency were not wrong...
...Foreign policy realists criticize the Iraq war on a different ground, one that plausibly applied both to Vietnam and to Korea: Victory for our opponents would have only modest strategic consequences...
...That would give Ahmadinejad's Iran a chain of likeminded governments stretching from Afghanistan's western border to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley...
...For reasons already explored, the strategic stakes— and the human stakes, for Iraqis, for the rest of the Islamic world, and for a West that remains under threat from mass murderers—are very high indeed, comparable to the stakes in earlier fights in which America invested far more blood and treasure...
...earlier this month, Ned Lam-ont triumphed over Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut...
...Needless to say, all three hate the West...
...As Barone puts it in Our Country, voters dissatisfied with Vietnam wanted to "win or get out...
...Consequently, all casualties seem to testify to the cruelty of Western power and the pointless suffering it causes...
...Then, as now, that constituency flexed its muscles in a key Democratic primary that seemed to turn American politics upside down: In March 1968, Eugene McCarthy almost defeated President Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire...
...A moderate Shiite-led democracy in Iraq would offer the Iranian people a picture of the alternative the mullahs and madmen who rule Tehran have denied them...
...But I bet they'd prefer winning to getting out...
...The territory over which we fight is among the most strategically important in the world...
...Still, fear of excessive casualties may cause a worse problem than more soldiers' graves...
...Vietnam cost the lives of 58,000 American soldiers...
...The real political problem with Iraq may be not that we're fighting an unwinnable or less-than-worthwhile war, but that our forces are at serious risk of avoidable defeat...
...But on any historical scale, American casualties in Iraq to date remain remarkably light...
...The recent fighting in southern Lebanon illustrates two key truths of the battle against Islamic terrorism: Whenever the fight involves a Western military force, time favors the terrorists...
...America has three enemies in the Middle East today: secular or Sunni Baathism, violent Sunni jihadism, and violent Shiite jihadism...
...George F. Will and William F. Buckley Jr...
...Rarely has a militarily powerful state fought for nobler ends...
...In assessing war's costs, the pointlessness of deaths matters more than their number...
...The effect on local opinion may not matter, but the effect on European and American voters may be huge...
...Iraq the Model, a blogger who knows far more about conditions in Baghdad than most Western reporters, fears not that American soldiers will cause more killing, but that we have too few soldiers on the ground to pacify territory and then hold it...
...The key difference has to do with publicity...
...That would have been inconceivable six decades ago...
...This war is not like Vietnam, where a massive buildup failed to produce military success...
...In Lamont's speeches, as in the antiwar rants on Daily Kos, the first half of that phrase is missing...
...it's radically unstable...
...The Truman and Eisenhower administrations both decided to stop fighting as soon as the Chinese and North Koreans were willing to accept the continued division of the peninsula...
...Instead of "win or get out," the critics' standard line is simply: Get out...
...There is no strong evidence that more boots on the ground lead to more violence, and at least some evidence to the contrary...
...The other side kills people who stand in line to vote...
...Voters may indeed want America either to win or get out of Iraq...
...As for Vietnam, it should suffice to note that America won the Cold War decisively even after North Vietnam conquered the South...
...But do the voters agree...
...Iraq isn't stable...
...Baathist Syria will be less stable if Iraq is more so...
...A good many opponents of the Vietnam war argued that our side was no better than the Viet Cong, that the fight was between two sets of thugs—and the thugs on the other side had more popular support...
...As three rationales justify abandoning wars before they're finished, so too three reasons justify ramping up rather than ramping down, fighting harder instead of ceasing to fight at all...
...If there is any significant possibility that the presence of more American soldiers on the ground in Iraq would raise the odds of success, not putting those soldiers on the ground is a crime...
...It ought to be inconceivable now...
...But on any plausible scale of strategic value, Iraq today easily beats Vietnam in the late 1960s or Korea in the early 1950s...
...Today, as in 1968, "win or get out" is a natural response to a long, frustrating war, especially when the war is going badly...
...It's not too late to add them now...
...The real question is, which one...
...First, the status quo might be both acceptable and stable...
...But I wonder...
...Recently, as part of the Army's effort to reduce the killing in Baghdad, soldiers were pulled out of Mosul— and violence in Mosul escalated...
...A large portion, maybe a large majority, might believe that Americans should fight only wars that are worth winning, that we should do all in our power to win them, and that the Iraq war meets the first standard but fails the second...
...First, experience may suggest that more men and more materiel will lead to better results...
...In this war, the Western press is a willing accomplice of the West's enemies...
...And third, time may be on the enemy's side: Sometimes victory must be won soon if it is to be won at all...
...Second, the value of victory or the cost of defeat may justify a greater investment in the fight...
...On the other hand, if American forces were to leave Iraq now, the likely result would be an escalating civil war that would radicalize Iraq's Shiites, leaving Sadr and his ilk in control of either the whole country or its Shiite-majority region—along with most of its oil...
...As between the dovish critique of the Bush administration's performance in Iraq and the hawkish one, the hawks have the better argument...
...each seeks not control of a small piece of Middle Eastern real estate but regional hegemony—even, in the case of the jihadists, world domination...
