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It’s not about medals, physicals or forged documents

Insanity, it has been said, is repeating the same behavior but expecting different results. Last week, in Part One of this editorial, we derided the insanity of the neoconservative dream of a democratic phoenix rising from the ashes of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, spreading Western values and consumerism throughout the Middle East. To us, that seemed like a repeat of the same ideologically driven mistakes we made in Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s.

The flip side of the Vietnam lesson, however, is our continuing obligation to the Iraqi people to deliver on what we have promised. In a recent Milquetoast editorial, the News Sentinel took the non-position that Congressman Jimmy Duncan’s call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq should be taken seriously. While we credited Congressman Duncan for his courage in breaking ranks with his fellow Republicans last year when he voted against giving President Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq, and we certainly understand his desire to see no more Americans die in the post-war quagmire, calling for the withdrawal of troops from that ravaged nation is both reckless and misguided.

Much has been made of our failure to oust Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War and our shameful tolerance of the Iraqi army’s bloody crushing of the Shia uprising (which we had encouraged) that followed it. A precipitous withdrawal of our forces in the near future would be even more shameful because it would result in a far greater tragedy for the Iraqi people and, what is more, it would be bad policy.

We have a moral responsibility to the people of Iraq to follow through on our promise to stabilize the country and to hold popular elections in January. Though the neo-con dream of a utopian democracy is dead, one Bush official’s prophecy about post-war Iraq has held true: Secretary of State Colin Powell’s admonition to President Bush that “If you break it, you own it.” Of course, as stated in last week’s editorial, merely bringing democracy to Iraq will not necessarily translate into a stable American ally. But the promise of democracy is self-determination, and with self-determination comes legitimacy. Elections, even flawed ones, should help promote a greater sense of ownership among the Iraqi people and inspire them to be more active in the fight to stabilize their country.

In Vietnam, the U.S. waged an unpopular, irresolute war and lost, ultimately withdrawing while that country—and most of Indochina—spiraled into ever-greater chaos.

Abandoning the Iraqi people prior to bringing stabilization will likewise result in escalating violence, making civil war a near certainty, and the entire region could very well explode into an Islamic version of the killing fields. We must not allow that to happen.

The world is already over-burdened by Islamist terrorists who have no return address on which to wage war. Further destabilizing the region by creating an even bigger vacuum into which extremists could step would be disastrous. Certainly, the near-term goal should be for U.S. troops to pull back and establish bases outside the more densely populated regions of the country, thus drastically reducing the number of American casualties, but we must continue to apply diplomatic and economic pressure on the existing governments of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—as well as on the new Iraqi government—to ensure that they police their own radical elements. A humiliating withdrawal of American forces would, to say the least, be counterproductive to that effort.

We have embarked on a course in Iraq that is reminiscent of the words of a U.S. soldier in Vietnam who, without irony, once stated: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Well, we have already accomplished phase one (destruction). Therefore, abandoning phase two (salvation) would amount to an atrocity; not to mention that the loss of life thus far shall have been in vain.

Ivo Andric, the great Nobel Prize winning author of the Bosnian Trilogy (The Bridge on the Drina, Bosnian Chronicle, and The Woman from Sarajevo) once observed: “From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living, nothing is better and more valuable than bridges.”

To win the war on terror, we must take care that—in our haste to distance ourselves from the hatred and violence of our enemies—we do not burn the bridges that lead to peace and understanding. That means we must remain engaged in the region and follow through on our promise to deliver a stable, democratic Iraq. To be certain, it will be extraordinarily difficult, but failure to do so will only serve to further establish us as cynical, self-serving imperialists in the eyes of our enemies. Moreover, they will be emboldened by our retreat, and the region will disintegrate into violence and turmoil; bloodshed that will undoubtedly visit our own shores one day.

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