This morning's The Baltimore Sun contains an op-ed piece by local psychiatrist/author Gordon Livingston, "Iraq looking more and more like Vietnam," which offers the most eloquent, succinct, and persuasive argument oldstyleliberal has yet seen to the effect that the war in Iraq is a huge — and growing — mistake.
The parallels with the Vietnam fiasco of the 1960s and '70s mount, Dr. Livingston says. Efforts to produce a constitution that everyone in Iraq will accept seem to have foundered, echoing our inability to foster a government in Vietnam that the Vietnamese would have preferred to Ho Chi Minh's communist regime, and that they would even have been willing to fight and die for. Dr. Livingston writes:
[L]ike Vietnam, where the average peasant was apolitical and just wanted the killing to stop, Iraqis appear more interested in security and basic services than in the details of governance.
"What can I do with a constitution if I have no water, gasoline and electricity?" asked one citizen quoted by The New York Times. "How come they gathered to approve the constitution while Iraqis are slaughtered?" asked another.
Now President Bush has even "closed the circle" of Iraq's resemblance to the Vietnam imbroglio by holding that the reason we must stay the course (and consequently get more U.S. troops killed) is basically to honor the deaths that have already taken place: that is, to keep those earlier sacrifices from having been in vain.
Dr. Livingston, who fought in Vietnam and came to oppose that war very strongly, says that "that ever-reliable call to arms: freedom, ours and the Iraqis'" is no longer valid as a justification for the war, if it ever was. "Along with most of our pre-war delusions" concerning weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links, he writes, "we have quietly relinquished the idea of a flowering secular democracy in Iraq that would serve as a beacon of hope to other peoples of the Middle East. In fact, we will be lucky if the Iraqis can agree on anything short of civil war."
The polls show that 54% of Americans now think the Iraq war a mistake. President Bush's approval rating is now a measly 36%. As far as oldstyleliberal can see, the president has done absolutely nothing of late to shore up his popularity, save possibly for his nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court, which some moderates (but virtually no liberals) approve of. As our supposed "war president," he's taken a five-week vacation while Cindy Sheehan, mother of slain soldier Casey Sheehan, so captured the media's attention by her personal protest against the war that she in effect had Bush for lunch.
Meanwhile, the mission in Iraq has stalled. There is no apparent progress in turning over security operations in that country to Iraqis. There is no reason to believe Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds will compromise on a constitution that all will support. There is no U.S. exit strategy that will guide us in extracting our troops from Iraq.
Furthermore, reports are coming out of the country to the effect that, contrary to what our administration has been saying, most of the insurgency we are fighting in Iraq is staffed by radicalized and disaffected locals — not by terrorists who have entered the country from elsewhere.
Things are looking very, very bad.
Yet oldstyleliberal still holds out hope for that "flowering secular democracy," that "beacon" to the rest of the Middle East. Let's face it, if all we are doing by "staying the course" is trying to keep a lid on chaos, then all those who have already died in Iraq did so in vain. When we do leave, if no secular democracy has taken root, the only alternative to chaos is theocratic dictatorship à la Iran.
If the reason more have to die is so that President Bush doesn't have to admit that the earlier deaths were his fault — due to his error, his stubbornness — how very, very sad.
I'm too much of an optimist to believe that will be the case.
Still, Dr. Livingston has me (in the words of a country music classic) almost persuaded that all my hope is in vain.
