A Pilgrim’s Digression

In the leadup to the much-anticipated “Petraeus report”, to be delivered next week, it has been interesting to listen to talk radio. Sean Hannity and his cohorts have been almost giddy with anticipation of the success that Petraeus is supposedly going to announce. Last night, on one of the local Washington talk shows, the host kept asking, “What are Democrats going to say if the surge turns out to be working?” As if he expected a meaningful answer from his hand-picked callers.

The conservative talking point is that Democrats and liberals have bet the bank on failure in Iraq, and they will be formally discredited when Petraeus delivers the report of victory that has been postponed four years now. Of course, any suggestion that the report might be exaggerated in its claims of success will be met with derision and hints of lunacy.

Not trust the military to present an accurate assessment of its war effort? Ridiculous! Why would they exaggerate their success?

OK, I am going to risk derision as a paranoid delusional and suggest that this report, as well as some of the publicity stunts surrounding it (the president’s always popular “surprise” visit to Iraq yesterday), are nothing more than an effort to create an impression of success where there is little or no success at all.

The phrase “Potemkin village” is used to describe, especially in a political context, a fabricated structure meant to disguise something undesirable. I think it’s applicable in this case as well.

I ask you, why would Petraeus report anything other than “success” when he delivers his report to Congress next week? Oh, he will be limited in his effusions. He probably doesn’t want to seem to be obviously exaggerating. But really, why would he not talk up the “surge” as a success?

The surge is his baby, and he has been asked, in a sense, to offer a self-evaluation. To make a comparison to my own experience, every August I am asked to write my own job performance evaluation. On it, I delineate all the things I have done over the preceding year and I judge my degree of success in achieving goals I set forth in the evaluation from the previous year. Why would I tell my boss anything other than “I met all my goals and even exceeded a few expectations?”

Why would Petraeus report anything other than success in Iraq?

The problem for liberals is that conservatives have been so successful in seeding distrust of the media, and an implicit, adoring trust of the military within the minds of Americans, that any suggestion that our military leaders might deceive us is met with heaps of ridicule.

An article such as “Weighing the Surge” in today’s Washington Post can be dismissed as naysaying. After all, even Democrats are starting to come around. Washington Democrat congressman Brian Baird recently announced that after a trip to Iraq, he thinks the surge is working. Of course, he probably never set foot outside his motorcade or took off his bullet proof vest, but the surge is working, he assures us.

So President Bush travelled to Anbar province yesterday, one of the most volatile in the entire country, to deliver a speech in proof that our military efforts have paid off. Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar are now working with the United States (nevermind that this apparently irritates the Shiites who actually run the government of Iraq), and violence is down. Violence against Americans, that is. Iraqi on Iraqi violence, well, that doesn’t count. It’s just Iraqis dying.

In an editorial for the Huffington Post, former Senator Gary Hart has written essentially what I’ve said here: the Petraeus report, as well as all the “surprise” trips to Iraq and “I saw the light” Democrat conversion narratives surrounding the report, are meaningless, in terms of deciding the rightness or wrongness of continuing our military involvement in Iraq. As Hart writes, “For [Petraeus] to say, Let’s pack up and go, would be a vote of no-confidence in his troops and in himself. Don’t expect it.”

So what is it going to mean, for us and for Iraq, once Petraeus delivers his report next week? Exactly nothing. No one’s mind is going to be changed. The President hasn’t changed his position, and neither will his opponents. Everyone will be as set in their thinking about Iraq as they were six months ago, or a year ago, or three years ago.

Long ago, probably about the time it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq became nothing more than a symbol: on the one hand, a symbol of Republican foolishness; on the other, a symbol of Democrat weakness. People now simply look for evidence that seems to validate one or the other points of view. Iraq is a Potemkin construct in the mind of all of us who think about it every day and try to come to grips with the reality of what America has wrought.

The problem with a Potemkin village is that there is nothing behind it. It is a facade. Because we have met some artificial goal of opening 300 shops in the Dora marketplace by August 1, we declare the surge a “success,” and nevermind that there were around 850 shops in the market pre-war.

“Oh, so you think Iraqis were better off under Hussein?” Conservatives will charge. No, but don’t Iraqis have a right to expect that under a supposedly free and democratic regime, their life would at least be as good, if not better, than under a dictator? What kind of a success is it to say, “We’re not up to the level of success that Saddam was able to sustain, but we might get there in another decade.”

Yes, there is a part of me that wants America to fail in this endeavor. There, I admit it. We should never attempt something like this again, and the only way to assure that it never happens again is if we get our knuckles cracked but good.

I have never cared much about national pride; pride is one of the seven deadly sins. I don’t think much of the argument that we can’t allow our soldiers to have died in vain–tell that to the President who sent them on this mission in the first place; those of us who oppose further escalation, or even a stay-the-course attitude, merely want to prevent more American deaths.

Nor do I believe that an American withdraw will “embolden” our enemies. The same President who tells us that our enemies will be emboldened by a withdraw, also tells us that the terrorists have declared war on us and will stop at nothing until we are wiped off the earth. So tell me, can they really be “emboldened” more than they are already? If they are determined to destroy us, it really makes no difference whether we withdraw or not.

Much of the reasoning around the war allows for similar non-sequiters and contradictory conclusions–”we must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here at home” comes first and foremost to mind. At some point we just have to say “enough.” Enough rhetoric. Enough false measures of success. This has to end, sooner rather than later. But I have little hope that it will, at least not before another administration takes power.

Like the great Bob Dylan once asked, “How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?” We all know the answer, and it isn’t a very hopeful one, unfortunately.