The Economic Nationalist

National pollsters ask respondents not only questions like, “Do you approve of the job the president is doing?” but also qualifying, cross-correlating questions like, “For whom did you vote in the last presidential election?” The pollster already knows how many voted for whom in the last election, of course—election results are not subject to post facto revision by opinion polls!—but the pollster asks the question anyway because he wants to estimate the numbers of Election Day supporters who now disapprove of the president’s performance, etc. Such qualifying, cross-correlating questions are routine. Hence, imagine the pollster Gallup’s surprise in December 1963 when, in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, two-thirds of respondents reported voting Kennedy! The real election of 1960 had in fact given Richard Nixon 49 percent of the vote.

As every American not living under the proverbial rock probably already knows, U.S. Army General David Petraeus is scheduled September 2007 to report to Congress on progress in Iraq.

I admit that I have heretofore avoided writing on Iraq. The Web brings no shortage of well informed U.S. opinion on the topic, from every conceivable viewpoint; I am afraid that I have little new to add. Nor do I have much desire to add. I love the U.S. Army fiercely, whose uniform I long ago had the privilege to wear, but the broader matter of the war has developed a sad, anti-Republican theme. I like Republicans, too. This is why, when it comes to writing on the matter, my heart just isn’t in it these days.

Be that as it may, it seems fitting that, at some time before Gen. Petraeus reports, I should summarize my Iraqi views—if not for your attention, then at least for the record. Having done so, should my views turn out wrong, I shall at least have the satisfaction of having expressed them in prospect rather than retrospect. After Gen. Petraeus reports, a cohort resembling Kennedy’s magic two-thirds seem likely to emerge; I would not belong to that cohort, for hindsight always seems wise. That is what this article is about.

Here then in summary are my views on Iraq, and on the broader American issues surrounding her:

1. Kosovo. Kosovo? How can Kosovo be point # 1 in an article on Iraq? Answer: The United States made a major mistake in the broader events surrounding the Iraq War, but not in 2003 when we invaded Iraq, nor even in 1991 when we liberated Kuwait. The major mistake lies in the intervening years in an event which too many Americans seem almost to have forgotten: our 1999 intervention in the Kosovo War. Indeed Americans should wish to forget, because the Kosovo War stains us with dishonor. A whole book should be written on the topic, but to summarize in a single paragraph: In the hardy, 732-AD spirit of Charles “the Hammer” Martel, Christian Serbs had been fighting during the dark years leading up to 1999 to roll back the gradual advance of the Muslim Saracen into Kosovo, the Serbian province Serbs (it is said) regard to be the cradle of their nation. Of course the war was bloody and bitter, and there were atrocities on both sides; for the people who lived there, the stakes could hardly have been higher. Americans should never have fought for either side in a war that was none of our business, but inasmuch as we did fight, we fought for the bad guys in that war. We should have known better. Much contorted political thinking, much hypocrisy, both in the U.S. and in western Europe, has emerged from the Kosovo mistake. Absent the mistake, absent the rampant western hypocrisy the mistake engendered regarding the “Religion of Peace,” events from September 11, 2001, might have flowed in another channel.
2. September 11, 2001. What Osama bin Laden and his fanatical followers did so audaciously to Manhattan that day was horrific. A slightly irrational national response was surely required of us, and by cheering so gleefully for the bad guys while simultaneously flouting the terms of the very 1991 Gulf War treaty by which he had in 1991 cowardly saved his own neck, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein made himself rightly a principal target of post-9/11 U.S. reprisal.
3. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Another book is required on this point; again a brief paragraph must serve. It embarrasses the United States greatly that we have found so little hard evidence of an active nuclear-weapons or other WMD program in Iraq. However, people forget. Saddam in 2001–03 was doing everything possible to give the world the impression that he was in fact hiding a WMD program. We did not make the non-existent WMD program up; he did. Why he did so is a question history may never adequately answer; that he did so is hard to dispute. Anti-war Americans who no longer remember this need to refresh their memories, beginning in 1981 with Operation Opera.
4. The Iraq War. We won the war. Mission accomplished. It was great. But, …
5. We didn’t know when to quit. The whole point of the war was to destroy Saddam’s government, to disrupt his army, to capture or kill Saddam if possible, to slay (collaterally, of course) some random Iraqi elites, to instill a proper fear of Uncle Sam in the hearts of the lucky elite survivors, and to get out. This is called gunboat diplomacy. We did it almost perfectly except on the last point. We did not get out. Big mistake.
6. Before getting out, we should have plundered exactly enough Iraqi oil as booty to pay for the whole U.S. war effort, plus enough extra properly to compensate valued coalition partners like Britain, Poland, Australia, and (at that time) Spain. (Would world opinion not have condemned us for plundering Iraq? Yes, it would have, but so what? World opinion though ignorant does indeed matter, but world opinion has condemned us anyway! What have we gained in exchange for foregoing such valuable, rightful plunder? If Iraq did not want us to plunder her oil, then her government should never have provoked us to war in the first place. The financial cost of the war has been huge. Saddam’s own oil wells should have paid it.)

