The Iraq war is not actually a war against terrorism, no matter how many times US politicians or military leaders proclaim it so. It is not a war against extremism or even a war against Al-Qaeda. It is a war against the specters of the past, a struggle against the nightmares evoked by the loss of the Vietnam War. It is a muscular reaction against something that is now almost half a century in the past. The Iraqis, Sunnis, Shias, and yes, even the Kurds are but pawns in a mighty, titanic and psychic battle of memory. If put into one neat pet phrase, in the halls of the White House and the Pentagon, it would be, “Oh God, please don’t let us have another Vietnam.” Former US Ambassador and fervent administration critic, Peter Galbraith, is of that opinion, among others. This frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and author, is one of several major proponents of the splitting of Iraq and is now linking the Iraq debacle to the Vietnam debacle, not just in how it was waged, but in how administration officials use the fear of emergent boogeymen to prolong the wars. On this and other points, Galbraith doesn’t bite his tongue.
“The Iraq war is lost,” he writes. Of course, neither the president, nor the war’s intellectual architects, are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways. The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes, but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, “the consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”
Tellingly, the Iraq war’s intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat, and they have already picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “Those who believe the war is already lost, call it the Clinton-Lugar axis, are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home. Lugar provoked Donnelly’s anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush’s Iraq strategy, as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. This blaming the American people approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to 15 years of military failure.
The question is not whether or not the US will withdraw; it is only a question of when. Politicians are now angling over who will be the butt of political blame for losing Iraq, as if Iraq was ever ‘ours’ in the first place. To politicians, spin is everything, second only to advantage, the loss of American life, the monstrous loss of Iraqi lives, the severing of a nation into three parts, the enormous costs in a nation’s wealth. All of these things are really quite forgettable to political animals. The issue is advantage. Why should this surprise us? Wasn’t the war really started for advantage? Didn’t a limited presidential figure long for the glory of becoming the war president? The war is lost. It’s time to move on. From death row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
