President Bush gave his long awaited speech last night offering a new plan for winning the war in Iraq. There are many opinions being bruited about pro and con, most based on very limited information and knowledge of military tactics, counter-insurgency, the actual state of affairs on the ground in Iraq and within the Iraqi government, etc; lack of detailed knowledge has never disqualified anyone from offering an opinion (often with their certainty inversely related to their knowledge.) I do not know enough about the various factors involved to offer a particularly knowledgeable opinion about the potential success or failure of the plan. I would suggest that it is always easier to create chaos than order so our job in Iraq is challenging, but I am struck by what the reactions tell us about what people Desire.
I am using Desire in a specific way. Psychoa is a Psychoanalyst who offered a brief description of Desire as part of a discussion of blogging, Worthy Topics:
I am of the mind that people are always and everywhere motivated beings, beings who (consciously or unconsciously, often both) have stakes it what they do, beings whose actions have meaning. And one of our primary motivations, I believe, is intersubjectivity. Interactions with others (real and imagined, external and represented internally) matter to us. In different ways and to different degrees, to be sure, but they matter. In other words, though we may well wish it were otherwise, I believe there are, indeed, for everyone of us out here posting, things on the line, that we do have things to prove, and that we absolutely, one way or another, care what other people think. [Emphasis mine-SW]
For a Psychoanalyst, no one acts without Desire.
When I argue that it would be best for our war effort and would maximize our chances of success if our enemies saw us as united in our approach to the war, it represents the outcome of many different Desires on my part. I am overtly aware of my first order, conscious Desires:
• To convince people to support the war effort.
• As part of my Desire to waken people to the danger we face from Islamic fascism.
• To help us win the war, ie, to maintain enough support politically to achieve a relatively stable, relatively democratic Iraq.
I am also aware of some of my second order Desires:
• To have a sense of community with my readers and, especially, with my commenters.
• To exhibit my erudition (a more Narcissistic Desire, somewhat conflicted).
• To deal with my fears by turning the passive experience of being a news consumer into the active experience of commenting on the news.
• To win the debate/argument.
I am able to infer some of my unconscious Desires but will leave that for another time and place; by definition this list can never be exhaustive. Overriding everything, however, is the powerful feeling, which certainly represents the "summing of my irrationalities" along with the addition of my well thought out rational understanding, that if we lose in Iraq, it will be disastrous for the Iraqis, for many of our friends, and ultimately for us. Interestingly, this view of losing in Iraq is nearly universal, even among those who insist we should start to pull out our troops now and those who insist it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the first place.
Senator Durbin, following the President's speech, spoke briefly to reporters. He made the point that we are in the middle of Iraq's Civil War and that we need to leave so that the Iraqis can resolve their problems. He was impassioned in his call to avoid putting more American troops in harm's way, and his passionate concern for our troops should be applauded. However, his position is incoherent, and this refers back to Desire.
If you truly believe Iraq is in a Civil War that we cannot defuse, then the idea that the Iraqis could prevent their descent into chaos without our help is simply nonsensical.
Change the parameters and do the thought experiment: The police are called to a domestic dispute. Two families, next door neighbors are armed to the teeth and hate each other. The police realize that if they try to disarm the two sides they will need more back-up. Now, as the police commander do you send the back-up, knowing full well that there is likely to be an escalation of violence and some people will be hurt and killed before the situation calms down; or do you decide to withdraw all the police and let the parties shoot it out, while telling the News reporters that you think this is the best way to get the two families to work things out peacefully?
I know this is an inexact analogy, as all analogies must be, but the point remains that if you believe that the cost of failure in Iraq is extreme, and again, this has never been disputed by the Democratic leadership (their position seems to be to insist we have already lost and it is time to cut our further losses), then why would you oppose trying to win in Iraq?
Here is where President Bush shows his political wisdom. The speech and plan includes the idea that the Iraqis need to show they can control their own country by November of this year. This allows Bush to say that he is giving the Iraqis one last chance, a Nobel effort in John Podhoretz's terms, to get it right or deal with our departure. (I understand this involves Bush making a virtue of necessity, since if we have not achieved stability and defeated the Sadrists and al Qaeda by November, there will be no support for further efforts in Iraq.) By next November, any failure in Iraq will be an Iraqi failure. However, if we were to pull out now, it would be an indisputable American failure. Again, I ask, why would anyone want to precipitate our failure prematurely? It would then become their failure.
Consider the scenario of Iraq in chaos in the summer of 2008. If the chaos is the result of our departure after giving the Iraqis this last chance to get their act together, we will be heading into the elections in a more insecure, frightening world, a situation which plays into the hands of the Republican candidates, who will almost certainly appear to be more attuned to forcefully protecting Americans. If there is chaos and it is plausibly pinned to those who insisted we get out prematurely (by cutting off funds, for example) then the Democrats will come off even worse. If the plan works and Iraq is more stable, then all those who were proponents of withdrawal will appear to be complete and utter defeatists.
There is a sizable part of the left especially, joined by the Buchananite right, who appear to Desire our defeat in Iraq and seem to be doing all they can to firmly wed themselves to that position. Desire is a funny thing. We often do not recognize the depths from which our Desires arise, which is why we so often do not achieve what we consciously Desire. Be careful what you wish for certainly applies in this situation.
Ralph Peters, who correctly refers to this as W's Last Chance, describes the factors that make this plan a departure from the past approaches we have tried and offers some metrics for evaluating its efficacy. He concludes:
There are no guarantees that this plan will work, but it deserves a chance. Surrender isn't a strategy, and cowardice won't save us from the deadly threats we face.
The president's new plan will have a painful human cost. But the cost of defeat would be incalculably higher.
Our president deserves our support. One last time.
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