IN THE CRUSH OF IRAQ EVENTS--abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, tough fighting in Falluja and Najaf, calls for Donald Rumsfeld's head on a pike--it's getting harder to see the forest for the trees.
Luckily, there is always Clausewitz to help us focus on the critical issues in war. And war, the Prussian sage reminds us, "does not consist of a single short blow." That pretty much sums up what's going wrong and what's going right in Iraq.
The Bush administration's failure to heed these words is what got us in trouble in the first place. Fascination with the "shock and awe" of modern battle, the wizardry of stealth, precision, global strike, information networks, sensors, technology ad infinitum, blurred the true meaning of "regime change." The three-week march to Baghdad, magnificent as it was, achieved regime removal but not change. The deeper purpose of the war--changing the nature of Iraqi politics--cannot be won by any blitzkrieg. This is even more true of the larger struggle to transform the greater Middle East.
We are beginning to grasp that true victory is going to take some time. But we shouldn't forget that we are in the process of winning and can complete the win if, at last, we begin to do the things a long war demands. Political fashion in Washington holds that the war is unwinnable. It's still taboo to talk about cutting and running, but the phrase "cut and shuffle"--whatever that may mean--is gaining currency.
This is bipartisan conventional wisdom. Despair so grips the Democratic
party that even Rep. John Murtha, a former Marine and long the voice of toughness among House Democrats, uses the term unwinnable when talking about the present course. Realist Republicans are grumbling about the president's hopeless, Wilsonian ideals. "In light of recent events," National Review has concluded, "we should downplay expectations. If we leave Iraq in some sort of orderly condition, with some sort of legitimate non-dictatorial government and a roughly working economy, we will be doing very well."
Vietnam analogies remain the opiate of the chattering classes. They put Sen. Robert Byrd in full Marc-Antony, Caesar's-wounds mode. "Forty years ago, the United States inundated the Vietnam jungles with American soldiers. What we received in turn was 58,000 caskets," Byrd wrote in the Washington Post. "Iraq isn't Vietnam," admits New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Except, he continues: "Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent WMD and links to al Qaeda. 'Hearts and minds,' meet 'welcome us as liberators.' 'Light at the end of the tunnel,' meet 'turned the corner.' Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi army."
In sum, a year after declaring "mission accomplished" in major combat and after waging a fairly successful counterinsurgency campaign, we still don't understand the war--in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or on terror across the greater Middle East--as well as we should. Perhaps President Bush does, but he has been far too tolerant of his lieutenants, not just in the Pentagon but across the government, who do not share his goals. Both in terms of strategy and structures--especially military strategy and structure--we have yet to solve the puzzle.
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