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The Uses of Enchantment

Ophthalmologists and astronomers warn parents not to allow their children to look directly into the sun except through a special filter. So bright are its rays that looking at it directly will burn their eyes.

Policymakers on both sides of the debate over the war in Iraq seem to be taking similar steps to keep those who are trying to follow the debate from looking directly at the war in Iraq, except through the filter of a series of fantasies.

Both the administration and its critics, for example, talk as though the Iraqi and American governments share the same goal—a democratic, peaceful and pluralistic Iraq—and it’s just a question of how best to achieve it. A good deal of evidence, however, suggests just the opposite: that it is the U.S. that wants to foster a democratic, peaceful and pluralistic Iraq. The Iraqi Shi’ites want to wreak vengeance on the Sunni minority that dominated them during the reign of Saddam Hussein. The Sunni want to regain their former dominance. The Kurds want to establish an independent Kurdistan and maintain at least their autonomy, if not their independence, from Baghdad. And the Iraqi government wants to keep American military and financial support and stave off the full-fledged civil war or chaos that could break out if the U.S. washes its hands of Iraq.

This professed belief in a shared vision of Iraq’s future is not the only fantasy that shrouds the debate. Some of the fantasies are the community property of both sides, while others are proprietary to one side or the other.

But none are the result of ignorance. They are knowingly advanced in the face of all evidence to the contrary, like a parent who continues to assert the existence of Santa Claus to a teenager who is holding credit card receipts for everything he found under the Christmas tree.

And all of them have the effect of obscuring what the debate is really about, and the consequences we and the Iraqis are really facing.

A few other fantasies:

• The Iraqi government could restore order and defeat the insurgents—if given the right incentives.
  This is another fantasy shared by both the Bush administration and its critics. The Iraqi government, says President Bush, needs to “follow through on its promises.” Sen. Clinton agrees that the Maliki government can find common ground with insurgents, and will, if we “impos[e] conditions on the funding we give them.” The Baker-Hamilton Commission makes it unanimous. “Continued American support should be conditioned,” it recommends, on the Iraqi government’s demonstration of “political will” and “substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance.” Are we under the impression that it is lack of incentives that has prevented the Iraqi government from getting a grip? This is a government that the Baker-Hamilton Commission described as unable to provide “its people with basic services: electricity, drinking water, sewage, health care, and education;” a government in which “corruption is rampant, “ the military is making only “fitful progress toward becoming a reliable and disciplined fighting force loyal to the national government,” “the judiciary is weak,” a country in which “criminality…makes daily life unbearable for many Iraqis.” Is this the country that, if properly incentivized by us, will make compromises, disarm the Mahdi Army, keep promises, and meet the benchmarks we establish?

• We have to support the troops.
  How? By sending more of them into a lethal war zone? Do either the war’s supporters or opponents expect us to believe that the troops in Iraq, many of whom are back for more or longer deployments than they were promised, want to stay there for more months or years and would resent being brought home? That their families and the families of those at risk of being sent to Iraq would turn against the political leaders who brought their sons and daughters home safe? That soldiers and Marines who were injured in Iraq, and the families of the more than 3,000 killed there, would consider the casualties incurred to have been in vain unless more soldiers and Marines are sent to Iraq to risk being killed or disabled?

• We need to engage Iraq’s neighbors, Iran and Syria.
  Such negotiations, according to those who favor them, like the Baker-Hamilton Commission and other foreign policy “realists,“ would persuade these countries that instability in Iraq is not in their best interests and that they should withdraw their catspaws in Iraq. Excuse me, but aren’t Iran and Syria smuggling catspaws and weapons and explosives into Iraq to keep the insurgency going and increase its lethality? What is the likelihood that whatever influence that these two malefactors possess would be exerted on our behalf? And exerted toward the objective of a pluralistic, even neutral Iraq, much less one friendly to us and our allies?

• We’ve done enough—maybe too much—for the Iraqis already.
  “We have freed them from a ruthless dictator,” Rep Al Green (D-Texas) told the House of Representatives the day after the president’s speech. “We have helped them to construct a constitution, to reestablish their constabulary.” Maybe we’re just too generous. Maybe we’ve been so generous that we have unwittingly made them dependent on us. Maybe they’d be better off if we would just go home and they could run their country themselves. Maybe—if we were actually there to do something for them. But almost every justifications for invading and occupying Iraq was related not to their welfare but to ours—our safety from weapons of mass destruction, protecting us from a Saddam-assisted Al Qaeda, fighting terrorists in Baghdad so we didn’t have to fight them here at home, establishing democracy in Iraq that might spread and promote stability throughout the region. Only now, in extremis, do we remember that we went in to eject a tyrant, and that we can’t leave because of the chaos that would break out in the wake of our evacuation.

• What Iraq needs is a political, not a military, solution.
  President Bush and the advocates of escalation have the better of this fantasy of opponents of the war. There can be no political stability without an end to violence, and without the unlikely cooperation of Iran and Syria—and maybe even with it; Iranian and Syrian support may fuel the insurgency, but it’s not clear that their withdrawal of aid would extinguish it—there would seem to be no non-military way to end the violence. President Bush is also probably right that a good deal of the violence is intended to undermine the Iraqi government, knowing that a strong government would be an insuperable obstacle to the kind of Iraq that Iran, Syria or Al Qaeda envision.

Why do serious people like the president, his senior civilian and military staff and the Congress advance arguments that they cannot believe themselves, cannot expect that others will believe, and must know that events will falsify? What purpose do these fantasies serve?

They serve to bolster, I would suggest, two fundamental fantasies, shared by both advocates and critics of the war. First, that failure in Iraq is not an option. President Bush says it explicitly. The opponents of the war imply it when they refuse, with a very few exceptions, to raise even for discussion the possibility that, other than the deposing of Saddam Hussein, whatever our goals might have been or might have become, they may now be beyond our grasp. Neither side can admit, in other words, the possibility that whatever the reason we went into Iraq, we have failed to achieve it.

And neither side can bring itself to raise to the public that whether we increase troop strength or not, stay in Iraq or withdraw, there is a strong possibility that the war will end very badly, Beirut-in-the-‘eighties badly, Somalia-in-the-‘nineties badly.

Why are these two baseline fantasies so important that both sides feel compelled to keep them in front of our eyes? What harm could come from looking directly at the conflagration that is Iraq?

A closer look—next time.

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