Half-decade war may not save Iraq

Exactly five years ago today two B-52 bombers took off from a London airstrip and, under a darkening sky, flew across the barren deserts of Syria and Iraq. They soared over Baghdad, and at precisely 9 p.m. fire blazed in the darkness as Saddam Hussein’s presidential complex exploded under the bombardment of cruise missiles.

“Shock and awe” was to be the grand opening to President Bush’s theater of war that promised to end Saddam’s reign, find weapons of mass destruction and bring democracy to the Middle East.

But while the Bush administration treated the start to the war as a drama production with a villain to slay and a village to save, America now realizes there was no script, no weapons of mass destruction, no al-Qaida connection and the stage of battle brings very real death, destruction and chaos.

After half a decade of being in a war, many Americans want out of Iraq.

They want the numbers to stop increasing. Numbers such as the 3,241 American soldiers killed in combat (an additional 749 have died in non-combat related incidents) and over 29,300 soldiers wounded, the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the $650 billion currently spends on the war – a figure that could exceed two trillion in the coming years.

We want to bring all of our soldiers home, put Iraq in the past and wash our hands clean of any more bloodshed. But we can’t.

To leave Iraq now would be disastrous to the lives of Iraqis who would endure brutal sectarian fighting and chaos. We tore apart Iraqi society, however repressive, and cannot leave it in bedlam.

While opinion polls have claimed Iraqis want America to withdraw immediately, journalists, such as New York Times international correspondent John F. Burns, caution that fearful Iraqis often tell pollsters only what they think the pollster wants to hear.

“My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability,” Burns wrote in a recent essay composed at the end of his five-year assignment in Iraq.

We cannot win the war in Iraq because there is no longer a clear definition about what it means to win. Winning implies we have gained, conquered or vanquished. The only thing America has gained, though, is more hatred and anger from other nations, and even when we leave Iraq, terrorist networks will continue to exist.

But while we won’t win in the traditional sense, we can remain until we restore stability.

Instead of anarchy, the American military can be a force that quells violence between Shiite and Sunni extremist groups and gives Iraqis a chance to start rebuilding their country and their government.

This may take fifteen years, hundreds of lives and billions of dollars.

It is a grim thought and a reminder of what can happen when a nation follows its leaders into a war whose goals, missions and endpoint are unknown and undefined.