Page 5 of 5 WAR OF THE
IMAGINATION, Part 2 The third act in
Iraq By Mark Danner
United States, I believe, is truly
disastrous ... We could leave behind an Iraq that
is a failed state, a haven for terrorism, a real
threat to the United States and to the region.
That's just not an acceptable outcome. We are well
down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of
threatening instability that stands as the precise
opposite of the Bush administration's "democratic
tsunami", the wave of liberalizing revolution that
American power, through the
invasion of Iraq, was to set
loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of
accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let
alone across the complicated landscape of the
entire region, were always very small. Saddam and
the autocracy he ruled were the product of a
dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it.
Reform of such a politics was always going to be a
task of incalculable complexity.
Faced
with such complexity, and determined to have their
war and their democratic revolution, the president
and his counselors looked away. Confronted with
great difficulties, their answer was to blind
themselves to them and put their faith in ideology
and hope - in the dream of a welcoming landscape,
magically transformed. The evangelical vision may
have made the sense of threat after September 11,
2001, easier to bear but it did not change the
risks and the reality on the ground. The result is
that the wave of change the president and his
officials were so determined to set in course by
unleashing American military power may well turn
out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism
that they had hoped to prevent.
In the
coming weeks we will hear much talk of "exit
strategies" and "proposed solutions". All such
"solutions", though, are certain to come with
heavy political costs, costs the president may
consider more difficult to bear than those of
doggedly "staying the course" for the remainder of
his term. Bush, who ran for president vowing a
"humble" foreign policy, could not have predicted
this. Kennan said it in October 2002:
Anyone who has ever studied the
history of American diplomacy, especially
military diplomacy, knows that you might start
in a war with certain things on your mind as a
purpose of what you are doing, but in the end,
you found yourself fighting for entirely
different things that you had never thought of
before. In other words, war has a momentum of
its own and it carries you away from all
thoughtful intentions when you get into it.
If we are indeed in the third act -
as I will take up in a future article - then it
may well be that this final act will prove to be
very long and very painful. You may or may not
know where you begin. You never know where you are
going to end.
Mark Danner, a
frequent contributor to the New York Review of
Books, is professor of journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley and Henry R
Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent
book is The Secret Way to War: The Downing
Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History.
His work can be found at markdanner.com.
(This article appears in the December
21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books.
Used by permission.)
