"Exit strategy" was the perfect watchword for voluntary American retreat in the Near East and southwest Asia. To break and run before inferior numbers of poorly equipped, tactically ineffective maniacs; abandoning the millions who eagerly stepped forward, braving threats and assaults to defend a concept of self-determination to which they'd barely been acquainted; and to thwart the purpose of deposing such manufacturers of horror as the Ba'athists and Taliban; all so easy with this geopolitical glancing at one's watch, the consummate failure of honor and responsibility never made to sound more reasonable. The phrase, a favorite of the relativist opposition to peace through assertive democratization, found its way into the campaign platform of President Bush's opponent and even after John Kerry's defeat, pops up here and there in the work of leftists, pragmatists and parochialists who prefer a more analgesic way to tell us that those oppressed aren't worth it.
Until the 30th of January Iraq's terrorist enemies could take heart, knowing that the political adversaries of the man promising a committed American military presence had more faith in the roadside bomb and drive-by shooting than citizen soldiers who would ask for no more than, in the words of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, "enough land to bury our dead." But on the 30th Iraqis took the day. The impression of nothing but base gangsterism to the thugs in their midst was confirmed in flesh as the very cowards were interviewed. Each day afterward saw reconstruction and recruitment continue in the face of scattered, flagging attacks; and independent Iraqi spirit, long-since emergent, was nearing commensuration to its charge.
And then the head of the American Central Command finally said it: the terrorists are losing.
The terrorists lolled, as we now know, in agreement. "Exit strategy" is now a consideration of our enemy. The Financial Times of London reported first on the Ba'athist "dead-enders" having found their namesake. A Guardian report now details what had been evident for some time — that these carnivores hunted in concert out of greed, a pack only until lean times:
The Iraqi resistance has peaked and is "turning in on itself," according to recent intelligence reports from Baghdad received by Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. ...The talks are aimed at driving a wedge between so-called Iraqi nationalist elements of the resistance and radical Islamic militants."We know there is a considerable degree of animosity between the various groups that comprise the resistance and that is an opportunity for us," said one security source.
Some on the left, oblivious to past and present fact, are still foraging for doubt and moral abdication; some parochialists still cling to the misnomer of "realist" they've heretofore had reserved, trying to revive an argument won in practical success by the "idealists." They claim that democracy is not an end unto itself, that failure and fortune is a perfect reason to discount the discrepancy between those in Iraq who wish to leave the history of authoritarianism and those who revel in it — a discrepancy that is numerically staggering and utterly lopsided in measure of ambition.
I've said that "strongmen will conspire with strongmen for selfish acquisition whenever opportune." In Iraq, it is no longer opportune; and because "methodologies are window-dressing," and the greatest power an operator accepts is himself, self-preservation and singular gain will prevail, tearing the successively beset seditionists to pieces.
Iraqis have proved their self-abnegation. The arrival of liberal politics in Iraq, so long disbelieved, its prediction mocked, has received the listless disdain of a gentry press. What of house and blood? Maybe the Iraqi assembly will go off in calumnious fireworks, we can read between the lines; but probably not and anyway, nobody at the bureau would really hope for that, would they? As before, a disconnection from history. That Iraqis would be so lucky to form an elected body in two months, and not the three years once ago endured while a lame writ allowed a certain headless, war-torn confederation to plot and squabble and fight. What's sixty days to sixty years — or six millenia, since no one until now asked a Mesopotamian how he wished to be governed? Lost amid Western impatience is how fittingly Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds have been forced to work with one another; even though they, like the caricatured "pork-barrel spenders" of the United States Congress, must consider the narrower agendas of their precincts. Let the cynics, aristocrats and Savagists have at it. Iraqis are free, and what free men have is a bond thicker than kin.
