Failure Is Not An Option: Part 6
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”
For the last week, we’ve been looking into these descriptions of failure. Today, we’ll finish the series by looking at the last five.
Failure in Iraq is the creation of a more dangerous world.
The rationale behind this one is deeply connected to the notion that our withdrawal from Iraq will turn the country into a safe-haven for terrorists. With the notion that the terrorists will be safe to educate and train new recruits comes the following effect that the world will necessarily be more dangerous than it is today. Most of the response to this is the same as to that.
With that being said, can anyone suggest that the world is safer with us in Iraq? Iraqis aren’t safer with us there. Our troops aren’t safer with us there. Recent events surely don’t show that Israel and Lebanon are safer. And we can’t even truly say that we’re safer, because the troops in Iraq don’t prevent terrorists from boarding a plane in Boston or New York.
And as I said before, the American boots on the Iraqi ground go a long way towards provoking the violence in the first place.
If failure in Iraq is a dangerous world, then events in the region show that we have already failed.
Failure in Iraq will create chaos in the region
Chaos in the Middle East? This excuse is damn near laughable.
Failure in Iraq is a failure to secure our own country.
Again, this is tied closely to the notions that Iraq will become a safe-haven for terrorists and that it is the first domino in the newest version of the Great Game. This warning is exactly what the President means when he reiterates that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror. I won’t make the argument again, because I’ve made it before, but you can’t have a war on terror; as Tony Corn wrote (in an article I don’t fully agree with), “The West is no more at war with terrorism today than it was at war with blitzkrieg in World War II or revolution during the Cold War.”
With that as a given, however, the President sees (as does Tony Corn) the war in Iraq as the war against a new totalitarianism. I humbly disagree. I see the war in Iraq as the war between two competing totalitarianisms. One is the totalarianism of fundamentalist Islam (though I don’t think it wants to take over the West as much as it doesn’t want to be bothered by the West), and the other is the totaliarianism of the “free market.”
Failure in Iraq is not so much a failure to secure our country as much as a failure to secure a new market. Personally, that’s a failure I can live with.
Failure in Iraq is a sign that “we will have lost our soul as a nation”
The President’s full quote is, “If we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation as far as I’m concerned.” But pulling out of Iraq, Mr. President, is not a sign that we have lost the desire. It’s a sign that we understand it is not our military that should be helping them. As long as the United States exists, it will desire to help those who have not asserted their human rights to do so. But we must realize tanks do not assert human rights. Only regular people do.
We imagined that the only thing standing between the Iraqis and their dream of a peaceful, free state was the mustachioed arch-villain, Saddam Hussein. So our cowboy President took out the bad guy, thinking that was all that was necessary. Perhaps if had seen The Three Amigos, he would have realized that there are no such thing as cowboy heroes. There are only the townspeople, taking it upon themselves to make their corner of the world a better place.
Withdrawal from Iraq is not a sign of anything other than the fact that the United States understands that unparalleled military power is not the blank check it used to be. It’s a sign that we have learned a lesson. That lesson is not that the terrorists are stronger than we thought, but that military might is not enough to reverse the effects of history, poverty, and illiteracy.
Our military withdrawal from Iraq must be countered by a monetary invasion. We should help the Iraqi government establish itself not on the basis of protecting its citizens from the insurgents, but on the basis of educating its citizens out of the desire for insurgency. The millions of Iraqis who cast their votes way back when reveal the desire for a peacable Iraq, but the violence of Iraqi on Iraqi in recent months reveal the ignorance of how to make that happen. We’re not going to teach them peace by shooting them in the head.
If withdrawal from Iraq is the loss of our soul as a nation, then our soul isn’t worth the parchment that Jefferson wrote it on.
You’re right, Mr. President, failure is no longer an option. But that is only because you’ve already failed. It’s time to learn from our failure. It’s time to move on. It’s time to move our troops out of Iraq.