August 14, 2005 - On May Day 2003 our President told us that the mission in Iraq had been accomplished. Even he now admits that the declaration of an end to major combat was a trifle premature. Is it significant that the announcement that major combat was over came on May Day – that international radio declaration of urgent distress and a need for emergency aid.

Let us look at what we have accomplished in that benighted country. We have invaded; utterly defeated the country’s military; destroyed the country’s economic and political infrastructure; deposed a one-party Ba`athist regime and imprisoned its dictator. We have disarmed Iraq of weapons that it did not have. We have spent billions while failing to rebuild the oil industry that we devastated, first by imposing an embargo on repair parts and then by the destruction of war. We have imposed one regime and have been foster parent to another. Both have had more resemblance to the regime we deposed than to any classical democracy. We have sacrificed 1850 American lives; 200 more of our allies and those of uncounted thousands of Iraqis and still see no end to the course that the President vows to stay to the bitter end.

Of course our occupation of a sovereign country has provoked an uncompromising resistance. It is easy to dismiss the enemy as criminal terrorists driven by Al Qaeda’s extremist anti-American ideology. It is easy and if believed it lends a measure of justification to the President’s call to “stay the course”. To do so ignores the reality of a nationalistic resentment of a foreign occupation that had not delivered on its promises to rebuild the destruction that its war caused. To do so ignores the centuries of uncompromising internecine conflict between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites and the existence of low intensity civil war underlying the occupiers effort to cobble together a government that is compliant to American policy while giving the appearance of democratic independence. There is no doubt that there is a significant contribution by Al Qaeda and its allies to the insurrection but to believe that to be the only explanation for the rebellion is simplistically naïve. Until we recognize that nationalism and regional factionalism play a major role in the insurrection we will not be able to fashion a policy to defeat it. Slavish devotion to slogans may be good politics but it is a lousy basis for policy.

There is growing evidence that it is bad policy too. The President favorability rating and the number of citizens satisfied with his handling of the war echo the numbers that LBJ earned in March 1968. It seems as though the American people aren’t buying the slogans any more and the polls say that they don’t believe this administration is leveling with them. When he was running in 2000 the President told us that he would not commit American troops unless there was a clear and limited objective for the exercise and a clear exit strategy. In Iraq and Afghanistan it is abundantly clear that there is no such clear strategy and until there is there can be no exit.