Iraq: 'This Abyss of Blood and Darkness'

“The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness . . . is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”

-- HENRY JAMES

I am currently marching through a terrific book, Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," and while the late great historian's focus is on World War I, there is a similarity to the Mess in Mesopotamia that is jarring:

That would be the prolonged and wrenching process of shocking Britain's civilian and military leaders into grasping what the soldiers in the trenches in France well knew: That the war was lost without a dramatic shift in strategy and millions more troops.

This similarity is all the more pungent since Senator Joe Biden said publicly the other day what has been whispered in the corridors of power for some time:

A significant portion of the Bush administration believes that Iraq is lost, it hasn't a clue about how to deal with this monumental screw-up, and the best thing to do is stall for two years and hand off resolution of the war to the next president.

Knowing this kind of takes the suspense out of what President Bush will say in his much-delayed speech on the war on Wednesday barring any more study groups or deck chair shuffling.

After all, what can the president say?

Half measures, such as the 20,000 additional troops that he is said to be contemplating, will not win the day, although the odds are that once the troops go in, they won't be coming home anytime soon. The old "we have to finish the job" thing, ya know.

Full measures that might make a difference in the short term such as 50,000 to 1000,000 troops would be political poison, and this war has been first and foremost about politics.

This is the part of the movie where I note that while no fan of George Bush and his brain trust, I was a supporter of the war early on, albeit a reluctant one.

The war is not a partisan issue for me. I feel no blue-state schadenfreunde for the bloody predicament that the president, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the especially despicable Richard Perle and other neocon warmongers (most of whom have now jumped ship) have gotten my beloved country into.

THE WAR WITHIN THE WAR

One of the most horrifying consequences of the Bush administration's arrogance has been the consequent civil war between Shiite majority and Sunni minority that burst into the open after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, shows no sign of playing itself out nearly a year on, and is the primary reason that the president believes he has no choice but to send more troops to Iraq. Just not enough.

Has the White House been forced to side with the Shiites to bring the civil war to a quicker end? Or is that embrace an outgrowth of its support for and propping up of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, a Shiite, despite his incestuous relationship with the single most toxic element in Iraqi today. That would be the virulent anti-American cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and his loathsome Mahdi Army and its ethnic cleansing death squads?

That's a trick question because the answer is that it really doesn't matter.

The unintended consequences of a botched occupation like the sectarian circus that was Saddam Hussein's execution will reverberate in the Muslim world and splash back on America's global standing for years to come.

And isn't it just extraordinary that a loathsome tyrant is now being hailed as a martyr?

A WATERSHED MOMENT?

Joe Biden has one of the biggest motor mouths on Capitol Hill when it comes to foreign policy, but his blunt assessment -- coupled with a letter to President Bush from newly minted congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi warning that the Democratic majority will not support a troop "surge" -- could be a turning point in the war at home.

I am not suggested that Bush will see the light. He has not taken to heart the stinging rebuke that voters gave him in the mid-term election. (And now even in Utah, the reddest of red states.) He has shunted aside the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which was created to give him the political cover that he has eschewed in pursuing an increasingly lonely course. He has given the finger to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who know that a half-assed troop increase is worse than none. Even at this very late date, he still talks of "victory" in Iraq as if it were some sort of product to which you add water, half bake and get quick results.

What the Democrats can do is to try to force the president's hand knowing that a majority of Americans and a growing number of Republicans see the surge "strategy" as a response staggering in its tepidness and a misuse of precious military forces already stretched to the breaking point.

Cutting off funding for the war would be a very bad idea because it would send the message that the Democrats don't care about the troops in the field, a longtime Republican mantra. Cutting off funding for an escalation is not a half bad idea.

But I have a much better one: Call for a series of no confidence votes on the president and the war. (The last time the Dems tried this they were in the minority and a no-confidence vote on former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld never made it to the floor.)

No matter that such votes might not make a big difference, but they'll weed out the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

That would be a notable beginning for a new Congress whose greatest legacy could be ending a war without end and not allowing it to slop over into a new presidency, one that they want very badly to be Democratic.

(Image by Jackie Morris)