THE WESTERN FRONT
No Time to Go Wobbly
The goal in Iraq is victory, not withdrawal.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, June 21, 2005 12:01 a.m.
The last thing we need in Iraq is a timeline for withdrawal. Victory sets its own schedule, and it's not contingent on the U.S. election calendar. Arbitrarily forcing a timetable on the battlefield will only aid the enemy. Yet a growing number of politicians are now calling for just that--or, at least, a better (read more negative) official accounting of what's happening in Iraq. With polls showing less support for the war and pols parroting that public opinion, we're in danger of losing sight of how to defeat the enemy.
Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, joined the parade over the weekend while also bluntly saying he's looking at a presidential bid in 2008--although he was careful to add that he thinks the next presidential election will turn on national security. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., normally a somewhat sensible Tennessee Democrat, has also joined the procession and hopes his call for a timeline will help win him the Senate seat Bill Frist is vacating. And it's not just Democrats. Sen. Chuck Hagel is making similar noises as he considers his own presidential bid.
In another era the U.S. probably wouldn't need to be involved with tens of thousands of troops in the Middle East. But then in another era, Osama bin Laden would be a two-bit thug, the Iranian mullahs would be little squirts, and we Americans could go on with our lives oblivious to them all. There have always been and always will be terrorists. What's different today is that in a large swath of territory, mostly the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, civilization itself has been disintegrating. In the 1990s it reached a point where organized terrorists would be able to amass tremendous power and weapons capable of spreading mass chaos in the Western world. That's the enemy we have to keep our eye on defeating.
Outside Israel, and to a lesser extent Turkey and Lebanon, democracy is something new in the Middle East. So as we struggle now to keep a lid on the violence, it's hard not to get demoralized with the notion that it's not possible to build a civil society because the region has always been mired in the kind of chaos it finds itself in now. But that, of course, isn't true. Afghanistan may have always been on the edge of the world, but Iraq once enjoyed a relatively wealthy and well educated middle class. In Iraq, civil society began a steep decline only after Saddam Hussein hijacked the country. Iran too was once home to a burgeoning educated class, but that was before the revolution. Beirut was the "Paris" of the region, with the wealth and sophistication to match, before civil war destroyed the city and the country. The region began its breakdown thanks in part to Soviet pressure, and now, Islamofacists have outlived the communists. The end results are the same under either system--poverty, oppression and aggression toward the West.
President Bush made the case to invade Iraq mostly on the basis of weapons of mass destruction. The stockpiles everyone thought the U.S. military would unearth have not been found. But the danger of a failed and chaotic state headed by a madman in the center of the Middle East stands. Saddam clearly had designs on acquiring all sorts of weapons, and he was a walking WMD because his very hold on power was leveling efforts to restore civil society. What we needed in Iraq was not a dictator to keep the lid on the chaos, but a society with cops, troops and intelligence officers going after al Qaeda operatives. Empowering Iraqis to choose their own leaders will give us that because democracy is the antithesis of the chaos in which terrorists thrive.
The hope, of course, is that as democracy takes root in Iraq it will spread to the rest of the region. Since the invasion there have been plenty of encouraging signs. Lebanon and Egypt appear to be moving in the right direction. And even Syria is looking to set up its first stock exchange, perhaps a precursor to liberalizing economic reforms. Inside Iraq a civil government is slowly standing up even as the insurgency continues to pull off deadly attacks.
This is a war of civil society versus the agents of anarchy. We don't need to set a schedule to accept defeat. We need more civil societies to help us keep a lid on the violence that will otherwise creep into our lives. That's what the war in Iraq is about and why winning it remains in our nation's vital interests.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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