The Cold Realities of
Our Fight in Iraq
At the one-year anniversary of the war that removed Saddam
Hussein and set Iraq and the rest of the Middle East on a dramatically
new path, about 400 American men and women have been killed in action.
Each of those lost sons or husbands or daughters is a source of heartache
for their families, and for all Americans. They’re also a reminder that,
as the saying goes, “Freedom’s not free.”
Right back here in our own land, about 300 defenders of
public safety (cops, firefighters, prison guards) sacrifice their lives
every year in the process of protecting the domestic tranquility of our
streets, homes, and gathering places. That’s 3,000 traumas per decade,
a bill paid less visibly than war deaths, but just as inexorably. Both
sorts of losses are part of the blood price of keeping our civilization
secure.
Those dead defenders are the reason all decent Americans
stand, snatch off their hats, and place their hands on their hearts when
old soldiers or officers of the peace walk down our streets at Memorial
Day parades or July 4th celebrations. We honor those who bear physical
risks for the rest of the country precisely because we know these are
not theoretical dangers, but real perils that claim a considerable number
of our bravest citizens each season.
The Americans who have given their lives in battle in
Iraq aren’t random victims. They were doing their duty in one of the great
turning points of our generation.
I reached voting age about the time of the Iranian hostage
crisis in 1979. What an excruciating episode that was: 52 Americans held
against their will, publicly taunted and humiliated day after day, our
government paralyzed. And that was just the opening salvo for a generation
of Middle Eastern extremism. There was the Beirut barracks bombing that
killed 243 Americans. Then the Berlin discotheque blast. The slaughter
of 270 innocent people on the terrorist-downed Pan Am Flight 103, followed
by hundreds more on other sabotaged airplanes. In 1990 came Iraq’s rape
of Kuwait, and the high costs in blood and treasure of reversing that
dangerous thrust. Next was the first attempt to bring down the World Trade
Center, in 1993, to which the U.S. made no effective response at all.
Two months later the Iraqi plot to assassinate President
Bush was uncovered. Then came the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia,
murdering American servicemen as they slept. Al-Qaeda killed 18 G.I.s
in Mogadishu, then hundreds in the suicide bombings of U.S. embassies
in Africa. The near-sinking of the USS Cole claimed 17 sailors and tens
of millions of dollars. And, finally, the singeing, infuriating horror
of September 11–with all the psychic, economic, and social trauma that
followed.
Looking back, it’s clear that we Americans were slow on
the uptake, that we failed over and over to recognize that this was not
a part of the world we could just ignore in the hope it would leave us
alone. Only after repeated woundings, followed by one of the ugliest maulings
Americans have suffered in their entire three-century history, did we
realize that this is a chaotic, hate-filled, and violent region which
urgently needs to be brought to order by more responsible forces.
Allowing the various zealots who populate the Middle East
to continue their maraudings against the rest of the world could, within
a period of just a few years, lead to the sort of unimaginable holocaust
that suicidal fanaticism and modern weapons are now able to produce in
combination. International inspectors were taken aback in early 2004 by
how far along the Libyan and Iranian nuclear programs were. At the same
time we learned that the father of Pakistan’s “Muslim Bomb”
has been selling nuclear secrets even to psychopaths like North Korea’s
Kim Jong Il. What other surprises await?
A de-fanging of the Middle East would be an historical
event of enormous consequence. And while transforming the Arab world is
undeniably a difficult venture, it’s no more unlikely than other conversions
we’ve witnessed recently. In the early 1970s, there was a grand total
of 40 democratic societies across the globe. Democracy, it was said, simply
wouldn’t grow in certain kinds of soil. Then stony lands like Portugal,
Spain, Greece, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, nearly all of
Latin America, all of Eastern Europe, and South Africa began to hold free
elections for the first time ever. Many of these dramatic turnovers took
place in a blink. Today, just 30 years later, there are 120 democracies,
and the fraction of the world’s population able to elect its own rulers
has increased from one third to two thirds. There is nothing absurd about
the idea that the Arab lands should be next in that line; in fact, there
are many good reasons to press energetically in that direction.
