The Victory Meme.

Is it appropriate to be celebrating victory in Iraq?

Retired General Barry McCaffrey reports:

The United States is now clearly in the end game in Iraq to successfully achieve what should be our princip[al] objectives: the withdrawal of the majority of U.S. ground combat forces . . . in the coming 36 months; leaving behind an operative civil state and effective Iraqi security forces; an Iraqi state which is not in open civil war among the Shia, the Sunnis, and the Kurds; and an Iraqi nation which is not at war with its six neighboring states.

Imagine if we had left a year ago!  I'm not going to go all the way back and say, "Imagine if we'd never gone in."  Too late, and too early.  Besides several thousand Americans, tens of thousands of Iraqis who are dead would still be living -- probably still under Saddam Hussein.  How Saddam would have been a player in the terror landscape, how and whether he might have continued to counterbalance Iran, is a never-to-be-known.  And whether the new Iraq will be strong enough to hold, in the high winds of sectarian rivalry and Islamist fanaticism, is not yet known.  But given how bad it was, it's as good as it could be.  And that is amazing.  That is worth celebrating.  Petraeus gets the credit (for an artful combination of counterinsurgency and strategic bribery, or "surge and splurge"), and Bush (and whoever advised him) gets the credit for sending in Petraeus. 

But don't call it "victory," says the very man most responsible for it.  He won't.

[Let's] talk about Al Qaeda in Iraq. They've lost Anbar province and Baghdad, where at best they can mount a couple of mostly insignificant attacks a day. They've vacated the Sunni Triangle. Virtually the entire Sunni Arab population has turned against them, and nowadays not a single Sunni imam, politician or tribal leader of note inside the country supports them—which was not the case even a year ago. While they're still duking it out in the northern provinces of Nineveh and Diyala, the territory AQI can operate in is a tiny fraction of what it was. Their situation is so grim that foreign jihadis are looking for other stomping grounds, and Al Qaeda's top leadership has turned its attention to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Why then don't we just say it?: Al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated.

"You won't find a single military leader in this theater who will say that," says Petraeus.

"You could be the first, general."

"Yeah, I could, but I won't be."

"At least can't we say 'strategically defeated'?"

"We'll leave that to the academics. [U.S. Ambassador Ryan] Crocker and I explicitly, from day one, together, said that we have got to be coldly realistic and not let our enthusiasms creep into our assessments ... [Success] is still not self-sustaining; there is still a degree of fragility to it, and it could be reversed."

As the general's counterinsurgency guidance puts it, under the rubric "Manage Expectations": "Avoid premature declarations of success." [...]  Petraeus acknowledged that this policy of modesty in the face of success is very much informed by our premature victory ejaculations of previous years (before he took charge, of course). "The champagne bottle remains in the back of the refrigerator," he says. "When you've been in Iraq for as long as actually both of us have, coming up on four years, you're a little less prone to get too excited too quickly."

But I think we're justified in at least getting cautiously excited, slowly.  And in thinking about incorporating into our worldview (if it's not there already) the notion that the United States does not give up.  That's a very useful notion for our survival, security, and morale, even if it's not pure as the driven snow.  If you make a horrendous mistake, do you retreat in shame in the depths of the mess you've made, or do you stay, change course, and clean it up?  Whatever happens to Iraq in the years to come, consider the difference it has made for American security and morale.  Al Qaeda may not be licked yet, but maybe "Vietnam syndrome" finally is. 

POSTSCRIPT:  Writing this made me realize why AmbivaBlog is the right name for this sucker.

Ambivalence is not just a cop-out, it's an actual position -- wanting to stay true to the mixed bag that life is, and not to succumb to the emotional satisfactions of oversimplification, editing the white out of the black or the black out of the white.  It's temperamental Taoism.

It doesn't mean you can't act and make choices, either.  The white half looks a little bigger, and by God, it is!  And the size of the dot varies.  Your actions just have to be accompanied by a certain modesty of affect, something like an existential shrug.  Neither triumphalism nor defeatism will appeal.

