How ignoring the past can help us

Concerning the occupation of Iraq, a prominent pro-war meme has been: "Okay, mistakes have been made. Should we have gone to war in the first place? Maybe not. But now we're there, and whether to get up and leave is a different question."

It's easy to see why the past and future must be carefully distinguished if this is your position. The argument regarding the past is a loser. Bush lied. The intelligence was cooked. The war was sold as a brief, easy run, that would pay for itself and inflict scarcely a scratch against our military machine, bring about the rapid flourishing of democracy, strike a blow against terrorism, allow us to secure the stockpiles of WMDs, yadayada. Instead, we have broken our military, encumbered trillions of dollars, furnished a variety of militias, Islamists, Iranian proxies, and criminals with a central government, supplies, training, thousands of tons of unguarded explosives, a no-man's-land in which to operate freely and test military and terrorist strategies, billions in stolen cash and black market oil, and subject matter for recruitment propaganda in the form of US lies, vulnerability, and evil, racist and blasphemous acts. Terrorism is increased, Iraq is worse off, the US is poorer, militarily constrained, and diplomatically isolated. The war is the second longest and the second costliest in our history, and the biggest military or foreign policy blunder since the birth of the US.

So, they say, let's not focus on that.

Instead, let's look ahead. The surge is working! The surge is working! Can't quit now right when things are getting sunny. Don't want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fail unnecessarily due to lack of resolve, dishonor the dead.

If the future is bright, then it does not matter whether:

A. The adventure was always noble, glorious and successful

or

B. The adventure was problematic at the outset, but we're finally getting our act together and finally have a decent chance at succeeding.

Either way, we must stay.

The impulse is always, of course, that when an opponent argues X, you want to argue not-X. So there is the urge to say things like, of course they want to ignore the past. The record is that they got it wrong, and worse, they lied. Ignoring the past means not approaching them today with appropriate skepticism when they sell the same snakeoil in a new bottle. By not attending to the past, we doom ourselves to repeat it, or, to put it in the terms of our glorious leader, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." Ahh, wisdom!

Nevertheless, I think there's a good argument for going along with this and ignoring the past. The anti-war argument should focus on how the future is not getting brighter. One reason for doing this is that the past is socially divisive and has a psychological potency that goes against good judgment.

If the future bodes badly, then the choice that does not matter is between:

C. The entire thing has been a horrible, unjustified, criminal fiasco from start to finish

or

D. The thing was actually quite good at the outset, but its merits are declining, and pretty soon it will no longer be beneficial to stay.

Either way, we must get planning on the exit.

One big advantage of forgetting the past and not distinguishing between C and D is that the D option is far more acceptable psychologically to many people than C would be. If the effort began nobly and accomplished something, then our losses have not been in vain and we do not need to expend more money and more lives, and impose greater and greater destruction, seeking to vindicate those losses. We can declare victory and leave the table without thinking we have to double our bet to make back what we've lost in blood, treasure, and dignity. This is in fact how all our wars end even wehen we lose. We don't keep fighting until we and our enemy are both reduced to inconsequential powers and some third force conquers us both. We leave intact but bruised, pretending to have won. That's the only we can leave, is with some figleaf of victory.

So how can we characterize the effort as getting less valuable over time?

1) Well, there were some early "successes," if you care to call them that. We confirmed the absence of WMDs. (It was a lie that Saddam threw the inspectors out, but whatever -- part of the mission was to make sure there were no WMDs left, and that is done.) Saddam and his sons are dead. (This is cited as a big plus, even though the way these things happened basically was a huge embarassment for the victors that made Hussein a martyr and let much of the truth about what happened die with him.) Elections were held. A new Constitution was written. (Even if these were largely disasterous in fact, the myth of them lives on.) The point is that the biggest things occurred the earliest, and as time has gone on... What lately? Nothing on that scale. What next?

2) The Iraqis are impatient. How long after winning a war can you continue to engage in military operations without being viewed as unwelcome occupiers? The red carpet is in tatters in reality, and even in the myth it's fraying.

3) Our forces are getting ground down. Many are going out having been knocked around pretty badly. Many have done multiple tours already. The equipment has undergone lots of wear. Captains have been fleeing the service. Standards and quotas for newbies keep declining.

4) The longer this goes on, the fewer targets are left to hit. Anything or anyone worth hitting has been gotten already. It's been five years.

