Who would have thought that you could learn anything from history? I am currently reading Joseph J. Ellis'
Founding Brothers and read this in the chapter on
Washington's farewell address:
Although [Washington] actually lost more battles than he won, and although he spent the first two years of the war making costly tactical mistakes...by 1778 he had reached an elemental understanding of his military strategy; namely, that captured ground--what he termed "a war of posts"--was virtually meaningless. The strategic key was the Continental Army. If it remained intact as an effective fighting force, the American Revolution remained alive. The British army could occupy Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and it did. The British navy could blockage and bombard American seaports with impunity, and it did. The Continental Congress could be driven from one location to another like a covey of pigeons, and it was. But as long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it. [emphasis mine]
This must be what our current President has in mind (if anything) when it comes to Iraq. There is no strategy for winning. We can only ape the strategy of the 18th century British armed forces and occupy. Leaving means losing, so the only "not losing" option entailed in our current strategy is to remain. We hear the importance of achieving victory without hearing how that might be achieved. We are told what a free Iraq would look like (Euro Disney?!?) but signs of this transformation are noticeably absent.
If the we occupy all of Baghdad and quell the violence there (unlikely--just today there are reports of the first insurgent artillery (!) attacks on our troops, a sign that this is moving beyond IEDs and mortars) this will not change the fact that we are an occupying force in a land that is not our own. Like the Continental Army, the insurgents will just move and wait.
The complexity of the situation has progressed far beyond a solution (if there is one) achievable through military means. I am convinced that our military presence there only adds to the civil deterioration. For a taste of this, you should really read Nir Rosen's
article in the New York Times Magazine on Iraqi refugees.
Perhaps if Bush read more history and less Camus, he could have seen that Washington had Iraq figured out by 1778; perhaps he already does understand this, thus his insistence that we never really leave Iraq--his wish for a pony for every Iraqi man, woman, and child never materialized and the only thing he can think to do is stay.
Again, we go to Ellis: "[Washington] was a rock-ribbed realist, who instinctively mistrusted all visionary schemes dependent on seductive ideals that floated dreamily in men's minds, unmoored to the more prosaic but palpable realities that invariably spelled the difference between victory and defeat" [think "a free, stable, and democratic Iraq"].
So the next time a war apologist tries to frame our actions in Iraq in terms of the difference (parsed, in this case, to a fare-thee-well) between Jeffersonian idealism and Jacksonian exceptionalism, you can feel confident in telling them to go fuck themselves--they don't know what the hell they are talking about.
