Five Years On
The war for Iraq and its lessons.
Mar 24, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 27• By JULES CRITTENDEN
The war started with an odd bit of air turbulence just before dawn. A waffling and whining noise, ironically enough. Hardly remarkable. Anyone who wasn't listening for it might have missed it.
I had just woken up on the Kuwait-Iraq border in a sleeping bag laid out on an armored vehicle's lowered ramp. I looked at my watch. It was 0429 hours on March 20, 2003. George W. Bush's deadline for Saddam Hussein to quit Iraq had passed half an hour earlier.
On the desert floor, our miles-long armored column was parked directly under the air corridor the Tomahawk cruise missiles would travel to Baghdad. Colonel David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, had informed us they'd fly 350 feet over our heads. A few minutes later, I heard them.
They were otherworldly, like ghosts in flight. They'd be arriving in Baghdad shortly, lighting up the palace district with dramatic effect for the world to see on CNN. It sounded like 20 of them. When the last one had past, I burrowed back into my sleeping bag to doze a little more before stand-to was called.
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We would arrive where those missiles were going in 19 days, after an epic movement through Iraq's western desert and combat along the Euphrates and Tigris, filthy and transformed by our experiences. I was a reporter embedded with A Company of the 4/64 Armor Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. Designated to lead the assault on Saddam's seat of power on April 7, 2003, our armored column attacked Baghdad at dawn. No one expected to see dusk. What we expected was Mogadishu writ large. The Americans would win, that was indisputable. But we, the first in, embarked on it without expectation of survival. We prepared to make a good run of it, stripping soft gear off the outside of the Bradley that might burn if we got hit, loading up on water and ammo. Smitty, the Bradley's 20-year-old radio operator, was bounced to make room for a psyops soldier and the amplifiers that would blast the "surrender" messages. Smitty was angry.
"I don't wanna stay back!" he said.
"Smitty," I said. "We're gonna get f--ing killed. You get to live. Be happy."
"If y'all gonna get killed, I wanna get killed with you," Smitty said.
Captain Wolford, the company commander, told me later that he was praying when he fell asleep and praying when he woke up that morning. "I had never done that before," he said.
I was the only one in the company who had a choice in the matter. But the question of whether to ride with one's friends, when one has a job to do, when one has made a commitment, is not much of a question at all. There was heavy fire that day and for two days after. A lot of people died. But not us. We lived, and learned some of the many lessons that war has to offer.
Things rarely happen as expected. Once you start, you have to finish. You don't get to be the same again. There is nothing much good about any of it, but winning is better than losing. And there is no such thing as a safe place to which you can withdraw. The fate of two reporters demonstrated that last point when they chose not to accompany the assault into Baghdad, considering it too dangerous. They were killed along with three American soldiers when an Iraqi missile struck the brigade's field headquarters south of Baghdad. Two cameramen, believing themselves safe in Baghdad's Hotel Palestine, were killed the next day when American tankers, my friends, mistook them for Iraqi forward artillery observers and fired.
We're five years into the war in Iraq now. Nearly 4,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Thousands more Americans and Iraqis have seen their lives shattered in what became the premier killing zone of a global war. But death and combat no longer make the front pages; the drama has been bled out of it, and the war has taken a back seat in the presidential campaign. Rather than maturing in time of war, the American people seem eager to put it out of mind.
After 1989, we were encouraged to believe that war was history. This illusion made the shock of 9/11 all the worse. Even then some people wanted to believe it was an aberration, something we had brought on ourselves and could fix with kind words and deeds. The ease of the Taliban's ouster then created the false impression that we had managed to reinvent war in a more palatable form.
In fact, all we've managed to do as a nation over six-and-a-half years of war is confuse ourselves. This is not a simple war to understand, and it has been going on for decades. It has expressed itself with everything from low-grade terrorism to conventional war to nuclear threats, across multiple continents, and with many, seemingly unconnected, adversaries. Just the part of it we call the Iraq war has involved many different, and not always distinct, adversaries in numerous, overlapping conflicts. Faced with this kind of complexity, it isn't so surprising that vague messages of "hope" and "change" resonate with the American public, and politicians vie for the right to own those terms.
The shallowness of the debate suggests our nation is in danger of failing the test of our time. The abstract circumstances of cause and consequence in this war have fostered an avoidance of reality in some quarters--and at some of the highest levels of our leadership, often quite nakedly for purposes of political gain. Would-be leaders would rather play to emotions than make the hard calculations that adulthood forces on us.
Iraq has become the central battlefield in the 21st century's Islamic war, and may have been destined to be, with or without us. Lying geographically, ideologically, and culturally athwart the Middle East, rich in resources and boiling with rage long before we got there, it is the place where the war will either be settled or truly begun. It is a fitting role for the cradle of civilization to host a war in which the very progress of civilization is being challenged.
While there were terrible errors made in going to war in Iraq, the decision to go to war was not one of them.
