Two Views on the War in Iraq

Robert Kagan is a neoconservative pundit, close to Senator McCain. He is a co-founder of PNAC and one of the signers of the PNAC Letter from 1998.
In his column from today's Washington Post (The 'Blame The Iraqis' Gambit) he makes his point in explaining why in his opinion Americans would remain in Iraq long after 2008.
He considers the arguments for withdrawal as irrelevant. Says Mr. Kagan, no matter why we went into Iraq and no matter how badly we have fought the war up until recently, this tells us nothing about what to do now. It doesn't make withdrawal any less costly. It doesn't make an implosion in Iraq and a victory for al-Qaeda any more tolerable.
The same, goes on Mr. Kagan, holds for the it's the Iraqis' fault argument: al-Qaeda's penetration in Iraq is not the fault of the Iraqis.
And Mr. Kagan continues, we didn't intervene in Iraq primarily to save the Iraqi people. We went in mostly for reasons of our own, to protect our interests and our allies from the menace of a serial aggressor. And now that we are in Iraq, the United States, not just the Iraqi people, will suffer the consequences of our failure. If Iraq implodes, if the region explodes, if al-Qaeda gains a victory and a foothold in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, it will be our interests that have suffered.
So, defeat will be no more tolerable in January 2009 than it is now. And it won't matter whom we try to blame.
The weak point in this view is that it does not answer the most important question: is the current strategy fit for the new kind of war imposed to us by al-Qaeda and all those global guerrillas? David Brooks spoke about this in an op-ed published on May 18 in NY Times. The article had a suggestive title, The Insurgent Advantage.
The question is addressed in a column published by Bob Kerrey in the Wall Street Journal.

Bob Kerrey is far from being a neocon. He was the Democratic Governor of Nebraska till 1997 and then served in the US Senate. He is now the president of the New School University in New York. So he is a Guy from the Village. However, his article from Wall Street Journal is very different to the Democratic position: the key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically yes.

And Mr. Kerrey concludes: the American people will need that consensus regardless of when, and under what circumstances, we withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. We must not allow terrorist sanctuaries to develop any place on earth. Whether these fighters are finding refuge in Syria, Iran, Pakistan or elsewhere, we cannot afford diplomatic or political excuses to prevent us from using military force to eliminate them.

Here are the two articles. First, the article of Robert Kagan:

