Forget it Jake, it's Iraq

In a NYT op-ed today, a reserve soldier explains that one of the most frustrating things about her time in Iraq was not knowing whether her efforts were having any impact:

In the fantasy, you know exactly what you’ve done, what impact it’s had, and you’ve put smiles on peoples’ faces. But in reality, you don’t necessarily ever get to find out the true impact of your actions. You’re left with questions instead. Did rebuilding all those schools over there have any kind of lasting impact? Did the Iraqis we tried to assist believe that we were sincere in our efforts?

In my hero fantasies, there are no such loose ends or doubts.

Fog of war and all that, but it also reminds me of Chinatown:

EVELYN
 Tell me something -- does this
 usually happen to you, Mr. Gittes?

  GITTES
 What's that, Mrs. Mulwray?

  EVELYN
 -- Well, I'm only judging on the
 basis of one afternoon and an evening,
 but if that's how you go about your
 work, I'd say you're lucky to get
 through a whole day.

  GITTES
  (pouring himself
   another drink)
 -- Actually this hasn't happened
 to me in some time.

  EVELYN
 -- When was the last time?

  GITTES
 Why?

  EVELYN
 Just -- I don't know why.
 I'm asking.

Gittes touches his nose, winces a little.

  GITTES
 It was in Chinatown.

  EVELYN
 What were you doing there?

  GITTES
  (taking a long drink)
 -- Working for the District Attorney.

  EVELYN
 Doing what?

183  Gittes looks sharply at her. Then:

  GITTES
 As little as possible.

  EVELYN
 The District Attorney gives his
 men advice like that?

  GITTES
 They do in Chinatown.

She looks at him. Gittes stares off into the night.

Evelyn has poured herself another drink.

  EVELYN
 Bothers you to talk about it,
 doesn't It?

Gittes gets up.

  GITTES
 No -- I wonder -- could I -- do
 you have any peroxide or something?

He touches his nose lightly.

  EVELYN
 Oh sure. C'mon.

She takes his hand and leads him back into the house.

184  INT. BATHROOM - MIRROR

Gittes pulls the plaster off his nose, stares at it in
the mirror. Evelyn takes some hydrogen peroxide and some
cotton out of a medicine cabinet. Evelyn turns Gittes'
head toward her. She has him sit on the pullman tile
adjacent to the sink.

  EVELYN
 Doctor did a nice job...

She begins to work on his nose with the peroxide. Then
she sees his cheek -- checks back in his hair.--


  EVELYN
  (continuing)
 -- Boy oh boy, you're a mess

  GITTES
 -- Yeah --

  EVELYN
  (working on him)
 -- So why does it bother you to
 talk about it... Chinatown...

  GITTES
 -- Bothers everybody who works
 there -- but to me -- It was --

Gittes shrugs.

  EVELYN
 -- Hold still -- why?

  GITTES
 -- You can't always tell what's
 going on there --

  EVELYN
 ... No -- why was it --

  GITTES
 I thought I was keeping someone
 from being hurt and actually I ended
 up making sure they were hurt.

  EVELYN
 Could you do anything about it?

185  They're very close now as she's going over a mouse very
near his eye.

  GITTES
 Yeah -- make sure I don't find
 myself in Chinatown anymore --
 wait a second --

He takes hold of her and pulls her even closer,

  EVELYN
  (momentarily freezing)
 -- What's wrong?

  GITTES
 Your eye.

  EVELYN
 What about it?

  GITTES
  (staring intently)
 There's something black in the
 green part of your eye.

  EVELYN
  (not moving)
 Oh that... It's a flaw in the
 iris...

  GITTES
 ... A flaw...

  EVELYN
 (she almost shivers)
 ... Yes, sort of a birthmark...

Gittes kisses her lightly, gradually rises until he's
standing holding her. She hesitates, then wraps her arms
around him.

As an aside, I always thought a cool idea would be to make a show--on HBO, say--about Jake Gittes' days on the Chinatown beat (that are only obliquely alluded to in the movie).

Democratic libel

In his latest column, Frank Rich correctly calls out both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for misrepresenting John McCain's "100 years in Iraq" comment:

REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.

