In his recent op ed, Our Unceasing Ambivalence, published December 8 in the Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele blames all of us for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
His basic premise, "Why it's so hard to define victory in Iraq," is one of the worst pieces of illogic I’ve ever read. Yet this man is paid to think, speak and write.
Follow, if you dare.
Steele, like any good story teller, begins with elements of truth(iness) to sucker the reader in:
Possibly the most confounding feature of the Iraq war, from the very opening of hostilities to the present day, has been the American government's utter failure to define what victory would be in this war. "Victory" has been a conjure word for the Bush administration, a Churchillian allusion meant to evoke the heroic perseverance shown in the great wars of the past. But no one in the administration has ever said what victory would actually look like. And, lacking this description, even those of us who have supported the war have seen trouble coming for some time. Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.
OK, fine, right? Wrong. The war in Iraq had many goals. The first goal was to make a President into a leader by deliverying a "winnable war" to him made up out of whole cloth. The "war" lasted just a couple of weeks—long enough to topple the government of Saddam Hussein by defeating a decrepit army, an army that was made to appear strong via the other Bush "conjure words": Weapons of Mass Destruction. This made the invasion not only justifiable but kept us on edge against the possibility that WMDs would be used against our troops any minute now. Except there weren’t any. Whether the Administration cherry-picked its intel or not is beside the point. It had what it needed to accomplish goal one:
GOAL NUMBER ONE: Make Bush 43 not just a "war President" but a better one than his father by taking Hussein out.
That opened the door for so many other goals we have been able to infer after-the-fact:
GOAL NUMBER TWO: Expand the "war on terror" so that the unilateral foreign policy of the Administration could be kept above criticism by placing it on a perpetual war footing.
GOAL NUMBER THREE: Using the WMD-based invasion of Iraq and 9/11, establish the President as a unitary executive who is above the Constitution and all domestic laws.
GOAL NUMBER FOUR: Secure a dominant military position for the United States deep in the oil-rich Middle East.
GOAL NUMBER FIVE: Remake Iraq into an ally resembling Muslim Turkey, a NATO member, but unlike Turkey, thoroughly beholden to the United States.
GOAL NUMBER SIX: Open Iraq for the economic exploitation of selected American corporations (i.e., Halliburton).
GOAL NUMBER SEVEN: Leverage newly unrestricted Iraqi oil production so that the achievement of all other goals is cost-neutral to the federal budget.
GOAL NUMBER EIGHT: Use the conquered Iraq as the springboard to (a) duplicate this same feat in Iran and (b) make North Korea see the light of day.
Look again at what Steele said:
Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.
His first logical gymnastic: Write the major premise backwards so you can argue from a false platform (a compulsory move, by the way, for the rest of the routine to score big).
The truth is, without goals there can be no victory in war because there is no measuring stick. But there were plenty of goals. Goals 1, 2 and 3 worked for a while, and Goal 6 continues to pay off like a broken slot machine stuck on three "BARS" but here’s the stinker: Goal 5 was the condition precedent to actual victory, which should be defined as achieving enough of a war’s goals to feel pretty good about the outcome. Without a stable, moderate Iraq, here’s how it all shakes out:
GOAL NUMBER ONE: Iraq turned the President into George "Worst" Bush such that his father, George "He Won" Bush publicly wept at the end of his family dynasty in politics and brought his ancient trustees out of mothballs to save the legacy if nothing else (results not promising).
GOAL NUMBER TWO: The unilateral foreign policy approach has failed spectacularly, costing the Administration all credibility on international matters.
GOAL NUMBER THREE: Iraq more than any other issue brought about a Democratic congress that will brutalize the "unitary executive" for his blatant illegalities.
GOAL NUMBER FOUR: The American military position in the Middle East is long-term, but in the "glue trap" sense, and hardly "dominant."
GOAL NUMBER FIVE: Iraq is a failed state, a terrorist training ground, and has drawn resources away from a now-failing Afghanistan occupation.
GOAL NUMBER SIX: The economic exploitation of Iraq has been at the cost of real American dollars and scandal.
GOAL NUMBER SEVEN: Iraqi oil production is nil, and the phrase "peak oil" is now a part of American vocabulary.
GOAL NUMBER EIGHT: Iran is the region’s dominant power and North Korea has nuclear weapons.
Measured by its goals (the morality and legitimacy of each aside) the invasion of Iraq has been an utter, complete and catastrophic failure, the consequences of which will reverberate for decades.
Steele’s description of the "hedgemony" that comes from traditional victory ("You win, you take over") is accurate but inapplicable. It is clear that Bush 43 did not want an independent, democratic and strong Iraq in the form of post-war Germany and Japan, nor would the world stand for Iraq as an American colony. What Bush 43 wanted was a stealth-version of Vichy France or the members of the Communist Eastern Bloc—a puppet state with the trappings of independence.
