The High Cost of Winning

I was listening to a story on NPR yesterday; a briefing with Sec. Rumsfield and a top general about the war in Iraq. Since this comes from my memory instead of text, my quotes below will be approximate, not literal.

The general was acknowledging that the level of violence in Iraq is basically the same as it was one year ago. There have been ups and downs, but overall, we—the Americans and the new Iraqi government—have failed to improve the security situation in Iraq.

So the general was taking questions, and one reporter asked if we were "winning" the war against the insurgents. The general responded, with some enthusiasm, "Yes, we are winning. And we’ve been winning for some time."

I burst out laughing.

"Sure, we’re winning," I talked back to the radio. "And I bet we’ll still be ‘winning’ in six months, a year from now, five years from now.’" The point is we’ve been talking about how we’re winning since we began this war, from the time Saddam’s statue came down, to Bush’s "Mission Accomplished" moment, to the battle of Fallujah, to the elections, to the current rash of bombings and attacks. We keep on ‘winning,’ and Americans and Iraqis keep dying, every day.

It’s no surprise that military leadership is going to put the best possible spin on the story. And I’m sure there is an argument to be made that we are seeing progress. There was an election, of sorts, and even though the Iraqis haven’t yet (as of this writing) managed to form a working government, it’s likely that they will … although its effectiveness will be an open question. [Oops, events have overtaken me. NPR is reporting that the Iraqis have finally formed a government, although key posts are still not filled. Close enough for horseshoes, I guess.]

There probably is an acute feeling in the Bush Administration that spin control is necessary, now more than ever. After all, earlier this week, the final in a long line of "No WMDs in Iraq" report was filed by the CIA, this one concluding that the last thin reed of hope for pro-war apologists, the theory that Saddam had somehow sent his WMDs to Syria, was not supported by any evidence. In addition, the report warned that those who had been involved in WMDs program in past years (pre-First Iraq War) are now unemployed and probably looking for work. Boy, doesn’t that make you feel safer?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7634313/

And then the story came out that an annual report on terrorism had been censored to exclude data on terrorist attacks, perhaps due to the fact that it would have reported that terrorism, worldwide, is up. "The number of serious international terrorist incidents more than tripled last year, according to U.S. government figures, a sharp upswing in deadly attacks that the State Department has decided not to make public in its annual report on terrorism due to Congress this week," said a story in the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content//article/2005/04/26/AR2005042601623.html

So that whole "fight them there so we don’t have to fight them elsewhere" argument seems not to be working out so well…

I can’t pretend to have any answers to what we should do now in Iraq. Even Howard Dean recently said we should stay there and finish the job, because the alternative would be worse than the current mess.

All I know is, if this is winning, I hope to God we never see what losing looks like.