Has History Not Taught Us Anything?

As the majority of Americans now believe, the war in Iraq started under false pretenses and continues for largely the wrong reasons. But, this does not mean ending the war means a simple fix. We now have the culpability to repair the society that would otherwise be left in shambles. We entered into this war for self-interested reasons, but we cannot leave under the same interests for different reasons.

This week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats plan to announce a bill that would limit funding for troops in 2008 and end combat in Iraq by next December and begin troop withdraw immediately a vote for today that would limit funding for troops in Iraq, forcing new restrictions to the amount of time troops had to spend at home, meaning a troop withdraw would begin immediately -- an unplanned withdraw that could set Iraq on a path of chaos and corruption for another 50 years.

This strategy has an eerie semblance to the European exit strategies in Africa during the mid-twentieth century. They came into African countries, usually managed a complete upheaval of their pre-existing societies, in governing structure, ethnic identities, the way they made their livelihoods. And then, when times got too hard and Europeans could no longer fund their operations after World War II, Africans started to rebel; so the Europeans left. Take the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for example. In 1960, there was an upsurge of Congolese violence against the Belgians, and within six months, the Belgians were gone, leaving no more than 11 college-educated Congolese to run the entire country. There was no plan, no exit strategy and with little interest in ensuring any kind of stability.

The DRC has remained war torn, poverty-stricken and under a corrupt governing structure for almost half a century. Over 4 million people have died due to fighting in the East, a conflict amplified by other occasions of European negligence of the mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the DRC, while perhaps an extreme case in decolonization was not the exception to the European decolonization tactics.

If history has taught us anything, it's that democracy cannot be carved in two, four, six years. Even our own history shows evidence of this. Our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but did not manage to ratify our now working Constitution until 1789.

We hastily got into this war, but whether we agreed with starting it or not, we cannot hastily get out. Doing so not only sets up the U.S. for further failure, but it only further threatens our own national interests: If we are to restore our legitimacy in the international arena, we cannot act carelessly in Iraq. We have a collective responsibility to right our wrongs, not just for the sake of the Iraqi people but for the sake of our reputation abroad as well.

We have to change the dialogue from "removing troops" to "restoring and maintaining peace" so that the Iraqi people can go about building productive lives and flourishing society. Isn't that what we mean by "democracy building," anyway?

We started this war. Now we have to finish it, and unfortunately finishing it may take another five years. It's not a simplistic, canned answer, much to the dismay of many presidential hopefuls, of either continuing funding for the war or to bringing troops home. That proves just as black and white as the ideology that got us into this war.

Democrats insist that they way that President Bush has gone about promoting democracy around the world not only proves faulty but inherently flawed. Instead of talking about troop withdrawal and what not to do, they have to start talking about what works. And, what works is promoting democracy with words but sometimes also with a military force that does not promote aggression but works to mitigate threats and diffuse violence.

Yes, a scale back may be in order, but that should not be how we frame our strategy to ending the war. We must use our resources more effectively, which hopefully means scaling them back, but ultimately, it comes down to a mission of building peace and protecting the people's lives we have endangered in continuing the violence and pursuing democracy as if it's the Holy Grail. That kind of trophy, "mission accomplished," will only come with time, with steadfast diplomacy and with some troops that are there that can serve as the money where our mouths are.

Comments

[oldpotsmuggler]

Hutus and Tutsis, for some reason, prefer each other dead. I suspect that this fact has nothing to do with Europe or Europeans, except that it's possible to believe that without Europeans whatever resolution they arrive at may have gotten finished back when there were less of each to kill and die. And it seems likely that at whatever point there was a removal of European control, the resolution of that matter would have out waited the Europeans.

What is there to indicate that Iraqis would ever use "peace" as an opportunity for "building productive lives and a flourishing society"? Saddam Hussein can't be credited with much, but surely he compelled a peaceful society. Sadly that peace did not translate into the conditions that the author fantasizes about. Nor is there any indication that any peace that we could impose would have any affect other than causing the pressure to continue to build under the lid.

The test cannot merely be "would bad things occur if we discontinue our troop presence in Iraq". Of course bad things will happen if we live, just as will be the case if we stay. The test must be which circumstance will result in the least terrible outcome and there is nothing available to indicate that staying causes less total destruction than leaving.

"Putting our money where our mouth is" needs to mean the same thing as if a pedestrian were hit by a car. We have to pay, but money and blood are two very different commodities.

And if the driver hit the pedestrian on purpose, a prison term would be in order, and that needs to happen here as well. Locking up Bush and Cheney would restore our standing in the eyes of the world in ways that no number of years spent killing and dying in Iraq ever possibly could.

[Lon]

Whether we should stay to "fix" things depends greatly on whether our staying actually does fix things.

When the Europeans occupied Africa they did so with the kind of heavy hand that could have created institutions. And in some cases, primarily with the British, they did and some of those institutions survive. But simply staying does not improve things, and there is nothing about our stay in Iraq that seems likely to produce positive developments.

For history to teach us that we need to stay, we would need historical examples of countries going into situations like Iraq and actually producing stable countries.

Unfortunately the reference to our history makes some of this post look silly. The colonies had developed democratic institutions at the state level. It ended the Revolution and quickly established a peaceful government. It later changed that government peacefully for primarily economic reasons. There is no similarity from that situation to what we see in Iraq.

We are not in a position to build institutions in Iraq. We would need more troops than we have available to do so. It isn't going to happen. And we can not justify staying and doing more harm on the grounds that leaving is bad.

[youngbodhisattva]

For history to teach us something, we'd probably first need to fix the educational system in this country. Right after we fix that map shortage so more Americans can correctly identify the location of Iraq.

All kidding aside, what exactly does "restoring and maintaining peace" look like? Is it a certain level of car bombs per month? Does the peace in areas of Iraq that have been ethnically cleansed count? While I agree that the US should not withdrawal as precipitously as we entered, I think our first mistake is still calling it a "war." Obviously you agree it's not a "war" since you believe our mission is now to "restore and maintain peace." Now, I've never been to war, but I'm fairly certain war isn't peacful in fact it seems to be the OPPOSITE. The MAIN problem with Bush's "War on Terror" is that it cannot be combated in the traditional sense. We our fighting an enemy that not only lacks an army, but even a single sovereign nation to attack. "Terrorists" organize more like the mafia than an army and their networks cross internationally among many governments, each with their own relationship to the West and the terrorist groups.

The situation is extermely complicated and woven into the fabric of history in the Middle East. (And there's a lot of history in that region seeing as civilization started there.) Unfortunately we have a simpleton in the Oval Office who refuses to acknowledge anything more complex than a false struggle of "good" against "evil."