William Kristol and Fairy Tales

William Kristol is to serious political commentary what Liberace is to classical music; sure, he's got some talent, but the closer you listen to him the worse he sounds. Kristol, of course, has been one of the most indefatigable cheerleaders for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Recently, he has taken to chastising leading Democrats for opposing the so-called surge, contending that Bush’s decision to increase the number of troops in Baghdad was an act of great political courage that has turned the tide in Iraq.

As someone who opposed the war – but after much agonizing reluctantly concluded that the surge was probably the best of our really bad options – I am deeply skeptical of Kristol’s glib assessment that the surge is in the process of being vindicated. Put simply, the surge has bought the Bush administration some valuable time, but the underlying conditions in Iraq remain anything but conducive to a national reconciliation.

The inherently limited duration of the surge has brought a short-term reduction in violence, but there are numerous reasons to believe the tactical momentum General Petraeus has achieved will prove to be something of a mirage. For one thing, nearly every force allied against the United States – from Sadr’s militia to al-Qaeda in Iraq – has an incentive to lay low before the U.S. is forced to reduce troop levels sometime later in 2008. Second, The Sunni militias we are arming to fight al-Qaeda now may turn their weapons against the Iraqi government later. And third, so long as corruption remains rampant, and the disbursement of political power and Iraqi oil revenues is based on tribal affiliations, then Iraq is likely to remain a dysfunctional state. U.S. troops, in short, are likely to be tied down in Iraq for decades in order to prevent the country from disintegrating into a Hobbesian nightmare.

Kristol chides Democrats for failing to "celebrate" progress in Iraq. I have to say I find Kristol’s snide obtuseness here morally repugnant. Four million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes, between 160,000 and 600,000 Iraqis have been killed, and "success" has been defined down so much that achieving it may mean little more than mitigating the threats unleashed by the invasion and botched occupation itself. Put simply, Kristol resembles nothing so much as an analyst who hyped Enron’s stock and then cleared his conscience by recommending investors could recoup their losses by selling their certificates on e-Bay.

Here, it is worth remembering that invading and occupying Iraq has not advanced America’s strategic interests. On the contrary, morally, fiscally, and militarily the occupation has been a catastrophe that has isolated, drained, divided, and diverted the United States in ways that have diminished its capacity to respond to other vital challenges. For instance, it has impeded our efforts to capture or kill bin Laden, which would have been a surefire way of delivering a knockout blow to al-Qaeda. Instead, the Bush administration led America astray with its quixotic fairly tale of turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy that would supposedly inspire a regional transformation in the Middle East).

Bush has bet not only his legacy on succeeding in Iraq, but also America’s future. The emergence of democracy, however, takes at minimum a generation, but by that time the nuclear genie may be out of the bottle as Islamic extremists based in Pakistan, Europe, or even the United States may have already detonated a WMD in a major American city. The enormous resources in blood and treasure America invested in Iraq may easily come to naught overnight. The historian Arnold Toynbee would have recognized the folly of the Bush administration’s faith-based foreign policy. After all, as he observed societies that reform themselves are more apt to succeed than societies that attempt to reform the rest of the world. If the past is prologue, Cassandra’s pessimism will prove more prophetic than the Pollyannaish fairy tale that that the Neocons like Kristol sold Bush on.

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