Comments

[michael Reynolds]

Petraeus is indeed a great general. Some of it was luck, but I give credit for luck. It's the result that matters.

Overall the war is like that one guy in a hundred who falls off a bridge and improbably survives. It's great to survive, but it doesn't make you want to repeat the experience.

It's always hard to know when to hold them and when to fold them. It's not possible to formulate a one-size-fits-all rule. "Never give up" is a slogan, not a strategy. The Wehrmacht never gave up. Turned out that wasn't so smart. The Japanese Imperialists were widely expected never to give up. Which is why we all know the names of a couple of otherwise obscure Japanese cities.

The Confederacy should have given up earlier, for example. All they accomplished by holding out was to bring devastation from which they have still not fully recovered. They hurt themselves and strengthened their foe. In Vietnam the smart move would have been to stay out, and failing that to "give up" before we reached the LBJ escalation. Early on we could have passed it off as a failed sponsorship of a weak South Vietnamese government. Later it became all ours, and thus a major defeat.

In the end the book has to be worth the candle. You have to look at the objectives, at the chance for success, at the price you want to pay, at the consequences of defeat. It's a complicated algorithm paid out in lives and money.

As for Vietnam syndrome, that was pretty well buried by the first Gulf War -- a war that accomplished its limited goals, cost few lives, strengthened our strategic position and actually turned a profit.

The problem we had in the Iraq War was not Vietnam syndrome, but Gulf War syndrome. We thought we could do very hard things without straining ourselves too hard.

What we ought to have going forward is a lot of caution, a reluctance to pull a gun, an appreciation for complexities and limits and unintended consequences.

It is reasonable to suspect that one of the consequences of the mess in Iraq is a much more dangerous mess in Iran. In which case it's hard to see this war as having been strategically profitable, despite Petraeus' brilliant rescue of a bad situation.

[amba]

You have to look at the objectives, at the chance for success, at the price you want to pay, at the consequences of defeat.

Yes, and you have to look at those things (as best you can) before you act. Because deciding whether and when to cut your losses in mid-war is far harder. Once you're committed to war and then change your mind, you're defeated. If you change your mind before a war (as you're suggesting about Vietnam), it can be prudence.

[Donna B.]

Michael, I think that it's reasonable to expect a dangerous mess in Iran, that was reasonable before the Iraq War and before the Gulf War.

It's reasonable to think that Iran strengthened because of the "limited engagement" of the 12+ years of the Gulf War.

And it is reasonable to think that the Iraq War has weakened Iran, though it has increase the (as of now) rhetorical threats.

As our attention turns to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iran will strengthen again. Our success in Iraq will dampen that some, but not entirely.

It's reasonable to disagree too :-)

[michael Reynolds]

I think the Bush pre-emption policy (which, by the way, I basically accept) has pushed Iran toward gaining nuclear weapons.

That's not a small thing.

[Meade]

Victorious in overcoming appeasement, defeatism and surrender. Victorious in removing Saddam, his sons, and henchmen. Victorious in ending the corrupt Oil For Food program. Victorious in giving Iraqis a chance to achieve self-determination. Victorious in defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq's designs on fomenting civil war. Victorious in obtaining, by agreement with the govt. of Iraq, our exit strategy.

The Victory ultimately will belong to the Iraqi people.

Call it whatever you choose. I choose to celebrate the liberation of Iraq made possible by George W Bush, our brave military heros, and those who never wavered in their support.

[michael Reynolds]

Meade:
That's the problem: it's all about the Iraqi people.

We go to war for our strategic needs, not for other people, generally, no matter how deserving. If we were rescuing peoples in need we should be on our way to Congo right now.

I'm actually very sympathetic to the forcible removal of thugs. I backed this war in part for that reason. But the situation for the Iraqi people, as bad as it was, was not as bad as the situation of people in Congo or Sudan today.

The crucial element was the concept of remaking the middle east by replacing a thug with a model democracy. That's why Iraq isn't Congo. But the price paid by the Iraqi people, and by us, and the strengthening of Iran leave this all looking like a very unattractive path to freedom.

