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PLAIN TALK |
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Leonard Horwin
May / June 12, 2007
(310) 785-6600 tel.
(310) 785-6644 fax plaintalk@linkline.com http://www.leonardhorwinplaintalk.com |
Questions and Answers are cited below as "Q" and "A"
1. Q: What is the significance of Christopher J. Fettweis's editorial: "Post-Traumatic Iraq Syndrome," from the Los Angeles Times?
A: "The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset."
2. Q: What is the significance of that?
A: "Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war."
3. Q: What is the immediate outcome for this change of opinion about the war?
A: "So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq."
4. Q: What conclusion does he draw from that?
A: "The consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation."
5. Q: What does that mean?
A: What has happened "will be a wedge that politicians will exploit for their benefit, proving yet again that politics is the eternal enemy of strategy."
6. Q: What is the consequence of that?
A: "The Vietnam syndrome divided this country for decades; the Iraq syndrome will be no different."
7. Q: What does that signify?
A: "The battle for interpretation has already begun, with fingers of blame pointed in all directions in hastily written memoirs. The war's supporters have staked out their position quite clearly."
8. Q: What is that?
A: "Attacking Iraq was strategically sound but operationally flawed. Key decisions on troop levels, de-Baathification, the disbanding of the Iraq army and the like doomed what otherwise would have been a glorious war."
9. Q: Can the American people understand this?
A: "The American people seem to understand, however - and historians will certainly agree - that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation."
10. Q: Was the Bush administration operating under an international political illusion?
A: No, this is major social basis for upset.
11. Q: What is the biggest question?
A: "The only significant question still hanging is whether Iraq will turn out to have been the biggest strategic mistake in U.S. history."
12. Q: Why?
A: "Vietnam was a much greater moral disaster, of course, and let to far more death and destruction. But, just the war's critics predicted in the 1960s, Vietnam turned out to be strategically irrelevant. Saigon fell, but no dominoes followed; the balance of Cold War power did not change."
13. Q: What is the difference now shown to be?
A: "Iraq has the potential to be far worse. One of the oft-expressed worst-case scenarios for Iraq -a repeat of Lebanon in the 1980s -may no longer be within reach."
14. Q: Why?
A: "Lebanon's simmering civil war eventually burned itself out, and left a coherent, albeit weak, state in its ashes."
15. Q: And the difference now?
A: "Iraq could soon more closely resemble Somalia in the 1990s, an utterly collapsed, uncontrollable, lawless, failed state that destabilizes the most vital region in the world."
16. Q: What will the American people likely conclude?
A: "Hopefully at some point during the recriminations to come, the American people will seize the opportunity to ask themselves a series of fundamental questions about the role and purpose of U.S. power in the world."
17. Q: Why? "How much influence can the United States have in the Middle East? Is its oil worth American blood and treasure? Are we really safer now that Iraq burns? Might we not be better off just leaving the region alone?"
A: "Perhaps at some point we will come to recognize that the United States can afford to be much more restrained in its foreign policy adventures."
18. Q: What would the "founding fathers" conclude in these circumstances?
A: "They would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain."
19. Q: Final conclusion?
A: "Either way, the Iraq syndrome is coming. We need to be prepared for the divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt and recriminations that will be its symptoms. They will be the defining legacy of the Bush administration and neo conservatism's' parting gift to America."