It is clear that the Iraq war has not gone as well as the Bushies had hoped. Bush has even admitted that they didn’t plan on such stiff or sustained resistance.
As a result, many Americans have soured on the war. They are tired of the war. They are quickly running out of patience.
It’s not that we’re losing. But we don’t seem to be winning. For every step forward there’s a reversal.
So it’s turned into a war of attrition. Inches gained and inches lost.
Many critics have blamed this turn of events on all of the “mistakes” which were made in the course of the war. On how Bush or Rummy or Cheney or the Neocons mishandled or misgauged the war effort.
If only we’d done this differently or that differently, things would have turned out better.
Perhaps so, although that’s unprovable. Life doesn’t allow you to try out every option in a test drive before you commit yourself. So you often will never know if the alternative you didn’t choose would have been any improvement.
But there’s a deeper issue. And that’s the underlying expectation.
Historically, just about every culture has been a warrior culture. The so-called “cycle of violence” was the norm.
The only time you had peace was when one warrior culture was so dominant that it temporarily subdued all its enemies. Peace through conquest.
What we’re seeing in Iraq, and throughout the Muslim world, is not the exception, but the rule.
To the extent that the Gospel has been able to infiltrate and penetrate the world, it has had a pacifying influence. And this may condition us to form a false expectation when dealing with unbelievers.
Richard Bledsoe has done a number of posts on this general subject.
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-lb3Fp1IjfrDu4TNRzbltcnO.
I don’t make this observation to either support or oppose the Iraq war.
But the instability in Iraq lies far deeper than any tactical miscalculations that the president’s war cabinet may have made.
If they made a mistake, it lay in expecting the best rather than the worst.
Bush has very limited control over events in Iraq. This isn’t a question of policy, but human nature.
Brace yourselves. Human history has ever and always been a quagmire, from the fall of Adam to the return of Christ.
We may enjoy some small degree of flexibility over which quagmire we choose to get mired in, but we’re all going to get our boots muddy. The only variable is the depth of the mud.
It’s not that we’re losing. But we don’t seem to be winning.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the Vietnam war and the U.S. soldiers who spoke of it. They all said "we were winning when I was there!"
In Vietnam, the US won virtually every single battle. Even the shocking Tet Offensive was a loss for the VC. But it didnt matter because the US was destined to have to withdraw eventually, and that withdraw was destined to bring about the failure of the US puppet government there.
In a civil war (which was what was happening in Vietnam back then, and what is also happening in Iraq right now according to the US endorsed Iraqi officials), the occupying force cannot win by winning battles.
Ironically, the more intervention the occupying force performs, the more ground is lost by the side that the occupying force endorses. This is because it makes that side look less legitimate in the eyes of the native population. It sends new fighters into the arms of the "enemy" side rather than the "friendly" side of the civil war. It happened in Vietnam, and it is happening again now in Iraq.