Where we went wrong was not in invading Iraq but rather in trying to democratize that country, to remake it in the image of, say, Canada. Now, admittedly, allowing for hindsight, at the time democratizing Iraq did indeed seem worth a try, inasmuch as the U.S. had already for other reasons gone to the trouble of invading the country—but what we should never have lost sight of is the fact that the project of democratizing Iraq was an experiment. It was an afterthought. It was an afterthought to almost everybody except President Bush, for whom it seems somehow to have become the point of the whole war. Tail wags dog.

Except for forces needed to secure the aforementioned booty oil, we should have been out of Iraq long before the U.S. general election of 2006, maybe even before the U.S. general election of 2004. What kind of government, what kind of civilization the Iraqis maintain in Iraq is up to them. Though one now doubts it, the U.S. may yet ultimately succeed at pacifying and stabilizing Iraq; but even if so, at what cost? What we are now doing in Iraq is not the project we the people thought that we were signing on for when we first invaded. It is a new project, born perversely of a policy vacuum in the shadow of our 2003 military victory.

Thomas Sowell argues tenaciously and persuasively that the U.S. cannot afford to exit Iraq as long as Iraq provides the best possible base from which to attack a nuclearizing Iran. Mr. Sowell may be right, but I suspect that he also may be missing the point. Firstly, hundreds of millions of people who live near Iran have rather greater an incentive to contain Iranian ambition than we do; containing Iran just isn’t our problem. Secondly, the best insurance available to us against Islamic jihad—rather more effective than the doubtful project of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuke (nice though that would be to do if we could)—would not be to fight Iran but rather humanely to expel all Muslims from the United States; if we really were serious about jihad, then this is what we would do. Thirdly, the United States simply is not willing to do what it takes to impose an American vision of peace on the broader Middle East region. Israel, we shall continue to support, because that brave warrior nation does her own fighting. But even in Iraq, which we have conquered, we punish uncooperative Iraqi civilians by imposing curfews on their villages, whereas our guerilla foes punish uncooperative Iraqi civilians by cutting off their hands and feet from opposite sides. Naturally we are unwilling to match such brutality so long as the war remains over there, so long as the war is not fought here among our own homes. Naturally we should not match such brutality. But, without matching it, how can we win? And, if we cannot win, then why are we still there?

I have come to agree with John Derbyshire. Let the Middle East go hang.

The Bush administration has long insisted that the publication of a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would only empower our foes there. In the beginning, the administration was clearly correct in this, only assuming that it held unpublished plans to withdraw. It seems increasingly clear that there never were any such plans. Ergo, the time to publish a timetable has come. That is my position.

I am not yet completely hardened against any suggestion of a new offensive strategy in Iraq, but whoever offers it is going to have to make a very good case for it. I am also not necessarily wholly opposed to suggestions that we disengage but not yet strategically withdraw. As John Kerry said in 2004, “We are where we are, sir.” Otherwise, however, it is time for new thinking. Containing Iran is not our job. We need to get out of there.

And, while we’re at it, let us get out of Germany, Korea, and most other places our troops are stationed in the old world, while boosting our defense spending here at home and on the high seas to meet unforeseen future threats. We like Germans and Koreans very much, but the greatness of the United States does not depend on how many countries we occupy. Iraq has been an expensive lesson to us. Having paid the price, we should take the lesson to heart.

HJH

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 10:22 am and is filed under Islamic jihad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.