There were essentially two assumptions which provided the rationale for the Iraq war: 1) Iraq was at or near the acquisition of atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction which it might pass off to terrorists groups who would use them against Israel and infiltrate them into America causing vast carnage in the homeland; 2) Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who had so oppressed virtually every minority in his country that his removal would clear the way for the human spirit to prevail and democracy under American tutelage, reminiscent of our occupation of Germany and Japan, would bloom.
Both of these assumptions were proved by history to have been misconceived. The first got us into the war and the second kept us in the war. Why did we make war in reaction to a terrorist assault committed by only 19 individuals armed only with box cutters? Because we felt that the next attack would we with weapons of mass destruction generated in Iraq. Because we felt that Iraq shared our basic cultural assumptions, our belief in the yearning of the human spirit for democracy and the rule law. Again, these beliefs were misplaced.
Once it was determined that Iraq did not harbor weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the war had to be the democratization of the country. We learned that democracy is more than majority rule, it requires as a predicate at least a culture of respect for the rule of law. We were thinking as people who drew upon the heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition, modified by the enlightenment. The Arab world has nothing to do with these traditions and wants no part of them.
Our efforts at democracy in these lands might be characterized as trying to teach a dog to speak English. It is not in his nature. The problem is not the odd dictator, the dictator is the symptom of the culture of Islam. The culture of Islam is the problem, the dictator is the symptom. Worse, superstition, brutality, victimology, paranoia, mob violence, intolerance, and murder are ingrained deep in this culture which erupts like a virus to attack opportunistically.
It is questionable whether it is more absurd to believe that invading and occupying an Arab country will somehow deter 19 more suicidal maniacs with box cutters, or is it more unrealistic to believe that we can impose Jeffersonian democracy on a medieval culture?
This is a culture with 1.6 billion adherents and we were undone by only 19 of them with box cutters. It led us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time, it bled our treasury, it wounded our military and in the process we empowered Iran and lost most of the Middle East. We can go on trying to teach this old dog new tricks, to attempt to teach Islam to think the way we do, we can employee bribery, appeasement, conventional war, drone strikes, national technical means, and a whole series of tactics and strategies but we are up against Islam.
Islam is not a religion but it is religion and politics combined but, more, it is in epistemology, a way of seeing the world which simply does not compute by our lights. It's not just anti-scientific and superstitious, it operates on a whole different set of assumptions about reality. We did not lose Falluja because we pulled our troops out too soon or because of some other tactical error, we lost Falluja in the seventh century. That which is true of Falluja is exponentially more true in Afghanistan. But it is true in places in the Arab/Muslim world that we once thought were relatively enlightened like Turkey and Egypt. There is enough of Islam in these places to affect the culture.
Our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan hit a wall because we were operating in different centuries. Can you imagine preaching toleration between Catholics and Protestants along the Rhine River during The 30 Years War in the 17th century and seeing how far we would get with a message that virtually everyone in America today accepts? It simply would not be heard. The culture was not ready. We would be lucky if we were not murdered on the spot by both sides.
Our job is to find ways to fight this war which will succeed and which we can afford. Some tactics like national technical means have produced more success than conventional land wars but the real problem is a looming internal implosion in America which will bankrupt us and leave us defenseless abroad. Our fiscal profligacy at home threatens to bring down the entire American experiment and render American military power weak. We are hollowing out our economy with pointless excursions against Islam while the threat from China, which requires an entirely different and more expensive response, grows apace.
We must rethink everything.
