Intractability

I got into an argument with my nephew over Christmas break, about the war in Iraq. I hate arguing, actually, about anything, but especially about something like the war. It's another one of those dead end, divisive arguments that really don't serve any purpose other than to firmly place the two parties in opposing camps and more than likely, hurt feelings.

So why do it?

I have an real aversion to remaining quiet while people talk authoritatively about things they haven't bothered to research. My nephew was arguing from the same tired old basis that EVERYONE who opposed the war does, that is, he argued yesterday's arguments. "We didn't find any weapons of mass destruction, we didn't find any links to 9/11...." Both of those arguments are easy no-brainers, but fail in the final analysis to really address the question of whether the war was necessary and/or wise. I don't pretend to be able to see into a crystal ball and determine whether or not history will look favorably upon the war, but I do think those that opposed it have a tendency to do just that. We don't KNOW there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the invasion, only that we haven't found any since then. To assume that in a country the size of California, where the former regime had months of warning of an impending invasion, that such weapons, many of which would be relatively small in size, couldn't be hidden or smuggled out is pretty naive. And even if Hussein's entire stockpile of weapons was destroyed prior to the invasion, he certainly had the programs in place to make them and the proven propensity to do so, in Iran and in his own country. I argued that anyone in the president's chair receiving the intelligence that Bush did, from Russia, England, Israel, and several surrounding Arab countries, not to mention CIA findings, would be hard pressed after the events of 9/11 to do something about the Iraq situation.

Obviously, that intelligence may have been flawed. But how long is one supposed to wait in a world where hundreds of thousands of people can go up in a moment if you are wrong? And why on earth would anyone trust Hussein's word that he had no such weapons after an examination of his history? Despite the fact that I did not vote for Bush in either election, I have been willing to give him a certain amount of slack based on the fact that this is a war unlike any we have ever fought. There is no blueprint for victory here; Bush like the rest of us is just basically feeling his way along in the dark, hoping he doesn't fall down and that he'll end up in the light at the end of his journey. He's bound to make mistakes, and certainly we all hope they aren't terribly costly ones, but the fact remains that delay can now mean death for untold thousands. It seemed, and still seems, in fact, reasonable to assume that a dictator who had hatched an assassination plot against a former U.S. president and had been humiliated in the first Gulf War might have the propensity to actually use WMD against the U.S., or at the very least, make them available to those who would.

The problem with all of my arguments, and all of the opposing ones, is that they really don't matter anymore. It's over. The time for debate has long past. Iraq was invaded almost two years ago now, and for better or worse, we are there. The arguments now should not be about whether or not we should have gone in the first place, but rather how long we should stay and what we should be doing while we are there. It's too late to "not invade", and only a myopic "I told you so" would obsess over that distant, moot debate.

Still, that's what opponents of the war insist upon doing. It's what my nephew did (quite badly, I might add). They are so bitter over losing that argument that at times it seems there only motivation from this point forward will be to declare a retroactive victory by pointing out all the negative things that have sprung from that decision. And make no mistake, there are many of those. More than a thousand dead soldiers, untold billions in U.S. dollars financing the war, an unquestionable diminution of respect for America throughout the world.

But again, the correct question shouldn't be "why didn't you agree with me?" but rather "what do we do now?" We can't remain so entrenched in the righteous of our own arguments that we ignore the reality in front of us. And while I would still argue that the decision to invade was not so unreasonable as many would have it, I am (and was) willing to concede that it may not have been necessary or wise. There seems to be few partisans on the other side who are willing to make a reciprocal admission.

I suppose, more than anything else, what