The unprecedented security, freedom, wealth, and opportunity
that Americans now enjoy didn’t just burst forth out of a cabbage patch.
These achievements were created, and then defended many times, by bloody
force of arms. If contemporary Americans aren’t sturdy enough to bear
the sacrifices and sadness occasionally required in defense of our rare
way of life, then we don’t deserve our inheritance. That is the cold,
undodgeable reality we face today in the Middle East.
The military men and women with whom I shared my late-January
flight back to the U.S. from Iraq were mostly headed home on emergency
leave. A major lost a grandfather. A sergeant based in Germany was going
to collect his family, then fly to Arizona for a relative’s funeral. A
private quietly explained that his wife, six months pregnant, hadn’t felt
their baby move for some time, went to a doctor, and learned they had
lost their first child. “I’m still in shock. We struggled so hard
to conceive.”
Not only in war, but also in the safety of our homes,
life can often be hard. It is always fleeting. Its meaning comes, ultimately,
from the ends toward which the life is dedicated.
There are times when the best response, perhaps the only
response, to the hard blows of existence is to embrace each lump as a
badge honoring the determined striving that produced it. In 1918, Teddy
Roosevelt’s son Quentin (who had left Harvard during his sophomore year
to serve in World War I) was shot out of the sky in one of aerial warfare’s
early dogfights. German propagandists took photos of his maimed body amidst
the plane wreckage and, hoping to dampen American morale, sent one to
Mrs. Roosevelt. Rather than letting herself be cowed, however, she insisted
that the picture be displayed over a mantel, as an emblem of her family’s
sturdiness and their pride in sacrifice for a high cause.
What Edith Roosevelt did was both a very hard and a very
soft thing. She pushed aside her own grief and expressed admiration and
undying love for her son by celebrating his bravery, and refusing to abandon
his fight.
As they aggressively attack ancient evil and gently nurture
frail shoots of a new good, our military bear many risks in Iraq. They
face enemies who aim to kill them, and to panic the American public standing
behind them. Our battle against Middle Eastern extremism can thus be thought
of as a struggle of wills.
But demoralization can work both ways, and today it is
Iraq’s insurgents who are facing physical and psychological defeat. In
January, U.S. forces seized a letter written by al-Qaeda’s mastermind
in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as it was being carried to top al-Qaeda
leaders in Afghanistan. The 17-page document despairs that despite their
deadly car bombs and the sporadic killing of U.S. troops, the fighters
have been unable to push the Americans from Iraq, or to spark mass discord
among Iraqis. The letter reports that the insurgents are having trouble
convincing Iraqis to join their resistance, and mourns that American forces
are “growing stronger day after day.”
Al-Qaeda itself is now in shambles. Two thirds of its
leaders have been killed or captured, finances have collapsed, communication
has been strangled, recruiting is difficult. Iraq’s Baath Party has likewise
been eviscerated. And other bullies in the region have turned skittish
and newly cooperative. While the U.S. will need to grapple against terror
for years to come, it is finally on offense, not defense. Having brought
the battle to the plotters in their own strongholds, things have turned
thankfully quiet at home. And across the Middle East, the most desperate
effort of a range of terrorists is now to avoid U.S. forces.
“We are at a breaking point today,” Colonel
Kurt Fuller of the 82nd Airborne told me in Baghdad, leaning forward for
emphasis. “This insurgency is running out of steam. We see many signs
that Iraqis want the violence to be over. They want to get on with their
lives. They can see we are not quitting, and they are increasingly willing
to come forward and help us stand up to the worst elements in their society.”
As the reporting in the center of this issue demonstrates,
this progress has been won by thousands of U.S. soldiers doing their duty
in Iraq. If Americans back at home will exhibit the tough love of the
steely Mrs. Roosevelt–celebrating the accomplishments of our sons and
daughters by cherishing their sacrifices on our mantels, and multiplying
and extending their courage by refusing to abandon the struggle they are
waging–then this is a fight America will certainly win.
Bird’s EyeThe American Enterprise