Gary Kamiya: Waving the flag on Iraq -- now in rerun!

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/07/29/mccain/

Waving the flag on Iraq -- now in rerun!

McCain's attack on Obama as a defeatist is right out of the Karl Rove playbook. But here's why it won't work.

By Gary Kamiya

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If enough American voters are ill-informed about the war, still confusedly think it may have been a good idea to start it, and believe it is winnable, McCain could win. The first stipulation may be true, but not the second and third -- and that's why even the Rove power play may not save McCain.

McCain's defense of the surge betrays a complete inability to grasp the bloody, ugly complexities of the civil war the United States touched off by invading Iraq. (He also has difficulty in keeping the most rudimentary facts straight, as when he falsely asserted that the Anbar awakening "began" during the surge.) As Juan Cole pointed out in a thorough refutation of McCain's surge argument, the main reason that violence in Iraq has declined to the still-hideous levels of 2005 is probably that Shiite militias, inadvertently enabled by U.S. troops, carried out a successful mini-genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Sunni residents in Baghdad. Once you've killed or expelled all those who belong to the evil tribe, there's no reason to keep killing. For McCain to praise the surge as leading to "victory" in Iraq is like praising a foreign power for "pacifying" Rwanda by alternately backing the Hutus and the Tutsi. (It goes without saying that McCain has nothing to say about the moral responsibility we bear for the nightmare in Iraq.)

At a deeper level, insofar as the surge and other factors played a role in reducing the violence -- and as Cole points out, it's impossible to know how large a role the surge itself played -- the conclusions one should draw from this are precisely the opposite from those drawn by McCain. For the factors that led to a lower level of violence in Iraq -- the completed ethnic cleansing, the increase in U.S. troop strength, bribery, Sunni revulsion at al-Qaida's horrific tactics, the Mahdi Army's decision to stand down -- represent the reverse of the simplistic, raising-the-flag-on-Iwo-Jima vision trumpeted by McCain and the Bush administration. When America has made progress in Iraq -- and all claims of "progress" must be measured against the fact that the war we started essentially destroyed the country -- it has been primarily due not, as war mythology would have it, to U.S. troops killing evil jihadists, but to far murkier factors -- the unintended consequences of ugly actions, canny political maneuverings, and back-room deals with deeply flawed players.

What has been widely overlooked, by both defenders and critics of the surge, is that these are precisely the kinds of complex, sometimes morally ambiguous responses that those of us who opposed the war in the first place called for as a strategy for fighting violent jihadists. Painstaking police work, diplomacy with sometimes unpleasant actors, good intelligence, the skillful use of carrots and sticks, knowing the local terrain, avoiding self-defeating moral posturings -- these things don't fit into bombastic presidential speeches about our heroic duty to fight the "axis of evil," but they have one advantage: They actually work. Which is not to say that they bring "victory," because there are no victories here.

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In the end, though, what may really doom McCain is not what Americans believe in or know, so much as what they no longer believe in. And it seems clear that most Americans no longer believe in "victory." There have been too many moments when winning in Iraq was right around the corner. The boy has cried wolf once too often. McCain's demand that we fight until a final victory may have sounded inspiring when people still believed the Iraq war could be won, but now it sounds increasingly like Gen. Custer's last speech to the troops as the Sioux closed in at the Little Bighorn. It's not a cry you follow unless you're a fanatic or a jihadist. Which is why I believe that in November, the American people will finally declare this endless argument, and this endless war, over.