[Mom]

Michael's insights are so astute. I really appreciate his comments, which are reasoned and well thought out. They are based on wisdom that is usually serene yet can be refreshingly crochety. I also appreciate and delight in his bursts of barely polite exasperation, evidence of a humane intelligence.

[Meade]

"The crucial element was the concept of remaking [Europe] by replacing a thug with a model democracy. That's why [France] isn't Congo. But the price paid by the [European] people, and by us, and the strengthening of [USSR] leave this all looking like a very unattractive path to freedom."

[amba]

Mom is such a Michael fan.

Meade: we who wavered salute you who didn't. Now how do you say that in Latin? I get the "te salutamus" part.

[michael Reynolds]

Meade:

Europe and WW2 are not Iraq and the Iraq War.

The 3rd Reich was an existential threat. Saddam was not a serious threat at all.

We did not attack Germany. Germany's ally, Japan attacked us. And then Germany declared war in solidarity.

Germany was still expansionist by the time we got into the war. Iraq had been defeated by Iran and ejected from Kuwait by us and our allies.

We did not enter the war to save France. We entered the war because to fail to do so would have left as as either a conquered people, a vassal state or a nation under siege.

Saddam presented no similar choice.

However, I did support the Iraq war in hopes of creating a model democratic state that would transform the politics of the middle east. Which is why within a month of the start of the war I was demanding that more force be committed, that the strategy be rethought, that the size of the army be increased, that Rumsfeld be replaced with someone less ideological and more competent.

In other words, what it took John McCain months longer to figure out, and was not figured out at all by Mr. Bush until he suffered a mid-term electoral beating.

[michael Reynolds]

Mom:

Thanks! That is very generous of you.

[Peter Hoh]

I'm happy to go with Petraeus' assessment. It's still too early to pop champagne.

Petraeus deserves all the kudos he is trying to deflect. He's done well. And Bush gets credit for putting him in charge.

My only complaint is that the surge wasn't implemented 3-4 years earlier.

Make no mistake, Iran has been strengthened by this war. Among other things, they learned how to make better roadside explosives, capable of inflicting much more damage than the crude IEDs that we saw earlier. And that knowledge has been shared around the world.

Meade wrote: "Victorious in overcoming appeasement." Really? Paying people millions of dollars to stop fighting us sounds an awful lot like appeasement, but what do I know?

[karen]

"I think the Bush pre-emption policy (which, by the way, I basically accept) has pushed Iran toward gaining nuclear weapons."

ok, Michael- but who is doing what to stop it? Weren't they always headed to arm themselves w/nukes? Just as Iraq claimed they were doing? Remember the yellowcake, which everyone seems to think was of no value due to it's low grade and i have to say the word- ahem- enrichment. Isn't that a part of the equation?

Peter, if Iran has been strengthened by the war in Iraq- they have also lost much(IMhO)since we were also fighting them in terms of their supplying and supporting alQ, no?

And the cost to alQ- always our main goal... is great.

[amba]

Karen, al Qaeda being Sunni, not sure how much support they ever got from Iran. Iran sponsors Hezbollah, which long-term is as dangerous as al Q -- they have a base in South America.

[Peter Hoh]

Iran supported Shiite insurgents. If I recall correctly, Iran brokered a deal between al-Maliki and the Mahdi Militia, seeing as they had ties with both parties.

Iran is suspected of offering technical advice in making more sophisticated IEDs. See this Wikipedia article and search for Iran.

While the flypaper strategy was bandied about after foreign fighters started to enter Iraq, that was never part of our strategic interest in invading Iraq.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Oh, good God, Michael, you ought to be embarrassed to say some of these things. There's the ignorant:

The Japanese Imperialists were widely expected never to give up. Which is why we all know the names of a couple of otherwise obscure Japanese cities.

(Hell, man, there were Japanese fascists who didn't want to give up after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

There's a barely arguable:

It is reasonable to suspect that one of the consequences of the mess in Iraq is a much more dangerous mess in Iran. In which case it's hard to see this war as having been strategically profitable, despite Petraeus' brilliant rescue of a bad situation.

