The Great Deceiver

THE CHRIS POWELL COLUMN


SO NOW LIEBERMAN TELLS US:
SEND MORE TROOPS TO IRAQ

By CHRIS POWELL

Last year as he began his campaign for re-election to the Senate, Joe Lieberman evaded questions about whether the number of U.S. troops in Iraq was enough to win the war there. Having lost the Democratic primary, Lieberman cinched the election by declaring in the last days of his campaign that he wanted the war brought to an end soon. The inference drawn by many voters was that, if re-elected, Lieberman would assist the search for a prompt way out.

Safely back in office for six years, Lieberman finally has answered the troop level question. In an essay about Iraq that was published the other day by the Washington Post, the senator wrote: "In nearly four years of war, there have never been sufficient troops to accomplish our mission." So Lieberman now supports a bigger war, a troop "surge" that "should be militarily meaningful in size, with a clearly defined mission."

But what should that "clearly defined mission" be? Lieberman didn't say.

Apparently it is to be more of the same, more mediation of Iraq's civil war, more U.S. military patrols down Iraqi streets to try to draw fire, more dragging the American killed and wounded back to base, and more doing it again the next day, all without ever holding ground.

That is the great crime in which Lieberman now is even more complicit and about which he deceived his constituents in the election: that the U.S. military isn't being allowed to win the war, because the cost of winning would be too much inhumanity to accomplish too little, since Iraq has not been a threat to anyone since it was expelled from Kuwait.

For the war in Iraq could easily be won: Iraq could be destroyed and made uninhabitable. Indeed, with their tribalism and religious fanaticism, the Iraqis themselves already have nearly done as much.

So U.S. soldiers in Iraq have become a hamstrung police force, opposing terrorists and gangsters who live among a population that supports them as often as it is victimized by them and really can't be distinguished from them and yet can't be attacked either lest the innocent be harmed too.

Now many Iraqis are protesting the execution of their former gangster dictator, Saddam Hussein, whose regime murdered and tortured tens of thousands. Many Iraqis miss him. And why not? Given the anarchy that has been unleashed on Iraq by Saddam's removal and the refusal of the United States to undertake the brutal methods necessary to control such a primitive country, Iraq actually was better off under Saddam, with fewer casualties and higher living standards.

Even Iraqis who hated Saddam would replace him only with another gangster more favorable to their tribe or sect. Such cultures are not remade overnight. Why should they be remade with American blood?

Gerald Ford, suddenly being revered after being forgotten for three decades, may have put it well a couple of years ago in an interview with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, an interview whose contents were not to be published until the former president's death, as they were published the other day. Reflecting on the Vietnam war, which he had both supported and allowed to end, Ford said: "I don't think we can force democracy on a people or a nation not prepared for it."

As in Iraq now, in Vietnam the United States did not wage war to win, did not wage war to hold ground, because the cost of winning would have been too much inhumanity. Instead, as in Iraq now, in Vietnam the United States waged a war of attrition amid a civil war. While the side the United States supported collapsed as soon as U.S. forces were withdrawn, Vietnam quickly refuted the "domino theory" that had rationalized the U.S. military intervention: Vietnam promptly went to war with its former great-power patron, China, and then invaded Cambodia to overthrow the genocidal communist regime there. Now Vietnam is Asia's new capitalist hot spot, soaking up U.S. investment.

President Bush, Senator Lieberman, and other advocates of policing Iraq warn that U.S. withdrawal would spark a disaster. But of course Iraq is already a disaster. The only question is whether it is going to be a disaster for Iraqis and Americans or just Iraqis.

Removing Saddam, even under false pretenses, the United States gave Iraqis a chance at something else. They have chosen to blow each other up -- which is what tribalism and religious fanaticism always come to. Europe went through hundreds of years of that kind of war before learning to separate tribe and religion from government. Why should the post-colonial Arab world require less time?

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.