5) Institutions get stickier over time. When we first arrived, everything was fluid and the early marks we set had a lot of impact. Now things have settled out and fallen into more stable positions and have been calcifying into place. It takes more and more work to make changes.

6) People are impatient stateside too. Time to start addressing the domestic economic crisis.

Of course, pro-war forces have already set up their meme about the surge working. Can we please expose this as a crock of waste?

Consider by analogy the following stories:

First: You have a problem breathing. You go to a doctor who says he knows exactly what is wrong. He says you have an infection in your lungs. He gives you antibotics and says that in 3-5 days you should experience some relief, and by one week the problem will be gone. You take the remedy and everything happens exactly as he says. If this happened, you'd say, the doctor's remedy worked. This would be like the surge working.

Second: you have a problem breathing. You go to a friend who says he knows exactly what is wrong, but he never tells you what he thinks it is. He tries a bunch of things in sequence, but you can't tell what any of those things are doing for you. The problem eventually goes away, and your friend says, "see, I'm as good as a doctor; I got rid of the problem just like I said I would." If this happened, you'd say, maybe a doctor would have done no better than my friend, and maybe something my friend gave me finally worked, but it seems like he didn't know what he was doing, and who knows whether his cure or something else entirely finally got rid of the problem. This would be like being very vague about what the "surge" strategy is, and claiming that it was working at the first sign of some improvement.

Third: You have a problem breathing. You go to a doctor who says he knows exactly what is wrong. He says you have an infection in your lungs. He gives you antibotics and says that in 3-5 days you should experience some relief, and by one week the problem will be gone. You never take the antibiotics because you lose your prescription. You start taking allergy medicine and the problem goes away the instant you start taking the allergy medicine. The doctor says, "looks like my treatment worked." This would be like outlining a surge strategy, but never actually having a surge, and having things improve for other reasons, and taking credit for it on behalf of the surge.

Fourth: You have a problem breathing. You go to a doctor who says he knows exactly what is wrong. He says you have an infection in your lungs. He gives you antibotics and says that in 3-5 days you should experience some relief, and by one week the problem will be gone. You never take the antibiotics because you lose your prescription. You start taking allergy medicine and the problem stays constant but the instant you start taking the allergy medicine, a rash that you also had on your leg goes away. The doctor says, "looks like my treatment worked." This would be like outlining a surge strategy, but never actually having a surge, and having things improve that were not the announced aim of the surge for other reasons, and taking credit for it on behalf of the surge.

The last is the closest to true.

The NYT had a nice chart of the total levels of coaltion forces in Iraq and there have been regular ups and downs, but you would not look at that chart without a key and be able to point to any obvious surge. The additional US troop levels have been trivial and mostly offset by allies leaving the coalition. So there has apparently been no surge. Of course, it's hard to tell because one cannot easily tell how to think about the Iraqi forces or the huge numbers of military contractors that do not show up in those figures.

Not only was there no surge, but the proposal for the surge was very specific about what it would be and how it would work. The idea was to flood the ground with security so that conditions could be stabilized and projects could proceed. There was to be an opening produced by the increased security that would allow refugees to return, infrastructure to be rebuilt, and political opponents to reconcile. Once a whole laundry list of benefits from increased security materialized, the country would be considered stable enough to draw down forces within six months to lower than pre-surge levels.

None of that has happened. The plan failed. The ethnic cleasing of Baghdad was completed. The relative calm afterwards was oversold. Civilian deaths were reported as dramtatically reduced while bombing raids, the number one source of civilian deaths, were dramatically stepped up, suggesting that the death rate has not really gone down, but has been effectively hidden because its source and location has shifted. (Remember the killing in Guatemala that appeared to die down when it shifted from the capital to the countryside, but had in fact increased to genocidal proportions?) There is still no infrastructure. People still live in fear. About two percent of refugees returned. More continue to leave. The government fell apart, the prime minister left the country, Turkey invaded, the British bugged out. The press got better. US morale improved. The place is still Hell no matter how it's sliced. There are no plans to reduce troop levels any time soon. In terms of its ultimate goal, it is an indisputable failure.

This all leads up to no big conclusion, except, let's push this meme. I must face the fact that blogging allows me to ramble and not really write anything very polished. It's more an outlet than a cabinet of showpieces. But at least some of my thoughts are preserved.