Op-Ed
Reflections on the War in Iraq
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If You Can Keep It
January 18, 2007 - 1:00amIn a little over two months, the United States will have been at war in Iraq for four years.
I cannot remember exactly how I felt on that night in 2003 when President Bush took to the airwaves to tell the American people that our men and women in uniform were headed into the country whose name is, for many, now synonymous with Vietnam.
But I have sure felt a lot of things since.
It was pretty soon after it became suspect that there were even any weapons in Iraq which were dire enough to warrant an invasion in the first place that I began to get angry. Why, then, I wondered, were we there? Why had our government — and our politicians on both sides of the aisle — been so anxious to send us there? And why had our president used every ounce of his political capital to actually get us there?
I campaigned for a man in 2000 who never missed an opportunity to criticize the Clinton Administration for its role in what he had called “nation building.” That man had been my governor. I had liked him. Texans across the state had liked him. Heck, even his Democratic lieutenant governor had liked him. This desperado with the different drawl — the one whose justification for the war had shifted from disarming the Iraqi government to introducing American-style democracy to the Middle East — I wasn’t too sure about.
The Iraq War now presents many challenges, not least among them how to end it. It is a difficult question to answer. But, for a conflict rooted in idealism, it was unrealistic — in every sense of the word — to have ever expected otherwise. The irony of our present situation is that we must find a way to achieve success in a struggle prompted by an ideology that has proven a dismal failure.
The idea of toppling a government in a given country to foment a political revolution predicated upon principles wholly unfamiliar to the vast majority of people in that country has never sat very well with me. A key hero of mine — no less than the Father of Conservatism himself — also would have found the idea a little hard to swallow.
“… [N]o name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the men, of whom any system of authority is composed, any other than God, and Nature, and education, and their habits of life have made them.” So thought Edmund Burke, anyway.
In writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke sought to offer a quintessentially British response to a teensy conflict across the English Channel that had, to be sure, a lot of people losing their heads (pun most certainly intended). That conflict, of course, was the bloody little number we know as the French Revolution. And while there are obviously a million and one things that distinguish the fall of Louis XVI from the fall of Saddam Hussein, the logic of Burke’s objections to the former is both timeless and universal.
Of those who advocated an American incursion into Iraq for reasons that reek largely of — yep — the type of “nation building” that President Bush so disparaged when his job was still in Austin, Burke would likely have said the same thing he said of the sons and daughters of France who set about to decapitate its rulers and demolish its institutions for a love of democracy in the abstract: “This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.”
To be clear: Edmund Burke was no foe of liberty. He simply did not believe that the violent overthrow of a government wherein that ideal had always been lacking would be effective in securing it. “… [S]ee what is got,” the Briton shot at his Gallic neighbors, “by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment in which they become truly despicable.”
I — like George W. Bush and Co. — would love nothing more than to wake up in the morning to a world with a free Iraq and a free Middle East. But the doctrine of American-led regime change is decidedly not the best way to get either Iraq or its neighbors to that point. There are other, subtler, more gradual ways to bring about reform in the region; direct military intervention is not one of them.
The unfortunate problem we now face — in a situation we should never allow ourselves to repeat — is what to do after such an intervention has already occurred.
And it is not a problem for which I or anyone else could honestly provide a sure solution.
For almost every Democrat and an increasing number of Republicans in Washington, the safe answer, politically speaking, has become what was once derided by the President as “cutting and running.” This is because the new Democratic majority in Congress has interpreted November’s election results as a sign that the American people, at least, don’t think that sounds like too bad a plan after all.
And yet, even when the polls seem to give both politicians and pundits every reason to agree, this columnist finds that he cannot.
Despite my philosophical dispute with the line of thinking responsible for forcing America into what this Texan can only describe as a boondoggle, I do not believe that leaving Iraq to fend for itself in its present condition would fall in line with this nation’s character or its convictions.
I may not have liked how we made the bed, so to speak, but I can’t shake the feeling that we are honor-bound to find a way to sleep in it.
Victory will not be pretty — but defeat is too ugly to imagine.
We just have to make sure, in short, never to sleep in the same bed again.
Mark Coombs is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mpc39@cornell.edu. If You Can Keep It appears Thursdays.