I’m a retired Air Force colonel and a
teacher, and over the years I?ve taught a great many people about
the military, sometimes starting out with a quote from Mark Twain’s
“Tom Sawyer Abroad”: “I asked Tom if countries always apologized
when they had done wrong, and he says ‘Yes, the little ones does.’”
That raises the question: Do we in America have the humility to
admit when we are wrong?
If we had known in 2003 what we
know now — before we cut taxes on the wealthy and asked the rest
of America to pay $600 billion and counting on the war, before at
least 50,000 Iraqi men, women and children died, before over 3,000
Americans were killed, and before 20,000 came home with banged up
brains and missing limbs ? would we have invaded and occupied Iraq?
I think not.
The Bush war in Iraq is lost. It is what
retired Lt. Gen. William Odom calls “the greatest strategic mistake
the United States has made.” The Bush administration?s strategy set
up the conditions for civil war, and by making Donald Rumsfeld the
scapegoat or suggesting that the Iraqi leadership is the reason for
civil war in Iraq, we merely blame others for our mistakes. Doug
Macgregor, a retired Army colonel, cautions, “Whatever the
Democrats do, they should reject the current schoolboy excuse we
hear from active and retired generals that ?Rumsfeld made me do
it.?”
Where to begin to fix this mess? First, the new
Congress must make Iraq yesterday?s issue. We must not escalate the
war there, and we must not increase the size of our military forces
so we can engage in more adventures like Iraq.
Second,
follow the advice of former military “green hawks” like retired
General Chuck Wald, who argue “that a tough military and foreign
policy won’t be enough to ensure energy security, and the only real
solution lies in changing consumption at home.”
Third,
whatever we do, we need to raise taxes to pay for it. By not paying
for the war in Iraq we have created inequality in America that will
take years to heal. The folly of the class war that?s been created
on the home front is a close second to the folly of the Bush war in
Iraq. The real cost to this country of the Iraq war is likely to be
between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, up to 10 times more than
previously stated by the Bush administration. The difference during
past wars is that presidents raised taxes to pay for them and made
sure the wealthy paid their fair share. Is there no outrage for
making our children and grandchildren repay our war debts?
Fourth, tell the American people what faces us in the
Middle East. Iran is the dominant player. The threat of nuclear
weapons proliferation in the region will continue. Iraq will
eventually become a confederation of three states, as both former
Ambassador Peter Galbraith and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., assume.
Our role will be to operate control zones, limit the violence by
leveraging our technology, and return to a containment policy. And
this new containment policy must be coupled with a long-term
solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. NATO could help by
establishing bases in both Israel and Palestine.
Fifth,
we should expect both Republicans and Democrats to blame our
departure from Iraq on the Iraqis. This is degrading to a member of
the profession of arms because it is a failure to admit
responsibility for a flawed strategy. What we can do for our troops
is to bring them home, take care of them when they get here, and
make those responsible for the war accountable.
Ivan Doig
wrote that “maybe it is an American condition, in this strange
nation we have become, all helmet and wallet and no brain or
heart.” We can change that. Edward Abbey, that cantankerous
Westerner, told us how to do it. He said, “A patriot must always be
ready to defend his country against his government.”
James Callard is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a retired Air Force colonel
who taught national security policy at the National War College in
Washington, D.C. He now teaches at Fort Lewis College in Durango,
Colorado, where he lives, and the University of Colorado,
Denver.
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