(The issue here being whether it's "reasonable" to predict on those things which appeal to your thesis. Yes, it's possible that we got a worse mess in Iran, but the evidence that Iran hadn't been a mess pre-war is massively lacking. What's far more likely is that we avoided having two major messes, with Iran pretty much where it is now --- honestly, what changes have happened in the Iranian course of things since 1979? --- and a renewed mess in Iraq, with Saddam and the kids having finally bribed their way completely out of the sanctions, that 500 tons of uranium ore being processed by the nuclear scientists Saddam still had using the plans still in his files, and A.Q. Khan collecting big money for transferring technology they didn't already have.)

And then there's the merely bizarre:

All they accomplished by holding out was to bring devastation from which they have still not fully recovered.

Dude, I lived in North Carolina for 13 years, and traveled all over the Old South, and I'm pretty sure that conditions are completely recovered from 1866. Hell, every house has electric lights and damn near all of them have indoor plumbing, and last I looked, economically the South is rather ahead of the North. Arguably the South has dominated national politics for the last 20 years. So I'm honestly really puzzled by this one.

The notion that the US had no strategic reason to invade Iraq is puzzling as well. Just off the top of my head -- I've admittedly thought about it a good bit in the past -- there were several pretty obvious things:

- Iraq was providing materiel support and financial support for a number of terrorist groups other than al-Q, including pretty substantial support to Fatah that was certainly encouraging the ongoing terrorism against Israel.

- Maintaining the no-fly zone and trying to maintain the sanctions was a major cost to the US military with no desirable end in sight.

- Breaking up Afghanistan and Iraq both eliminated adversarial support bases and interrupted our adversaries' logistics in a major way.

Since I don't have access to the intelligence, it's hard to tell how much of this was planned, and how much was a desirable accident, but it also spooked Libya into dropping their own WMD programs and eventually into paying damages for Lockerbie and otherwise working to get off the s-list, and something in that time frame led to the AQ Khan network's exposure.

[michael Reynolds]

Charlie:

Allow me to enlighten you. As you know, I live to help others.

1) Your point re: Hiroshima is incoherent. I can't actually figure out what you're saying that's any different from what I said.

2) There is little evidence that Iran was determined to obtain nuclear weapons. You may recall that we were worried about WMD in Iraq, not so much Iran.

It didn't take a genius in Iran (Or NK) to figure out that we'd have a much harder time changing regimes in a nuclear state. This gave impetus to the Iranians to push much harder for nukes.

Further, the mishandling of Iraq damaged our military credibility, made us seem ineffectual and overcommitted. The Iranians have known full well that we no longer had the available resources to launch a major assault that would include ground forces.

In fact, as we know, the Iranians have been actively involved in killing Americans in Iraq. Not something they'd have done had they had a decent respect for our capabilities.

3) I've lived in North Carolina, Virginia, the panhandle of Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

The sequelae of the Civil War resulted in economic retardation in the South. Their economic system was destroyed and their infrastructure, already behind the North, had no base upon which to grow and catch up. The North got richer and built the roads, bridges, railroads, ports, universities, phone lines, electrical grid etc... that are part and parcel of economic progress.

Essentially we have a race. Two participants start out from unequal positions. Then the runner who is already behind has his leg broken.

By just about any measurement you'd care to look at, the old south remains behind the rest of the nation. The South today is still poorer, less educated, less connected than the rest of the country. Draw a line between New York City and Boston and you'll find far more top-flight educational institutions within say, 20 miles of that line, than you will in all the South combined.

4) Your arguments on strategic reasons for invading Iraq are silly.

-- Iraq supported non Al Qaeda terrorists? Syria does more, and Iran, even back pre-war, did more.

--Maintaining the no-fly zone was a strain? Hello? As opposed to invading and occupying?