...BY WILLIAM J. STUNTZ Thirty-eight years ago, American politics was rocked by another politically controversial war...
...Instead, Iraq looks more like a slow-motion Somalia: The conflict began with too few soldiers to do the job, and as the threat built, reinforcements were not added...
...And Shiite jihadism loses the most of all...
...Those are stunning facts...
...it only hears about the victory or suffers the defeat after the fact...
...others are not worth fighting very hard...
...Western governments apparently think so...
...That is roughly the decision the United States made in Korea after 1951: The North Korean and Chinese invasions of South Korea had been repelled, and the South's government was unlikely to fall if the fighting ended...
...Perhaps the administration is right...
...But that is not what the evidence shows...
...The pattern extends beyond the angry left...
...That might mean the end of the current Iranian regime, in the not too distant future...
...Shortly before Kim Il Sung's army invaded South Korea, Secretary of State Dean Acheson all but invited the attack, declaring South Korea outside America's zone of strategic concern...
...American soldiers are responsible for ousting a murderous monster and allowing Iraqis to elect their leaders after a generation under the monster's heel...
...In an intelligence war, with battles like the one just fought and won in Great Britain against the would-be bombers of international flights, the public doesn't see the fighting...
...And that would be true even if our enemies were not uncommonly murderous—which they plainly are...
...Iran, now the biggest danger to American interests in the region, is potentially our most valuable friend, because Iran's population is more pro-American than any other Muslim people save the Kurds...
...The real problem is that we aren't doing either...
...France's backing and filling over the past couple of weeks over how many troops to deploy to southern Lebanon may be nothing more than an attempt by its government to avoid antagonizing French voters...
...Taking away the ones who are already there would be an atrocity...
...Some wars are not worth fighting at all...
...There is one more possible reason to head for the exits in Iraq: Victory is either impossible or (what amounts to the same thing) prohibitively expensive...
...Second, success may be worth too little to justify the effort...
...It's hard to imagine a more morally worthy goal...
...And there may be one more parallel...
...Because the Israeli Defense Forces fought halfheartedly (more the politicians' fault than the IDF's), few Israeli soldiers died in the recent war...
...For three-and-a-half years, those soldiers have fought a loose coalition of equally murderous enemies who sought to replace the monster with their own brands of thuggery...
...But when the United States is engaged in a battle with a vicious enemy whose victory will produce death and enslavement on a massive scale, it is a crime of historic proportions to lose the fight because the resources devoted to the battle were insufficient...
...Our strategic interests suffered more from the war itself than from Hanoi's triumph...
...isn't worth fighting...
...Maybe so...
...A jihadist Shiite superpower with nuclear capability at the head of such an alliance is a truly terrible outcome, comparable in world-historical terms to Hitlerite rule over Europe...
...Israel's failed war against Hezbollah illustrates the point...
...In wars fought by soldiers with guns and tanks, the story is different...
...Each of those groups loses big if a democratic regime is successfully established in Iraq...
...when the fight involves intelligence or police work, time favors the West...
...Defeat will leave that same regime inestimably strengthened...
...A pullout now risks a regime controlled by radical Shiites like Moktada al-Sadr—another ally for Iran, to add to Baathist Syria and Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon...
...If the answer is more, then it is pointless to send more soldiers...
...Or maybe they have an attitude similar to the one Barone saw among Vietnam-era voters...
...America's military is fighting not to protect one set of thugs from another, but to allow a democratically elected government to establish itself in a society a majority of whose members want it to do so...
...The "our side is no better" line pops up a lot these days in connection with Iraq, but it simply isn't true...
...Which leads to the last reason—time...
...Plainly, this condition doesn't hold in Iraq today...
...Across the ideological spectrum, one hears and reads arguments for pulling back or pulling out...
...A stable Iraq will show that Sunnis and Shiites can live together peacefully without a Sunni autocrat's boot, a terrible message for Sunni jihadists...
...The Vietnam war should never have been fought—not by American soldiers, at any rate—and was fought badly, at huge cost in American and Vietnamese lives...
...Every billow of smoke that rises from a seemingly peaceful Arab neighborhood, each woman wailing over the destruction of her home—even when the images are faked (and fakery is easy)—is beamed into European and American homes...
...These three enemy forces have demonstrated their willingness to work together: witness Baathist Syria's alliance with Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, and the sometime cooperation of Zarqawi's Islamist killers with pro-Saddam Iraqi insurgents...
...Perhaps voters would say that more soldiers only make a bad situation worse, that we're spending money and lives to no purpose...
...There are three plausible grounds for pulling out of a war...
...It is good and right that American soldiers' lives should be spent warily, and only when necessary...
...Victory will place the most dangerous regime on the planet, Iran's fascist theocracy, in serious peril...
...Whether or not many voters do think that, there is a strong case to be made that they should...
...It is well worth fighting to prevent this—indeed, it is worth fighting harder than America has fought to date...
...It is as if the United States had lost the Battle of the Bulge because the Germans had more tanks, more planes, and more men on the battlefield...
...something resembling victory might already have been achieved...
Vol. 11 • September 2006 • No. 47
