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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
In honor of Charlton Heston, here are 10 lessons we should engrave on our foreign policy tablets as we prepare to leave Iraq.
By Gary Kamiya
Read more: George W. Bush, Middle East, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War
April 15, 2008 | The Iraq war is over. The failure of Bush's surge to produce political reconciliation in Iraq, combined with the unsustainable stress on our military and Congress' unwillingness to keep writing checks for $12 billion a month, all point in one direction: withdrawal. Even if John McCain is somehow elected president -- and for that to happen, there would have to be a near-miraculous breakthrough on the ground -- he too will have to face the reality that this is not the kind of war you win. You just have to decide when you're going to cut your losses.
This is a surreal situation. The war drones along on autopilot, but it's already finished. It's a dead war walking. We're just waiting for George W. Bush to leave. In Vietnam, the slogan was "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?" In Iraq, it's "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die so that the worst president in U.S. history can keep his doomed war going until he leaves office, so he can blame his successor for losing it?"
Bush will face the judgment of history, and it will not be forgiving. But that is not our immediate concern. The most important thing now is to recognize the mistakes that led us into the most disastrous war since Vietnam -- a war that will thankfully cost America many fewer lives than Vietnam, but that has had far worse strategic consequences. If we don't want to repeat those mistakes, there are 10 lessons we must take away from Bush's war. In honor of the recently departed Charlton Heston, let's call them the Ten Iraq Commandments.
It is immoral and illegal to attack a state that has not attacked you. Dick Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine," which held that America was justified in attacking a foe even if there was only a 1 percent chance it would attack us, violates "just war" doctrine, international law and American tradition. If a deity descended from the heavens and informed the president that a state was about to launch nuclear missiles at the United States, then a preemptive (as opposed to preventive) war would be justified. But no such deity exists (although the devoutly deluded Bush may have thought one did). Corrupted by the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence notoriously failed in Iraq, but intelligence is never going to be reliable enough to justify attacking a state that has not attacked us. In any event, the Bush administration could not even claim that its war on Iraq was preemptive, since it posed no imminent threat. It was a preventive war. And as Iraq has shown, one ounce of preventive war is worse than a ton of cure.
Commandment IIAs we've seen, Bush's excessive response to al-Qaida's successful terrorist strike only increased the danger of terrorism. A military response to terrorism may be justified, as in Afghanistan, but this is a rare case. And even the invasion of Afghanistan is looking problematic. Police and intelligence work are far more effective. Our moralistic response to terrorism is useless. In a little-recognized irony, the Bush administration was forced by necessity to recognize this in Iraq, magically turning yesterday's Sunni "terrorists" into today's "concerned local citizens." This pragmatic approach should guide our larger strategy for dealing with terrorism.
The only effective way to reduce the threat of terrorism is to work to end the conditions that give rise to it. In the case of Islamist terrorism, this means a comprehensive and enlightened political, economic and diplomatic strategy for dealing with the Arab/Muslim world. Only a tiny minority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims support radical jihadis, but catastrophic errors like invading Iraq make violent fundamentalism more attractive. Follow the physician's credo: First, do no harm.
Commandment IVThe foolish concept of "Islamofascism" conflates all Arab/Muslim terrorism. This is self-defeating. Al-Qaida, an absolutist movement with a totalitarian religious ideology, is not the same as Hamas or Hezbollah, which are, respectively, a religious national liberation movement and a complex political party/militia/public-works provider. By treating them all as if they were the same enemy, we create unnecessary enemies and make the task of defeating the absolutists, who actually do threaten us, much harder.
Next page: Get the media to grow a spine
Iraq taught us nothing
Why we can't win the "war on terror"
The real lessons of 9/11