by Larry DeWitt
April 15, 2004

Remembering Vietnam

During the Vietnam War, I was a student at a small public university in Arizona. Periodically we students pranced about the campus protesting the war. We never ventured off-campus to demonstrate, for the timorous reason that the locals might crack our heads if we were outside the cocoon of the university's protection. So we protested from the comfort of our dorm rooms as it were--on mommy and daddy's dime in most instances.

One organized demonstration on campus featured anti-war faculty members making speeches of outrage and indignation-to the cooing adulation of most of the student body. The Chairman of the Philosophy Department was on the program, speaking, as philosophers are wont to do, on a hopelessly obscure and indecipherable topic: "The Pros and Cons of Vietnam War Banalities." We assumed he was against the war, but it was hard to tell from that title. As it turned out, it was hard to tell from the speech too. His aim was to point out the intellectual incoherence, foolishness, muddled-thought, and downright idiocy of much of the political cant, on both sides of the debate. His talk pissed off nearly everyone, since he was not clearly cheering for either side. Nobody booed, because they really couldn't follow much of what he was saying. But they knew he wasn't cheering for their team. For myself, it struck me as just about right.

In that spirit, I am offering here the following five hard truths about the Iraq War, in the confident expectation that I will piss off just about everyone. Which suits me just about right.

1. The Bush Administration did not invade Iraq to liberate it from Saddam Hussein or bring democracy to the Middle East.

Who knows what darkness lurks in the hearts of men? So who knows why the Bush Administration chose to go to war with Iraq. Put any interpretation you want on their motives. It's all pretty much irrelevant what their initial motive(s) were. Because one thing we know for sure, the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq is an ex post facto rationale now being deployed by the Bush Administration because they can't get away with any other rationale. We can no longer reasonably say it was about weapons of mass destruction. We cannot, try as Condoleeza Rice might, connect Iraq with the terrorist threat to the U.S. in a way that would justify an invasion. We will not even be able to steal their oil with the whole world watching--even if that was part of the Administration's initial plan. We cannot remotely expect to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq after the manner of the old imperialists--indeed, we can hardly wait to find the fastest way out of the place. Maybe Bush did it to avenge his daddy, and so his personal Freudian dreams are less fevered than they used to be. But even if this is so, he has to keep that one to himself. Even if you are given to paranoid rantings about the hidden-hand influence of Jews and the Israel-lobby on the Administration's Middle-Eastern foreign policy, this too has been rendered moot. The only remaining rationale the Bush Administration can deploy without being hooted off the stage, is the idea that we aspired to produce regime change in Iraq for the purpose of bringing democracy to the long-suffering people of that nation.

Now as it happens, I support this idea of bringing democracy to Iraq. It is a good and fine thing, and we ought to do it. But we had best face one fact about ourselves: if bringing democracy to Iraq was the expressly stated objective before we launched the war, we would never have set foot on Iraqi soil. For the simple reason that this goal would probably have met with the enthusiastic support of me, Thomas Friedman, and maybe three other Americans--none of whom are members of the Bush Administration. To put it bluntly, America would never have supported going to war in Iraq if it was for the purely selfless reason of liberating the Iraqi people. We only went along for this ride because the Administration told us there were threatening weapons of mass destruction there, and Saddam was setting up a bazaar to peddle them to terrorists.

So, by all means, support the President and the Administration in their efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. But don't let them lie to you about the history of this war in the process. It was never about bringing democracy to Iraq, until the Administration realized it had no other excuse.

2. The Bush Administration is trying to prosecute the war like it is trying to balance the budget-understating the real costs and postponing the hard parts.

If anything is certain about America's involvement in the Iraq War it is that we have been trying from the beginning to do it without inconveniencing ourselves too much. It is expected--indeed the President has insisted--that we go about our day-to-day life as if nothing much is happening. Remember the President's advice at Christmas time: go shopping America! So we want to go shopping, and visualize the horrors of war mainly on our giant flat-screen television sets. The families of the dead and wounded service personnel have sacrificed to be sure; but how about the rest of us? Have we committed ourselves to any widely-shared sense of sacrifice?

During World War II this nation transformed everything about its daily life on the homefront. We rationed goods; we deferred buying things so the raw materials could be used in the war effort; unions agreed not to strike; workers allowed their wages to be frozen and businesses their prices; almost every family in the nation either had men or women in uniform or workers in defense-related industries. We were all in it together and everything about our daily lives was disrupted. Even during the Vietnam War the nation could not pass a single day without anguishing in some degree over the war. One big reason is that we had the draft. Which meant that the kids of the vast middle-class of the nation were at peril. In the Iraq War we have no draft, so our kids are not really at risk unless they choose, for whatever reasons, to make themselves so. So a tiny fraction of the nation is bearing the entire burden of the war effort.

This all results in our leaders lying to us in two major ways. First, they have lied to us about the number of troops needed in the war effort and the post-war reconstruction. So we have roughly 110,000 troops in Iraq even though it has been obvious for a long time that we need massively more. We try to hide from this fact by contracting-out parts of the military function. Here is a horrifying statistic: the second largest armed force in Iraq is not any of our coalition partners, it is the private security firm which has the contract to provide security where our troops cannot. But contracting-out a military function is less visible to the public than sending a large contingent of Army reservists. So we hide the truth yet another way.

