If Howard Dean has a fault, it is that being direct and ahead of the curve can make you a little too sound-bitable. Dean is abbreviates his arguments moving stright from point A to point E. He must learn to take us through the interim steps in his reasoning. He would also do well to sugar-coat things just a little for his political patients. The truth is America has already won the war in Iraq. The Saddam Hussein regime is deposed and the ability of Iraq to project military power is destroyed. And yet Howard Dean is right that we can't win this war.
See you on the flip.
How can the two things be true at the same time? Anyone who read "
Plan of Attack" should have been well-impressed with the tremendous effort Gen. Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld and our intelligence agents put in changing this nation's Iraq war plan from a 500,000 troops massive occupation model to a lightning-fast blitzkrieg using not even half that number of troops. And those troops swept over the Iraqi forces even faster than the plan's authors had ever hoped. After that fantastic success, George Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished". And it would have been, had that been the mission. Had we set out to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime and leave the Iraqis to their own devices, it would have been a tremendous success.
But we didn't. We set out to conquer a country and install a new regime that would not fall into anarchy the minute we departed. That is the war we cannot win. That is the war that required the half-million troops anticipated and the cooperation of our allies.
Iraq is not a desperately poor and largely isolated country like Afghanistan, but a country which has active internal and external political forces, oil money and radical Islam to contend with. There is a reason that Saddam's forces fell so quickly. They were designed with three purposes in mind -- the second and third were defense and attack, respectively. The primary mission of Saddam's forces was vengeance. A 500,000 US troop plan would support defense as well as attack. But the limited Rumsfeld/Franks plan was designed primarily for attack.
Our attack totally overwhelmed Iraq's defenses and destroyed their capability for any concerted attack, but it did not destroy their capability for vengeance. That infrastructure still exists in Iraq. To defeat that force you either have to put in a regime which can enforce order and civil society. Either you can do it by being significantly more tyrannical than Saddam was (which would be tough, even if we wanted to do it) or you have to have a massive force which can impose order and make it safe enough for positive, peaceful political forces to do the work of government.
At its core, the problem is that Republicans don't know how to do positive, peaceful politics and they despise the work of government. All they know is attack. Their theory is about projecting power through intimidation and getting what they want. But Iraq is teaching them that you can't make a decent society that way. You have to build.
That's not a lesson the Bush Administration or its media mouthpieces seem to be ready or even able to learn. As a case in point, we have Tony Blankley, editor of the Washington Times, attacking the argument of Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, on the necessity and even inevitability of diplomacy. Blankley urges Bush to be bold, brash and reckless and rush hell-bent into Iran.
After agreeing that Iran's nuclear bomb was only months away, he [Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei ] went on to explain that, on the other hand, any attempt to resolve the crisis by non-diplomatic means would "open a Pandora's box, there would be efforts to isolate Iran; Iran would retaliate; and at the end of the day you have to go back to the negotiating table to find the solution."
Also illuminating is that Blankley constructs for Bush the choice of being Hamlet (indecisive) or Henry V (bold). The interesting point is that both these Shakespearean figures are mere teenagers or at most in their early 20s. Hamlet is a prince who is subordinated to his mother and his uncle. Henry is a young King, exhorting his army to take up arms against a more powerful and established foe.
In Blankley's analogy, Republicans aren't the "Daddy Party" as much as the "I Won't Grow Up Party". The Hamlet/Henry analogy only works if we are content with leadership that is perennial trapped in an ongoing adolescence, a leadership that consistently "acts out inapproprately".
Americans have grown up. It's time that we demand our leadership do the same. America can't just attack. And because the Bush Administration has failed to learn that lesson it has waged a war of attack that cannot be won.