Well, I suppose this comes as no surprise. The top three Democratic presidential candidates today all admitted that sure, they’re opposed to the way the war in Iraq was handled - but it’s not like they’re going to pull out or anything.
Hillary, John Edwards and Barack Obama all talked about reducing the number of combat troops. But the implicit assertion is that however much we might draw our forces down, we will be keeping a significant number of troops in Iraq and the Middle East for a very, very long time - perhaps years. Perhaps forever.
At the same time, as Andrew Bacevich points out in a Sunday Los Angeles Times op-ed, all three have called for an increase in the size of our armed forces. This, I suppose, is designed to make them look hawkish; the mightiest military on earth needs to be mightier still, in order to defeat… whom, exactly?
The question is never explicitly asked. There’s just this general assumption that in a dangerous world, we need more good guys to protect us from the bad guys. But what if the manner in which we have employed the good guys actually creates more bad guys?
Bacevich spells it out:
The underlying problem is that the basic orientation of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been flat wrong. Bush’s conception of waging an open-ended global “war” to eliminate terrorism has failed, disastrously and irredeemably. Simply trying harder — no matter how many more soldiers we recruit and no matter how many more Muslim countries we invade and “liberate” — will not reverse that failure. More meddling will evoke more hatred.
The top three Democratic candidates have failed to learn this lesson. Whatever else Iraq might have been - and personally, I believe it to have been first and foremost about securing the region so that we might ensure its energy resources are “fungible,” that is, make it to the open market - Iraq was perhaps the greatest single attempt at social engineering we have ever undertaken. “Social engineering” in that we have believed we could change and compel Muslim behavior; that we could change the Muslim world from without, and that we had no choice but to try, in that only by “employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.”
It has failed, as it was bound to fail. But the lesson we take from this is that we need more soldiers, that we might try this in other nations, or several simultaneously?
As much as I might personally like to see someone like Barack Obama elected president - as good as I think that might be for the country in the long run - I’m not convinced he gets it; I’m surely not convinced Hillary gets it. She, moreso than any of the other Democratic candidates, seems to think what we need is merely a more efficient militarism, that there’s no problem so great we can’t solve it with an invastion and the studied application of American force; whereas I have come to believe that there are some problems we cannot solve no matter how many soldiers we send into battle or how much American gusto we apply.
Edward Luttwak may be right; perhaps backwards societies like those in the Middle East are best left alone. We’re not going to change them, we’re only going to exacerbate the problem by trying. After September 11 we told ourselves we had no choice, but we indeed had choices - one of which might have been an effort to wean this country off oil, thus making the Middle East less relevant. Instead we allowed ourselves to believe there was a militaristic solution; even now that this has proved to be an illusion, still we cling to it; still those who should know better and would strengthen themselves, their party and ultimately the country cling to it.
So I suspect we will get our additional soldiers, and we will ask them to make noble and heroic sacrifices. They will do it. And another decade down the line, we’ll wonder why they, and why we, still haven’t accomplished the impossible.
