WHY OUR DEFEAT IN IRAQ IS INEVITABLE

A recent Gallup poll shows that 63 percent of the American people want a timetable set for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2008. In that same poll, 56 percent said that the Iraq War was a mistake. These results are mirrored by numerous other polls taken since at least the beginning of 2006, if not earlier, and were ratified by the election results last November. Clearly, the American people have turned against the Iraq War and this opposition is what is now driving the political debate in Washington.

We have seen this all before. In Korea and Vietnam, two large-scale, limited wars that were fought at great cost without the benefit of a Congressional declaration of war and that, over time, seemed unwinnable in any traditional sense, the American people eventually came to oppose the war, which resulted in the political pressure necessary to bring each to an end. The wars in Korea, Vietnam and, now, Iraq all validate an important fact about the American people's ability to wage limited wars. Americans have no stomach for long, bloody and, seemingly inconclusive wars. In the Summer of 1974, Larry Elowitz and John W. Spanier wrote an article for Orbis magazine called "Korea and Vietnam: Limited War and the American Political System". Their words written in that Summer of Watergate echo eerily down to the war being fought in our own time:

"...if a limited war continues beyond a point in time where the probability of victory is invalidated by battlefield events and for perceived Administration failure to reach a settlement, public opinion, as evidenced by the polls, will express a decline in support for the President, continued war costs, and war policy in general. There will also be a concomitant rise in the intensity of Congressional dissent. These two lines, a declining curve of public support and a rising level of Congressional opposition 'lock-in' the President, restricting his ability to maneuver and conduct the war successfully".

The current debate over the so-called "surge" is just the latest example of what Elowitz and Spanier were writing about more than thirty years ago. President Bush is attempting to achieve battlefield conditions that can lead to a political settlement in Iraq, but he is being denied the flexibility and maneuvering space necessary to achieve that goal. Just like Truman and Eisenhower in Korea and Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam, Bush is being pushed into a corner from which he cannot escape, except by conceding that the war cannot be won. In Korea, due to the unique geographical conditions of the country, a stalemate was achievable because the opposing armies held a World War I-style line of trenches stretching across the entire peninsula. The Chinese and North Koreans were finally willing to accede to a cease-fire because they knew that they could not achieve anything more by continued war. In Vietnam, since much of the war was being fought by units passing back and forth over porous borders between the two Vietnams and the border with Cambodia, no such stalemate was possible. The North Vietnamese knew they merely had to wait for our troops to leave and our support of the government of South Vietnam to end before they could take the country by conventional invasion and occupation.

In Iraq, the same porous border conditions that hampered our ability to win in Vietnam exist, with terrorists and their equipment travelling back and forth between Iraq and Iran, as well as Syria and, perhaps, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. While we can achieve short-term victories in limited geographical areas, we cannot hope to seal the borders of a country so large, and with so many neighboring governments either willing to look the other way when jihadists cross into Iraq, or are actively aiding them in their endeavors.

So, President Bush looks to obtain a strong bargaining position for himself and our allied Iraqi government to convince those other governments that they must acquiesce to the current, pro-American political structure of Iraq. But, as Elowitz and Spanier wrote, that will not turn the domestic situation around, in fact, just the opposite will happen. "A limited war aimed at attaining and eventual bargaining position with the enemy rather than traditional conceptions of victory will unleash divisive and partisan pressures" across America. This, of course, has already happened. And, with those divisive and partisan pressures curtailing his ability to maneuver, the enemy knows that they can continue to fight, confident in the belief that, eventually, this President or the next will call a halt to American involvement in the war.

As in Vietnam in 1968, we have long since passed the point when a military solution could be achieved that would leave a politically acceptable situation for America on the ground. As in Vietnam, with no political will to attack the sponsors of the insurgents in a way that would defeat them and, in fact, with just the opposite sentiment held by the majority of the American people and their representatives in Congress, there is no longer any possibility of victory in Iraq. It is simply a matter of time. If this President is unwilling to remove American troops from Iraq, then the people will elect a President in 2008 who will be willing.

In Korea in 1953, an accident of geography gave us a politically acceptable stalemate. Today in Iraq, as in Vietnam, we have no such luck. The American people, in the words of Robert Endicott Osgood, in his book "Limited War", think of war "as something to abolish, war as something to get over as quickly as possible, war as a means of punishing the enemy who dared to disturb the peace, war as a crusade...these conceptions are all compatible with the American outlook. But war as an instrument for attaining concrete, limited political objectives, springing from the continuing stream of international politics and flowing toward specific configurations of international power, somehow this conception seems unworthy to a proud and idealistic nation". This limitation of the American ability to wage war caused us to give up in Vietnam, and will cause us, inevitably, to give up in Iraq.