President Bush, in his August press conference, said, “The American people have got to understand the consequence of leaving Iraq.” I think he’s right. Before we can genuinely call for our troops to leave Iraq, we have to know what the end result of that process will look like. We have to know what failure means.

According to the President, failure in Iraq is…:

• A civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites
• Innocent civilians living their lives in fear
• The creation of “a safe-haven for terrorists”
• A message to reformers in the Middle East that the US has “abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror.”
• The first domino
• The creation of a more dangerous world
• Chaos in the region
• Telling our troops that they sacrificed for nothing
• A failure to secure our own country
• A sign that “we will have lost our soul as a nation”

Yesterday, we continued last week’s project of looking into these descriptions of failure. Today, we’ll keep going and look at his fifth description.

Failure in Iraq is the first domino in the newest version of the Great Game

At a press conference in 1954, President Eisenhower was asked about the importance of Indochina. He responded:

You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences….When we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people. Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand. It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go — that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live. So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.

In his press conference, President Bush said:

The only way to defeat this ideology in the long term is to defeat it through another ideology, a competing ideology, one that — where government, you know, responds to the will of the people…It would be a huge mistake for the United States to leave the region, to concede territory to the terrorists.

This is in no way different from the Cold War thinking that led to Vietnam. In the movie, The Fog of War, Kennedy and Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, talks about his trip to Vietnam in 1995, when he learned that the only reason the Vietnamese partnered with Russia was because they wanted the U.S. out. The domino theory was just plain wrong, and in the movie, which is all about the lessons that McNamara learned throughout his life, this realization is the basis of lesson number eight, “Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.”

The idea that our withdrawal from Iraq would be only the first step in the “terrorists” (as if they all work together) eventual domination of the globe is a silly one. The President imagines a vast army of terrorists conquering nation after nation, kind of like…oh, I don’t know…the way the West has always feared the conquering potential of Islam.

In his classic work, Orientalism, Edward Said writes:

Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devestation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the “Ottoman peril” lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events, its figures, virtues, and vices, as something woven into the fabric of life…[a fear of] what Henri Baudet has called ‘the Asiatic tidal wave.’

The President’s warning that the terrorists will attempt to conquer the whole globe if not defeated in Iraq is the latest in a long line of warnings about the constant battle between the Occident and the Orient. In 2003, Said wrote in the preface to the 20th anniversary edition of his book:

The terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like ‘America,’ ‘the West,’ or ‘Islam,’ and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed, their murderous efectiveness vastly reduced in influence and mobilizing power…Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.

If failure in Iraq is the first domino in the newest version of the Great Game, then we must say two things: First, with Kiplinger, “When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.”; and second, with Said, “Critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy…Humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against inhuman practicies and injustices that disfigure human history.”

Come back tomorrow for the conclusion, “Failure Is Not An Option: Part 6.”