Why Can’t We Leave Iraq?

Posted on August 3, 2004 in Occupation of Iraq

It’s politics Tuesday!

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

  –Joan Didion

I hesitate to call it a psychosis because it is so common that nearly anyone can fall into it. Perhaps it is a relic of some behavior, once vital, such as that which led hunters and gatherers to keep pursuing a wounded buffalo or keep looking for vegetables when the basket was half full and the sun was setting. Perhaps it is a broad survival trait expressing itself in an alien context where it makes no sense. Evolution gone wrong.

Of course, this explanation does not suit many Americans who have bought into two meshing ideas: that we are the creations of a perfect God and living that God’s purpose. And that America exists to do only right, can only exist to carry that God’s political agendas for the world even though we might not be able to see it. I think that these layers blind us to both the source of the problem and the problem itself. They prevent us from behaving responsibly about Iraq.

We, like all humans, tell stories. This relates to our ability to tell the important stories: how to find the place where the apples are, where the game trails lead, what is the route to the spring. Research suggests that so far we are the only animal which can communicate our understandings of cause and effect relationships from one to another. To these basic abilities, we applied flourishes and took our powers in new directions: epics, songs, poems, short fiction, novels, plays, movies. The human genius expressed what had been unexpressible and rose above mere instinct to improvise and extemporize. We gave ourselves tales, legends, and myths, guidelines for morality and philosophy.

If you tell yourself something is true enough times, you shall believe it. Likewise if you follow a pattern often enough, you will come to believe that it is the only way. Americans are now engaged in trying to make sense of last year’s blunder, of putting our troops in a hostile land on the word of a known liar and a thief. When a president or a pretender wants a war, he gets it. There’s no saying no. One and a half years after the announcement that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, we now know that this is not true. But we’re there and we need a close for the story. And therein lies our problem.

We want happy endings, certainties that we did the right thing. We want to catch the buffalo, find enough to fill our basket. We want to get the girl or the guy. Beyond that, we want to think of ourselves not as evil, but as good people — as A Good People because we’ve been trained to think of ourselves as a separate species, defined by language and culture rather than genetics: as Americans. As it dawned on us that Iraq was no threat and was not involved in the World Trade Center attacks, we sought to change why it was good that we went there. We freed a nation from an oppressive dictator, went the refrain. Then came Abu Ghraib and the Iraqi resistance to our occupation. American soldiers shot dead and killed by car bombs. A civilian beheaded. Oh no! Perhaps things were better with Hussein there? No. We were America and we were the agent of God’s Goodness on this planet. There had to be a happy ending in this.

Thirty years ago, a young veteran named John Kerry told the United States Congress that he hoped Vietnam would mark the moment when America saw sense and had the courage to get out of a bad situation. That we would look at the veterans of that war not with contempt but with appreciation and understanding that they were the agents who demonstrated the folly of intervention. Now John Kerry talks about staying in Iraq, about “making things right” and about expanding the War on Terror. He preaches an ending very different from the one he championed when he was an antiwar activist. He promises us a new cold war against Terrorists, which is a variation on the very theme he spoke out against when he was a young man.

As a Yale student, Kerry proposed a different kind of finish for Vietnam than we had had for other wars. The radical right did not like that ending: the only satisfactory ending for them was total victory. During the eighties and nineties, they harped on how we had lost the war in Vietnam. They told us fictions about MIAs still in the hands of the North Vietnamese. They insisted that the war was about to be won when we pulled out. They blamed our loss not on the stupidity of going in the first place but on the antiwar protestors at home. They screamed at The Wall, that most moving testament to some of the lives lost in Vietnam. People love stories: they knew that. And they provided fictions designed to promote the idea that we had lost the war in Vietnam. Kerry’s alternative lesson came only from the lips of a few dedicated peace activists and liberals. No one wanted to see Vietnam as a mistake anymore, not even John Kerry.

And now we pay for the failure of the American people to come to terms with Vietnam. The price is called Iraq. We reject the ending, the wise ending of lessons learned. A year and a half ago, based on what the White House now styles as “misinformation”, we repeated the mistake. In my small collection of antiwar buttons, I have one which says “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam” and so it is. John Kerry, of all people, now talks about waging this war until it is finished, against a people who resist our very presence there.

“Now that we’re in there,” I hear people say, “it’s important that we do the right thing.” The right thing, they say, is to keep waging this war, with more attention being paid to the conduct of our troops. I suggest that the right thing for us to do is pull our troops out of there, let the United Nations send peacekeeping forces. If America is involved, it should be in the form of Peace Corps volunteers and private foundation aid. Take off the camouflage and put on the t-shirts. Instead of digging trenches, dig the foundations for the peace.

We must reject the notion that the only way America can do right by this is alone and by keeping our troops there. This is the message to send to John Kerry, former antiwar activist, now dedicated to repeating the mistakes of Vietnam. We missed his message — he missed his message — and the price we are paying is the death of our troops and the blood of more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians on our hands. Lord knows how many soldiers. If it can no longer be Vietnam that marks the point of our seeing sense, then let it be Iraq.

At the beginning of this article, I suggested that our obsession with closing this episode just so arises from our evolved capacity to tell stories to one another. I do not think we are damned like the male praying mantis who gives himself to the female as both a lover and a cannibal sacrifice. We need not let this affray eat off our head and with it our reason because our instincts push us to act that way. Our genetic and cultural heritage may prod us in certain directions, but our intellectual capacity allows us to resist and write a new ending like the one John Kerry suggested when he was young. As creatures shaped by Nature, we have evolved the power to override and command our destinites in creative and fulfilling ways. We can get out of Iraq with our head high just as we can leave a bad marriage or a bad job. In these cases, too, we go in willingly — often on bad information — but that never stops us from doing the right thing which is leaving. And that is the ending I suggest we set our eyes on: getting out of there with our heads high and our dignity intact. Let’s not make Iraq into the time when one more time we failed to learn the lesson of Vietnam, that there is no shame in admitting a mistake and remove our forces so that the world can repair it via the auspices of the United Nations.

A whole new genre of world politics awaits us. Let us pick up our pens and help to write it.