Democrashield.com

Republicans don’t understand Iraq.

How do most of us see Iraq? We see a complex struggle involving a variety of different actors—US troops, militias, terrorist groups, insurgents, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military. We see a political and a military confrontation, a battle fought on the ground and in the parliament. We see some progress, but not nearly enough relative to the massive level of violence.

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t see the reality on the ground. They brush off the political aspect of the conflict and the limitations of military force. They dismiss the various factions in Iraq, as well as their alliances and enemies—more often than not, conservatives simply lump all of them together into one group.

In other words, Republicans see Iraq as a chess game, a two-sided black-and-white battle of wills. Their view of Iraq boils down to “staying is winning and leaving is losing.”

Their perceptions, their talking points, their arguments, their expectations, all of it is based on this one overly-simplistic meme. As long as we’re in Iraq, we’re winning; as soon as we start to pull out, we’re losing.

This also explains the recent Iraq-Vietnam comparisons among Republicans—they see Vietnam the same way.

To them, we didn’t lose Vietnam because of poor leadership that left us with no good options; we didn’t lose because we were massively outnumbered; we didn’t lose because the Viet Cong were willing to suffer massive casualties; we didn’t lose because the Viet Cong knew the terrain and could easily hide among the populace, giving them a strategic advantage. No, to conservatives, America lost because we gave up—because the anti-war movement pressured Congress to withdraw from Vietnam. They ignore the reality on the ground in favor of their overly-simplistic battle-of-wills viewpoint—had we just stayed in Vietnam, we would have won.

Now, like then, they believe staying is winning and leaving is losing, no matter what the reality on the ground is. Just like in Vietnam, when things end badly in Iraq they won’t blame the people who started and mismanaged the war—they’ll blame the people who opposed it. And if things actually end up going well in Iraq, they’ll likely credit themselves for it.

Let’s examine two extremes. If we withdraw from Iraq and the country falls into a bloody, violent, destructive, regional civil war, conservatives will say war opponents are responsible for forcing Congress to pull out of Iraq. But, all the way on the other end of the spectrum, if we pull out and Iraq turns into a stable, peaceful democracy, conservatives will say they were right all along to want to invade and democratize Iraq, and the war opponents were foolish defeatists who didn’t believe success was possible.

I’ve written on the surge before, and we’ve seen some military success and no political success. Atrios and MissLaura wrote about this, and I agree wholeheartedly with them.

Putting more troops in Iraq has reduced violence, to some degree, which was completely expected—more troops mean a greater ability to fight extremists, that’s common sense. But what most of the right-wing doesn’t understand is that Iraq cannot be fixed militarily—preventing this car bomb or killing a few more militants in Baghdad will not fix Iraq.

Remember, the original justification for the surge was to reduce violence in Baghdad so the Iraqi government could start making political progress. So far, we’ve only been able to accomplish half of that. Without a cooperative, functioning government, Iraq won’t be able to stop their downward spiral into bloody, raging violence—especially when you consider that the U.S. won’t be able to maintain the surge much longer, according to our government’s own estimates.

So, conservatives are quick to point out the moderate military successes in Iraq as proof of the surge’s victory, ignoring the Bush administration’s stated purpose in implementing the surge—giving Iraq’s government the time to make political progress. And as long as conservatives maintain their unrealistic, simplistic stance on Iraq, they will never understand the reality on the ground, they will never be able to acknowledge our failings and understand the changes both we and the Iraqis need to make.

Simply put, Republicans don’t understand Iraq.