Secondly, they don't even tell us the truth about the dollar costs of the war. We have already spent $121 billion on Iraq. Congress had been trying for months to get the President to answer a simple question: "what is your best estimate about the future costs of the reconstruction?" In response, the Administration dribbles down its chin in efforts to mumble something that appears to be similar to talking without actually saying anything. The President and the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense all refuse to project costs past December 2004, because that is the period for which they already have funding. President Bush even has the audacity to submit his 2005 budget without any costs identified for the Iraq war and reconstruction--zero, zip, nada. The 2005 federal budget takes effect October 1, 2004. No budget estimate for any period after October 1, 2004. Does this mean we will be out of Iraq by October 1st? Or does it maybe mean that the President does not want to tell us the truth about the costs of our commitments to Iraq on the eve of an election?

So the $121 billion we have already spent in Iraq is a down-payment on a purchase whose total price is being kept from us. Because we don't really want to know. Best to just postpone even thinking about that for as long as we can. Sort of the way we postpone thinking about the overall federal budget deficit, just so long as we can have our tax cuts now. War on the cheap and easy--that's the way we like it, and that's the way the President panders it for us.

3. The Iraqis want liberation like Peter Pan wants to fly-just by wishing they want to make it so.

Despite the moral obtuseness of the American anti-war crowd, the truth is the Iraqi people desperately wanted someone to liberate them from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Mostly they hoped some fairy-godmother would do it for them so there would be no real costs involved. But even when it became clear the liberator would be us, they still longed for us to invade their nation and liberate them. Before the war, this truth leaked out only in the off-the-record comments made privately to journalists, since to speak this truth during the Saddam era was to risk torture and death.

If you are still in denial about this, here is a kernel of hard evidence. At the end of February 2004 (after much suffering and disappointment) the first scientific public opinion survey ever conducted in Iraq found that only 39% of the Iraqi people were opposed to the U.S. invading their country!

This rarely-spoken truth allowed a certain class of feckless Americans to conveniently evade the moral imperative of ridding the world of the evil of Saddam Hussein. They told themselves that the Iraqis really didn't want us there, so it becomes easy in such a circumstance to hide from responsibility. But the Iraqis could never liberate themselves, and if America didn't do it, no one ever would--not the U.N., and not any smug European country would ever stoop to end the terror of the brutal Saddam regime. They would merely cluck about how deplorable the whole thing was, but, well you know, the Iraqi's don't really want us there. The hard fact was: America was Iraq's last best hope.

The Iraqis wanted us to save them; but then they wanted us to magically disappear the next day so that they never had to suffer the indignity of occupation. But you can't have the one without the other. An extended occupation to stablize the country is the price the Iraqis have to pay for their freedom. And they ought to face this fact, and be damn glad to pay this price. Because we have given them a gift beyond price-their liberation from tyranny. But they will not acknowledge any of this. Like spoiled children everywhere, they want to fly like Peter Pan--without having to do the heavy lifting of building airplanes and mastering the skills of flight, and paying the price in terms of false-starts and crashes.

4. It is in-part up to the Iraqis to make the war a success, and the blame is shared by them and the Administration if it fails.

Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq, and we are expending our national treasure on their behalf. Our only remaining aim is to bring the Iraqi people the blessings of freedom and democracy. Compared to the tyranny under which they have lived for the last 30 years, you would think they would be grateful. So it's high time they started acting like it.

The vast majority of Iraqis disapprove of the terrorist tactics of those Iraqis who are murdering our service men and women, and even the civilian aid workers who are there trying to help them. That same first-ever poll found that 79% of the population disapproves of this Iraqi terrorism. So where are they? Why are they not standing up and speaking out in defense of the American occupation and in condemnation of this treachery? Why don't we see leading Iraqi citizens on Al-Jezerra TV condemning the atrocities being committed by their fellow citizens? Why aren't they turning the terrorists in to the authorities? Why are armed Iraqi police cadres standing idly by while terrorists kidnap civilians off the streets of Fallujah? Where are the decent Iraqis? If they want a peaceful society, what are they doing to help us bring it about?

The truth here is that the Iraqis are a bunch of sunshine-patriots, sitting on the sidelines waiting to see which way the wind will blow. But it's high-time that Iraqi patriots started pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the effort to bring peace and democracy to their nation.

If the Iraqis don't start taking some responsibility for their own fate, all the blame for what befalls them cannot be placed on the U.S.

5. No matter what happens, we will declare victory and get out of town.

When America cynically declared victory in the Vietnam War and fled the country on the last helicopters out of Saigon, we ended a long tragic involvement in Southeast Asia on a note of shameful ignominy. Insult was added to ignominy when Henry Kissinger was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing "peace" to Vietnam. No one will be stupid enough to award any American government official the Nobel Peace Prize for the ruins we will likely leave behind us in Iraq. But in the other respect, we are about to see a repeat-performance--no matter how "firm" President Bush talks in his press conferences.

We are, I fearlessly predict, virtually certain to cut and run at the earliest possible (i.e., politically-feasible) opportunity. We are certain to behave in this dishonorable way because of Hard Truth No. 2--America is unwilling to pay the price of succeeding in Iraq. We are a feckless and self-indulgent nation which has not undertaken any real universal sacrifice in generations. So we will fail in Iraq. Having failed, we will call it a success.

June 30, 2004 is just the opening act in our exit. Whatever mess we are facing in Iraq at the point it becomes politically feasible to leave, is the mess that will stay when we have gone. Those who opposed the war from the beginning, and those inveterate Christmas shoppers who don't want anything to upset the scheduling of the kids' soccer game, will join hands in a parade leading out of Iraq. Whoever is President at the time, will march at the head of the line, declaring victory all the way.

This is the hardest and ugliest truth of all about our involvement in the Iraq War. Although I supported the war from Day 1--because I really want to bring democracy to Iraq and social justice to its people--I also knew on Day 1 that it was inevitable we would fail at the effort. Welcome to twentieth-first century nation-building--American style.