...

The Democrats should...stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.

This sort of distortion is especially disappointing coming from Obama, who is supposed to be committed to the raising the level of political discourse in this country. I hope that he issues a public apology to McCain and reiterates both McCain's views and his own in a fair-minded way.

Al-Qaeda Over There

The US says that a suicide bomber and roadside bomb that killed 68 in Iraq was the work of Al-Qaeda--the second deadliest attack in Iraq this year. Also, 154 were injured.

The Bush administration and other supporters of the war sometimes justify our presence there by saying that we must stay and fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Indeed, John McCain has said of withdrawal from Iraq, "They'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al Qaeda.'' However, before the US invaded Iraq, there was no significant Al-Qaeda presence there, and terrorist attacks were non-existent. This fact complicates the anti-withdrawal argument stated above, and puts a couple of different interpretations of it into play.

One interpretation is that, yes, it was a mistake to go into Iraq--especially as incompetently as we did--and yes, this did have the unintended consequence of attracting Al-Qaeda to Iraq. However, whatever mistakes have been made, we must face the current reality, which is that Al-Qaeda is in Iraq--and they must be engaged there. To withdraw at this point would be to surrender--if not in fact than at least in appearance--which for various reasons is completely unacceptable.

Another interpretation construes terrorist attacks as a sort of zero-sum game: there are always going to be some number of Al-Qaeda attacks, and the attacks have to be carried out somewhere. As long as we keep engaging Al-Qaeda in Iraq, those attacks will be carried out over there, instead of in, say, downtown Manhattan. If we relent in Iraq, then the terrorists will be able to refocus their resources and attention on attacking the US mainland. Seen this way, then, keeping troops in Iraq is an imperative for domestic security: our best defense is to remain on offense.

Now, it is obvious to me that--though I may not agree with it--something like the first interpretation is at least pragmatic, well-intentioned, and honorable. The second one I find to be cynical and cowardly. The first is acknowledging a tactical reality; the second regards Iraqis as mere cannon fodder and uses them essentially as human shields. It is as if to say that Iraqi civilian deaths are somehow more acceptable than American civilian deaths, or that American lives are more valuable than Iraqi lives. Not only that, but it makes the mistake of assuming, in an intuitive way, that a terrorist attack carried out abroad is one less terrorist attack that would have been carried out on US soil--an obviously false notion.

Of course, no one would openly advocate the second interpretation in the precise way that I've stated it--however, sometimes the rhetoric of the opponents to withdrawal seem to imply just this sort of reasoning. Someone who suggests that Al-Qaeda will "follow our troops home" if we withdraw is, to me, favoring the second interpretation. So is anyone who does not regard the death of an Iraqi civilian with as much heart-felt sympathy and compassion as that of an American civilian.

Opportunity cost

From Bob Herbert, who talks about estimates made by a Congressional committee:

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more.

...[M]oney spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

The incredible amount of money spent on the Iraq war has rendered absurd any argument coming from a Republican that we must reign in domestic spending. Whatever mechanism is being used to finance the war can obviously also be used to finance anything else, including domestic programs--and everyone knows this. Moreover, since the Republicans never seem to acknowledge that there is any economic downside to this excessive spending on Iraq, they forfeit the ability to lodge similar complaints against domestic spending.

I really think that--for better or for worse--the Republicans have unwittingly opened the door to a new era of gigantic government programs. Ten years ago, universal health care was a pipe-dream--in these days of trillion-dollar elective wars, it's looking doable. The socialists can thank George W. Bush.

Obama is consistent on Iraq

My friend Carlos frets about Obama's credentials as a progressive, linking to an article by Matt Gonzalez that casts aspersions on Obama as any kind of lefty at all. Many of Gonzalez' points are legitimate progressive gripes against Obama, who in many ways is not as liberal as the Republicans would like to think. However, one particular argument in the article bothers me, because it is entirely fallacious:

Let's start with his signature position against the Iraq war. Obama has sent mixed messages at best.

First, he opposed the war in Iraq while in the Illinois state legislature. Once he was running for US Senate though, when public opinion and support for the war was at its highest, he was quoted in the July 27, 2004 Chicago Tribune as saying, "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." The Tribune went on to say that Obama, "now believes US forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation ­ a policy not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration."

