EDITORIAL
War in Iraq: Toward finding a way forward
As the United States occupation of Iraq nears the two-year mark, reasons for optimism become harder to identify and to cling to.
Hadi Mizban • Associated Press
The occasion seems to offer an opportunity to redefine our purpose in Iraq, with a clearer vision of how we will know when that purpose has been achieved — and what that spells out as an exit strategy.
An Iraqi man walks past a banner advertising the upcoming election in Baghdad. Text on the banner reads "We shouldn't be concerned about Iraq, we are its people."
The original reasons for invading Iraq — that it represented an imminent threat to the United States and that it was linked somehow to the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon — have been thoroughly discredited. Last week the CIA acknowledged that it has folded up its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
That came four months after Charles Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials.
Now another report from the CIA ominously warns that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists.
Iraq has become "a magnet for international terrorist activity," where before the war Saddam Hussein had few ties to al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of allying with Saddam because Saddam rejected Islamic ideals and ran a secular regime.
Now bin Laden acknowledges the craven Abu-Mussab al-Zarqawi as his "emir" among the terrorists in Iraq.
Iraq, the report concludes, has joined the list of conflicts — including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the Philippines and southern Thailand — that have deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped spread radical Islamic ideology.
It's thus clear that in some ways the invasion of Iraq has made things worse, not better, as it deepened the terrorist threat to the United States.
As the other reasons for the invasion faded, Bush in recent months has cited the goal of replacing Saddam's tyranny with a blossoming democracy — surely a worthy goal had it not resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis. And we're not as sure as Bush that we see a light at the end of this tunnel.
The upcoming election, for instance, seems to be a lose-lose proposition. If the election proceeds and the Sunni minority boycotts or is intimidated from voting, the results will be discredited. If the elections are postponed, the insurgency may be emboldened to the point where it is doubtful that security sufficient for elections could be established any time soon.
The least bad option, we'd hazard, is to proceed with the election as scheduled, in the hopes that rank-and-file Iraqis want democracy badly enough to risk death for it.
What seems essential going forward is for Americans to hammer out a new consensus on what exactly our purpose in Iraq is, and how we'll know when it has been achieved.
Establishment of democracy, it's now clear, is a worthy but impossibly fuzzy goal. Will we insist that all factions be represented in a secular government? Or would we declare victory and pull our troops out if an Islamic theocracy is popularly elected but begins oppressing minorities and women?
Even though we have opposed this war, the idea of cutting and running, leaving Iraq in worse shape than we found it, seems unthinkable. Yet we must be smart enough to recognize when the costs begin to exceed the likely benefits. It's time to agree on those criteria.
Whether you believe the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do or, as we have argued from the start, a tragic mistake, it's crucial that we now agree on a clearly defined, measurable way forward.
