12. Welcome To The Post-War War

There was a heady moment when our troops first went into Bagdad. Iraqis dancing in the streets. The giant statue of Saddam tumbled head-first off its pedestal.  The statue’s head being dragged through the streets while an anonymous boy ran beside whacking it with a stick.  In that brief instant it looked as though our strategy of unilateral intervention would be vindicated. Americans, glued to their TV sets, were moved as the citizens of Bagdad seemed to reenact the Liberation of Paris before our very eyes, but then something seemed to go wrong. The looting began. It struck many as an unseemly way to celebrate the catharsis of liberation.  Pundits patiently explained it was the kind of thing you had to expect from a population brutalized and thwarted for so long.  But things got uglier and uglier. Hospitals, schools, and museums were sacked while American troops stood by.  I remember an interview by one of the networks with a European gentlemen who had been liberated by the Americans in World War II.  He simply shook his head. It had been the happiest moment of his life. Looting, he said, was the last thing he would ever have thought of.  Iraqis themselves were appalled—those who were not busy looting. They blamed the Americans. The honeymoon of liberation was over.  Here was a picture of the true Iraq Saddam had created, a land where decades of despotism and the cult of personality had prepared its citizens only for anarchy or rule by ruthless force.

Having won the war against Saddam, it is now incumbent upon us to win the peace, as the pundits never tire of saying.  Therein lies the fallacy. We never really won the War in Iraq, we merely forced it to take another form-- a form already quite familiar to countries like Algeria, Pakistan, and Israel. Especially Israel. For, in fact, what we have unwittingly done in Iraq is create and inflict upon ourselves our own version of the West Bank and Gaza. Does anybody doubt that the remnants of the Republican Guard and the Baathist security forces, aided by the free-lance Islamic Jihadists infiltrating Iraq from all points Middle Eastern are at least as capable as the Palestinian Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad at inflicting pain on US troops and their Iraqi supporters?  Are we prepared to follow Ariel Sharon’s scorched earth policies to maintain our control of Iraq? I don’t think so, and I don’t think our adversaries will readily allow us to choose a moderate path. We are now engaged in a race to rebuild Iraqi civil society faster than it’s opponents can destroy it.   All you have to do is turn on your TV to see how things are going.  Recent attacks against the UN and the Red Cross underscore our inability to protect our friends. It is not so much the images of bomb-torn buildings, burning convoys, and crashing helicopters that bode so much ill, but the increasingly large crowds of jubilant Iraqis who appear spontaneously each time we are bloodied—or the angry crowds that form each time we retaliate with our superior firepower. There is talk of “internationalizing” and “Iraqizing” the war. Both of these we must do, and as quickly as possible.  In the event we are successful, we may be able to extricate ourselves from Iraq with some sense of dignity and accomplishment.  However we will never be able to do so in the triumphal way the Administration once predicted.

GO TO CONTENTS   UP     NEXT     BACK     HOME