Yes, our Iraqi adventure started on a false premise. Yes, our presence in Iraq is making lots of Muslims (and others) hate our country. And no, having troops in Iraq will probably not deter terrorism in the U.S. or Europe. But we still shouldn’t leave Iraq until we can hang up a real “Mission Accomplished” banner.

It’s nice to be liked as a nation, but it’s more important to get respect. America’s foreign policy has always had an element of hubris to it, even before the Monroe Doctrine. If we’re going to issue edicts to countries like Iran and North Korea, we must be prepared to back up our words with a credible threat of force.

Our earliest foreign conflicts after the American Revolution, the First and Second Barbary Wars, taught us that treaties not only need to be made, but enforced. They also showed that rogue states can often only be tamed when more than one strong power decides to stop their errant behavior; that even a strong American military is more effective when allied with other forces.

If we had heeded the lessons of the Barbary Wars, our first Iraqi invasion would have been decisive. We would have removed Saddam Hussein and supported a new, less awful Iraqi government, and “we” would have been a number of countries, not just the United States.

And, even if we were a little slow to learn, by the time of our second Iraqi War we should have realized that we could best accomplish the objective of overthrowing Saddam and allowing a new, more democratic regime to flourish if we had waited to build a widespread international consensus, and had gone to war as part of a broad alliance dedicated to helping Iraq become a peaceful, prosperous nation.

But we didn’t do these things. We are where we are, like it or not. And whining about how Bush and his cronies lied — or about Democrats who supported the war when they shouldn’t have, or didn’t support it when they should have — will not solve our current Iraqi problem.

Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn analogy was correct. We broke Iraq, and now it is our responsibility to fix it. We jumped into Iraq before we completed our stated mission in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan is starting to come apart again. We broke Somalia, then ran away without fixing it. We broke Vietnam, and ran away without fixing it. The Korean War ended in a nasty stalemate that is still giving us grief. We need to stop this pattern of leaving broken nations behind us.

World War Two was the last war we fought to a full conclusion. And then we helped both our allies and our former enemies rebuild. Most of our major WWII allies and enemies are now strong trading partners. We have foreign policy disagreements with them from time to time, but our citizens and theirs travel back and forth, and our relations are generally pleasant.

Another analogy for you: The world’s best unfinished novel is not as good as a mediocre one that gets finished — and published.

If we pull out of Iraq tomorrow afternoon, radical Muslims will not suddenly love us, nor will the rest of the world’s population suddenly start believing the American government always has their best interests at heart.

If we’re not going to get the world’s love, we might as well try to get the world’s respect. And the best way to do that today is to grit our teeth and stay in Iraq until it has a stable government capable of holding the number of bombings, beheadings, casual executions, and general mayhem down to a level low enough that most Iraqis can go about their daily business without worrying about whether they’re going to get home alive.

Put it another way: the day an American tourist can wander the streets of Bahgdad umolested, at least in the “better” neighborhoods, we can claim victory in Iraq. But if we pull out before then, we will — correctly — be called losers by the rest of the world, and that will make more trouble for us in coming decades than the problems we already have with Iraq — and with Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea, too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 5:43 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.