Today, my father, my older brother, and I attended a "Computer Fair and Ham Fest" in Westminster, Maryland. As Westminster is in the more conservative, "Republican" part of Maryland, where pickup trucks with Ehrlich and Steele bumper stickers on them are plentiful, I was pleasantly surprised to hear disdain for President Bush voiced by a number of the venders and attendees.
As is the case in many areas of the country, the displeasure with Bush, in large part, revolved around the Iraq War. The short term benefits of this for the Democratic Party, and for the United States of America, will be good, especially if they lead to an administration committed to a change of direction after the 2008 elections. After listening to conversation today, however, I am much more uncertain of the long-term benefits. Especially as I seem to be watching a most unwise framing of the history of the Iraq War take hold.
The revelation that Bush is no longer as popular as he used to be in Maryland’s Republican country came thanks to one vender, who was selling, along with various technical gadgets, a number of talking, George W. Bush dolls. The dolls were being sold "on the cheap," in large part because their necks were "broken." This meant that, rather than looking straight forward, the dolls stood there, staring down at their feet – making them look somehow "ashamed," in a way that I only wish our "real" president were capable of.
By the time I walked up to the stand, the vender was already joking with my older brother about the dolls, and explaining that, because of the broken necks, they were being offered at a discount. At this point, an older gentleman in a U.S. Navy cap, who had been standing near by, piped up and said, "If only that would happen in real life. Blame me, I guess. I voted for him. Twice. Who knew what would happen?"
I was floored. This was Carroll County, Maryland. Rural, conservative, uber-Republican. Represented in the U.S. House by right-wing nutjob Roscoe Bartlett. If Bush is losing the people there, if even small cracks are stating to form, then he’s in big trouble – big enough trouble to explain his high 20s, low 30s approval rating. If Bush’s unpopularity rubs off on the Republican Party, and the Republican nominee, they may very well be screwed in the 2008 elections. That’s potentially very good news for the Democratic Party, at least in the short term.
What came next in the conversation, however, was unnerving. It further bolstered the suspicion I expressed in my last diary that, no matter what short-term benefit politically we may see from the war, the country is now in the process of failing to learn the proper long-term lessons from it. And that, in the long run, may be a failure that haunts us.
When the vender tried to explain to this now anti-Bush Bush voter that, back in 2000, he had tried telling his friends that Bush, if elected, would invade Iraq, the Bush voter replied by saying, "I have no problem with invading Iraq. I just wish we would have won."
And, therein lies the problem. This man, this probable Republican, now quite fed up with George W. Bush, is upset based less on the reality of the situation – that it was very unlikely that we could have "won" an occupation of Iraq at all – and more upset based on a national fairy tale that is already starting to coalesce around the war, the very fairy tale that, in my last entry, I feared that Olympia Snowe was falling victim to, the very fairy tale that Meteor Blades fears may be propagated by No End in Sight: That the Iraq War was a "good idea," but that we "lost" only because of botched implementation by the Bush administration.
George W. Bush’s low approval rating is a good thing. So too are the political gains that are being reaped by the Democrats, as the Republicans sink ever further into the quagmire of an ill conceived war that is primarily of their making.
However, such ill-conceived wars are not nearly as rare as they should be when one looks at the course of American history. From the Spanish American War - and our subsequent and bloody occupation of the Philippines - to Vietnam, to the Iraq War today, we have demonstrated a disturbing tendency, every few generations, to set common sense aside, to wrap ourselves firmly in a dogmatic belief of the infallible nature of American military power, and embark down a bloody path of unnecessary foreign military intervention. Each time this happens, it results in needless pain, suffering, and death. Yet, every time – even after Vietnam, which has so firmly engrained itself into American conscience and culture - we also fail to learn our lessons as to the limitations of American military power.
The truth of the matter is: America, especially today, is incredibly skilled when it comes to forcing a rival, "conventional" military out of an area where they have little in the way of local support. We did so in the Gulf War, and, we did so again in the initial phase of the Kosovo conflict.
Where we begin to fall down, however, is when we’re forced into a long-term occupation of an area where our forces aren’t necessarily welcome, and where we may face asymmetric warfare. Our military is the most powerful in the world when it comes to fighting enemy tanks, artillery, and planes. That power is much less applicable, however, when trying to combat local groups of insurgents and terrorists, who likely have a lifelong knowledge of the local area, people, and customs. Even if it’s possible to successfully pull off such an occupation in a country the size of Iraq, it requires a hell of a lot of people – a hell of a lot more than we had available for a war in Iraq.
We can attack the Bush administration all we like for "failing to follow the advice of the generals," but, the truth is, they may not have followed the generals advice because following it would have been impossible. Indeed, putting together the number of troops needed for a "successful" occupation - "20 foreigners for every 1,000 natives", according to a RAND Corporation study – was simply not possible to do, given the size of our military, and our commitments elsewhere. According to Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias, in a November, 2005 article in The American Prospect (p. 31-34):
The 20-to-1,000 ratio implies the presence of about 500,000 soldiers in Iraq. That’s far more than it would have been possible for the United States to deploy. Sustaining a given number of troops in a combat situation requires twice that number to be dedicated to the mission, so that soldiers can rotate in and out of theater. As there are only 1 million soldiers in the entire Army, a 500,000-troop deployment would imply that literally everyone – from the National Guard units currently assisting with disaster relief on the Gulf Coast to those serving in Afghanistan, Korea, and Europe to the bureaucrats doing staff work in the Pentagon and elsewhere – would be dedicated to the mission.
Worse, even if we had been able to send the "recommended" number of troops into Iraq, I still have my doubts as to whether we would have been successful in stopping the country from slipping into civil unrest. Great danger lies in tinkering with areas and people for whom you have very little in the way of "true" understanding of historical divisions and hatreds. Especially when a dedicated and prolonged opposition to your presence may very well develop.
At this early stage, it already looks as though the Iraq War will be an issue in the 2008 elections. If it is, the Democratic Party – and progressives in general – would be foolish not to take advantage of it, as we did in 2006. It’s an issue that works for us, and it’s an issue that needs to be talked about.
When we do talk about the Iraq War, however, we must have more than our short term political goals in mind. We must also keep in mind the future health of the United States of America itself. And, that, in turn, means framing the Iraq War debate in a way that does not further re-enforce the "good idea, flawed implementation" myth. Indeed, if that idea is raised, we should do our best to fight it: We should question where we would ever have found the number of troops necessary for a "post-war stabilization" of Iraq, and whether or not, given Iraq’s history and diversity, any number of troops really would have ever been able to create stability.
Americans, for some reason, find it difficult to accept that, like every other nation in human history, our military power is limited in ability, that there are some things we just can’t do well. Instead, when faced with a debacle like Vietnam or Iraq, we have to make excuses for our failure, be they, as the "explanation" goes for Vietnam, a "biased press corps and a weak willed populace," or, as the increasingly popular explanation for Iraq seems to be, a "flawed implementation of a ‘good’ plan."
This is a dangerous cycle. And, it’s one that we need to work hard to break America out of. For, if the country fails to recognize the lessons this war is teaching us about the limits of our military power, we may, some day, once again, see thousands of American troops, and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, dying in a foreign quagmire.