A messy choice

I woke up two days ago with a realization so obvious it probably shouldn't be called a realization. To invade Iraq was a choice, not a necessity. Try to understand what I'm saying here: I'm not saying everything would be peachy, it just means that Iraq was a conscious choice and that, had the winds blown another direction three and a half years ago, today would somehow be very different. That such a difficult and wrenching situation was avoidable gave me a knot in my stomach the other night.

Everyone has an opinion on Iraq, including one of my former professors. I saw him two days ago and remembered a comment he made to me two years ago: He had told me (in winter 2004/2005) that the U.S. should "cut and run." I didn't say so at the time, but that idea made me uncomfortable. With so many U.S. deaths already, with countless more Iraqi victims of violence, how could he propose such a coldly calculated withdrawal?

I realize now he thinks like the gambler, Wall Street analyst and political realist all should: they recognize that money in the pot is no longer your money, no matter if it was you who put it there in the first place. Consider a game of poker: the only money that's yours is the stack of chips in front of you. Should you decide to place a bet - say $100 - that money, once in the pot, is no longer yours. . .you now must win the hand to win that $100. This sounds obvious, but psychological ties to the money already in the pot inevitably lead the average gambler to blindly chase the money he already threw away. If there are other players at the table, you have to acknowledge that no matter what you do, there exists a good chance that someone else at the table may outplay you or simply have better cards.

I think to Iraq and the region in general, and of how great it would be to have a shining star in the Middle East, a country that didn't need oil wealth for its rulers to rationalize they had done well. A country that had the true support of a productive, successful and integrated public whose members took part of a vibrant economy with low unemployment, high literacy rates and low poverty. Without hypothesizing on how to do that, I simply say it would be great not only for the Middle East, but for the world. Maybe it's this idealism that gave me a squimish feeling when the professor told me the U.S. should "cut and run."

The professor continued on. He stated that even if adequate ground forces had been introduced (500,000) into Iraq in 2003 instead of 150,000, even if there was a plan for reconstruction after the fall of Baghdad, even if Donald Rumsfeld had been replaced earlier, the whole idea was "foredoomed" to failure. This was the most difficult thing for me to swallow; that despite opposition to the war, nobody, including potential democratic presidential candidates (Obama, Clinton et al), has come to the conclusion that no matter how many "what if's" there are about the conduct and strategy of the war - aka the decision to invade, occupy and change the political system in Iraq, a country with an oddball mixture of ethnicities, oil, simmering religious conflicts, recent war, long ago smashed together by the British Foreign Office and now wedged in between Iran and Syria both with strong political agendas of their own, which had been held together only due to the sheer brutality of Saddam Hussein - these "what if's" completely miss the point. To invade Iraq was simply a strategic blunder, no matter how it was carried out.