Written by a former Army officer, the article is the apex of the Western surrender reflex:
However sincere, such questions are also pointless. To pose them is to invite dissembling. The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off.
We touched off a conflagration of conflict between the Sunni Arabs and the Shias and Kurds? Between Arabs and Persians? Really? This must come as a shock to the Shias and Kurds who suffered under decades of Saddam's misrule and centuries of Sunni Arab oppression. Folly indeed. The folly was the period leading up to 9-11 when we believed we could let the rot of Islamism fester and somehow cope by letting thug regimes hunt them down to imprison, torture, and kill them.
And even though we were capable enough of starting the centuries-old problem, we are incapable of influencing events in our favor today?
To say that Iraqis will decide their own fate is to state the obvious. That has always been what we are trying to do. We have always said that it is up to the Iraqis to win. Of course, getting the Syrians and their Iranian masters to stop interfering would help. We have a great role in helping the Iraqis cope, and I think we will succeed. At worse, the majority of Shias along with the Kurds will run their own affairs in a far more benign authoritarian government rather than being oppressed and slaughtered by a Sunni Arab version of Apartheid. At best, Iraq will get a democracy with a local flavor no less authentic because it doesn't reflect our form of democracy, or Britain's, or France's, or Japan's, or Mexico's.
With a democracy, I think we will indeed have an example for others in the Middle East to emulate. Tired of dictatorships with the facade of democracy and repulsed by the only option they've seen so far--Islamism--it is about time Moslems had another choice that doesn't lead directly to planes slamming into our buildings.
And the heart of Bacevich's piece is the silly notion that we are distracted from the war on terror by fighting in Iraq:
As a consequence, the "global" effort aimed at eliminating Islamic terror, launched back in September 2001, has narrowed in scope. Today the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia.
We are not distracted. We have helped fight jihadis in the Philippines, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, and yes--in Iraq itself. Indeed, polling shows that al Qaeda has lost its aura of glory and Moslems see it as an organization that kills fellow Moslems. Even Saudi Arabia now fights jihadis within their kingdom rather than just point them at us and hope for the best. We work with nations all around the world to fight the jihadis. We have advisors bolstering fragile governments to keep them strong enough to resist jihadis, and we cooperate with foreign countries quietly to hunt down jihadis that exist (until the New York Times reveals the legal and effective programs, of course).
There is no distraction. And unless Bacevich thinks that you can win a war by sitting on your ass, reacting only on the defensive, our effort to replace the allure of jihad with the promise of democracy is exactly about winning a global war on jihad. How a former officer and a professor can fail to see how we are acting worldwide to fight terrorists is beyond me. It is the anti-war side that has become over-focused on Mesopotamia--not our President. And certainly not our war effort.
Not to miss any checkpoints on the road to the apex of this surrender genre, Bacevich throws in the obligatory inappropriate Vietnam analogy:
For his part, the president increasingly preoccupies himself with tactics at the expense of statecraft. Much as Lyndon Johnson once reviewed lists of targets to be bombed in Hanoi, Bush now ponders how many brigades will be needed to impose order on a handful of neighborhoods around Baghdad.
Does the professor not know the difference between micro-managing tactics as Johnson did and the strategy of determining where our national resources are allocated? Just because he is a Vietnam veteran he thinks that he can toss around nonsense about the war he served in?
Determining how many troops to commit to various theaters is strategy and not tactics. And if this is not the responsibility of the commander-in-chief, whose job is it? The Speaker's? Talk to me when the President has street maps of Baghdad laid out in the Oval Office marking down where he thinks combat outposts should be established and the routes the patrols should take each night. Over-focused on tactics, indeed.
And to add to the nonsense, Bacevich winds up by contradicting what he wrote long ago at the beginning of his piece:
Candidates who still find merit in an open-ended global war on terror should explain how we prevail in such an enterprise. Given the lessons of Iraq, what exactly does it mean to wage such a global war? Where can we expect to fight next, and against whom? What will victory look like?
Ah, so now we are in fact engaged in an open-ended global war on terror. I guess I misinterpreted that whole "the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia" part. Silly me!
And we who support the war have to lay out our entire prediction of how the war will unfold globally (I mean, if we are to admit we are waging a global war) even as Bacevich absolves the anti-war side of saying what they will do to win just in Iraq!
The jihadis have invaded Iraq to fight us where we stand. Explain to me how abandoning Iraq to the jihadis and the mullahs to pick over the bones of the Iraq carcass will help us defeat Islamism. Explain to me what victory looks like when we retreat from whatever battlefield the enemy chooses. Because I think I can tell you where we can expect to fight next if we retreat. We will fight here at home and everywhere Americans live or work abroad.
So in the end, Bacevich's article isn't about getting out of an Iraq war that distracts us from the real global war on terror, but another talking point to get us to stop fighting the war on terror at all. Let's just go back to those happy days when we put blind sheiks on trial and lobbed a few cruise missiles now and again to make us feel like we are doing something. Back in those history-less days, the worst thing that could happen to the White House was a strange stain on the carpet. The jihadis on 9-11 told us that the worst thing they could imagine was a smoldering crater where the White House (or Congress) stands.
The jihadis also told us that they will grant no quarter in this struggle. They are the ones engaged in an open-ended struggle. We will submit to them or we will kill them and help moderate Moslems reform their religion to reduce the appeal of fascist Islamism.
And in the meantime, we must fight our jihadi enemies wherever we find them on the globe--even when they are inconveniently located in Iraq.
Good grief, what a heaping and smoking pile of drivel his article is. So bravo, Professor Bacevich. Bravo. Truly the apex of the genre. He should be so proud.
