Recently the President has stated that he will only leave Iraq when the mission is accomplished and we can come home victorious. I seem to recall a banner at some point saying that we already had accomplished the mission, but that, I guess, is not really the point. The question is at what point will we "succeed" or at what point will we simply declare victory and go home.
Having followed the war closely since it was started over 3 years ago, I've been wondering since the start what our actual aim was. I've become firmly convinced that not only do I not know what our goal in the war is, the President doesn't either.
Lets look at some of the possible objectives and what we would need to do to meet them.
- Find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Well, if this was the goal of the war, it seems we can go home now. There are no weapons of mass destruction, and at the rate the various death squads are killing scientists , intellectuals and students there's not going to be anyone left over there who will know how to make anything for awhile, so I think we can call this one fairly safely completed.
- Remove Saddam from power. Again, regardless of if this was the actual reason for going to war, it seems that this goal has been accomplished. He's not in power and even if he was let out of prison today his people would as likely shoot him on sight as let him back in power. He's hardly a threat to world peace anymore. Mission accomplished here!
- Establish Democracy in Iraq. Well, this hasn't happened and I would guess that no matter what we do in the country it's not going to happen. I suppose that Bush is holding out for a miracle here, but I think that he's going to be rather upset when he realizes that this is just a fantasy. The people of Iraq are not interested in an American style Democracy yet and if we (should have) learned one thing from all the regimes we've set up over the years is that forcing democracy on people is far harder than forcing a dictatorship on them. So this goal is probably forever out of reach.
More Cynical Goals:
- Seize the oil wealth of the nation. This is a pretty bad one too. The cost of the Iraq war is far more than the value of their daily oil exports, so even if this was a goal that we had we seem to be failing at it. Therefore if this was the goal we should just realize it's not going to happen and get out.
- Try to show off Americas continued military might. We did a pretty good job with this early on, but at this point it's not really doing so hot. If we want to try to salvage this one we should have a last big explosive mission or two then leave. It might do some good for our image as a military super-power and at least we'd be out.
Of course, none of these issues seems to matter to Bush. I was listening to him today and as far as I can tell his plan for Iraq is to stay there until we are victorious. He's also said that the only way America can be defeated is if we pull out before the job is done. Since it appears that the "job" is completely undefined by the administration the only logical conclusion that can be drawn is rather sobering. That the only way to win the war is to stay there forever. It stops us from being defeated and it allows us infinite time to come up with a definition for victory.
I hope I'm wrong about this, but I think that to Bush, winning is staying and nothing else will satisfy him.