Posted on 09/22/2003 6:03:13 AM PDT by optimistically_conservative
A man was driving down the freeway when his cellphone rang. His wife was calling. "I just heard on the news that some nut's driving the wrong way on the interstate," she told him. "You better be careful!"
"I know, I know!" her husband said, his voice filled with stress. "But honey, I gotta tell ya, it's not just one car, it's hundreds of them!"
President Bush goes to the United Nations on Tuesday, where he hopes to convince the rest of the world that he's the one headed in the right direction. It's going to be a hard sale.
And even if we somehow manage to negotiate a supportive U.N. resolution, it won't matter much. Other nations clearly aren't going to commit enough troops or resources to improve the situation in Iraq. We're on our own.
As that realization sinks in, some members of Congress have begun demanding a timetable for bringing U.S. troops home. They've seen the poll numbers, and they want some reassurance that this will not be an open-ended commitment, or to use the loaded term, a quagmire.
Bush officials have wisely resisted that demand because they understand its dangers. Once we announce a goal of holding elections by February, for example, our opponents can win simply by ensuring the timetable isn't met. Once we announce that our troops will be gone by Jan. 1, 2005, our opponents know they can win by lasting until Jan. 2.
Yet it's important to remember that deadlines do exist. We may not set them; we can't even be sure what they are. But they exist, and we ignore them at our peril.
For example, while we may want to transfer control to Iraqi officials as quickly as possible, we also know that transferring power too quickly could lead to chaos. For that reason, U.S. officials are correct to reject demands from the French and others for an almost immediate transfer of power. Before we can give control of the country to the Iraqis, we have to gain that control ourselves. At the moment, we don't have it.
We also know that every day we occupy Iraq, our presence feeds resentment. At some point, that additional resentment may begin to outweigh the additional good we do by staying. And once that point comes, staying any longer becomes foolhardy.
Again, it's impossible to know when that tipping point may come. We may already have passed it without realizing it, but I don't think so.
From the beginning, experts have warned that any occupation that lasts longer than a year will greatly increase the risk of a mass Iraqi uprising. If so, that gives us until spring 2004 to bring things under control and give the government a meaningful Iraqi face.
Coincidentally, next spring also happens to be the point at which we can no longer sustain current troop levels in Iraq. Two other factors will also come into play about that time. If we fail to make significant progress by spring, the struggle will continue into another Iraqi summer, when tempers rise with the temperature. The presidential campaign will also be heating up about that time, adding yet another complication.
Perhaps the most important decision we face, though, is how to define success.
First, we have to abandon these far-fetched notions of installing a Jeffersonian democracy. It's not going to happen, and if we insist on that unattainable goal, we may lose our chance at something more feasible. Success will be an Iraqi government along the lines of Jordan, which rules with at least some respect for basic human rights.
Nor can we define success as bringing all our troops home. Five years from now, if no U.S. troops remain in Iraq, it will mean that we've been driven out of the country, leaving behind either chaos or an anti-Western, repressive dictatorship much like that of Saddam Hussein. Realistically speaking, Iraq's only hope for humane government depends on the United States remaining "the power behind the throne" for a long, long time. Admittedly, that's not a pretty picture. But when a series of bad decisions has put you on the interstate headed in the wrong direction, success is defined as survival.
Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Mondays and Thursdays.
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