The sight of President Bush taking his extraordinary
victory lap earlier this month aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln made
it more difficult to argue with those (a planet-wide majority, if we can believe
the international polls) who accuse our leaders of arrogance. Flying in at the
controls of a Navy jet, making a tail-hook landing, back-slapping sailors in the
California sunshine while wearing a fighter-pilot flight suit, then announcing,
against the blue Pacific, the end of major combat in Iraq—well, it had a
certain swagger. And yet there are signs that the Bush Administration is
genuinely concerned about not seeming triumphal over its victory in Iraq. In
fact, we are told, there was no victory—only a liberation—and the
Administration has been trying to get out the message that homecoming parades
for the troops, including a big one here in New York, should somehow make that
distinction clear. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and some of the military’s
top brass have been spending “significant time talking about this and thinking
it through,” according to Victoria Clarke, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon.
They’re all hoping to avoid, as the Times put it,
“parades that might appear to be gloating.”
Why this sudden sensitivity to appearances? To anyone even slightly
familiar with the record of Saddam Hussein’s regime, a bit of gloating over
its destruction doesn’t seem unreasonable. And this is, after all, the
President who dismissed the demonstrations of February 15th—when ten million
people, in six hundred cities across the globe, marched against the invasion of
Iraq in what was probably the largest one-day protest in history—with the
observation that he never listened to “focus groups.”
Still, the protesters had a greater effect on events than today’s
conventional wisdom recalls. Domestic and foreign opposition pushed the
Administration to go back to the United Nations, for instance, for one more
round of weapons inspections, and perhaps to take added care in avoiding
civilian casualties. The war, of course, went ahead. The more dire predictions
of its opponents did not, thankfully, prove correct, and the relatively quick
fall of Saddam Hussein seemed to mean, both logically and morally, the defeat of
the antiwar movement.
Except that few of the war’s opponents, domestic or foreign, have
become wholehearted supporters of the Administration or of its plans for
Iraq’s future. And support matters. Even though Spain’s Prime Minister, for
example, was one of the willing, the opposition of ninety per cent of his voting
public meant that he was confined to contributing a hospital ship and
humanitarian help, rather than combat troops, to the war effort. A private deal
cut with Turkey’s top politicians fell apart on the parliament floor despite
American inducements amounting to some twenty-six billion dollars, because the
Turkish public wouldn’t abide it. If the United States learned anything in the
tortuous months of politicking leading up to the war, it was that today it must
win over not only the leaders of foreign countries but their citizens.
That may explain why the Administration’s rationales for invasion,
which seemed to change constantly, from anthrax and Al Qaeda to supposed nuclear
sales in Africa, all eventually acquired, whatever their merits, the hectoring
sound of sales pitches being made to skeptical, even hostile crowds. This
rhetorical escalation was driven, in part, by the pressure of sustained
opposition, as was the Administration’s tendency to overstate its claims about
Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and intentions.
The Administration seemed similarly compelled to exaggerate the
short-term prospects for turning Iraq into a democratic, peaceful, modern
capitalist state. Simply installing a few reliable exiles would probably never
have worked, to judge from the nationalist and religious passions now roiling
the country. Even so, after all that has been argued and promised, anything less
than a sustained effort to restore order, keep the country together, and
generally nation-build would expose the Administration to charges of wantonness
and hypocrisy.
The war was won without Turkey, and despite the French. But, as the
Administration’s attempt last week to craft a resolution on lifting sanctions
that would be acceptable to the entire Security Council suggests, we’d rather
not have to win the peace without them. One problem with the “v” word is
that the victory, even on the Administration’s own terms, is incomplete. As
President Bush said in his speech aboard the aircraft carrier, it wasn’t
actually a war we just fought; it was a battle in a larger, longer war against
global terrorism. Even the most myopic unilateralist must realize that to fight
such a war we need allies. Without the help of Pakistan and Germany, just to
take two obvious examples, we would be making little, if any, progress against
Al Qaeda. American triumphalism over the war in Iraq plays very poorly in both
of those countries.
At the same time, many Americans are deeply wary of the notion of an
ongoing, or even permanent, war. (The Democrats dread this prospect for their
own reasons, since they badly need to change the subject to the domestic economy
if they are to gain any traction in the 2004 election campaigns.) According to a
recent Times/CBS poll, a majority of Americans still oppose preemptive military
strikes. The vast strWilliam Finneganeet
protests we saw before the war were expressing, it should be remembered, the
fears and concerns of many more Americans (tens of millions, apparently) than
ever got out and marched.
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