Is the War Lost? Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Harry Reid is taking some flack from Republicans for saying that the “war is lost.”  I’m confused about whether this is true or not, because four years into this war we still don’t have a definition of victory. 

If the mission was to bring a stable and representative government to Iraq that can act as an example for others in the region, I’d have to say we’ve lost.  Improving our position in the Middle East?  Lost.  If it was narrowly defined as deposing Saddam Hussein, than I guess we’ve already won.  As far as I can tell the mission today is simply to avoid failure, which really isn’t a mission at all. 

If memory serves me, the original mission was to eliminate Saddam’s WMDs.  I’m so confused.  Did we win or lose that one?

Comments

[Zathras]

Though as a rule I think we pay too much attention to whether events are assigned the right words, this is an exception.

The issue is whether we should think about Iraq as a question of success vs. failure, or as one of victory vs. defeat. The President and his associates clearly prefer the latter, and the reason isn't hard to understand. Americans are deeply supportive of their military personnel, and as deeply resistant to the idea that they have, for whatever cause, been "defeated." An unfortunate coincidence in this case is that America's genuine enemies would also prefer us to think in terms of victory or defeat, the reasoning being that anything short of a complete victory for us is a victory for them over the hated United States.

One might expect the leader of the Democratic party in the Senate to speak instead of the war in terms of success and failure. Americans tend to see these as political terms applying to the political leadership (and political leaders, as we know, use language in the same way when talking about a multitude of subjects unrelated to Iraq). Defeat belongs to the military, failure to the politicians, which explains why the Bush administration prefers warning the public about the consequences of (the military's) defeat rather than about the results of (its own) failure. From the standpoint of Islamist terrorists, American talk of success vs. failure does not help very much, because it is harder to explain what it has to do with them or their cause.

The reality in Iraq is that "victory" -- the establishment of a stable Iraqi democracy -- was always something that could only be accomplished by Iraqis. Americans could certainly claim success if Iraqis achieved this goal, but there was never any way we could make certain that they would. It is asking a lot of the military at any time to say that it can only win victory if other people, out of the military's control, act in a certain way toward one another. Does it make sense to say that the American military has been defeated because Sunni Arabs in a Baghdad neighborhood who sympathized with the insurgency have been driven from their homes by a Shiite militia? Does an outbreak of fighting between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps in Najaf equal defeat for the American military?

Developments like these could truthfully be said to indicate a failure of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Americans, though, and especially opponents of the administration's course, have good reasons to call failure what it is, and assign blame for it where it belongs. Responding to the administration using the administration preferred terminology is a serious mistake on Sen. Reid's part, one I am surprised he was not clever enough to avoid.

[Dan Kervick]

I suppose the popular view of war is that it is a deadly contest or game of some sort, and that the outcome is either a win, a loss or a draw.

But a war is a military operation that may be be launched with multiple explicit and implicit objectives, just like any other kind of operation, military or not. These objectives may be only partially met. So as Zathras says, it is better to view a war in terms of "success" or "failure", bearing in mind that there may be many degrees of partial success and partial failure. Perhaps it would be even better to describe the outcome of the war in terms of a "net plus" or "net minus."

According to the Department of Defense, Operation Iraqi Freedom had eight explicit military objectives:

To end the regime of Saddam Hussein by striking with force on a scope and scale that makes clear to Iraqis that he and his regime are finished.

Next, to identify, isolate and eventually eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, production capabilities, and distribution networks.

Third, to search for, capture, drive out terrorists who have found safe harbor in Iraq.

Fourth, to collect such intelligence as we can find related to terrorist networks in Iraq and beyond.

Fifth, to collect such intelligence as we can find related to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction activity.

Sixth, to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian relief, food and medicine to the displaced and to the many needy Iraqi citizens.

Seventh, to secure Iraq's oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people, and which they will need to develop their country after decades of neglect by the Iraqi regime.

And last, to help the Iraqi people create the conditions for a rapid transition to a representative self-government that is not a threat to its neighbors and is committed to ensuring the territorial integrity of that country.

From our standpoint here in 2007, I think we can say that the most interesting of these objectives is the third. It certainly looks like there were very few "terrorists" operating in Iraq, or enjoying safe harbor there, during the Hussein regime. But there are now a very large number of terrorists present in the country - some foreign born and some home grown - doing terrible damage every day. Whether this new birth of terrorism will continue to exact its toll on Iraqis only, or will eventually move abroad, time will tell. But the "terrorism" dimension of the Iraq War clearly appears to be a net minus at this point.

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