Several conservative columnists, including one in today's Wall Street Journal, who have interviewed President Bush lately have come away with strong impressions on how Bush really feels about the war in Iraq, why he apparently decided to invade Iraq back in 2003, and the depressing news that under Bush Americans may be in Iraq forever, or at least until a new commander in chief occupies the Oval Office.
According to conservative commentators who have interviewed him recently, President Bush is pretty much spending every waking hour concerned with one thing and one thing only: preventing another major terorist attack on Ameerican soil. The President, they write, will make vague but ominious references to the daily intelligence that passes over his desk, and to terrorists determined to deliver another 9-11, or even an attack on a bigger scale than that horrendous day.
Which leads to Iraq. The President, we are told, believes that by fighting in Iraq, we are "taking the fight to the terorrists," fighting "them" over there, not here on home soil. As the President told the Wall Street Journal, this is the first war in our history where our enemy will follow us home if we quit.
The President's basic assumptions are largely applauded by the commentators (big suprise), who generally fawn over the President like celebrity reporters interviewing Brad & Angelina, (if they offer up any criticism of the President's Iraq policies at all, it's that the President hasn't poured enough resources -- i.e., American soldiers, into the conflict, or been straight enough with the American public about the stakes in Iraq.) Nor are Bush's basic assumptions challenged at all. But if Bush really believes we are fighting terrorists to the last dead civilian Iraqi to protect American civilians at home, then America is heading straight for the greatest strategic setback and moral debacle in its history.
On the strategic level, Bush's argument really makes no sense at all. Yes, a portion of insurgents opposing our presence in Iraq claims some sort of allegiance to Al Qaeda, and yes, Al Qaeda attacked us on 9-11. But as we all know now (and some of us knew way back in 2002) there was never any connection between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda, and never any Al Qaeda organization in Iraq until after we invaded. If there are Al Qaeda elements in Iraq today, it is because we gave them a motivation to go there (and removed the dictatorship that had kept them out).
The President may argue that the fanatics attacking us now in Iraq may have decided to strike us here at home after 9-11 if we hadn't given them the opportunity to kill Americans closer to their homes. By the logic of this argument, U.S. service personnel are little more than sitting ducks, sent overseas to wear a big, black bullseye on their backs. The moral bankruptcy of this concept is self-evident. Buh's policy also displays a very upsetting moral calculus: Innocent American lives are more valuable than innocent Iraqi lives. He's essentially bombed, shot-up, and brought civil-war conditions down on a population that, no matter how crazy their former leader may have been, never meant us any harm. Yet Bush is willing to sacrifice th em in order to keep Americans safe.
There is also the strategic blindness. If you take Bushg's assertions at face value, then essentially U.S. service personnel have to stay over there indefintely. After all, it's not like the terrorists are going to sue for peace one day, and ask to negotiate a Paris Peace Treaty arrangment to formally surrender. How are we ever going to know that there are no longer any fanatics planning to strike us here at home? Does Bush expect to receive some sort of secret sign from above? Or is he following some sort of Joseph Conrad/Mr. Kurtzian strategy of killing all the brutes? Either way, he's sending us down a long, dark tunnel with no end in sight.
So here we are today, watching a nation-state self-destruct right before our eyes, while our military nears the breaking point, our international prestige is at a historic all-time low, and a whole new generation in the Middle East has a whole new example of Western imperialism to motivate them to hate and despise us. And wasn't bitter opposition to our intervention in the region in the past one prime motivating factor in the 9-11 attacks?
Sometimes history repeats itself, both times as tragedy.