The Triangle

Issue date: 3/6/09 Section: Ed-Op

Media Credit: MCT

Media Credit: MCT

Barack Obama has finally made semi-clear his intentions on the two wars he inherited from the George W. Bush administration. In Iraq, he is going to stay the course. In Afghanistan, he is preparing what appears to be a variation of the Iraqi surge - a large infusion of troops that, admittedly incapable of providing the margin of a military victory, is presumably intended to stave off impending collapse.

Did we just give Bush a third term after all?

U.S. forces could be withdrawn from Iraq in a matter of weeks, but Obama says they will continue to be engaged in combat operations until Aug. 31, 2010. This means that Americans will continue to proactively fight and die until then in a war Obama himself once denounced. It also means they will continue to kill Iraqis until then as a matter of policy.

The idea is to draw down combat forces (at an unannounced rate) until that point, and then maintain a residual force of up to 50,000 until a final withdrawal of all forces on Dec. 31, 2011.

This latter date was not set by Obama, but in the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated - as usual, with no Congressional input - by the Bush regime. In short, Obama's plan is to keep U.S. forces in Iraq until the last minute envisioned by Bush policymakers.

In other words, the Obama peace plan in Iraq is to give us three more years of war on top of the six we've already had. Those six years are already longer than World War II, the last fully premeditated war of aggression endured by the world community. Three more years will really leave Adolf's record in the dust.

Barack Obama had it two-thirds right the first time when, in the fall of 2002, he warned that invading Iraq was both unnecessary and unwise. He did not add that it would also be unjustified. A war can be necessary in the sense that it advances or defends a nation's perceived interests. It can be wise in the sense that it is the most tactically efficient way of promoting or protecting those interests. But if a war is legally and morally unjustified, then it is wrong: wrong at the beginning and wrong at the end; more wrong with each day it lasts. It makes no difference whether the war is won or lost (many wars of aggression are quite successful). It makes no difference whether incidental benefits are conferred on the nation or community attacked; the cost always exceeds the benefit. An unjustified war has no other character, legally or morally considered, than the fact that it is unjustified. And the only appropriate response to it, other of course than resistance, is the demand that it be stopped. Not stopped on the installment plan; not phased out so that the aggressor nation can recover its investment or give itself a soft landing. The demand must be that it be stopped at once.

Let us recall for a moment the demand of the George H. W. Bush administration in the summer of 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. That President Bush declared that Saddam's aggression "will not stand," and demanded that Saddam withdraw his forces at once. This demand was nonnegotiable. It did not offer a timetable; it did not set a deadline. Saddam's compliance was to be immediate and unconditional, failing which the United States declared itself willing to proceed with such allies as would assist it in driving Saddam out of Kuwait with force of its own. And the U.S. did precisely that.

The case of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 was equally clear - indeed, clearer, since every Iraqi government since 1922 had claimed Kuwait as part of its territory, credible assertions had been leveled that Kuwait itself was encroaching on Iraqi territory and resources by the slant drilling of oil wells, and the U.S. had given Saddam considerable reason to believe that it would not regard the occupation of Kuwait unfavorably. In contrast, the 2003 invasion was founded on no historic claim and no plausible assertion of any imminent threat by Iraq to the U.S. or any other nation. Claims of threat were no more credible to any competent observer than Hitler's assertion that Poland was a menace to Germany in 1939. We now know for a factual certainty that they were willfully false.

This is not a war that Barack Obama started. But he inherited it, as Lyndon Johnson inherited John F. Kennedy's war in Vietnam and Richard Nixon inherited it from Johnson. It belongs to him, and its moral taint now rests with him. The deaths it causes, American, Iraqi or other, are on his head. And he has now announced that he will cause more of them.

I have discussed in previous Triangle commentaries the prudential arguments for remaining in Iraq, or at least for a withdrawal that does not "destabilize" the country. I have pointed out that the American presence is itself the most destabilizing factor in Iraq. I will not restate my argument, for my present one does not rest on it. We should get out of Iraq at once - which I would define as within 60 to 90 days, although preferably fewer - because it was wrong to be there from the beginning, and each day compounds the original evil.

Afghanistan is another matter, because the U.S. was in fact attacked by an enemy based on its territory with the knowledge and consent of its government. Militarily, we could have chosen not to respond, or to have limited ourselves to destroying Al Qaeda's existing bases and interdicting future ones by surveillance and air strikes. Politically, that would have been suicidal for any American administration, and George W. Bush elected not to commit suicide - not, at least, the short way. But if there were any competent planners within his administration (none have yet been discovered), they would have recognized from the beginning that an Afghan war could only be a quagmire: impossible terrain and logistics; ethnic polarization, radical political decentralization and a near-total absence of modern infrastructure; the certainty of grinding guerrilla resistance from cross-border sanctuaries. It's been said that the Bush administration took its eye off Afghanistan and underfunded the war from the beginning, but it might also be that it realized the war was unwinnable and simply put it on the back burner as quickly as possible.

If that war was unwinnable in 2001, it is far more clearly so today. Seven-plus years of American-style warfare - intensive and more or less indiscriminate bombardment with heavy civilian casualties and the usual quota of unreported atrocities - have made us hated, and made heroes of the Taliban resistance. Seven years of occupation would have made us hated in any case, even had we behaved like angels and fought our war with the most exquisite tact. The only concrete result of our presence has been to destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan, which may turn out to be the most devastating consequence of 9/11.

I am tolerably sure that Obama understands this. Yet he has now committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, with no clear explanation of their mission or even the bother of a public address on the subject. This is the step that Lyndon Johnson took in Vietnam in February 1965, aware as he was even then - as we now know from his taped conversations - that a war in Vietnam could not be won. That war convulsed the country and brought it to its greatest political crisis since the Civil War. It also destroyed Johnson, a man who might otherwise be remembered for having given new life to the New Deal and done more for black enfranchisement than any president since Lincoln.

Obama stands where Johnson did, except that the stakes could well be catastrophically higher. If he knows that the Afghan war cannot be won, he needs to cut his losses, painful though they will be. If he knows that the Iraq war was wrong, whether morally or prudentially, he needs to liquidate it as quickly as possible. These are risky steps; the alternatives are riskier. Otherwise Obama's presidency, like Johnson's, could end in tragedy.



Robert Zaller is a professor of history. He can be reached at op-ed@thetriangle.org.

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