The longer the fighting continues, the greater the suffering inflicted upon Iraqi civilians, the solider Arab and Muslim (and European and Asian) anger toward the United States becomes, the bigger the pool of possible terrorist recruits grows—the more these things happen, the higher becomes the cost of victory, until, at some unknowable point, victory becomes defeat.
Too bleak? By the end of last week—even though American troops, who by all accounts have fought honorably and without undue cruelty, were at the gates of Baghdad—it was already too late for the rosy scenario of the cakewalk conservatives. It’s possible to think of ways that this sandstorm of steel might have been averted. (The French proposal for delay followed by reproach was contemptibly unserious, but the idea of “coercive inspections”—which, as promoted for months by Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, would have entailed greatly expanded teams of inspectors, empowered to create “no drive” as well as “no fly” zones and to call in air strikes—was worth trying.) If war was truly unavoidable, it’s possible to imagine routes to it that would not have forced us to fight alongside only a single meaningful ally and against the wishes of the people of nearly every country on earth. It’s too late for all that now. It’s too late for no war; it’s too late for a different war; it’s too late for an alternative war. And it’s too late to accept any outcome that does not involve the fall of Saddam. Those of us who opposed this war or who simply had doubts about it or who thought it had to come but were dismayed by the diplomatic and institutional wreckage its coming has wrought now have no alternative but to hope for a quick and victorious end. But it still matters how the Battle of Iraq is fought. And it still matters, more than ever, what will follow.
— Hendrik Hertzberg |
