A new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll (
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,299374,00.html) claims that overall,
11% of Americans think the world would be better off if the U.S. lost the war in Iraq.
A couple of questions come to mind:
I have yet to hear a satisfactory definition of winning in Iraq. How would we define losing? Just leaving without achieving our nebulous win? Actually signing articles of surrender to AQ?
If we 'lost', how would the world be better off? How would America be worse off?
We lost in Vietnam, and no abyss opened up and swallowed the U.S.A. It seems the main reason to stay at this point is the philosophy of General Patton:
If you consider losing as not achieving your aims, then at the moment, the US has not won yet, and maybe cannot win, if the aims include establishing a Western style republican government in Iraq, with Iraq defined as the nation state bounded by the borders when Saddam was last seen as the president of Iraq.
Examining such victory conditions, how much of a loss is the establishment of an autonomous, or free/independent, Kurdish state? It's a loss insofar as retaining Iraq within the lines on the map from Balfour's day, but how critical is that? Yugoslavia is no longer in the lines from that era, and neither is the British Mandate in Palestine. Are those wins, losses, or something else?
Czechoslovakia isn't in that old shape either, but is the new form of the Czech and Slovak republics a loss?
If the aim is to create a democratic domino effect, where Iraq grows into a parliamentary and constitutional republic, and then acts as a catalyst for similar changes in neighboring states, which American allies in the Persian Gulf region have bought into those war aims?
So far, such matters look all to frequently as hope used for a method, not a well linked strategy between military means and diplomatic and economic aims.
Sun Tzu once remarked that in order to defeat one's enemy, one should find out and frustrate, or nullify, his plan. If the plan is untenable, or weakly structured, it's not hard to defeat it. If the plan was solely to remove Saddam, that's long since been done, so on the face of it, there was more to the plan than that. Having achieved that intermediate aim, what other aims must be achieved to consider the larger aim a success? If an element of that is a multinational effort to coach Iraq as a cohesive whole into that democratic model, it too is in poor shape.
The first year of the US in Iraq saw a series of attack along coalition seams, with the result of a number of coalition members dropping out by mid 2005. That part of the plan continues to erode, at least in the short term. Some months ago a British chief of military staff indicated a 2007/2008 end date to the UK's participation. That prediction seems to be on track for coming true.
To better answer your question, does it matter if the US loses, as in being unable to achieve the suggested larger aim? What is the expected outcome of the US leaving in the near term with such broad aims unachieved?
Likely outcomes, but not slam dunks, are increased Iranian influence in Iraq. Is that compatible with American strategic aims? Saudi aims? Jordanian aims? Gulf State aims? I don't think so, unless Iran liberalizes a bit politically. Not betting the rent money on that one, no.
Likewise, is the devolution of Iraq into two or three smaller, and internally stable, states (similar to how Yugoslavia broke up) an end state more likely to enhance regional stability, or to undermine it? The regional allies of the US have a significant security interest in the answers to that, and don't at the moment appear to like what the odds are if the US takes the "awe, screw it" course of action, takes its ball, and goes home. It may not be traumatic to America to "let 'em play," but the allies in the Gulf look to have a more dire problem to deal with.
As of this writing, the stew is still cooking. If abandoning allies in that region is good American policy, then the answers change.
We're not at war with anyone in Iraq, we're meddling in their civil war
Joe, while I generally agree, the non Iraqi Islamists in Iraq represent an enemy to both America, and a number of the factions within in Iraq, so even that isn't as cut and dried as we might like it to be.
DR
