As the death toll for the Iraq War continues to climb and President Bush decides to ramp up the U.S. commitment there instead of ramping it down, public support for the war has taken a nosedive in the past year. The latest USA Today/Gallup poll gives Bush a 72% disapproval rating on his handling of Iraq.
Politicians and pollsters are now lining up to declare themselves in essentially two separate camps:
- The camp that says we made a mistake going into Iraq
- The camp that says we were right to go into Iraq, but have done a poor job of it
When we put ourselves into George W. Bush’s (most likely fake) cowboy boots, we generally ask ourselves if we would have made the same decision back then as he did. The alternatives are generally framed as a messy, violent situation where Saddam Hussein remains in power, or a messy, violent situation where Saddam Hussein isn’t in power.
But I think the real acid test on the war is this: would you still have invaded Iraq if the United States had easily and decisively won the conflict?
Let’s pretend that instead of the smoldering ruin we have now, Iraq is now a functioning, albeit dodgy, democracy. Let’s pretend that those looters never tore Baghdad to shreds in the days immediately following the fall of Saddam, and that the radical Islamists never gained any traction with their insurgency. Let’s pretend that, instead of 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, the total casualty list right now is merely in the hundreds or the low thousands. Knowing all this… if you had the opportunity to jump in a time machine right now, would you still choose to invade Iraq?
The point I’m trying to make is that fair-weather war supporters piss me off. If you’re going to support the war, then support the fucking war and take responsibility for it.
Did you support the invasion of Iraq back before the death toll started to climb, and then change your mind when it was your kid or your friend or your neighbor that lost a leg? Did you support the decision to destabilize the region and send U.S. troops into harm’s way only because you thought we’d kick ass and take names? Did you support the war because you thought it would be easy? What did you think would happen when the tanks started rolling in and the missiles started flying? Did you really buy that line about us being greeted as liberators?
I’m a little worried about attacking straw men here, simply because I don’t know anyone personally who’s made such a turnaround. Almost everyone I’ve had discussions with about the Iraq War opposed it to some degree from the beginning. But these fair-weather war supporters have to be out there. The approval numbers have gone from 76% in April 2003 down to their current 26% today. What could account for these numbers other than people who supported the war because they thought it would be a cakewalk?
News flash: war is hell. It’s always hell. Details at 11.
We the public get a rather distorted picture of war from the coverage we see on TV. We look at the first Persian Gulf War and think that that was pretty easy, only a few hundred casualties, we could deal with that again — forgetting that tens of thousands of Iraqis died, some of them buried alive by Gen. Schwarzkopf’s bulldozers. We look back at the NATO bombing of Kosovo as an altogether successful mission, forgetting the thousands of casualties we incurred there too. (Take that last link with large heaps of salt, seeing as it comes from a website called slobodan-milosevic.org.) And don’t forget that for every death you hear about, there are another five amputees you don’t.
So if you were going to support the Iraq War back in 2003, you should have expected carnage. You should have expected instability. When you’re supporting the decision to go to war, that’s what’s on the table. Any war that doesn’t cause such things is an aberration. Let’s put it in Dungeons & Dragons terms: Going to war is a 1d20 roll, where any result from 2-20 equals massive amounts of painful, painful death, no matter who the winner is.
I’m not claiming that there’s never justification for war. You’ve got your Hitlers and your Napoleons who need pacifying, and sometimes the only way to do it is at the barrel of a gun. I might have been ready to support going after Saddam if I didn’t think he could be contained through nonviolent means.
Just make sure that if you vote for war, you’re ready for the carnage. You’re ready to accept the consequences of losing or winning Pyrrhically. And don’t cry ignorance later when things go sour.
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(What did I think before the war? I opposed it from the start, though I admit I once supported the invasion of Afghanistan, which I’m no longer sure I agree with either. But even opposing the war, I still thought we would win it with a minimum of casualties to either side. I say this not to be a self-righteous asshole, but to set the record straight for the inevitable question.)
(Okay, so I do want to be a self-righteous asshole, just a little bit.)