Yes, there is something "novel" about this war in Iraq. The extensive cast of characters, the exotic locales, the numerous chapters, and the sense of progression, as, in this case, the United States goes from neocon idealist ready to reinvent the Middle East to dissembling bungler attempting to portray every setback as the next step in the march to victory. The problem is, war should be more like a movie than a novel, with a definite beginning, middle and - yes, Mr. President -- end, a series of plot developments resolutely leading to a climax and conclusion, with the idea that everybody knows what has to happen before the final credits roll. A novel, on the other hand, is something you pick up and put down at anytime, a lengthier experience, one not so much plot-driven as hinging on such intangibles as thought, emotion, milieu, tone and language itself.
The war in Iraq, therefore, is certainly a "novel war," and therein lies the problem. It's a novel now four years in the making, and its author is not yet working on its conclusion. In fact, ironically enough, George Bush now believes that by expanding the war, he will be able to end it, the logic being that only if you turn logic on its head can you really be certain that what you're doing makes sense, as witness the originally circulated idea, that we must wage war to preserve peace.
If we take World War II as an example, the objectives were fairly clear -- drive the Axis out of conquered territory and destroy their military capability. Even Vietnam had some meaning, in that we believed it necessary, lest the dominoes keep a-tumblin', that the communists had to be kept out of Saigon. But what is our objective in Iraq? Originally there was a specific goal - stop Saddam Hussein's production of weapons of mass destruction. In order to do this, Saddam had to be toppled, a feat achieved with relative ease, at which point, when the now-infamous WMDs did not materialize, we might have just declared "mission accomplished" and withdrawn our forces. But instead our objective was hastily reformatted, and suddenly we were in Baghdad to spread democracy, a convenient justification for us to stay just a little bit longer.
There were warnings, of course, that we were in the excremental muck beyond our ankles. The initial outbreak of mass looting alerted us to the mysterious fact that when a society is relieved of its government, the rule of law is one of the first things to go. So, yes, it was our job to make sure Iraq got a "good" government, which, with a much-vaunted show of purple fingers, we said we had. Unfortunately, our idea of good government did not necessarily mesh with the ideas of a great many Iraqis, and those who didn't like what we liked became part of an ever tenacious insurgency willing to use any means possible, including beheadings and suicide bombings, to let us know. And so, our objective changed again - Iraq needed more than just a new government, it needed stability to ensure that the new government could survive.
The insurgency, however, continued to grow. By the time we were ready to acknowledge that it was an insurgency, our objective had changed again. We were now in Iraq to quell that insurgency, to fight them there before we had to fight them here, to defeat Al Qaeda and the foreign terrorists who were behind the resistance to the American presence.
To sum it up, then, the following is the war that George built:
This is the war against the terrorists
That would bring the stability and security
That would shore up the good, pro-American government
That would become the democracy
That would make us forget the WMDs
That weren't found in the war that George built.
The insurgency has, four years later, proven "unquellable," and our leaders both feet on the ground (in Iraq) and way off the ground (in Washington) are now, I would imagine, scrambling to change objectives again. But perhaps, at this point, there are no viable objectives left. Perhaps now we are truly stuck with that dangerous and depressing situation known as "objectiveless war."
President Bush, of courses, claims that we do have an objective, and is willing, with Congress behind him or not, to commit more lives and money to achieving it. He continues to talk about victory in Iraq without offering a clear definition of what that victory is. This nebulousness is the direct result of all the shape-shifting that has gone into his war, making it impossible for anyone to be quite sure where its, or his, true purpose lies. Change your story enough times and even you forget what it really is.
The Bushies have clearly forgotten. This has been a war, and an administration, of chimerical goals. The overarching war on terror, perhaps the first time a war has ever been declared on a strategy, is a case in point. But perhaps this has all been part of the "plan." That is, by being vague about one's intentions, it's easier to spread the umbrella wide. And the wider the umbrella, the more one is able to stay within its protective shadow.
Ever since George Bush took office, and especially since he was born again on September 11, 2001, the umbrella known euphemistically as "national security" has been open as wide as our system will allow, and, as many will argue, even wider. So many abuses of power have been fomented beneath this screen, including Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition and illegal FBI surveillance under the Patriot Act, that we may sometimes wonder if the United States is now channeling the spirit of the Soviet Union. But of all the less than democratic evils that have been released under the auspices of national security, the worst has far and away been George Bush's war in Iraq.
But is it? Congress did vote him its support, and I'm afraid, so have the American people. We have been living with the war for four years now, and it doesn't seem to be pulling us asunder. In fact, we have allowed ourselves to be fooled and have not recognized the real danger inherent in this objectiveless war. We have failed to see that the war's lack of an objective is its objective, that the White House has sold us on the proposition that as long as American soldiers are dying, Bush and Cheney, Inc. must be doing something right, since our enemies are still killing us, meaning that the danger is ever-present.
In other words, we are fighting over there because we never quite figured out how to fight over here -- how to make this country safer without having to reshape the world to accommodate our oil-sucking ways. Because the war has become, or always was, Bush's mission, it is also what feeds his exercise of power and what justifies his executive autocracy. The war remains objectiveless because our present leader remains objectiveless; there can be no suggestion that the war is anything but a messianic calling. If it were, then Bush would have blood on his hands. As it stands now, all he has on him, at least in his mind, is a vision that fewer and fewer people understand, and which matters more to him than reality, i.e., the actual welfare of this country, ever will.