| Slate's Fred Kaplan has an excellent question: "What does Bush mean by 'Victory in Iraq'"?
I say "excellent," because Iraq is going to play a major role in the upcoming election, and will be used as a political cudgel for years to come, even if we withdraw in 2009, not a safe assumption. And I say "excellent" because the definition of victory is as elusive today as the cause of the war was in 2003.
Kaplan:
Originally, victory was conceived in grandiose terms. The defeat of Saddam Hussein's army and the toppling of his regime would spawn a new democratic Iraq, the example of which would ignite the flames of freedom across the Middle East.
Bush scaled back the standard in a November 2005 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy titled "A Strategy for Victory." This victory will come, he said, "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe-haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation."
Neither victory goal seems realistic, especially now that al-Sadr's cease fire shows signs of ending and the "Sunni Awakening" unravels, threatening to reverse the recent and relative quiet in Iraq, which never did provide the political compromises and coalitions needed to ensure a stable and democratic Iraq. Oh, and if you believe the "surge" was responsible for the quiet - though most evidence suggests otherwise - well, that's coming to an end, too.
If we can trust the Bush administration - and there's no reason to think we can - and take their avowed victory goals at face value, we've already lost. There's little or no chance we'll achieve especially the audacious and ignorant goals of administration pre-war rhetoric. There'll be no "Velvet Revolution" across the Middle East; our invasion has only inflamed tensions and pushed more people towards the region's radicals. The longer we stay, the worse it will become.
But I don't buy the administration's rhetoric. The causus belli and the definition of victory, like the term, "the war on terror," has always been vague and plastic. It gives the war's architects the power to indefinitely perpetuate conflict - which, if the war is about oil, fits in nicely with an endless occupation, the "100 years in Iraq" John McCain recently promised us.
This ambiguity also serves partisan political goals. The Republican party can claim that, in the event of a Democratic-led withdrawal, the left "lost" the war. Setting unattainable terms of victory, as Bush has done, only serves to foster that message. Even if Republicans want to end the war, they can shift the burden of withdrawal onto Democrats, hitting them politically for it, while simultaneously enjoying the economic, diplomatic, security advantages that would accompany the end of the war.
Unless it's about the oil. In that case we'll never leave no matter who's in charge.
Here's the thing. It's not a "war." The war was won long ago. We're involved in an "occupation." You don't win occupations, you endure them, then end them. |
