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| Volume XIV, Fall 2007, Number 3 |
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| Editor's Note |
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Washington policy circles were abuzz in August over a New York Times op-ed by the
Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack entitled “A War We Just Might
Win.” They were referring to the one in Iraq, having just returned from an eight-day U.S. military-sponsored
junket to the war zone. They claim the situation, from a strictly military perspective, is
not hopeless, although they end with a caveat: “How much longer should American troops keep
fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much
longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the
reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields
of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.” The military
want another six months at least, and they enlisted a few friends (William Kristol, neocon editor of
The Weekly Standard, was another) to help them convince the opinion molders. The piece was
relentlessly promoted on television and radio talk shows, where the message was swallowed hook,
line and sinker. Not so in the blogosphere: Glenn Greenwald of Salon ax-murdered the op-ed and its
authors’ credibility, to the cheering of cognoscenti everywhere who no longer trust the major
media.
The O’Hanlon-Pollack piece is a love letter to the troops and the revered General David
Petraeus, father of the surge, who will have given his report to Congress by the time this journal is
read. Of course, there is little doubt about what he will say — the surge is working but needs more
time to really succeed, and so forth. The authors were early proponents of the war who have been
forced to watch the debacle metastasize for four long years. If it can be salvaged somehow, so
perhaps can their credibility. Besides, no one from the Washington policy elite can afford not to
“support the troops,” in whose ranks people of their social demographic seldom serve. Sharing
hideous field conditions with America’s brave, endangered, exhausted youth makes one feel guilty
about sitting in a chilled office drinking iced lattes. It would be unfeeling not to see the glass in
Iraq as half full. It would also be unwise for anyone hoping to take part in the next administration to
wander too far from the seldom-debated elite consensus: the world is better off if we run it, though
maybe not with our own boots on the ground.
Not all Washington analysts agree with the cheerleaders, even those who went with them to
Iraq. Anthony Cordesman of CSIS, who participated in our recent Capitol Hill symposium on U.S.
Middle East strategy (see page 1), is more pessimistic. The Iraqi government “has failed to act at
the rate necessary to move the country forward or give American military action political meaning,”
he charges. But there has been one piece of luck, according to Cordesman: the decision of the
Sunni tribal shaikhs in Anbar and northern Iraq to fight al-Qaeda in their midst. He condemns the
original U.S. strategy, however, saying that without major revisions it will fail. “Like it or not, the
U.S. will be rightly seen as having gone to war for the wrong reasons, as having consistently
mismanaged the ‘peace’ that followed and been largely responsible for the suffering of some 27
million Iraqis” (see the Cordesman trip report at www.csis.org).
As regime-change advocates would have it, real peace talks cannot happen first; a deal with Syria involving an exchange of land for peace would cement in place the ruling Baath party of Bashar al-Asad. If he were to regain through negotiations the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since its Blitzkrieg of June 1967, he would be a god to his people, having set right what his father could not. A popular leader is very hard to topple, even in a weak state. The fantasy of finding a Syrian Ahmad Chalabi to take power and stop making trouble for Israel and Lebanon dies hard. This domino was supposed to fall when Iraq was shocked and awed back in 2003 (see the symposium proceedings for a discussion of U.S. concerns about talking to Syria, p. 1).
The military claims there is a window of about six months (yet another one?) for the surge to
“succeed” — well into ’08. With the British having retreated in the south, and the Shiite militias
fighting each other there, instability seems to have markedly increased, though we are trying to pin
this on Iran. The Bush administration is even going to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a
terrorist organization in order to be able to more easily make war on Iran (see Parsi and Amuzegar
on the complexities of Iranian politics). The war in Afghanistan is also heating up again, according
to all accounts (The New York Times, August 12), just as the American public is growing impatient
to be rid of our military commitments. The gap between elite and popular opinion is widening, and
when the bill comes due, it will grow even wider. Last week, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, our war czar,
actually mentioned the word “draft” in public testimony. No other concept so perfectly conjures up the shade of Vietnam and the bitter antiwar protests of the late 1960s. The public is not there
yet, but it could eventually arrive at that place, no matter which party wins the election in November
2008. Power to the people, we used to say.
It seems clear that the front-running presidential candidates agree with Bill Clinton: Americans
would rather have their leader be strong and wrong than weak and right (see articles inside about
the complexities of “democracy” by Isakhan, Goldsmith and Yavuz/Ozcan). The success of the
Giuliani candidacy among the Republican base only makes sense from this perspective. Idealistic
fervor seems to sell better than realism. The major Democratic candidates are all for withdrawing
“combat” troops from Iraq, and to most people that sounds like leaving. However, if you read the
fine print, they differentiate between combat and other sorts of military support (advisers, special
forces) and between permanent and other sorts of bases. Despite the debacle in Iraq, Hillary
Clinton and Barak Obama do not differ very much from the Republican administration on how to
manage the Middle East. They seem to agree with the neoconservative Robert Kagan: the United
States has to be seen actively maintaining world order or people will not believe we will intervene.
Obama caused a stir in July, when he delivered a major foreign-policy speech that veered
outside the parameters of respectable debate, stating that he would retaliate against an al-Qaeda
strike by bombing Pakistan, if the perpetrators could be located there. Never mind that this is
current policy and was the excuse for the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq in 2003. Obama had
also expressed sympathy for the Palestinians (and then had to try to shore up support from AIPAC
for this breach of standard practice). He has also shocked the elite gatekeepers by advocating
talks with any and all world leaders in an effort to secure U.S. interests. This was called naïve;
conventional wisdom has it that we must not reward adversaries by meeting them face to face. Of
course we speak to “peer competitors” like the former Soviet Union and China, but Henry Kissinger
in the 1970s promised Israel that the United States would not even talk to the PLO until they met
several preconditions. This hamstrung U.S. diplomacy but protected Israel’s victim status and left
it free to annex as much Palestinian land as possible (see articles on the current lack of peace by
Kelman, Kasrils and Peled-Elhanan). We still allow Israel to call the shots. Ehud Barak, a contender
for power again, has said that talking to Hamas had to wait until Israel had a military deterrent to
the low-tech missiles that have been lobbed into Israeli towns from the Gaza Strip. There is no sign
that the U.S. government, whichever party leads it, will talk Israel down from this position. And the
current fiasco in the making — buying off Fatah and starving Hamas — is an Israeli plan that
Washington has had to accept.
Policies like these cause “them” to hate us and our quislings. Unfortunately, we need “their”
cooperation in order to bring some order to the chaotic world — if only to do business. American
interests cannot be realized if the whole Muslim Middle East and its sympathizers live to thwart
them, out of a desire to take revenge for what are seen as outrages in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon,
Afghanistan and Iran.
Anne Joyce
August 15, 2007
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