The Northern Agrarian

The War in Iraq has basically disappeared as an issue in this election, and the Democrats have earned the blame for this. They have allowed the War Party to dictate the terms of victory in Iraq, and according to those with the most to lose politically–Bush, McCain, Wolfowitz, Kristol, et al– the terms for victory have been met! Once again, recent events (Bush calls it “The March of History” or some nonsense) have proven the defeatists and appeasers wrong. Right?

Not exactly.To begin with, there has been no conversation of any significance addressing whether there is anything to learn from the US’s entrance into Mesopotamia. There is a reason for this: predictions from the Kristols and Kagans and Cheneys in power have been proven wrong on nearly every account. Americans remember those predictions, and they won’t buy it again. Imagine life if we had not invaded a sovereign country and ousted an Iraqi leader with no ties to al Qaeda or the September 11th attacks. Or imagine how screwed America would be had we not disarmed an unarmed dictator and expended enormous amounts of blood and treasure dismantling a government that was no threat to the United States. Or if Bush, who has a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, had paid attention when being taught that history shows that, much more often than not, imposing a democracy on a non-Western country living virtually in the stoneage does not work. Or what if we imagine a world where there existed an actual military and political counterbalance to Iran in the region instead of one where an American-installed government is friendlier to the Iranian mullahs by the day? Does the War Party want Americans thinking about this world? Of course not. There are two worlds to Wolfowitz: the one we live in now with endless foreign conflict, or one full of cringing appeasers of islamofascism where terrorist killers run rampant on the American populace. Has so senseless a dichotomy ever existed in the minds of Amercan policy makers?

Anyway, I digress. Given the situation we are in right now, the Surge is working, we are told. “With the surge, we are winning,” goes the story. “If we hadn’t escalated, we would be losing.” But winning and losing are subjective terms, especially in the complicated world of foreign affairs, so how the terns are defined is much more important than any sort of objective statistics on the ground. And in this respect, the Republicans are dreadfully wrong in their own shockingly-low expectations.

For instance, McCain has argued that if we had followed Obama’s plan:

“We would have lost. And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region.”

This is purely polemical and has little basis in facts or conditions on the ground. We still face a war-too-wide, Afghanistan is a mess where our initial objective–to destroy the entire Taliban infrastructure and kill al Qaeda leaders–is not even close to being met. But what about in Iraq? Violence is down, so we must be winning.

Not so true either. Violence is down from the catastrophic numbers that folks became used to over the past few years, but are still as high as they were in 2005. And the recent success owes something to the influx of soldiers in the region, but also owes a lot to deals and payoffs to Sunni terrorists who have killed Americans in the past but now are being bought as mercenaries to fight al Qaeda in Iraq.

Despite National Review formerly depicting a beautiful budding flower in the desert as their cover years ago, Iraq is developing into another desert cactus. A Politically unstable and economically impoverished ally of Iran, Iraq is hardly the friendly, prosperous ally neoconservatives had been counting on it to become. To say that Iraq is worse off than under Saddam would be irrational, but the despotic evil that existed formerly has been replaced by a different type of evil; the everyday kind where families that lived in relative peace before now can not feed their children. It is better than Saddam’s torture-chambers, but how much better?

But in reality, foreign policy realists have a lot to be happy about. Despite years of fighting “dangerous” timelines for withdrawal, Bush is now discussing “time horizons.” The Iraqi government wants us out in 12 to 18 months, and it will be a very difficult political sell convincing the American people that we should keep dying and spending when we are not wanted anymore. After years of shunning “appeasers” who wanted to talk to Iran, Undersecretary of State William Burns is meeting with the Iranian nuclear envoy and high-ranking diplomats from other regional powers.

Nearly every landmark for victory for the neocons–be it disarming a dictator, destroying al Qaeda, creating a stable and prosperous ally, or controlling energy reserves–has failed. The reasons we went in have been invalidated.

“Shut up,” says The Weekly Standard. “We’re winning!”

If this is winning, I’d rather be losing.