JINSA Report #612 What are we Doing in Iraq? Part I

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October 19, 2006

JINSA Report #612

What are we Doing in Iraq? Part I

Seventy-two American servicemen have been killed in October thus far,
putting the month on course to be the bloodiest for US forces in two
years. We mourn each one and pray their families find consolation in
the strength, skill and dedication to duty that each soldier possessed.

And no, it doesn't help to be reminded that in WWII our losses were
staggering – more than 1.1 million fathers, sons, husbands, brothers
didn't come home or came home less than whole (total military deaths
were more than 24 million). Or that our WWI casualties were more than
300,000 between May and November 1918.

What Americans ask as we sacrifice our children somewhere else is "why?"
WWII was "somewhere else," but understood as a fight in the name of
our own security. Kwajalein, Anzio, Normandy, Kasserine, and Okinawa are
part of our history. Our WWI casualties were "somewhere else" as well,
but Cantigny, Belleau Wood, and the Argonne Forrest belong to us in
understanding.

What are Ramadi, Baghdad and Balad? If they are only Iraqi places, what
are we doing in the middle of their Civil War? By what right do our
soldiers die to repair their oil wells or protect their government? We
deposed Saddam for reasons of our own. Can't we leave them to decide
whether to live with each other or kill each other?

No. We didn't fight in Remagen for the Germans, and we are not in
Haditha for the Iraqis. Iraq was, and remains, a front in the larger war
against terrorists and the countries that harbor and support them.
There are indigenous fault lines in Iraq, to be sure, but they have been
crossed and muddied by Iran and Syria. Iraq, as is its history, is at
the crossroads of the Persian and Arab worlds and the Sunni and Shiite
worlds. And we might once have been content to watch them fight it out
there, far away from us. But this is the 21st Century. We are in the
middle of an ideological and religious battle with imperialist
ramifications, not the nationalist war that was Vietnam in another century.

President Bush was right when he said those who think the US upset the
stability of the Middle East by invading Iraq were under some illusion
that there was stability to be upset. Beginning with the Iranian
Revolution in 1979, through the Afghan and Bosnian wars and the
Iran-Iraq war; Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia and the Philippines; the
invasion of Kuwait; and the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, radical Islam
has been seeking to expand its reach, harnessing the discontent of the
masses. This discontent, and these masses, are in the Middle East,
obviously, but they are also in Europe, Asia, the Indian subcontinent
and in North America. It is our war and it is here. Even if we don't
fight, our enemies do.

If we understand Iraq in those terms, our presence there is crucial.
But if we understand it in those terms, the question becomes how best to
affect the ends we seek and whether we can do our job on the Iraqi front
while remaining inside Iraq and outside the Iraqi civil war.

[Part II will explore some of our problems and options.]

To view this JINSA Report online click on the link below.
http://www.jinsa.org/JINSAReports/3561

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