The Key to the U.S. Doing More Good in the World

Maybe Patton (or at least George C. Scott in the movie Patton) was right. “Americans will not tolerate a loser,” he says in the movie’s opening sequence. “[T]he very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”

That hatred of losing—or at least political leaders’ belief that Americans cannot tolerate losing—is the reason that the possibility that the US will lose, or at least fail, in Iraq, is almost never mentioned in the debate about the war. The Bush administration and its supporters portray the troop “surge” as a move that will turn the tide and lead to American success in Iraq. Opponents say that the surge will only prolong Iraqis’ dependence on the US military and postpone the day when the US pushes Iraq out of the nest so it can take responsibility for its own survival.

Rarely mentioned, except as the consequence of the other side’s misguided policies, is the possibility that whatever course is taken, the US project in Iraq will not succeed—that Iraq, with or without more American help, will not be able to hold itself together, that American helicopters will again have to pluck people off an embassy roof and leave others behind, and that Iraq after our departure will resemble Beirut in the ‘eighties or Somalia in the ‘nineties.

To avoid facing the possibility of American failure, leaders on both sides of the debate frame the debate in terms of arguments that nobody, including them, really believes: the Iraqi government could restore order to their country, and would, too, if only the right incentives were applied; we have to maintain funding in order to support our troops. (Look here for a fuller exposition of these fantasies, and the grim realities that the fantasies seem intended to shield, like a filter held in front of the sun, to avoid hurting the viewer’s eyes.)

Maybe the leaders of both pro- and anti-war factions try to filter reality through these fantasies because they’re afraid that “Patton” was right, that if people understood how strong the risk of losing—or, at least, of not winning, of failing—really is, they’d turn on their leaders, punish them for failing.

It’s not that Americans are unfamiliar with military failure. In fact, failure in Iraq would be the third major military enterprise in a row—first Korea, then Vietnam, now Iraq–in which we have failed to achieve the objectives that impelled us into military action.

Interestingly, the leaders the public has turned on after these failures have not been the presidents who liquidated them—Eisenhower in Korea, Ford in Vietnam—but their never-say-die predecessors, the ones who stayed the course. Truman left office with the war still stalemated and approval ratings lower than President Bush’s are now. Johnson, who could not bear the thought that he would be remembered as the president who lost Vietnam, stayed the course—and was effectively defeated anyway. And although the Watergate cover-up was the proximate cause of Nixon’s being driven from office, Watergate, it should be remembered, began as an effort to undermine and discredit opposition to the war in Vietnam.

So maybe political safety, even gain, is on the side of those like Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold who want to cut funding and bring the troops home.

But for now, at least, the smart money—the money that’s behind the presidential candidates with the best chances of winning and the committee chairs and ranking members—thinks it better to maintain the fantasies and obscure the possibility of failure.

The fear of failure does not set in only in extremis, and does not haunt only leaders who are afraid to face the consequences of their mistakes. It’s the basic motivation behind the strategy that has ruled American military policy for thirty years, the Powell Doctrine, the belief that the U.S. should only commit its armed forces if and when it is prepared to deploy overwhelming force, force that would overpower any possible opposition or resistance.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld rejected the Powell Doctrine to go to war in Iraq. They may genuinely have believed that we could win without using overwhelming force. Or they may have feared opposition if they send in the number of troops they really needed. Or maybe the administration thought that our interests in Iraq didn’t justify the political and financial cost that overwhelming force would have required.

Paying greater heed to the American people’s presumed intolerance of failure would have forestalled our invasion of Iraq, and that would have been good. It would have kept us out of Vietnam as well, and that would have been good, too.

But it would have kept us out of Kosovo, too, and that wouldn’t have been so good. And it is keeping us out of Darfur, and out of other places where we might be able to help. That may or may not be good.

We’d do well to stay out of Darfur if we continue to think about these things the way we do now, viewing the commitment of any force, diplomatic, economic or military, as just the first step in a process that ends only when we get our way.

Getting our way in Darfur could be as hard as or harder than getting our way in Iraq has proven to be. Diplomatic initiatives have been tried, tried and tried again. Sanctions could follow. But what impact are economic sanctions likely to have against a nation like Sudan with oil reserves a tiny fraction of Iraq’s and a per capita GDP higher than Ethiopia’s but lower than Chad’s? Military intervention? Darfur is bigger than Iraq, and emptier: The 150,000 or so soldiers the U.S. has sent to Iraq would be spread even more thinly in Darfur.

Diplomacy could work in Darfur. Sanctions could work. But if they don’t, we could be exactly where we are in Iraq: out of options that have any chance of success but unwilling to cut our losses in the face of futility.

We’re not good at calibrating our commitments to our interests, and cutting our losses when the amount of coercive force needed to achieve our objective begins to exceed the importance of the objective to our national interest. “In for a dime, in for a dollar” seems to be our motto.

How do we keep Bosnias and Darfurs from turning into Vietnams and Iraqs?

We start by learning to live with failure. There are problems that we cannot solve, people from whose necks we cannot lift the yoke of tyranny, people whose persecution we cannot alleviate, people whose unjust deaths we cannot prevent. Not because we don’t want to, but because our strength, as great as it is, not to mention our wisdom, is not sufficient.

But as human rights activist Samantha Power has said, just because we cannot do everything doesn’t mean that we do not do anything. There will be conflicts whose importance is worth American diplomacy but not sanctions, or worth sanctions but not military intervention. We need to be willing to act when we should, but to be able to recognize failure when we encounter it—to realize when we have done as much as our interests warrant, when success is not achievable at any price we are willing to pay.