Iraq and Afghanistan

Reports out of Iraq continue to appear to be emanating from two different worlds occupying the same space. One reads and hears accounts from outstanding and well-thought of American and British reporters whose message is essentially that we have already lost the war. The people are all against us. They regard the new Iraqi government and its forces as completely illegitimate tools of the Americans. The ranks of the insurgents are growing every day while the areas under American or governmental control are steadily shrinking. Some former supporters of the war, even those directly involved in the American effort at an earlier point now accept this picture. This Sunday the paper included a discussion among neocons that pointed to a minority that have now moved into this camp.

One also reads and hears accounts from a different cast of persons, representing generally a more conservative viewpoint, and in many cases a military viewpoint, that says that what the papers are reporting is nonsense. Reporters are concentrating on problem areas while ignoring the much larger area of the country where American control is unchallenged and the new government is taking over. These analysts believe in polls that show that while Americans are not liked and are wanted out, most people continue to want the new government to succeed. The fact that a few days ago the government could bring together 1100 leaders (and many were local leaders) to a conference in Baghdad to choose the new assembly certainly supports this second picture. Why would so many Iraqis of standing be willing to identify themselves with this process if the country were already "going down the tube". They should be home taking care of their families and plotting ways to get out of the country.

Why would reporters like John Burns of the Times believe the first position that nothing is working if it is? One can understand why people who are emotionally invested in our success in Iraq would hold the second position. But if the first position is untrue, what mind-set would cause otherwise reliable observers to report so negatively? Do they hate the Bush administration so much, because of its half-truths that led us into war, that they want to see us lose, in spite of all that means to America's world position — yes, and even to the future of Iraq? I can think that of Moore, but I find it harder to think that of mainstream reporters.

The fact is that if we decide to leave without victory, we may as a nation never know what the truth was. We will want the first picture to be correct, for this will justify our actions to ourselves. We left Vietnam essentially because we were tired of the losses and fact that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. This led many reporters at the time to write as though the people of South Vietnam had rejected us as well as the South Vietnamese government in favor of the communists of the North. My belief as a sometime student of that war is that most of the people in the south remained anti-communist throughout the war. The famous Tet Offensive in 1968(?) was a propaganda victory for the communists but also a serious military defeat for them. Nearly the entire Viet Cong force in the South was wiped out. From this point on, the war was essentially a conventional war between a well organized and equipped conventional North Vietnamese Army and, as the American forces were phased out, the South Vietnamese Army. Remember that it was at least a year after the Americans had essentially left the country that the North Vietnamese staged a major tank attack down through the center of the country that broke through the government's lines, leading to an ultimate route.

Yet also in the end, what the situation actually was made little difference. The American public was tired. Why should we go on losing lives as long as we had no plans to invade the North and thus end the conflict. We had to leave.

Fortunately, the Iraqi insurgents have no outside power to rely on. Yet, the United States is much more worried about casualties today, and rightly so, than we were in Vietnam. It will take much less this time to make us tired. If we cannot bring down the scale of the insurgency within six months, and the government fails to extend its writ over all the country, perhaps we will again feel we have to leave, regardless of how many children wave at our soldiers or how many new schools have been opened.