George Will, Running Out of Fights to Quit

posted at 8:41 pm on September 3, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ National Defense ]   

Here is George Will, our country’s new leading defeatist, in a nutshell (from “Time to Leave Iraq” – Townhall.com):

If, in spite of contrary evidence, the U.S. surge permanently dampened sectarian violence, all U.S. forces can come home sooner than the end of 2011. If, however, the surge did not so succeed, U.S. forces must come home sooner.

The above paragraph concludes Will’s new “Leave Iraq” column, which follows closely upon a similar, much-discussed call for retreat from our other active relatively large-scale military engagement (“It’s Time for the U.S. to Get Out of Afghanistan“). Will’s mannered tone distracts from his false oppositions and embedded straw man arguments. That he obfuscates like an aristocrat doesn’t make his methodology any less brutally manipulative and dishonest.

Among the critical falsehoods upon which Will’s treatment turns is his implicit claim that Surge supporters and Surge triumphalists are and must be the same people. To the contrary, those best informed about the strategy, including its designers and chief implementers, have always both insisted on fair assessments of progress and cautioned against premature declarations of victory – or, as General Petraeus likes to say, “end zone dances.” Supporters of Senator McCain in last year’s election included many who believed that victory in Iraq was still much in doubt, and that a firm expression of the determination to achieve it remained critical to preserving security and political gains. Instead, the short-term objectives of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and likely U.S. president Barack Obama were served by an inherently artificial and militarily counterproductive, but politically useful timetable. In a position of weakness, the outgoing Bush Administration seized upon the best deal with a chance of standing up, and the generals put the best face on it, believing, one suspects, either that they could make it work well enough or that, if necessary, terms could be adjusted under the pressure of real developments.

Will’s second construction is a variation on the same theme – that a failure to have solved Iraq in four years inherently equates with failure and disproof of concept. In fact, the strongest criticism from thoughtful observers, including leftwing chronicler of the Surge, Tom Ricks, as well as members of Petraeus’ own brain trust, had always boiled down to this: Petraeus was implementing a ten-year (at least) strategy for which we and the Iraqis may not have had ten more years of commitment and patience to spare. If our unwillingness to oppose and the Iraqi willingness to push the artificial timetable may be proving the critics right, no honor goes to George Will. He’d merely be acceding to a fait accompli, and making his own small contribution to general incomprehension regarding its real basis.

If Will gets his way, and we flee from both Iraq and Afghanistan, the last fallback for conservatives – and, in an unspoken, rarely or never acknowledged way, for all our liberal reactionaries – will lie in the harsh calculations of grand strategy, under which the blood and treasure sunk in those blasted lands can be subsumed under longer-term American interests. In an ideal world, or at least in a better one, those might be served best, for all concerned, by a more humane and far-sighted approach, including nation-building and democracy promotion where at all practicable, but the American interest may still be seen as satisfied by the punishment and destruction we inflicted on two regional upstarts – the Taliban/Al Qaeda and Saddam & Co.

Under this rationale, future leaders and strategists could be expected to revert to some cruel version of the Powell Doctrine, emphasizing the threat and application of overwhelming force – nation-punishment, nation-destruction, and periodically demonstrated deterrence, rather than nation-building and ally-making. Unfortunately for our sensibilities, within this broader framework it’s not only Iraqi and Afghan casualties, and the casualties of future “more rubble, less trouble” operations, that will have to be discounted: From a grand strategic perspective, the investments represented by Petraeus’ counterinsurgency doctrine may amount to a rather pointless and overly expensive distraction, but 9/11-level and even worse events wouldn’t amount to very big deals either: A few buildings, a few thousand casualties, a passing panic – not much in the life of a globe-spanning neo-empire pursuing a “realist” policy.

Will’s defeatism offers the prospect of reduced bloodshed in the short term, but it would be a promise of much greater sacrifices to come. The hope of preserving some semblance of order – of pre-empting strategic challenges and the immense costs, on all sides, that inevitably accompany them – offered justification for the Afghan and Iraqi enterprises. Turning our backs on them would very likely mean adjusting to eventual much higher levels of violence and instability – and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Update:  A detailed factual rebuttal to Will's article can be found at NRO here]

cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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