The article then goes on to mention several bills that Obama voted for in the US Senate that funded the ongoing effort in Iraq.

Let's be clear: there is absolutely no inconsistency in a) opposing the war from the start and b) funding that war--or even supporting an extended, indefinite troop presence in Iraq--given that the invasion has already come to pass. It is quite possible that, though the initial decision to invade Iraq was a mistake, it is nevertheless true that--given that we have already invaded--the best course of action is to maintain a troop presence there, or only gradually withdraw troops. Indeed, it is this second option--gradually withdrawing troops--that Obama has settled on.

So it is not the case that Obama has sent "mixed messages" about Iraq--his view has been entirely self-consistent and, in my opinion, correct. Matt Gonzalez's charge is that Obama lacks ideological purity with respect to Iraq--but if ideological purity means elevating pithy charges of inconsistency over the complex and difficult truth, then so much the worse for ideological purity.

A Constant Struggle

I don't know whether or when we should withdraw the troops from Iraq. I don't know if the troop surge was the right course of action or not. I'm certainly no military expert. And I simply don't know enough about conditions in Iraq to be able to comment intelligently about the right tactics. So in response to this important political question of the day, all I can come up with is a big fat je ne sais pas.

This gulf of not-knowing wants to be filled--but not with knowledge. No, it wants to be filled by the stuff of cognitive dissonance--unfounded convenient truths that just so happen to harmonize with my ideology and my politics. I want to believe that withdrawing troops will be better for the Iraqis. I want to believe that there is nothing more that we can do there, and that our presence there is not required. In short, I want the consequences of withdrawal to be consistent with the principles I value, despite the lack of evidence for or against this being the case. I don't want it to be true that American withdrawal will precipitate ethnic cleansing. I don't want it to be true that American withdrawal will encourage more and not less violence toward the West. And, perversely, I don't want it to be true that "staying the course" in Iraq will lead to success. It would be a validation of the opposing ideology. Every time a bit of bad news emerges out of Iraq, I am secretly content, because it is a validation of my own position.

This fact about myself makes me feel ashamed and unliked, and I make a conscious effort to fight it. When I see the death toll reach 3,000, I try to submerge my ugly glee in Socratic ignorance: "I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about...." I try to empathize with the soldier's families, and how it's a dad that's gone forever. I try my best to do this, but I have self-doubts about whether I am doing it authentically enough. In the end I have to settle for a cold fiat from my intellect: the deaths of these soldiers is a tragedy; you are saddened. It is unclear to me whether I ever take this order truly to heart. Maybe I do, sometimes--not when I'm thinking about politics, but about life and death in general. It is then that my mind sometimes wanders sideways to the deaths of those people, and only then that the magnitude of the thing hits me.

So, what am I to make of myself? While other people--my peers and younger--volunteer to fight in the war, away from their families, risking their whole human happiness, I skulk around on the internet coming up with clever arguments and snide, post-modern comments. Politics is a sport that I keep up with and occasionally participate in. But it's just that: a game. Something that I become absorbed in and want to win at. Not something that opens the world up to me in any visceral way; not something that enlightens me or makes me wiser or better. I am tempted to dismiss myself as a hack, with neither the moral clarity nor courage to say anything worth paying attention to.

One more shrill voice in a whole internet full of shrill voices.

***

But this verdict rings false. It doesn't stick. The reason is because it doesn't make sense to judge myself according to what my first impulses are, or to what feelings I do or do not feel. I can't help it if these are my immediate reactions; it is out of my power to prevent them.

However, it is within my power to correct them. I may not have any say in how I immediately feel about the latest news out of Iraq, but I do have a say in how I choose to reflect on it afterwards. I have the option of earnestly assessing my emotions and beliefs. And it is my choice as to whether or not I accept these emotions and beliefs as decent and reasonable.

In the end, my particular flavor of cognitive dissonance is a part of me and, for better or worse, affects my judgment. But so long as I struggle against it, it will be true that I am not my cognitive dissonance--and, hopefully, not such a shrill voice after all.