Iraq, four years later

Editorial

This week marked the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq. However one might have perceived this fight four years ago, the field has shifted irrevocably and no realistic observer sees the possibility of success.

What United States President George Bush calls a "cut and run" policy is increasingly supported by a large number of Americans – and Iraqis.

A Gallup poll released this week says that 77 per cent of Jewish Americans believe going to war was a mistake. A slim majority of all Americans – 52 per cent – agree.

These numbers are dramatic, though perhaps somewhat deceptive. Americans who believe the war was a bad idea from the outset are probably disproportionately concentrated on the urban east and west coasts, where most American Jews live.

Moreover, the question itself may be distorted. Given what we know now – which is that the premises for launching this war were fabricated by the administration – who wouldn't alter their perceptions?

But there is probably another factor in play, which is that Jewish Americans, who have probably paid closer attention to Middle East affairs than other Americans, know a lost cause when they see one.

This is not a hopeful reality. If American (and their limited allied) forces are the only things (barely) standing in the way of unleashed full civil war and catastrophic mayhem, their presence serves a purpose, whether or not the crisis is of the Americans' own devising. Still, postponing the inevitable – at the cost of hundreds, maybe thousands, more American lives – means steadfastness is madness.

For America, the repercussions are vast. If Vietnam caused a massive domestic social upheaval – including the disastrous physical and mental damage to thousands of veterans who returned to an ungrateful country ashamed of a misdirected, failed war – we have seen nothing yet.

A country that spent the past six decades perfecting state-of-the-art technological weaponry to fight battles on land, sea, in the air and in space, ended the Cold War as victors and stood as the world's sole superpower, was brought to its knees domestically by a dozen zealots with Xacto knives and internationally by a cave-dwelling madman. What America did not learn in Vietnam – that even the world's mightiest armies are of limited effect against cadres of fanatics who abide by no rules of engagement and welcome death – it must surely have now learned in Iraq.

So, what is the answer for Iraq? It's not an answer possessed by the United States and its "coalition of the willing." And no amount of young American and Iraqi lives will change that.

All of this is no less horrifying than the fact that defeat of the Americans in Iraq almost certainly means victory for Iran in the region. A nuclear-ambitious terrorist theocracy set on the destruction of Jews in Israel and elsewhere, Iran is the main source of support for the insurgency in Iraq and much of that in Palestine and the rest of the world. Worse than what a pullout would say about Iraq is what it will mean vis-à-vis Iran.

While American public opinion is surely moving against the war, Canadian public opinion has its own curiosities. Always against this war, Canadians have watched, somewhat smugly, from the sidelines.

But, on the issue of the broader Middle East, Canadians have some contradictory tendencies, according to contrasting recent polls. Eighty per cent of Canadians believe that Iran poses a direct threat to Israel. Another poll, a worldwide BBC survey, finds that only 27 per cent of Canadians think Israel is a positive force in the world. Perhaps this explains why, though the Iranian president's threat of nuclear annihilation of Israel is realistic and believable, most Canadians are no more exercised about it than they were about the threat of Hitler in the 1930s.

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