A Little History

Ted has posted a response to my earlier post on Howard Dean's irresponsible comments on Iraq.

To begin, Ted sates:

Victory is defined as a resolution to a conflict in which the victor gets to impose his will on the defeated. In this case the enemy is an ideology, so victory is therefore moot.

While I think this definition is a little narrow, I can live with it. I don't understand the second part, however. The enemy is not an "ideology," it is people who are trying to impose that ideology on other people. "Nazism" was an ideology as well, but that didn't mean that victory was moot. If you help create a functioning, elected government with armed forces capable of maintaining domestic peace in Iraq, that's a victory. It doesn't mean people like Zarqawi are going to stop existing or thinking what they think, but it is going to make it difficult, if not impossible, to pose a significant threat. There are "Nazis" in the U.S. but nobody seriously believes that they are going to take down the government and start sending Jewish citizens to camps.

Ted continues:

Thusly, when one quotes Howard Dean by inferring that he said 'we can't win', one is, in fact, giving Howard undue credit for being right. We cannot win.

I didn't infer from his comments that Howard Dean said we aren't going to win in Iraq; I quoted Dean as saying it. I don't know how much clearer his comment could have been (Dean :"the idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong"). I'm not at all certain why pointing out what a silly, irresponsible statement that is gives Dean any credit at all. I mean, I'm basically saying that the guy is a misguided idiot. Not a lot of credit there.

I didn't just imply that saying we aren't going to win is dangerous or irresponsible; I said it directly. It is irresponsible and dangerous. It's dangerous because it hands a lot of credit (and a huge PR victory) to an insurgency that has no way of winning short of wearing down public opinion in the U.S. It's irresponsible because Dean is a representative of the Democratic party and it sends the message that at least one of the major parties in the U.S. is ready to throw in the towel.

Ted then writes:

To those who disagree, I suggest reading some history.

I've read more than a little bit of history in my day and I'm not certain I follow Ted's examples. Historical analogies, in my opinion, don't shed much light on current situations because they are so imprecise.

For example, Rome predates the advent of Islam by a few centuries, so I don't know what the parallel is here. If we are looking for examples of successful occupations by Rome, I'd point to any number of areas into which Rome expanded at its height. But, then again, Rome was seeking to expand territory under its control, which is not the goal of the United States in Iraq, so what is the parallel?

Ted calls the American Revolution "not really a revolution," but offers no explanation for that fairly bold comment, so I don't know what he is getting at. Again, the historical parallel sheds little light because it is so imprecise. If Iraq were filled with English-speaking, American citizens who were protesting a relatively light tax to pay for, say, the earlier Iran-Iraq war, it might make a good parallel. But that is not at all close to the situation in Iraq.

Ted next turns to Vietnam. I see some similarity here, but in my opinion it is a different lesson we learn about Iraq. For starters, we pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, let the Communists take over and we remember what happened next. I assume that Dean can remember it because he lived through it. Communist "re-education camps," mass starvation, mass killings, boat people desperately seeking asylum. I don't see withdrawal as a reasonable option given what we have started in Iraq.

Another lesson we can draw from Vietnam is that the entire world saw that the way to overcome the overwhelming advantage in military power of the United States was to undermine public opinion. This is not simply a theory of mine, it is something that has been mentioned over and over by people like Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Zarqawi in their public statements. This image of America was further enhanced when Reagan turned tail and fled Lebanon in the early 80s and when Clinton tried to respond to bin Laden with cruise missiles.

When Dean says "we aren't going to win," I imagine our enemies are smiling broadly because they see victory on the horizon. They know they have played the Ho Chi Minh strategy to win.

And that strikes me as irresponsible and dangerous.

Ted closes by saying that he the insurgents are just "the folks who live there." The leader of at least one component of the insurgency is a Jordanian leading Arab fighters imported from other countries. I'm sure that the remnants of the Baathists who are fighting are Iraqis, but I'm also sure that there were ex-Nazis in Germany after the war. Nobody suggested that we just leave the country to them either.

So far Iraq has held two elections with great success. A third election is slated for December 15. I'd define these elections as mileposts on a path to victory.