Tethered Swimming

“Fool me seven times, shame on you.  Fool me eight or more times, shame on me.” - Amy Wong

When it comes to the discussion of the Iraq War these days I can’t help but feel a bit like Ned Flanders.  Specifically, like Ned felt when an unconscious Homer bounced right back into the burning Simpson home after Ned risked life and limb to push Homer to safety.  Flanders simply shrugs and says, with resigned determination, “Okay.”  It is the perfect expression of frustration without despair.

The monumentally stupid plan to add a few extra troops in Baghdad has played out exactly as war critics predicted; nevertheless the public discussion over the war is being framed by an assumption that military progress has been made, and therefore that there might be a foundation for other improvement.  This is patently false and I find the credence it’s been given so far painfully familiar.  To be fair, to this point the discussion has mostly been media masturbation and I’m shouldn’t be taking it at all seriously.  No substantive (public) negotiations have yet begun, but it looks as though the debate, such as it is, is going to once again be conducted under disingenuous assumptions.

I am not going to debunk, line by line, the Administration’s incredible and dishonest report next week.  Professor Cole and others will do a far better job.  I will only point out something very simple.  Without exception - without exception - reports of turning points and progress have been flat out false.  I am going to repeat that because it’s all you really need to know when coming to a conclusion about whether or not we ought to continue our Mesopotamian adventure.  Without exception - without exception - every single time the Administration has said things are looking up, or that we’ve turned a corner, or that progress is finally being made, it has been proved wrong by subsequent events.

Just off the top of my head this includes the capture of Saddam Hussein (remember him?), the transfer of sovereignty (whatever that meant), the purple fingers, the promulgation of a constitution, more purple fingers, al-Maliki’s elevation to Prime Minister, the replacement of Rumsfeld, and now the, ahem, surge.  I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but it’s near impossible to keep track and I’m not even going to mention all the different tactical and command reforms we’ve undergone.  Crazed war supporters, most of them directly or indirectly on the White House gravy train, have to figure that if Congress and the public have swallowed the first thirty flavors, why not thirty-one?

There is a problem with that line of thinking though.  A government that is held accountable to its populace every two years should be aware of the fact that its wars need to be either brief or justified.  This one is neither.  Our troops are an occupying army in a foreign land that has no real government.  No thundering speeches or advertising campaigns are going to change that.  The fashionable malarkey about how the, ahem, surge is beginning to show military progress is coming from the same people who trumpeted all those other important milestones and critical phases.  I call bullshit.

Whatever security improvements that have been seized upon by the usual screeching chorus of chicken-hawks are almost certainly illusory.  The metrics and numbers that will be published on the fifteenth of this month won’t quite be made out of whole cloth, they will merely be cherry picked and twisted as much as humanly possible.  Trying to draw conclusions from that kind of data is like putting faith in Enron financial statements.  And even if the numbers weren’t fictional, they’re still meaningless.  There is no functional Iraqi government and there is no hope of forming one.  What security does exist is provided by sectarian militias with shifting allegiances and contradictory goals.  Even if we spot the Administration every piece of data and take them at their word, the situation is still hopeless.

Now for the good news: the very political vacuum that precludes any successful conclusion to our involvement can be used as an excuse to cover our tracks while we flee.  Blaming the Iraqis is like telling a rape victim that she was asking for it; it’s nakedly disingenuous and downright sleazy, but I’m willing to go for it if it ends American involvement in Iraq.  Whether we get everyone out in 2008 or 2009 will matter little to the history books (let the academics fight it out for the next thirty years), but it will matter a hell of a lot to the people, American and Iraqi, who get killed and maimed in the interim.  Those are the people we need to think about, the ones that are breathing today but won’t be a year from now.

Here’s hoping that there isn’t enough juju left in the White House bullshit machine to doom them.