Page 2 of
10 THE
WAR OF THE IMAGINATION, Part 1 How a war
of fantasies happened By Mark
Danner
political process that
charted and even worsened the growing divisions
among Iraqis had actually become the avenue for
bringing them together. It would mean there might
be hope.
I took the young diplomat's words
as an invaluable bit of inside wisdom from the
American who knew this ground better than any
other, and I kept them in mind a few hours later
as I traveled from
polling place to polling
place in that city of rubble, listening as the
Fallujans told me of their anger at the Americans
and the "Iranians" (as they called the leading
Shi'ite politicians) and of their hatred for the
constitution that they believed was meant to
divide and thus destroy Iraq. I pondered the
diplomat's words that evening, when I realized
that in a long day of interviews I'd not met a
single Iraqi who would admit to voting for the
constitution.
And I thought of his words
again several days later when it was confirmed
that in Anbar province - where the most
knowledgeable, experienced, indefatigable American
had confided to me what he had plainly ardently
believed, that on the critical vote on the
constitution "a great many people would vote yes"
- that in Anbar 97 out of every 100 Iraqis who
voted had voted no. With all his contacts and
commitment, with all his energy and brilliance, on
the most basic and critical issue of politics on
the ground he had been entirely, catastrophically
wrong.
"You know where you begin.
You never know where you are going to end."
The 98-year-old George F Kennan,
sitting in the Washington nursing home as the war
came on, knew from eight decades of experience to
focus first of all on the problem of what we know
and what we don't know. You know, though you spend
your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis,
lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a
country torn by a brutal and complicated war those
Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special
subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing
to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to
Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who
depend on the Americans not only for their
livelihoods but for their survival.
You
know that the information these Iraqis draw on is
similarly limited, and that what they convey is
itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to
please their interlocutor. But though you know
that much of your information comes from a thin,
inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and
Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those
grueling 24-hour days eventually lead you to
think, must lead you to think, that you are coming
to understand what's happening in this immensely
complicated, violent place. You come to believe
you know. And so often, even about the largest
things, you do not know.
As this precious
stream of flickering knowledge travels "up the
chain" from those on the shell-pocked, dangerous
ground collecting it to those in Washington
offices ultimately making decisions based on it,
the problem of what we really know intensifies,
acquiring a fierce complexity. Policymakers,
peering second, third, fourth-hand into a twilight
world, must learn a patient, humble skepticism. Or
else, confronted with an ambiguous reality they do
not like, they turn away, ignoring the shadowy,
shifting landscape and forcing their eyes
stubbornly toward their own ideological light.
Unable to find clarity, they impose it. Consider,
for example, these words of Donald H Rumsfeld,
speaking about the Iraq war on November 9, two
days after the mid-term elections and the day
after President George W Bush fired him as
secretary of defense:
It is very clear that the major
combat operations were an enormous success. It's
clear that in phase two of this, it has not been
going well enough or fast enough.
Such analyses are not uncommon from
Pentagon civilians; thus Dov Zakheim, a former
Rumsfeld aide, to a television interviewer later
that evening:
People will debate the second part,
the second phase of what happened in Iraq. Very
few are arguing that the military victory in the
first phase was anything but an outright
success.
Three years and eight months
after the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense
and his allies see in Iraq not one war but two.
One is the real Iraq war - the "outright success"
that only very few would deny, the war in which
American forces were "greeted as liberators",
according to the famous prediction of Dick Cheney
which the vice president doggedly insists was in
fact proved true: "True within the context of the
battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his
forces. That went very quickly."
It is "within this context"
that the former secretary of defense and the vice
president see America's current war in Iraq as in
fact comprising a brief, dramatic, and "enormously
successful" war of a few weeks' duration leading
to a decisive victory, and then ... what? Well,
whatever we are in now: a phase two, a "postwar
phase" (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) which
has lasted three-and-a-half years and continues.
In the first, successful, real
