More than a year ago, Kenneth Adelman, a prominent national-security official in the Reagan Administration who now serves part time, with Richard Perle, on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, wrote a piece for the Washington Post. Its title was “Cakewalk in Iraq,” and its payoff went like this: “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they’ve become much weaker; (3) we’ve become much stronger; and (4) now we’re playing for keeps.” It’s worth remembering that “last time”—that is, in 1991, when a genuine coalition of American, European, and Arab armies expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait—the ground war was over in a hundred hours. Next time, the reader was left to conclude, the job would be wrapped up even faster.
During the long runup to the present war in Iraq, assumptions of this kind came almost universally to be taken for granted. That was the work partly of high officials of the Bush Administration, partly of quasi-governmental outriders like Adelman and Perle, and partly of the neoconservative fedayeen of the op-ed pages and the cable talkathons. In early March, for example, General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serenely anticipated “a short, short conflict.” On the Sunday before the opening “shock and awe” barrage, Vice-President Cheney said that the war would go “relatively quickly,” and that American troops would be “greeted as liberators.” He went on, when asked if the fighting might prove to be long, costly, and bloody, “Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way.” (As Dana Milbank, a Washington Post White House correspondent, noted, “Cheney has spoken that way for months.”) Perle, still a Defense Policy Board member, though no longer its unpaid (if not exactly unremunerated) chairman, predicted on the eve of the war that it would last no longer than three weeks, adding, “And there is a good chance that it will be less than that.” Last summer, he declared that “support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder.” In the February 24th issue of National Review, David Frum, the former “axis of evil” White House speechwriter, wrote that “the Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.”
To be sure, Administration officials themselves were usually careful to include what is known in the editorial trade as a “to be sure” sentence, acknowledging that you never can tell, nothing is guaranteed, there might be bumps in the road. (For example, right after asserting that the war would go quickly, Cheney added quickly, “But we can’t count on that.”) Still, the Administration’s body English conveyed the conviction that Iraq was going to turn out just as neoconservative enthusiasts like Adelman thought it would. “The media did not make up the expectation that they expected this to be a brief, essentially bloodless war,” Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, said the other day. “They got that from officials, from the Vice-President and the Joint Chiefs chairman.” That authoritative expectation was widely accepted across the spectrum of opinion. There was no shortage either of debate on the diplomacy leading up to the war or of speculation about its sequel. But the war itself—its conduct, its political cost in the Arab world and elsewhere, its human reality—got relatively little attention. Its speed and success were simply stipulated, by supporters and opponents alike. It was treated as a pair of parentheses with nothing in between. As a result, the entire discussion was distorted.
For the war’s supporters, the rhetorical air has from the beginning rung with echoes of the Second World War: the Munich analogy, the demand for “unconditional surrender,” the notion of the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan as a model. But the parallels are inexact, to say the least. This is not a war like the Second World War, and the difference is not simply one of scale. The Second World War was an existential war. To lose would have been to lose everything. Whatever the price of victory, it had to be paid and exacted; the endurance and infliction of any amount of suffering and death seemed justified, even sanctified, by the imperative of defeating and destroying Nazism and its Japanese partner.
There is one way in which it is misleading to classify what is happening in Iraq as a war at all. Like Dunkirk, Midway, and the Bulge, it is only part of a larger enterprise. That is how it has been justified; that is how it must be judged. The aim of that larger enterprise is not to overthrow the Iraqi regime, however devoutly that is to be wished; it is to minimize the chances of another September 11th. The success of what might more properly be called the Battle of Iraq must ultimately be measured by whether it brings us closer to that larger aim or leaves us farther away from it. The longer the fighting continues, the greater the suffering inflicted upon Iraqi civilians, the solider Arab and Muslim (and European and Asian) anger toward the United States becomes, the bigger the pool of possible terrorist recruits grows—the more these things happen, the higher becomes the cost of victory, until, at some unknowable point, victory becomes defeat.
Too bleak? By the end of last week—even though American troops, who by all accounts have fought honorably and without undue cruelty, were at the gates of Baghdad—it was already too late for the rosy scenario of the cakewalk conservatives. It’s possible to think of ways that this sandstorm of steel might have been averted. (The French proposal for delay followed by reproach was contemptibly unserious, but the idea of “coercive inspections”—which, as promoted for months by Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, would have entailed greatly expanded teams of inspectors, empowered to create “no drive” as well as “no fly” zones and to call in air strikes—was worth trying.) If war was truly unavoidable, it’s possible to imagine routes to it that would not have forced us to fight alongside only a single meaningful ally and against the wishes of the people of nearly every country on earth. It’s too late for all that now. It’s too late for no war; it’s too late for a different war; it’s too late for an alternative war. And it’s too late to accept any outcome that does not involve the fall of Saddam. Those of us who opposed this war or who simply had doubts about it or who thought it had to come but were dismayed by the diplomatic and institutional wreckage its coming has wrought now have no alternative but to hope for a quick and victorious end. But it still matters how the Battle of Iraq is fought. And it still matters, more than ever, what will follow.