What are we Doing in Iraq? Part I

Seventy-two American servicemen have been killed in October thus far, putting the month on course to be the bloodiest for U.S. forces in two years. We mourn each one and pray their families find consolation in the strength, skill and dedication to duty that each soldier possessed.

Seventy-two American servicemen have been killed in October thus far, putting the month on course to be the bloodiest for U.S. forces in two years. We mourn each one and pray their families find consolation in the strength, skill and dedication to duty that each soldier possessed.

And no, it doesn’t help to be reminded that in WWII our losses were staggering – more than 1.1 million fathers, sons, husbands, brothers didn’t come home or came home less than whole (total military deaths were more than 24 million). Or that our WWI casualties were more than 300,000 between May and November 1918.

What Americans ask as we sacrifice our children somewhere else is “why?” WWII was “somewhere else, “but understood as a fight in the name of our own security. Kwajalein, Anzio, Normandy, Kasserine, and Okinawa are part of our history. Our WWI casualties were “somewhere else” as well, but Cantigny, Belleau Wood, and the Argonne Forest belong to us in understanding.

What are Ramadi, Baghdad and Balad? If they are only Iraqi places, what are we doing in the middle of their Civil War? By what right do our soldiers die to repair their oil wells or protect their government? We deposed Saddam for reasons of our own. Can’t we leave them to decide whether to live with each other or kill each other?

No. We didn’t fight in Remagen for the Germans, and we are not in Haditha for the Iraqis. Iraq was, and remains, a front in the larger war against terrorists and the countries that harbor and support them. There are indigenous fault lines in Iraq, to be sure, but they have been crossed and muddied by Iran and Syria. Iraq, as is its history, is at the crossroads of the Persian and Arab worlds and the Sunni and Shiite worlds. And we might once have been content to watch them fight it out there, far away from us. But this is the 21st Century. We are in the middle of an ideological and religious battle with imperialist ramifications, not the nationalist war that was Vietnam in another century.

President Bush was right when he said those who think the U.S. upset the stability of the Middle East by invading Iraq were under some illusion that there was stability to be upset. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, through the Afghan and Bosnian wars and the Iran-Iraq war; Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia and the Philippines; the invasion of Kuwait; and the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, radical Islam has been seeking to expand its reach, harnessing the discontent of the masses. This discontent, and these masses, are in the Middle East, obviously, but they are also in Europe, Asia, the Indian subcontinent and in North America. It is our war and it is here. Even if we don’t fight, our enemies do.

If we understand Iraq in those terms, our presence there is crucial. But if we understand it in those terms, the question becomes how best to affect the ends we seek and whether we can do our job on the Iraqi front while remaining inside Iraq and outside the Iraqi civil war.