The Real vs. The Imagined

Happy Friday.

There is a war going on in Iraq. No, not the war you read about. Certainly not the war as presented by the neocon idealists (their oxymoronic term) in Washington. And not the Phase 1, "Mission Accomplished" war that lasted a few weeks and sacrificed 140 American lives.

There is a real and escalating war (more than 2,700 Americans lost since Phase 1) which, although it has little impact on our daily lives outside of politics, is possibly the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of our nation. And, in light of the 21st century symmetry between foreign and domestic, global and national, terrorist and ally, is sure to have devastating consequences long after our national focus turns elsewhere and we hope for forgiveness (or at least forgetfulness) from the Iraqis and most of the world.

Mark Danner offers a sobering description of the current catastrophe in IRAQ: The War of the Imagination. The theme of the article is captured by one of the last century's most prescient, and revered, foreign policy analysts, George F. Kennan:

Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.^[1]

And, of course, the plan for reaching an "end" in Iraq remains enigmatically undefined. It signifies the extraordinary failure of a president who has been unable to lead his government when electing to exercise the most grave of all presidential powers: taking the nation to war.

The results of this failure to consider an "end" are striking:

• In the first year of the war Iraq saw 109 "terror related bombings"; in the second year 613; in the third year, 1,037; in the last six months, 1,002.^[2]
  
• The number of daily attacks on US forces at each of the Iraq war's purported "turning points":
  
  

  July 2003: Bremer Appoints Iraqi Governing Council; sixteen attacks per day.
  
  December 2003: Saddam Hussein captured; nineteen attacks per day.
  
  June 2004: Handover of sovereignty to Iraqis; forty-five attacks per day.
  
  January 2005: Elections for Transitional Government; sixty-one attacks per day.
  
  June 2006: Death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; ninety attacks per day.^[3]

• 6,599 Iraqis were murdered in July and August 2006 alone. Estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed during the war range from a conservative 52,000^[4] to 655,000,^[5] with the Iraqi Health Minister recently announcing a cumulative total of 150,000. The current rate of killing of one hundred Iraqis a day would be the equivalent, adjusting for population, of 1,100 Americans a day, or 33,000 dead a month. (In the decade-long Vietnam War, about 58,000 Americans died.)

Only the week before the November 2006 election, President Bush warned an interviewer about the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq:

The terrorists...have clearly said they want a safe haven from which to launch attacks against America, a safe haven from which to topple moderate governments in the Middle East, a safe haven from which to spread their jihadist point of view, which is that there are no freedoms in the world; we will dictate to you how you think....^[6]

We have given them just that. Today's Iraq is a war torn hell ruled by war lords and their militias; just like Afghanistan today, and in the years leading up to 9/11. Purple fingers do not a democracy make. "Stay the course" and other platitudes do not appease a war weary nation (neither ours nor the Iraqis').

Worse still, the current political landscape focuses on an "exit strategy" reduced to the withdrawal of troops and the establishment of a "sovereign" Iraqi government. But this too is not a plan. It is an escape.

In the end, the problem is not just that the president is locked into an imaginary vision of Iraq far better than the reality. It's that the reality is far worse then he had the capacity to imagine.
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^[1] See Albert Eisele, "George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq," The Hill, September 26, 2002.

^[2] See "The Geography of War," Newsweek, November 6, 2006. These numbers do not include attacks on American troops with improvised explosive devices, of which there were 2,625 in July alone (nearly double the 1,454 IED attacks in January). See Michael R. Gordon, Mark Mazzetti, and Thom Shanker, "Insurgent Bombs Directed at GI's in Iraq Increase," The New York Times, August 17, 2006.

^[3] See Anthony Cordesman, Iraqi Force Development: Summer 2006 Update(CSIS, 2006), p. 7.

^[4] Iraq Body Count.

^[5] The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

^[6] See This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, October 22, 2006.