Back in 2002, George Will pronounced himself quite pleased about the coming invasion of Iraq and what it would bring. As he said in an extended interview with Charlie Rose:
"I do believe that you will see a ripple effect (in the Middle East), a happy domino effect, if you will, of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies . . . Condoleezza Rice is quite right. She says there is an enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy. And there's an enormous ahistorical error when people say, "Well, we can't go into war with Iraq until we know what postwar Iraq's going to look like." In 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, did we have a clear idea what we were going to do with postwar Germany? With postwar Japan? Of course not. We made it up as we went along, and we did a very good job. . . ."
"The last eleven years have been filled with hard learning. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign-policy decision in U.S. history, coincided with mission creep ("nation building") in Afghanistan. Both strengthened what can be called the Republicans' John Quincy Adams faction: America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.""
To be fair, Will has been using similar language about the invasion since 2008, and has even gone so far as to strongly defend President Obama against conservative charges that he "lost" Iraq. In early 2009, Will put his disgust pretty frankly in a column demanding that U.S. forces be brought home from Iraq as soon as possible:
"After almost 6 1/2 years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military -- overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation -- to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is a worse use of the U.S. military than "nation-building," it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples' politicians."
There's a lot of that going around these days. In a Veterans Day piece published in the New York Times, retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger recounts a similar personal transformation:
As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to "clear/hold/build" even as the "hold" stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan. The American people had never signed up for that."
Of course, all of that's hindsight. It's easy now to see such error, even if it's hard for some to admit to it. The question is how those lessons can best be applied to the future, or even to the present. Many of the same people who pushed so hard for the invasion of Iraq now push just as hard for intervention in Syria, or even for putting combat boots back on the ground in Iraq.
What could 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 U.S. combat troops in Iraq accomplish that 130,000 U.S. troops could not accomplish in more than eight years of trying? Another "surge"?
As Bolger points out, the legend of the successful "surge" was just that: legend, as in myth. "The surge in Iraq did not 'win' anything," he writes. "It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate."
What has changed that might suggest a different outcome next time? Nothing.**
In his latest piece, Will suggests that a new battle for the foreign policy soul of the Republican Party is taking place, a renewal of a debate between isolationists and neo-con interventionists that has its roots in the early years of the 20th century. In the quote above, he calls those distrustful of intervention "the Republicans’ John Quincy Adams faction." But there is no such faction. It's wishful thinking of the exact same sort that allowed Will to think that the invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to the Arab world.
You can tell that Will is reaching beyond his evidence when he cites U.S. Sen. Rand Paul as the swallow that presages this new foreign policy spring for the Republican Party. If Paul is a swallow, he's a swallow who has flown way, way off course, a swallow who finds himself trying to fit in among the hawks by puffing himself up to absurd proportions and talking tough.
Yes, Paul came into office arguing a foreign policy strategy that borrowed heavily from the teachings of his father, former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, and that differed strongly from Republican dogma. But as his presidential ambitions have grown, Paul has chosen to switch sides rather than fight. He has abandoned a line of thinking that was too anchored by isolationist ideology in favor of a line of thinking that isn't anchored at all, and that instead drifts wherever the vagaries of public opinion might take it. He is intellectually and ideologically incapable of championing the cause that Will wants him to undertake.
Personally, I favor the hard-won pragmatism of General Bolger:
"Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren't enough, we're told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we're there.
As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I'd like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, "degrade" its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It's not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat."
Implicit in Bolger's analysis is the idea that ISIS and indeed the larger problem of Islamic extremism are problems that will have to be managed and minimized, and over a long time frame, rather than solved through military action. That's largely because it's not our fight. What's going on in the Islamic world is a crisis of profound dimensions, the long-delayed clash between the forces of modernism and medievalism. As outsiders, we cannot possibly impose a resolution to that clash. We can only attempt to contain its consequences, and the hard truth is that we will not always succeed even at that.
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** It's particularly alarming to see many of those who pushed so hard for war against Iraq now seek to undercut negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear program. Those talks may very well fail on their own, but attempts to sabotage them from afar are idiotic. In the absence of negotiation, we are left with two options: acceptance of Iran's nuclear capability, or war.
And that war, like the Iraq war, won't be the tidy little affair that its sponsors promise.
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