When U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton says, as she did yesterday, that she doesn't approve of President Bush sending more troops to Iraq, I'm shocked to find myself in agreement. If this continues, pretty soon I'll agree with her on the time of day. Shades of Vietnam! My vague feeling of deja vu arises not because I think Iraq is anything like Vietnam, but because I'm acquiring strange bedfellows once again.
I opposed America's involvement in Southeast Asia just like the psychedelically challenged draft-dodging dupes of the hippified 1960s, though for an entirely different reason. The sandal-wearing potheads and their quasi-Marxist accomplices opposed the war because they didn't believe that communism was an evil that needed to be stopped; I opposed the war because I didn't believe that Southeast Asia was the right place in which to stop it. If the ancient wisdom that the foe should be engaged at his weakest point was valid, the sensible place to confront communism, it seemed to me, was in Eastern Europe.
Few people shared this view in the '60s, partly because they didn't realize that communism was most vulnerable close to its heartland, and partly because of the fear that a confrontation in Europe could escalate into a nuclear exchange. The latter was a well-founded concern, but it didn't justify waging a war in the wrong place. I felt -- and wrote repeatedly -- that waiting until the free world could pick its own battleground would be smarter.
Today, we know that communism's weak link was in Europe, not excluding its motherland, the Soviet Union. Marx's rickety edifice collapsed there all by itself between 1989-91, without the West having as much as tugged at it, whereas it's still standing, after a fashion, in Vietnam, in China, and especially in North Korea, despite all the blood and money America and its allies expanded to pull it down. Ironically, no communist regimes stand today, except the ones whose forces America engaged in a shooting war at one time or another, directly or through proxies, as in Cuba's Bay of Pigs.
One could conclude from this -- wrongly -- that engaging hostile regimes militarily only strengthens them. But this is nonsense. The lesson isn't that one should not engage the foe, but that one should engage him wisely.
One should fight the enemy at the right time, in the right place, with the right amount of force. One shouldn't let him get away to fight another day, like Bush the Elder let Saddam escape after the first Gulf War. Nor should one hang around after victory, trying to convert a war zone into a Sunday school, as Bush the Younger is still doing in Gulf War II.
Which brings me to my strange bedfellows. There I go again, just as I did 40 years ago. I actually agree with the likes of Senator Clinton. Not, of course, beyond the narrow point that deploying another thin line of troops in Iraq at this stage would expose another few thousand young Americans to mortal danger for no conceivable benefit. Other than that, I agree with opponents of the Iraq war even less than I agreed with opponents of the war in Vietnam.
Forty years ago, I agreed with our benighted generation of turned-on dropouts that America shouldn't have gone, or rather tip-toed or stumbled into Vietnam. Today, unlike most opponents of the Iraqi war, I have no problem with America having gone into Iraq, or with the way it had gone in, or the way it conducted itself up to and including the day when President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Lincoln to announce "mission accomplished." My problem begins after that day -- May 2, 2003 -- and especially after Dec. 13, 2003, when Saddam was pulled out from his hole in the ground.
I contend, and have contended all along, that after those dates America no longer had any business in Iraq. Having accomplished the honourable and feasible mission of eliminating a hostile tyrant and his regime, the coalition forces should have started pulling out.
Pulling out would have caused a civil war, according to one argument.
What, a worse civil war than there is now? That's a joke. The difference is that pulling out in 2003 would have been victory. Pulling out today is defeat. And lingering will be a debacle.
America stayed in Iraq to wait on the tables of democracy and force-feed it to those who didn't like the taste. But marines make lousy waiters. If you force feed democracy, people will gag on it. Chances are, those who have no taste for democracy have no stomach for it either.
It was a mistake to involve the military in the dubious and not very feasible -- perhaps downright impossible -- mission of effecting cultural metamorphosis. Soldiers are good at defeating the enemy. Soldiers aren't good at changing cultures. They do sometimes, indirectly, over the long haul, but it's a poor military objective.
As Talleyrand told Napoleon: "You can do everything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them."
I believe in hearts changing, but I don't believe in changing hearts.
A letter-writer wounded me to the quick this week by saying that I've gone wobbly on Iraq. I don't think so. "Defeat the foe, then go," has been my view all along. Wrong, perhaps. Wobbly, no.
© 2007 George Jonas
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