When people want to justify the unjustifiable and accept the unacceptable, they try all kinds of ways to make themselves feel better about their decision. For those who want to pull out of Iraq, there is a whole panoply of excuses:
"Bush lied us into war" is the favorite of many Democrats, including presidential candidates who supported the war but now want to claim they were misled. "Bush screwed up the war" is the favorite of people such as me and others who argued from the beginning for more troops and a different military strategy and were told to shut up by folks in the Pentagon and the White House.
Both of these excuses have the same problem. No matter why we went into Iraq and no matter how badly we have fought the war up until recently, this tells us nothing about what to do now. It doesn't make withdrawal any less costly. It doesn't make an implosion in Iraq and a victory for al-Qaeda any more tolerable.
The same is true for what has now become the most powerful and pervasive excuse for pulling out of Iraq: "It's the Iraqis' fault." For Republican elected officials looking desperately for a way out of supporting a war that threatens their reelection, this has become not only the preferred excuse but also a necessary psychological crutch.
For these Republicans, even more than for Democrats, blaming the Iraqis solves a number of big problems. It absolves them of having supported the war in the first place. We were right to go to war, they will say, and we gave it our best shot. It isn't our fault if the Iraqis were unable or unwilling to do their part.
Blaming the Iraqis also allows Republicans to acquiesce in defeat without having to acknowledge that it is an American defeat. We didn't fail, the Iraqis did. And blaming the Iraqis clears the American conscience. We got rid of Saddam Hussein, Republicans will say. The rest was up to them, and they failed. The more sophisticated will declare that the Iraqis were culturally destined to fail.
As with any good cover story, there is just enough truth in this one to sell it to those who need an excuse. The Iraqi government has been a disappointment. Sunni and Shiite leaders don't have an easy time compromising with one another, as opposed to, say, Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Sectarian killings continue.
It is what's wrong with this story, however, that makes it so irresponsible. The fact is that, contrary to so many predictions, Iraq has not descended into civil war. Political bargaining continues. Signs of life are returning to Baghdad and elsewhere. Many Sunnis are fighting al-Qaeda terrorist groups, not their Shiite neighbors. And sectarian violence is down by about 50 percent since December.
By far the biggest problem, and the source of most of the violence reported every day, has been al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Qaeda's strategy is to foment sectarian violence by killing both Shiites and Sunnis. How come? If sectarian violence were out of control already, why would al-Qaeda have to stir it up? In fact, it is precisely fear that things will calm down in Iraq that has al-Qaeda working overtime to blow things and people up.
Al-Qaeda's penetration in Iraq is not the fault of the Iraqis, some of whom are mustering the extraordinary courage to fight back. Nor are the Iraqi people to blame for al-Qaeda-manufactured car bombs that go off in markets where Sunnis and Shiites are shopping together. According to Gen. David Petraeus, upward of 80 percent of the suicide bombers are not Iraqis. Al-Qaeda's inhuman violence, including the use of small children as "suicide" bombs, cannot be written off as just part of that whole Iraqi cultural thing, however convenient that might be for the American conscience. As for the United States, if we are driven out of Iraq, it will be by al-Qaeda, not by the flaws of the Iraqi people.
There is another problem with the cover story. We didn't intervene in Iraq primarily to save the Iraqi people. We went in mostly for reasons of our own, to protect our interests and our allies from the menace of a serial aggressor whose domestic repression was of a piece with his desire for regional domination. And now that we are in Iraq, the United States, not just the Iraqi people, will suffer the consequences of our failure. If Iraq implodes, if the region explodes, if al-Qaeda gains a victory and a foothold in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, it will be our interests that have suffered.
Republican leaders think they're being clever in saying that if there is no progress by September, or by the end of 2008, we will have to wash our hands of the whole mess. That's nonsense. Defeat will be no more tolerable in January 2009 than it is now. And it won't matter whom we try to blame.
And the article of Bob Kerrey:

At this year's graduation celebration at The New School in New York, Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi delivered our commencement address. This brave woman, who has been imprisoned for her criticism of the Iranian government, had many good and wise things to say to our graduates, which earned their applause.
But one applause line troubled me. Ms. Ebadi said: "Democracy cannot be imposed with military force."
What troubled me about this statement--a commonly heard criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq--is that those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently.

Let me restate the case for this Iraq war from the U.S. point of view. The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were "over there." It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the "head of the snake." But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.
As for Saddam, he had refused to comply with numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions outlining specific requirements related to disclosure of his weapons programs. He could have complied with the Security Council resolutions with the greatest of ease. He chose not to because he was stealing and extorting billions of dollars from the U.N. Oil for Food program.
No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.
Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.
The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.
Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn't you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq's middle class has fled the country in fear.
With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.
The key question for Congress is whether or not Iraq has become the primary battleground against the same radical Islamists who declared war on the U.S. in the 1990s and who have carried out a series of terrorist operations including 9/11. The answer is emphatically "yes."
This does not mean that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11; he was not. Nor does it mean that the war to overthrow him was justified--though I believe it was. It only means that a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would hand Osama bin Laden a substantial psychological victory.

Those who argue that radical Islamic terrorism has arrived in Iraq because of the U.S.-led invasion are right. But they are right because radical Islam opposes democracy in Iraq. If our purpose had been to substitute a dictator who was more cooperative and supportive of the West, these groups wouldn't have lasted a week.
Finally, Jim Webb said something during his campaign for the Senate that should be emblazoned on the desks of all 535 members of Congress: You do not have to occupy a country in order to fight the terrorists who are inside it. Upon that truth I believe it is possible to build what doesn't exist today in Washington: a bipartisan strategy to deal with the long-term threat of terrorism.
The American people will need that consensus regardless of when, and under what circumstances, we withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. We must not allow terrorist sanctuaries to develop any place on earth. Whether these fighters are finding refuge in Syria, Iran, Pakistan or elsewhere, we cannot afford diplomatic or political excuses to prevent us from using military force to eliminate them.