--Don't conflate Iraq and Afghanistan. Having created a power vacuum in Iraq into which Al Qaeda moved, we can hardly claim it as a plus that we managed, after many American and innocent Iraqi deaths, to dislodge those same terrorists. If I leave food on my kitchen floor and attract roaches it's not a great moral victory when I step on them.

In fact, the greatest damage to Al Qaeda was self-inflicted. The bestial, sadistic actions of their Iraq counterparts discredited the movement to a degree. (Obviously not entirely: Mumbai.) But I doubt you want to claim that it was clever of us to allow Al Qaeda thugs to use power drills on women's heads because the result was damage to Al Qaeda's moral authority.

[karen]

"The bestial, sadistic actions of their Iraq counterparts discredited the movement to a degree. (Obviously not entirely: Mumbai.)"

That's not necessarily a given.

No offense about the war between the States, but-- didn't the South ~ask for it~? If you go to war, one side wins and the other gets ~its leg broken~. It's too damned bad it was actually the leg of the same dude running the race as the one who broke it.

Big words don't mean everything, Michael.

[Callimachus]

Why does everything turn into the Civil War?

The South after, say, 1820, realized it was sliding down into the position of a poor, rural, economic vassal of a dynamic, capitalist, industrial Yankee nation. It took a shot at charting its own course in the world and failed. The result was that it got what it pretty much was going to get anyhow.

As for what the Confederacy should have done, some might say the lesson is they should have done exactly what the Iraqi Sunnis did: Give up at the start, not defend borders, let the invaders march where they will and just harrass the hell out of them with guerrilla tactics till the Yankees got tired of dying without the battlefield glory and the summer patriots turned sour on the whole enterprise and started writing editorials about bringing the troops home. The lesson of 1876 is that this probably would have worked.

Vietnam was worth it -- barely -- however badly it was managed, but that's a conclusion only a longer view of Asian and world history can reach.

I suspect Iraq will turn out to be the same. The best reason for doing it was the most abstract one, and the most idealistic. The paradox in that is that war itself is the most viscerally ugly way to do something like jump-start a free nation in the middle of the swamp. (I'm hypothesizing a good outcome here; like Petraeus I have no wish to declare victory in Iraq today. I'll leave that judgment to my daughter's generation).

As for chest-thumping and celebration, it repulses me. I don't even think that's possible anymore. With the modern media and our culture, it becomes impossible to pay attention and at the same time to keep one's distance from a war. From the ugliness and waste of it, from the dead children and the sacrificed soldiers, the folly -- all that Billy Sherman shit. What is to celebrate?

[amba]

Thanks, Cal. It's good to hear it from you, whom no one is going to call a "defeatist" for being repulsed by chest-thumping.

War is full of ugly things, including "collateral damage," i.e. deaths of innocent civilians, but also corruption and profiteering, inevitably. It was so in WWII, I know. One of the people who testified in the Winter Soldier thing this year (which I heard on the car radio on the way to the dojo) had been an expert electronics maintenance technician with the Army; his real job was given to someone from Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root for $75,000 a year in taxpayer money while he was left doing unspecialized grunt work.

That does not necessarily invalidate a war, but it is another inevitable accompaniment of war. There are a lot of reasons why at the rah-rah victory parades, the veterans are usually silent or crying.

[Callimachus]

Right on. My beef with the anti-Iraq War people was, partially, that they did not know how to distinguish the vulgarity and hideousness of THIS WAR from that of any and every war.

I was raised by and among Quakers; I know real pacifism, and I respect it, because it's a very difficult ideal to hold. These people on the anti-Iraq War left lacked the moral commitment of real pacifists as they dodge the maturity that requires making hard, real-world choices among crappy options.

[karen]

You mean- Code Pink gals aren't real Pacifists?! They just pretend to be in order to further their anti-American agenda(pics to prove- somewhere)?!

I'm shocked. Shocked!!

[Melinda]

Neither triumphalism nor defeatism will appeal.

Triumphalism and defeatism are the two things that drove me to search for blogs that expressed neither.

[michael Reynolds]

Why does everything turn into the Civil War?

Because we know it will suck you in. Like sugar to bees, or blood to vampires.