Arguing over the lessons of the Iraq War: Andrew Bacevich says, bring it on

Andrew Bacevich is following the debate already under way about the lessons to be drawn from the Iraq War: Fighting over who lost Iraq Los Angeles Times 11/07/06 (election day last week). He sees three major narratives emerging so far:

The Bush dead-enders. Although dwindling in number, President Bush's defenders will ascribe failure in Iraq to a loss of nerve, blaming media bias and liberal defeatists for sowing the erroneous impression that the war has become unwinnable. Bush loyalists will portray opposition to the war as tantamount to betraying the troops. Count on them to appropriate Ronald Reagan's description of Vietnam as "an honorable cause." Updating the "stab in the back" thesis, they will claim that a collapse of will on the home front snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Baghdad as surely as it did in Saigon.

The buck-stops-at-the-top camp. Adherents of this second view are currently in the ascendant, attributing the troubles roiling Iraq to massive incompetence in the Bush administration. In a war notable for an absence of accountability, demands for fixing accountability are becoming increasingly insistent. Parties eager to divert attention from their own culpability are pointing fingers. Senior military officers target Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Congressional Democrats who voted for the war and neoconservatives direct their fire against Rumsfeld and Bush. The theme common to all of these finger-pointers: Don't blame us; the Bush team's stupidity, stubbornness and internal dysfunction doomed the American effort.

The conspiracy theorists. Even before the United States invaded Iraq, critics on the far left and far right charged that powerful groups operating behind the scenes were promoting war for their own nefarious purposes. Big Oil, Halliburton, the military-industrial complex and Protestant evangelicals said to be keen on defending Israel all came in for criticism and even grassy-knoll-style paranoia.

Bacevich is not a "simple answers" kind of guy. So it seems to me that he's skeptical about all three strands of explanation and blame-setting right now. But he sees the current emerging debate as the first stage of a very necessary process. I should add that I don't think that he's discounting the elements he mentions as part of the conspiracy-theorist approach, which is perhaps not the best label. Certainly, he himself talks at length about the effect of Protestant fundamentalists on attitudes toward military policy in The New American Militarism (2005).

Like other war critics, he is hoping for an "Iraq syndrome" to become part of American politics to instill in decision-makers a more healthy level of caution than the Cheney-Bush administration demonstrated in invading Iraq:

Figuring out "who lost Iraq?" ought to provide the occasion for throwing out more than a few rascals who hold office and discrediting others — a process that will no doubt get a kick-start with today's midterm elections. With luck, those surviving will be at least momentarily chastened, perhaps giving rise to an Iraq syndrome akin to the Vietnam syndrome, and which at least for a while will save us from another similar debacle.

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, lessons of iraq, stab-in-the-back