Sunday, December 28, 2003
Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out
All throughout the runup to the Iraq war (during what White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card famously called "rolling out a new product," between September 2002 and March 2003), we kept hearing tales about how if we just rooted out Saddam Hussein and installed a democratic government, Iraq could become the model for other aspiring democratized, free-market societies in the Middle East. But in today's Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports on the vast scaling back of those dreams. The deadline for the U.S. to transfer sovereignty to the provisional government is July 1--after which Bush will be able to proclaim "Mission accomplished" again, and begin posing for campaign photo-ops with returning soldiers. After that, many highly touted objectives, such as the privatization of previously state-owned businesses and the drafting of a constitution, are going to be dumped in the laps of the already fractious Iraqi governing council--along with the thorny problem of reconciling the conflicting desires of Iraq's various ethnic and religious groups.
So let us get this straight: The neocon dream for turning Iraq into an Islamic Switzerland, which was as stupidly romantic in its own way as any fantasy a 12-year-old girl ever cooked up about the boy in the next row, ran up against realities of resistance to conquest that should have been obvious to anybody who ever took a Western Civ course. And now the whole thing has turned into farce, with a steady drip of American casualties and growing skepticism about the wisdom of the war on the part of American voters. So rather than staying the course for as long as it takes no matter how hard it is (as our Maximum Leader has promised time and time again), we are getting out.
Congratulations, Iraqi resistance. You won.
But our departure is all just temporary. Even if this stratagem gets Bush reelected, he's not done with Iraq. When the place dissolves into horrific civil war sometime in 2005 (within a few months of the much-ballyhooed first democratic election) and ignites the rest of the Middle East with it, he'll have to come up with another genius plan to fix it--or, more likely, another genius misdirection ploy to keep voters from thinking too much about it, or knowing the truth. And if Bush somehow gets thrown out in the 2004 election, his successor will inherit the same mess. And then, because the base hypocrisy of the Republican Party knows no bounds, we'll be treated to the spectacle of them screaming about the quagmire in Iraq and wondering why the Democratic president can't get us out.
I was opposed and remain opposed to the war in Iraq--we should never have gone in there with all guns blazing like we did, and we sure as hell shouldn't have done it on the word of Ahmed Chalabi, who snookered Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocon geniuses like it was all three-card monte. But now that we're there, we have a responsibility to make sure we don't leave the place worse than we found it. (Which is pretty much what Howard Dean has been saying all along.) Bush's decision to cut and run to aid his reelection campaign is an abdication of that responsibility. Once again, the vaunted moral clarity under which this administration supposedly operates is revealed as malleable public relations nonsense with the same relation to the truth as a beer commercial.
If there is a hell, there are going to be a lot of surprised souls there someday, none more so than that of George W. Bush. I expect to have a good laugh at his expense when I get there myself.
All throughout the runup to the Iraq war (during what White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card famously called "rolling out a new product," between September 2002 and March 2003), we kept hearing tales about how if we just rooted out Saddam Hussein and installed a democratic government, Iraq could become the model for other aspiring democratized, free-market societies in the Middle East. But in today's Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports on the vast scaling back of those dreams. The deadline for the U.S. to transfer sovereignty to the provisional government is July 1--after which Bush will be able to proclaim "Mission accomplished" again, and begin posing for campaign photo-ops with returning soldiers. After that, many highly touted objectives, such as the privatization of previously state-owned businesses and the drafting of a constitution, are going to be dumped in the laps of the already fractious Iraqi governing council--along with the thorny problem of reconciling the conflicting desires of Iraq's various ethnic and religious groups.
So let us get this straight: The neocon dream for turning Iraq into an Islamic Switzerland, which was as stupidly romantic in its own way as any fantasy a 12-year-old girl ever cooked up about the boy in the next row, ran up against realities of resistance to conquest that should have been obvious to anybody who ever took a Western Civ course. And now the whole thing has turned into farce, with a steady drip of American casualties and growing skepticism about the wisdom of the war on the part of American voters. So rather than staying the course for as long as it takes no matter how hard it is (as our Maximum Leader has promised time and time again), we are getting out.
Congratulations, Iraqi resistance. You won.
But our departure is all just temporary. Even if this stratagem gets Bush reelected, he's not done with Iraq. When the place dissolves into horrific civil war sometime in 2005 (within a few months of the much-ballyhooed first democratic election) and ignites the rest of the Middle East with it, he'll have to come up with another genius plan to fix it--or, more likely, another genius misdirection ploy to keep voters from thinking too much about it, or knowing the truth. And if Bush somehow gets thrown out in the 2004 election, his successor will inherit the same mess. And then, because the base hypocrisy of the Republican Party knows no bounds, we'll be treated to the spectacle of them screaming about the quagmire in Iraq and wondering why the Democratic president can't get us out.
I was opposed and remain opposed to the war in Iraq--we should never have gone in there with all guns blazing like we did, and we sure as hell shouldn't have done it on the word of Ahmed Chalabi, who snookered Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocon geniuses like it was all three-card monte. But now that we're there, we have a responsibility to make sure we don't leave the place worse than we found it. (Which is pretty much what Howard Dean has been saying all along.) Bush's decision to cut and run to aid his reelection campaign is an abdication of that responsibility. Once again, the vaunted moral clarity under which this administration supposedly operates is revealed as malleable public relations nonsense with the same relation to the truth as a beer commercial.
If there is a hell, there are going to be a lot of surprised souls there someday, none more so than that of George W. Bush. I expect to have a good laugh at his expense when I get there myself.
