Today I played a little catchup on my newspaper reading, since I hadn’t been around yesterday to read the Times when it first came. I sort of hopped from yesterday’s paper to today’s, and serendipitously happened to read the following two articles one after the other.
The first (The Laptop is Mightier than the Sword), written by Owen West and Bing West, proposes that we use our technological prowess to institute a Big Brother type state in Iraq, where we can effectively track every human being in the country and imprison anyone remotely suspected of being the “enemy”, whatever is meant by that term in this context. Whether it would work or not is something I can’t express an opinion about. What struck me was this:
Part of the problem was that when the military surge was announced, it became commonplace for officials to assert that political compromise, not military force, would determine the outcome of the war. This vacuous idea would startle George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, to mention only a few unlikely bedfellows who forged success during an insurgency.
Buying time with American lives is not a military mission. No platoon commander tells his soldiers to go out and tread water so the politicians can talk. The goal of American soldiers is to identify and kill or capture the Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents. (Emphasis added)
Whether intentional or not, the Wests have confirmed what many of us have argued, that we are fighting both sides in a civil war, a distinctly uncomfortable place to be. Why they feel comfortable about that mission is beside the point, however, because it appears to be the case that the mission they reject is the mission that the soldiers still there have been given.
After reading their column, I read this article, in today’s paper (In Iraq, Gates Says Progress Toward Peace Is Lagging). Here’s the money quote, at least from my point of view:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates arrived here late on Friday bluntly expressing disappointment with the pace of political reconciliation under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, even as the final units of the American troop increase were moving into position and bombings threatened to inspire more sectarian violence.
Mr. Gates, making his fourth trip to Iraq in six months as defense secretary, said his message to the Iraqi leadership would be that “our troops are buying them time to pursue reconciliation and that, frankly, we are disappointed in the progress thus far.” (Emphasis added)
So, while buying time with American lives may not be a military mission, it appears to be the mission that has been imposed upon our military. The Wests are right that it is doomed to fail, not so much because it can’t be sold to the troops by their platoon commanders, but because it is a policy that ignores the reality of a thousand years of history. This war was brought to us by those who rejected the reality based view of the world, but reality has a way of asserting itself.
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