Page 1 of 10 THE WAR OF THE IMAGINATION, Part 1 How a war of fantasies happened
By Mark Danner
(This article, which appears in the December 21, 2006 issue of the
New York Review of Books, is posted here
with the permission of the editors of that magazine.)
"Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know
where you begin. You never know where you are going
to end." - George F Kennan, American adviser, diplomat, political
scientist and historian, September 26, 2002
"I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq? ... Saddam's story
has been finished for close to three years." - President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, August 13,
2006
In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by US Marine
artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of
March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the
following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls
and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I
sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F Kennan.
Not the grand old man of American diplomacy, the 98-year-old Father of
Containment who, listening to the war drums beat from a Washington nursing home
in the fall of 2002, had uttered the prophetic words above. I was thinking of
an earlier Kennan, the brilliant and ambitious young diplomat who during the
late 1920s and 1930s had gazed out on the crumbling European order from Tallinn
and Berlin and Prague and read the signs of the coming world conflict.
For there in the bunkered Civil-Military Operations Center (known as the C-Moc)
in downtown Fallujah, where a few score Marines and a handful of civilians
subsisted in a broken-down bunkered building without running water or fresh
food, I met young Kennan's reincarnation in the person of a junior State
Department official: a bright, aggressive young man who spent his 24-hour days
rumbling down the ruined streets in body armor and helmet with his reluctant
marine escorts, meeting with local Iraqi officials, and writing tart cables
back to Baghdad or Washington telling his bosses the truth of what was
happening on the ground, however reluctant they might be to hear it.
This young diplomat was resourceful and brilliant and indefatigable, and as I
watched him joking and arguing with the local sheikhs and politicos and
technocrats - who were meeting, as they were forced to do, in the American
bunker - I thought of the indomitable young Kennan of the interwar years, and
of how, if the American effort in Iraq could ever be made to "work", only
undaunted and farseeing young men like this one, his spiritual successor, could
make it happen.
This was October 2005, on the eve of the nationwide referendum on Iraq's
proposed constitution, and I had come to Fallujah, the heart of rebellious
al-Anbar province, to see whether the Sunnis could gather the political
strength to vote it down. In a provision originally insisted on by the Kurds, a
provision that typified an American-designed political process that had been
intended to unify the country but that instead had helped pull it inexorably
apart, the proposed constitution could be rejected if, in three of Iraq's 18
provinces, more than two in three Iraqis coming to the polls voted no.
During the first post-Saddam Hussein election the previous January, the
televised extravaganza of "waving purple fingers" which had become perhaps the
most celebrated of the many promised "turning points" of this long war, the
Sunnis had boycotted the polls. This time, after Herculean efforts of
persuasion and negotiation by the American ambassador, most Sunnis were
expected to vote. What would draw them, though - or such anyway was the common
wisdom - was the chance not to affirm the constitution but to doom it, and the
political process along with it.
And so as I sat after midnight on the eve of the vote, scribbling in my
notebook in the dimly lit C-Moc bunker as the young diplomat explained to me
the intricacies of the politics of the battered city, I was pleased to see him
suddenly lean forward and, with quick glances to either side, offer me a
confidence. "You know, tomorrow you are going to be surprised," he told me,
speaking softly. "Everybody is going to be surprised. People here are not only
going to vote. People here - a great many people here - are going to vote yes."
I was stunned. That the Sunnis would actually come out to support the
constitution would be an astonishing turnabout and, for the American effort in
Iraq, an enormously positive one; for it would mean that despite the escalating
violence on the ground, especially here in Anbar, Iraq was in fact moving
toward a rough political consensus. It would mean that beneath the bloody
landscape of suicide bombings and assassinations and roadside bombs a common
idea about politics and compromise was taking shape. It would mean that what
had come to seem a misbegotten
