March 24, 2006

Hard Pounding
Who will keep his nerve?

If I could sum up the new orthodoxy about Iraq, it might run something like the following: “I supported the overthrow of the odious Saddam Hussein. But then the poor postwar planning, the unanticipated sectarian strife and insurrection, the mounting American losses, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction — all that and more lost my support. Iraq may or may not work out, but I can see now it clearly wasn’t worth the American effort.”

  

Aside from the old rehash over disbanding the Iraqi army or tardiness in forming a government, three observations can be made about this “readjustment” in belief. First, the nature of the lapses after March 2003 is still the subject of legitimate debate; second, our mistakes are no more severe than in most prior wars; and third, they are not fatal to our cause.

Consider the most frequently alleged errors: the need for more troops; the need to have restored immediate order; and the need to have had up-armored vehicles and some tactical counterplan to improvised explosive devices.

In none of these cases, was the manner of the solution all that clear-cut — especially since on the first day of the war the United States was trying to avoid targeting civilians, avoiding infrastructure as much as possible, and waging a supposed war of liberation rather than one of punitive annihilation.

Had we brought in another 200,000 troops to secure Iraq, the vast increases in the size and cost of American support might not have been commensurate within an increased ability to put down the insurrection, which from the beginning was decentralized and deliberately designed to play off larger concentrations of conventional patrolling Americans — the more targets the better.

The insurrection broke out not so much because we had 200,000 rather than 400,000 troops in country; but rather because a three-week strike that decapitated the Baathist elite, despite its showy “shock and awe” pyrotechnics, was never intended, World War II-like, to crush the enemy and force terms on a shell-shocked, defeated, and humiliated populace. Many of our challenges, then, are not the war in Iraq per se, but the entire paradox of postmodern war in general in a globally televised world.

And if the point of Iraq was to stress “Iraqification” and avoid too large an American footprint in the Middle East, then ubiquitous Americans may have posed as many problems as they solved — with two or three Green zones rather than one. Instead of drawing down to 100,000 we might now be talking of hoping to keep below 300,000 troops.

Past history suggests that military efficacy is not so much always a question of the number of troops — but rather of how they are used. Especially large American deployments can foster dependency rather than autonomy on the part of the Iraqi security forces. Each month, fewer Americans are dying in Iraq, while more Iraqis are fighting the terrorists — as it becomes clear to them that some enormous occupation force is not on its own going to save the Iraqis’ democracy for them.

The looting should have been stopped. But by the same token, after the statue fell, had the U.S. military begun immediately to shoot looters on sight — and that was what restoring order would have required — or carpet bombed the Syrian and Iranian borders to stop infiltration, the outcry would have arisen that we were too punitive and gunning down poor and hungry people even in peace. I fear that 400,000 peacekeepers, given the rules of postbellum engagement, would have been no more likely to shoot thieves than would 200,000.

We forget that one of the reasons for the speed of the American advance and then the sudden rush to stop military operations — as was true in the first Gulf War — was the enormous criticism leveled at the Americans for going to war in the first place, and the constant litany cited almost immediately of American abuses involving excessive force. Shooting looters may have restored order, but it also would have now been enshrined as an Abu-Ghraib-like crime — a photo of a poor “hungry” thief broadcast globally as an unarmed victim of American barbarism. We can imagine more “Highway of Death” outrage had we bombed concentrations of Shiites pouring in from Iran or jihadists from Syria going to “weddings” and “festivals” in Iraq.

Throughout this postmodern war, the military has been on the horns of a dilemma: Don’t shoot and you are indicted for being lax and allowing lawlessness to spread; shoot and you are gratuitously slandered as a sort of rogue LAPD in camouflage. We hear only of the deliberately inexact rubric “Iraqi civilian lo