Poetry vs Reality on Iraq

Poetry vs Reality

Hillary Clinton gave me one of the high points of my week.

In a strange kind of way.

It was when she accused General Petraeus (yes, he of "the surge") of requiring from the Senate and the American people the "suspension of disbelief". video here.

To give her her full due, what she may have meant by using that term is that Petraeus was spinning a kind of poetry- the poetry of noble aims and worthy sacrifice.

The term comes from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps the least known of the main Romantic poets. To enjoy the war poetry you have to stop being critical, basically, according to Sam and Hill's theory.

It was, I thought, typical of the Senator for New York- this kind of pretentiousness combined with a plausible kind of false reasoning. It must have sounded good to her- educated and suggestive without saying someone is lying. After all, is poetry a lie? Is patriotism? Dulce et decorum est... etc.

Yet the pitch is exactly indicative of the falseness of the debate. It's the tendency to reduce all criticism to epic poetry- in this case playing to the stereotype of a poetry of patriotism.

It was a truly low intellectual blow.

A positive debate was impossible politically for the Democrats, but what would it have looked like? For a start, it wouldn't have used the poetry of loss and mourning- suggesting that the pain in Iraq is cyclical and doomed to repeat. This Democrat "poetry" has long meant that the antidote is seen to be sunny optimism. Everyone has cried out for Reagan, an optimist who never dealt with long lists of casualties except for the Beirut bombing- which he took as cue for an isolationist policy regarding the Middle East.

No a positive debate begins by saying America is good. US power is good and the aim of the policy should be to extend and preserve it through choosing the right course in Iraq. If that's sounds too positive, it's actually only the attitude of a healthy, happy individual to themselves. Self-mistrust is perhaps an essential ingredient for healthy people, but it is not helpful when making important decisions of destiny.

So my argument for Petraeus, for consideration by the US Senate, would be as follows.

We have faced many enemies in Iraq. Enemies hurt you. But that is a good reason not to be beaten, because a helpless, defeated person may be beaten mercilessly by a vicious opponent. What that means in this case is that, not the US directly, but the US' interests in the Middle East would be tortured by its opponents- we're talking about oil, Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel, to name a few. In addition, terrorists would be harboured, and have the luxury of many ports of call and numerous sugar daddies.

Additionally, backing out of Iraq would lead to an intensified conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani border lands. It would offer succour to the Sudanese regime. It might re-embolden Gadaffi in Libya.

Well, I've started negatively so that I can turn to the positives. What recent histoy has taught us in Iraq is that we can call the shots when we want. We are the hyperpower, we have the manpower to change the facts on the ground.

This is despite out enemies. Yet it is crucial to realise that we are faced with strong opponents with toxic political aims and zero moral restraint. Look at Al Qaeda in their bombing of Najaf. Look at Al Sadr in the behaviour of his forces, in the death squads of Baghdad.

The encouragement here is to be found in the fact that we have opponents with rationales. They want to achieve things for their own ends. Our goal should be to neutralise them. In fact, they want to get us out of Iraq, and probably create a division of Iraq between Syria and Iran.

The idle hands of the Islamic world can simply not get enough of conflict. They will happily play the game of Sunni/Shia until the time comes that they have a more satisfying target, like the West. While some would like to leave them to it, that tactic has been tried and history has moved on. After festering for generations, the Islamic world is healing the divides with a Frankensteinian tenderness as it scents alien blood, rather as a Tiger shark and a White shark might forget each other were a bleeding elephant to be dumped floundering in their aquarium.

Yes, US forces are a target in Iraq, but they are also capable, here and now, of inflicting massive and memorable defeats on those who would otherwise be left in a post-Saddam sectarian madhouse to ferment their fantasies against the West. To them, you see, it doesn't seem like a madhouse- they lived through their "splatter-movie" years under Saddam, after all.

It's important to recognise what's happened in Iraq- we've faced down the Baathists, faced down al Qaeda, drawn in the Sunni minority. Meanwhile we've antagonised the Shia and their sectarian ambitions are so far a little behind schedule. We now need to continue to antagonise the Shia, proving to the Sunnis that we will ensure order in Iraq where both groups can live peacefully. This means outmaneuvering the worst radicals within the Dawa-led Iraqi Govt itself. There are signs that, for instance, the security forces are welcoming an influx of Sunnis. This must continue, and make the Shia in Govt. know that they face an integrationist movement that will aggressively act to unite the factions. By next elections, the Sunni need to be fully engaged, and allied to the Kurds in the North. The radical Shia must be discredited, the Iranians sent many an unambiguous message.

This political strategy should have been happening in the first two years in Iraq. Instead the Shia were too elevated (an obvious and understandable danger which should have topped the list of political concerns among the post-invasion Coalition hierarchy), and now we are dealing with Sunnis with blood on their hands who should have been killed straightaway before they infected their brethren. Still the wheels have turned. The point of momentum is not far away. It may seem like poetry, but one last push should would could might do it. Or should we call that a "surge"?