Tuesday, June 29, 2004
MoveOn Gets Stuck
MoveOn spends its funds on a full-page advertisement in today's New York Times attacking the transfer of power in Iraq as a "fumble". Actually, anything Bush might have done yesterday in Iraq would have been so characterized. Echoing this, Paul Krugman entitles his Op-Ed "Who Lost Iraq?" It is another recitation of some of the well-known errors of the adventure as well as some not so well known. To me these attacks are very much like harping on the mistakes surrounding 9/11. Yes, we made mistakes. Gore would have made mistakes. Yes, it would be good to have a new Administration in a few months. But right now we have Iraq. People are dying there, Americans, Iraqis and others who have come to work Iraq. It may make us feel good to spend our energy painting new coats of disaster on the Iraq adventure, but this is not responsible citizenship.
The turnover of power in Iraq may turn out to be merely another chapter in a sorry story. But as I suggested in yesterday's entry, there are several reasons to hope for a better outcome. And for the sake of Iraqis we must help to make this more rather than less probable. The more it becomes clear to Iraqis that many Americans expect us to fail in Iraq, indeed have invested so much already in this failure that they want the United States to fail there (see Michael Moore's "documentary"), the more the resistance is encouraged to hold out and the more people on the government's side will lose heart. As we have all been taught too many times, communications media do not live in separate national boxes any more — what is expressed in one country, particularly the USA, will soon be known to observers everywhere. This is a major reason Kerry has played a very responsible role so far. Let us hope he continues.
The military exit remains tricky. Last night Zbigniew Brezezinski proposed again that we set a definite date for Coalition forces to leave. This sounds like a good idea. It will avoid an Iraqi government feeling for nationalistic reasons that it must ask us to leave. It does not mean, of course, that we have to stay until the date announced (just as it did not mean this for the turnover). Nevertheless, it is hard to tell ahead of time where we will be at any particular point in the future. We do not know now the reasons any President, Bush or Kerry, might legitimately want to keep troops in Iraq after any given date. One could say, for example, that if the Iraqis cannot control their own country by June 30, 2005, we should do as we did in Vietnam — leave and let those left behind suffer the consequences. But I do not think this is wise or just. Whatever we may think of our adventure, we started it. We brought death and destruction to the Iraqis along with some of the good that we intended. Many Iraqis hate us, but we have persuaded millions of others to support our objectives, to identify their future with our success. To these we have a responsibility that cannot be lightly dismissed, even though some day dismiss it we might.
MoveOn spends its funds on a full-page advertisement in today's New York Times attacking the transfer of power in Iraq as a "fumble". Actually, anything Bush might have done yesterday in Iraq would have been so characterized. Echoing this, Paul Krugman entitles his Op-Ed "Who Lost Iraq?" It is another recitation of some of the well-known errors of the adventure as well as some not so well known. To me these attacks are very much like harping on the mistakes surrounding 9/11. Yes, we made mistakes. Gore would have made mistakes. Yes, it would be good to have a new Administration in a few months. But right now we have Iraq. People are dying there, Americans, Iraqis and others who have come to work Iraq. It may make us feel good to spend our energy painting new coats of disaster on the Iraq adventure, but this is not responsible citizenship.
The turnover of power in Iraq may turn out to be merely another chapter in a sorry story. But as I suggested in yesterday's entry, there are several reasons to hope for a better outcome. And for the sake of Iraqis we must help to make this more rather than less probable. The more it becomes clear to Iraqis that many Americans expect us to fail in Iraq, indeed have invested so much already in this failure that they want the United States to fail there (see Michael Moore's "documentary"), the more the resistance is encouraged to hold out and the more people on the government's side will lose heart. As we have all been taught too many times, communications media do not live in separate national boxes any more — what is expressed in one country, particularly the USA, will soon be known to observers everywhere. This is a major reason Kerry has played a very responsible role so far. Let us hope he continues.
The military exit remains tricky. Last night Zbigniew Brezezinski proposed again that we set a definite date for Coalition forces to leave. This sounds like a good idea. It will avoid an Iraqi government feeling for nationalistic reasons that it must ask us to leave. It does not mean, of course, that we have to stay until the date announced (just as it did not mean this for the turnover). Nevertheless, it is hard to tell ahead of time where we will be at any particular point in the future. We do not know now the reasons any President, Bush or Kerry, might legitimately want to keep troops in Iraq after any given date. One could say, for example, that if the Iraqis cannot control their own country by June 30, 2005, we should do as we did in Vietnam — leave and let those left behind suffer the consequences. But I do not think this is wise or just. Whatever we may think of our adventure, we started it. We brought death and destruction to the Iraqis along with some of the good that we intended. Many Iraqis hate us, but we have persuaded millions of others to support our objectives, to identify their future with our success. To these we have a responsibility that cannot be lightly dismissed, even though some day dismiss it we might.
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