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Progressive Agenda
by Joshua Adams
Three years into the War in Iraq, President Bush
assures
us he is encouraged by the progress being made in that country. One wonders what he
means by progress, exactly.
Is he referring to the
abuse
of Iraqi detainees by soldiers from Task Force 6-26,
who, instead of merely beating and intimidating prisoners with little security
value, also used them as human paintball targets? Or was he referring to the
vaunted Iraqi elections, which culminated in a stalled political process that better resembles
improvisation
than constitutional government? Perhaps he is referring to the country's copious
oil
resources, which, instead of paying for
reconstruction, remain less productive than they were during the previous
regime.
Maybe he is thinking of the progress made in the overall stability of the country
— a stability which, according to former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi,
takes 50 to 60 Iraqi lives per day and can only be described as a
civil war.
On second thought, he could be thinking about the low toll taken on US troops,
since only 2,313 have
died
and a mere 7,000 have been injured so gravely that
they have not been not able to return to military service. Still, he might be
thinking about something else: the bargain basement
cost
of the war, which, thanks to emergency appropriations and little oversight, is a steal at just $250
billion and growing.
Surely, by progress, President Bush means the discovery of no
weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, although the destruction of such weapons was the
justification for the invasion. Or did he mean the
capture
of Saddam himself,
which, rather than ending the war, only signaled the end of the beginning? Of
course, he must have meant how well his administration planned for the occupation of
Iraq, junking recommendations made by the State Department's
Future of Iraq Project,
instead letting US troops look on as
looters
destroyed key government ministries.
Building on this success, it allowed proconsul Paul Bremer to
disband
the Iraqi Army and de-Baathify even the lowliest, most useful civil servants, producing a few hundred
thousand enemies to the American occupation in one fell swoop.
Our president is nothing if not a man of the people. So by progress he must
have wanted to remind us of the 33,000 to 37,000 Iraqi
civilians
who have died
in the war and subsequent occupation at the hands of terrorists, insurgents and
US military mistakes. He must have wanted to remind us of the stoicism with
which the Iraqi people have
endured
the kidnapings, extortion, rapes,
beheadings and bombings that have occurred in the wake of our invasion.
Furthermore, he must have wanted to remind us, too, how well Iraqi
ethnic groups have been getting along with one another; how Shiite Interior
Ministry death squads exacted revenge on the Sunnis for years of persecution
under Saddam; how Sunni insurgents planted bombs in Shiite mosques to
foment secterian strife; how the Kurds watch and wait for the right moment
to declare de facto independence; and how no one, simply no one,
suspected
that these tensions would bubble up after we toppled Saddam.
Was the President, in his own way, being circumspect? Was he recalling how well
the Iraq War went over, and continues to go over, with our allies abroad, a
magically
shrinking
group that pretends to share this burden with us? Did he
allow himself a reverie or two on how completely the US has
contained the
nuclear ambitions of states like North Korea and Iran over the last three years,
since the former now almost certainly possesses nuclear weapons capacity and
the latter is hell-bent on doing so? One wonders if the President is so
impressed with our progress in Iraq that he now imagines preemptive
"progress"
in Iran as well, even though that country might present an actual — and not
merely imagined — threat to national security.
By invoking progress, the President probably wanted to point out that Iraq looks
very little like Vietnam, and that it's purely a
coincidence
that military officers
are now scouring their own histories of that war, looking for advice on how to
win the current one. He probably wanted to praise the very advocates of regime
change who sat out the Vietnam War (like Vice President Dick Cheney) but who
nonetheless managed to learn its lessons so well: avoiding the pitfalls of
The Best and the Brightest,
they shed all that social-scientific mumbo-jumbo in
favor of a properly faith-based
political theory.
And the President probably
wanted to point out how impressive it is that none of the war's architects have
suffered crises of confidence à la Robert McNamara, even as their fantasy of
emulating the Greatest Generation has foundered on the banks of the Tigris
and Euphrates.
Or perhaps the President just wasn't thinking. If he had been, he would have
chosen his words more carefully. Back in 1996, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan
suggested
that conservatives would be able to lead America only by adopting a
neo-Reaganite foreign policy. The child of that policy is now three years old.
But it is not the heroic, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
wall," Gipper heir who presides over the War in Iraq, but a president closer to
Ronald Reagan the actor, the man who was convinced he had liberated Nazi
concentration camps although he had only done so in propaganda films.
Instead of uniting our country behind a
mission of benevolent global hegemony, the War in Iraq has brought pain to the
people it liberated, embarrassment to those who prosecuted it, shame to those
who have witnessed it and flat-out denial to those who continue to support it.
Three years later, a
majority
of Americans disapprove of what this
administration has done in Iraq. Progress at last.
E-mail Joshua Adams at joshua at uchicago dot edu.
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