The sad truth is that America’s capacity for constructive intervention has been gravely wounded by its Iraq adventure. Thus the war that was supposed to bring us closer to peace in Jerusalem has in fact made peace more remote.
“The road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad.” Remember? That was the loudly touted view of neoconservatives in the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Depose Saddam Hussein, establish democracy in Iraq, and the moderating ripples would spread, the Palestinians would give up their violence and the Israelis would let go of their fears and find at last the answer to Rodney King’s famous question: Yes, we can all get along.
Now, in an effort to clean up the mess that George W. Bush et al. have made, we have the report of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. Or, more accurately, we had their report—since the President seems to have chosen to ignore the advice of his father’s friends and advisers in much the same way he is reported to have chosen to ignore his father’s advice. More than that: He has turned the ISG report inside-out, using its lavishly gloomy assessment of our situation in Iraq as an excuse to up the ante rather than to fold his hand.
Still, the ISG report, whether it proves a very minor historic blip or a lasting occasion for an “I told you so” rebuke to the Bush administration, is a fascinating piece of work on at least three counts.
First, the report’s utterly candid assessment of how sloppily this war has been conducted is startling. In a city where spinning the truth is as instinctive as passing gas, the ISG is blunt, and comprehensive. No aspect of the war is left unexamined, and the resulting indictment is unrelievedly harsh. For a day or two after its publication, it seemed that President Bush was stuck at its epicenter, unable to escape it. But escape it he did, testament to his political acumen.
Reinforced by the interviews with its co-chairs is the report’s pessimistic tone, which ultimately defeats the recommendations the report details, for it reveals what the report tries to conceal: We have lost this war.
That’s a harsh thing to write, and the ISG did not write it. Like Robert Gates, our new secretary of defense, the members of the ISG would only say that “we are not winning.” For the record, they denied that we are losing, preferring to argue that there is still time and there are still ways to turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse. But the recommendations themselves—a mix of the innocuous and the politically preposterous—make clear that there is no plausible strategy for victory. This war counts as the worst strategic blunder, and the most expensive, in America’s history.
Finally, there’s the matter of Israel. There was ample reason to include some reference to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, along with other examples of regional instability, in the report. But far more than “a reference” we find there is an argument that turns the old wisdom on its head: The road to Baghdad (that is, to victory in Baghdad) leads through Jerusalem. To give the ISG members their due, they may well have believed that by brokering an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict, America might be able to re-establish its tattered credibility in the region, and then withdraw from Iraq with some of its honor intact.
But that is, at best, about America’s honor, not about Baghdad’s fate. While there is compelling reason for the United States to take a dramatically more active role in restarting the Israel-Arab peace process, including not only Palestine but also Syria, the relationship of that set of issues to the Iraq debacle is at most tangential. (It is anything but tangential to James Baker, whose intimate ties with the Saudis have long been a matter of record.) But the sad truth is that America’s capacity for constructive intervention, regardless of its will, has been gravely wounded by its Iraq adventure. Thus the war that was supposed to bring us closer to peace in Jerusalem has in fact made peace more remote.
Neocons, who have been reveling these last years in their accession and proximity to power, are clinging desperately to its leavings. They sought, with some success, to establish a new kind of government here. Their secret belief was that it is the road to Washington that leads through Baghdad. Engage in what is defined as, and may truly be, a permanent war and you have justified what they call a “unitary presidency.” Out with checks and balances, in with the president not as commander-in-chief only of the military, but as commander-in-chief of everything. No more habeas corpus, no more warrants before wiretapping and other intrusions, no more judicial review or meaningful congressional oversight. In with “signing statements,” whereby a president declines to enforce provisions of laws approved by Congress—a device used by our first 42 presidents a total of 566 times, but used by George W. Bush more than 1,000 times.
It is easy to assert the propriety of preventive war and to pursue an imperial presidency if you believe you have been chosen not by fate nor by ambition, not by virtue nor by merit, nor for that matter even by the voters, but by God, as George W. Bush says without shame he has been. Neither Congress nor our increasingly accommodationist courts nor an ultimately toothless elite commission such as the ISG has had the power or the skill to stand against the Bush revolution. But in shock and in awe of the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, and sensing that it is not just Bush’s fate but that of the Republic that is at stake, the American people can.
