At first, I thought his latest
columnwas going to be yet another "we must stay the course in Iraq" column. Then he concludes with:
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been told that they are at war. They have not been told what sacrifices, material and emotional, they must make to sustain multiple regime changes and nation-building projects. Telling such truths is part of the job description of a war president.
Looking over Will's columns for the last year, he was an avid supporter of invading Iraq. In his
3/19/03 column, he praises Dubya's speech that prepared for the invasion while dismissing opposition from Daschle and the UN. Will has written much on Iraq since then, but this
9/7/03 column is little more than a annotated Condi Rice press release. On the 30th of last month, Will bashed Dick Clarke's book - "Clarke's book will quickly be forgotten" - and this little bit on Iraq:
So what makes Clarke strident -- his self-description -- is his belief that the Iraq War was a tragic blunder, arising from the president's monomania about Saddam and draining resources from the war on terror.
Intelligent people can and do make that argument. However, by day eight Clarke's version of it was puerile: But for the Iraq War, Sept. 11 might have caused the Islamic masses to say "maybe we've gone too far."
None of those columns prepared me for his latest column. He opens with how bad things are in Iraq:
As this is written, headlines speak of 1,200 Marines "encircling" Fallujah, which is as populous as Newark, N.J. It is a sign of things falling apart that common language seems unable to get a purchase on Iraq's new reality -- a civil war defined by the uprising of many Shiites against the U.S. occupation.
Nothing in America's national experience is comparable to today's dependence on the good will of a reclusive 73-year-old Shiite ayatollah, Ali Sistani. That dependence would be ominous enough if he were the uncontested voice of Iraq's Shiite majority. But now his 30-year-old rival, Moqtada Sadr, has summoned his followers to "terrorize your enemy" -- America.
Then the middle of the column is the usual "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going" garbage. Then he goes back to describing the situation and the picture he paints is ugly:
A U.S. official in Baghdad accurately insists that the violent insurgency involves "a minuscule percentage" of the 25 million Iraqis. However, history usually is made not by majorities but by intense minorities. Remember 1917, and this from Richard Pipes's "The Russian Revolution": "The Bolshevik triumph in October was accomplished nine-tenths psychologically: the forces involved were negligible, a few thousand men at most in a nation of one hundred and fifty million." There may have been fewer Bolsheviks than there are members of Sadr's militia, which is one of many. The cancellation last weekend of a Baghdad trade fair was symbolic of the ability of a minuscule minority to sow chaos sufficient to prevent a majority from attending to mundane matters.
Not much else having gone as planned since the fall of Baghdad, a delay in the transfer of sovereignty, scheduled for June 30, should not be unthinkable. A delay would trigger violence. But, then, the transfer on schedule probably would be preceded by an offensive by the insurgents. The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears "any place that we control."
The transfer is to be to an institutional apparatus that is still unformed. This is approaching at a moment when U.S. forces in Iraq, never adequate for postwar responsibilities, are fewer than they were.
U.S. forces in Iraq are insufficient for that mission; unless the civil war is quickly contained, no practicable U.S. deployment will suffice. U.S. forces worldwide cannot continue to cope with Iraq as it is, plus their other duties -- peacekeeping, deterrence, training -- without stresses that will manifest themselves in severe retention problems in the reserves and regular forces.
Then he concludes with what I lead with - blaming Dubya for not telling us what a mess Iraq would be.