THREE years after the beginning of the war in Iraq, what have we accomplished? The honest fact is that we don’t yet know the answer to this question – and because we don’t know, the war remains unpopular.
For example, we don’t know yet whether the war we’re fighting against al Qaeda in Iraq has made the United States safer because we’ve tied down terrorist assets and distracted terrorist attention from the homeland. This was not the purpose of the war at the outset, but world-changing conflicts take twists and turns no one can foreseen.
What we do know is that 4 ½ years have passed since 9/11, and we have not been hit again. To be sure, others have – Spain and Britain and Indonesia most evilly. But we have not. Is the war in Iraq part of the reason? The question will have an answer – not now, but eventually.
Presumably, as time goes on, evidence will emerge in the form of intelligence we don’t know about, secret correspondence, prison interviews and memoirs, e-mails and the like that will tell the tale. That kind of evidence emerges over time, from the careful spadework of historians and academics expert in languages and idioms that present-day journalists and intelligence officers just don’t get.
We do know that our decision to put boots on the ground in the Middle East has had profound consequences in two Arab countries.
In Libya, Moammar Khadafy gave up his weapons of mass destruction. In Lebanon, a million people took to the streets of Beirut in a show of astonishing resistance to Syrian imperialism following Syria’s assassination of a leading Lebanese politician – something that would have been unthinkable before the United States invaded Iraq.
Will the positive changes we helped provoke in these countries have lasting meaning? No one can yet say.
The key accomplishments are in Iraq itself, and they are considerable – and to some degree offer an answer to the fashionable pessimism of the present moment.
Despite the insistence of some realist conservatives that we have learned the folly of attempting to plant democratic ideas in the ruined earth of Iraq, the evidence of the past two weeks is that the seeds we planted are bearing fruit among the politicians elected in those dramatic and moving elections in January and November 2005.
Yesterday, as Iraqi and Coalition troops were beginning a pitched battle against insurgent fighters, the new Iraqi parliament was sworn in. It was only two weeks ago that Sunni insurgents blew up a holy Shia mosque in a transparent effort to ignite a sectarian war – a war that, we were assured by many, was sure to catch fire.
Only it hasn’t. Instead, Iraqi politicians have sought to find common ground to calm the sectarian waters and calm enraged Shiites whose sense of grievance at Sunni wrongs is hard-earned. “Zal” Khalilzad, the American ambassador in Iraq, said plainly that this was a time of choosing – a time for choosing a future of hope rather than a decade of war.
And for now, the members of Iraq’s political class have chosen hope – chosen to fight their battles at the bargaining table rather than in the streets. By doing so, they are, in fact, offering an example of what democratic institutions are intended to do. They are supposed to replace armed conflict with political negotiation conducted by those who might otherwise take up weapons to get their way.
Because of the bombs and the bloodshed, and because many critics are desperate to see President Bush discredited and disgraced, the triumph of the political class in Iraq has been little noted. But if it holds, what has happened in the past two weeks will probably be seen as a turning point – and a validation of George Bush’s conviction that Iraq could eventually become a democracy.
“I think the outcome, the judgment, of all of this needs to await history,” Secretary of State Condi Rice said yesterday. It is conceivable that history’s judgment will be harsh. But it is also conceivable that history will regard the difficult American effort in Iraq as a dramatic achievement, all the more so because it was subjected to such withering and defeatist criticism here and abroad during its darkest days.