Ignoring that there were true goals of the Iraq Misadventure, Steele then embarks on the path of fantasy, and mischaracterizes the various "commissions":
And now, as if to confirm that this is a "relativistic" war meaning everything and nothing, there are at least three national commissions--the White House, the Pentagon and the Baker committee--tasked to create the meaning that will give us a dignified exit. Of course America is now quite beyond any possibility of dignity in this situation save the one option all these commissions have or will likely dismiss: complete military victory.
The Iraq Study Group (and you know where Steele is coming from when he calls it "the Baker committee") exists for one purpose only: to nudge Prez Fratboy into withdrawal. The White House commission is simple face-saving, and the Pentagaon might at this point be in ass-saving mode. All come down to a simple precept: "The boss is here, look busy!" And We The People are "the boss" who finally showed up at the factory after a long absence during which production shot to Hell.
Dancing blithely on his Yellow Brick Road, Steele now adds a triple somersault:
Why don't we know the meaning of this war and our reasons for fighting it? I think the answer begins in the awkward fact that America is now the world's uncontested superpower. If this fate has its advantages, it also brings an unasked-for degree of dominion in the world. This is essentially a passive dominion that has settled on a rather isolationist nation, yet it makes America into something of a sheriff. Whether the problem is Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Darfur, America gets the call.
If you are not insulted by now, read on, MacDuff:
Thus our youth are often asked to go to war more out of international responsibility than national necessity. This is a hard fate for a free and prosperous citizenry to accept--the loss of sons and daughters to a kind of magnanimity. Today our antiwar movement is essentially an argument with this fate, a rejection of superpower responsibility.
And this fear of responsibility is what makes us ambivalent toward the idea of victory. Because victory is hegemonic, it mimics colonialism. A complete American victory in Iraq would put that nation--at least for a time--entirely under American power and sovereignty. We would in fact "own" the society as a colony. In today's international moral climate this would both undermine the legitimacy of our war effort and make an ongoing demand on our blood and treasure. If we are already a good ways down this road, complete victory would only take us further.
Hear that folks? BLAME AMERICA! Look again at what I set out in bold. We not only REJECT our role in the world we FEAR it. A population that blindly supported not one but TWO invasions in our "post 9/11 world" (more conjure words) now TURNS AWAY from the road to "complete victory" because it costs too much.
Here’s the topper:
Is it any wonder, then, that we have failed to completely win this war? Since World War II, American leaders--left and right--have worked out of an impossible double bind: They cannot afford to win the wars they fight. Thus the postmodern American war in which the world's greatest power deconstructs its own motives for fighting until losing becomes a better option than winning.
What utter, total bullshit! The goals of this war are clearly visible in hindsight. They were hidden from us because they were immoral. They were also unachievable by any nation, even the world’s sole "superpower." Steele completely ignores in his World War II analogies that the goals then were simple and achievable, but only with monumental effort: Defeat Germany and Japan. Yet Germany was defeated not just by America but by the combined military might of the Allies, including the Soviet Union, and Japan was only defeated by unleashing Armageddon’s Own Hammer—nuclear weapons, the ultimate in WMD.
At this point, reading Steele becomes almost intolerable. Steele writes "Islamic extremism is an ideology of menace." Yes, it is. But George Worst Bush’s own actions have emboldened, expanded and accelerated this menace, and brings a menace all its own, cloaked in righteousness. He is the one, the "decider" who not only chose his actions in Iraq but did it "on the cheap" trying to make an illegal war with immoral goals opaque to the American people through mass deception.
His false construct firmly in place, Steele continues,
So, in the Middle East, America has gone to war not against Islam but against menace as a formula for power--menace as the force that brings the First World in toe to the Third, and that makes bargaining between the two inevitable. Whether the issue is an obsession with nuclear weapons or terrorism in London or assaults against Israel, menace is the power that draws the West backwards into engagement with otherwise forgotten parts of the world. Iran cannot produce a digital camera or a Ferrari but, through menace, it can affect the balance of power in the world. We in the West, and especially America, then, are at war with menace--the indulgence of evil for strategic advantage--because today it is the power that most compromises us.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! We didn’t go to war against menace. We went to war for avarice. And because we didn’t get what Bush and his cronies wanted, we need to do still more:
For every reason, from the humanitarian to the geopolitical to the military, Iraq is a war that America must win in the hegemonic, even colonial, sense. It is a test of our civilization's commitment to the good against the alluring notion of menace-as-power that has gripped so much of the Muslim world. Today America is a danger to the world in its own right, not because we are a powerful bully but because we don't fully accept who we are. We rush to war as a superpower protecting the world from menace, then leave the battle before winning as a show of what, humility? We confuse our enemies, discouraging them one minute and encouraging them the next.
I wish I could write something pithy here. I really do. But to even attempt it at this point simply gives legitimacy to lunacy.
The Administration had goals going into Iraq. Achieving them would have meant victory. By all measures of humanity, our goals were wrong. By all measures military, we conquered ineptly. No wonder the Iraq Misadventure is the worst decision ever made by a U.S. President.
Yet lunatics like Steele pretend this debacle was forced upon the country then blame us for the catastrophic failure of a war of bad choice. You, me, our friends, families and associates, all of us are slackers to a man, woman and child in his twisted, pathological construct.