Unqualified Offerings

I read the President’s speech looking for the did-he-or-didn’t-he “just ratchet back up our ambitions for Iraq?” Zachary Roth seems to overstate when he writes that “Bush never said anything about democracy in Iraq. It’s just an incredibly sloppy mistake by the AP.” Bush clearly includes Iraq among the “fragile democracies” NATO is defending against “undermining” by bad folks: “Some are Shia extremists, others are Sunni extremists — but they represent different faces of the same threat.” And he says that “I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.” AP’s gloss – “”The United States will not withdraw its forces from Iraq before its mission of building a stable democracy is complete, President Bush said Tuesday.” – seems like a reasonable summary. Perhaps they cleared the analysis with Baghdad police captain Jamil Hussein.

The wrinkle is that the president’s speech defines the mission in the negative: it’s less about “building a stable democracy” than about preventing a fragile democracy from being undermined. The former requires you to be able to point to a pretty robust polity before you can claim victory. The latter lets you claim victory so long as you’re still showing the flag. It’s an easier standard to meet, and you don’t even have to show any particular progress: you can basically claim that your very presence means the fragile democracy hasn’t been undermined yet. Rhetorically, it’s an attempt to apply jiu-jitsu to the standard interpretation of asymmetrical war, that it’s the insurgent who “wins by not losing.” The President is arguing that the US “wins by not losing.”

It’s a nice trick if you can get away with it. I can even admire the cleverness. That said, it’s nothing more than a variation on “leaving is losing”; it does not make Iraq the Model which other Arab and Muslim countries aspire to emulate; it will tend to breed complacency among policy-makers since it revalues “just showing up” as 100% of life instead of the cliched eighty; it doesn’t magically undo the damage to America’s standing in the world; and, oh by the way, it entails massive expense, death and maiming for Iraqis and Americans alike, much more expense for us and much more death and maiming for them, but plenty of all for everybody.