March 19 marked the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq. People on all sides of the aisle admit by now that this war,
or at least the way it was fought, was a terrible mistake.
What is there to say on a grim anniversary of what has become
the largest American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam?
The initial reaction from many students at UCLA is “I told
you so.” While this may be therapeutic, it will do nothing to
help the safety of American troops and the hope for some form of
fragile peace in a war-torn country.
The president has an approval rating of 36 percent; the American
people have clearly lost faith in a commander in chief that even
conservatives are now abandoning. People on all sides are looking
for an answer they know the current leadership cannot provide.
The simple answer many proposed is to bring the troops home. If
Iraq erupts into civil war, this may happen anyway. Donald Rumsfeld
himself asserted at a recent Senate hearing that it would be
primarily Iraqi security forces, not Americans, that would fight in
the event of civil war. And without American support, it would take
a miracle for the newly formed government to stay in power.
In the all but inevitable power vacuum, it is likely that a
religious autocrat would take power, with the Kurds forming an
autonomous state. This would greatly expand the power of Iran,
which is already a threat to world peace. This growing power would
also threaten Saudi Arabia and Israel, our chief allies in the
region. The growing instability would facilitate terrorism far more
than Saddam Hussein ever did.
But staying in Iraq will become less and less of an option as
time progresses. Many on the right say that America has already
done its job, and it’s not the U.S.’s fault if Iraq
collapses into civil war. This is a direct contradiction to Colin
Powell’s reference to the Pottery Barn rule in regards to
Iraq: If you break it, you own it.
It seems that we may break Iraq into pieces and abandon putting
it back together again. America is forced to choose between the
death of our own soldiers and the continuing deaths of people we
tried to save.
And though we may still be forced to make this terrible
decision, there is one final thing that the U.S. can do before we
leave, something that we rarely do.
Imagine that we lived in a country with the political and moral
strength to recognize our mistakes and that we did this in an
effort to show real leadership and humility as part of a true world
community. We need to apologize for going after nonexistent weapons
of mass destruction, for ignoring the advice of the rest of the
world, and for an imperial hubris that made a desperate situation
even worse. We need to admit that we were wrong, and that we are
sorry.
There will always be foreign policy challenges that require our
leadership, leadership that the world still needs. We need to work
with the rest of the world and become a partner rather than a
superpower. We need to calm the hatred for our country that has
grown since the Iraq invasion because we might need help dealing
with future conflicts.
If we choose to end this sad chapter in our history, we need to
learn from our mistake.
Savage is a second-year political science student at Lewis
and Clark University in Portland, Ore.