Saddam Hussein convinced the world he had active weapons programs. The evidence now suggests he didn't, but how active his programs were, ultimately, is irrelevant. He had demonstrated his desire to dominate the region. Our European allies were eager to do business with him despite their own intelligence reports. Absent any containment, there was potential for more terrible and far-reaching wars. It was inevitable that Iraq would undergo a post-Saddam power struggle with massive ethnic conflict and with interference by Iran and Syria. The question was, and remains, how much influence we would wield in that event.
Five years on, the threat Saddam Hussein posed to regional stability--global stability, if you consider the resources he sought to control--has been neutralized. The toll in American and Iraqi lives to date may well have averted a far worse toll, though we can yet get the full accounting if we withdraw precipitously. The deadly influence of Iran remains limited by our presence in Iraq and by the still somewhat credible threat to use force against its nuclear ambitions. Iraqi genocide and the remaking of the map of the Middle East to the benefit of the Islamic Republic of Iran remain potent what-ifs.
The side benefits of the 2003 invasion included a briefly more compliant Iran and capitulation by Libya. The beacon of democracy shined, with successful, if sometimes problematic, democracies emerging in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon and with democratic movements making gains elsewhere in the Islamic world. Even the Palestinians had a crack at it and have learned that choices come with consequences. Those parties most threatened by civil order find themselves increasingly marginalized within the larger Islamic world, from Hamas in Gaza, to Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan is only the most recent case of renewed democracy producing a victory over Islamism in elections supported by the United States--despite the widespread resentment of America's alliance with Pervez Musharraf, a seemingly contradictory situation that underscores the difficulty of our task in this war.
Those Americans who have sneered at these fits and starts of democracy are experiencing their own domestic political frustrations. Democrats are demanding more political cohesion from Iraq and Pakistan than they've been able to manage themselves. As Congress presses for disengagement with no practicable plan, we learn--thanks to the candor of a departing foreign policy adviser--that the leading Democratic candidate has no plan whatsoever for his campaign's central plank of withdrawal from Iraq.
The errors committed in this war have contributed greatly to American frustrations. There was a failure to recognize the extent of the challenge ahead, even as ambitious plans were being laid starting in late 2001. The Bush administration could have had a blank check and recruits lined up around the block, but instead insisted on taking us into war with a post-Cold War military that is only belatedly being built up. The administration failed to seize control of Iraq with sufficient urgency and, when a complex insurgency was well underway, failed to move with sufficient skill to quell it until late in the day. The greater failure was to not adequately communicate the mission to Americans and to the world.
All wars go through evolutions, and it is unrealistic to expect no missteps. In this case, however, they are cited most frequently not as arguments to improve the war effort, but as excuses for abandonment. The Bush administration has made good at last with a counterinsurgency strategy that has hobbled Al Qaeda in Iraq and has the Shiite militias in a box. Iraqi military capabilities are improving, and the next president appears likely to inherit a somewhat pacified, reconciled Iraq; an enhanced American position of influence in the Middle East; opposing terrorist organizations that are sharply compromised; and a string of nascent democracies. At considerable cost of American blood and treasure, the United States is now in a position of marked if precarious influence in the most dangerous part of the world. The new president will have to consider how much of that he or she wants to throw away or build upon.
The antiwar camp and their candidates hold a childish hope that our problems will just go away if we withdraw. They argue that Iraq was an artificial cause, that our presence fuels violence and our departure will end it, that Iran can be a helpful partner in this process, and that al Qaeda can be fought from afar. They desire nothing but a return to the innocence we enjoyed before September 11, 2001, ignoring the fact that our enemies had been emboldened by decades of American demurring, disengagement, and half measures.
The American people have been allowed to believe that getting out of Vietnam was the best thing we did there, and that there was no penalty for cutting our losses. It should not be surprising that so many believe the same of Iraq. Looking past the immediate victims of that historic abandonment, the Soviet Union was emboldened by our show of weakness, invading Afghanistan and triggering a fateful string of events. Iran, seized by Islamic zealots, staged the 1979 hostage crisis to kick off three decades of support for terrorism and a bid for regional domination. In both cases, the belligerents knew we would do nothing about it. Figures like Osama bin Laden, among others, noted this void, and created the circumstances we are currently compelled to address.
The United States has commitments to Iraq and the larger region and a pressing interest in the defense of free and open societies. If we avoid our responsibilities we simply plant the seeds of further conflict. The pressing question of the 2008 presidential campaign is whether the part of this global war that began five years ago will be prosecuted to a satisfactory conclusion, or whether the effort to end the Iraq war will be marked by a different kind of waffling, whining noise than that one I heard at dawn five years ago, followed by more devastating explosions.
Jules Crittenden is an editor at the Boston Herald and blogs at julescrittenden.com.
R Idealism is only not practical, because people lack the will to follow through when it gets tough.
