Who Is Losing Iraq?

After the Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar--who served as both the Tommy Franks and L. Paul Bremer of that operation--had serious pacification problems. A particularly violent revolt occurred in the town of Uxellodunum. "Caesar saw his work in Gaul could never be brought to a successful conclusion if similar revolts were allowed to break out," wrote his friend Aulus Hirtius. "So he decided to deter all others" by cutting off the hands of the prisoners taken at Uxellodunum and sending the survivors out across Gaul as an object lesson. Hirtius concluded, "The situation was now everywhere satisfactory."

Iraq, like Gaul, is divided into three parts--and the U.S. has more serious pacification problems, and a less vivid set of pacification options, than Caesar did. The Bush Administration says the country is largely quiet--but a successful guerrilla war doesn't require much more than a fervent handful of fighters. In Iraq there are on average a dozen attacks against American soldiers each day. There are countless acts of sabotage. There is massive theft of oil, copper (from power lines) and electrical equipment. And there are the now weekly high-profile terrorist acts, like the bombing of the U.N. headquarters two weeks ago and of a shrine in Najaf last week.

Indeed, a depressing array of defense and foreign policy experts, including members of the uniformed military, have quietly concluded that postwar Iraq is the most vexing theater of operations the American military has faced since Vietnam. Even if Saddam Hussein is captured or killed, most experts (outside the Pentagon) believe that the restoration of order will be extremely difficult. Jihadist terror, organized criminality and internecine religious violence are likely to continue. For the immediate future, this is where George Bush's war on terrorism is being fought--and this is where his political future may be decided.

Last week the President restated the obvious: retreat is not an option. Iraq cannot be left an anarchic, terrorist state. Every major Democrat running for President, including Howard Dean, agrees--and most go further than Bush, asserting that more money and manpower are needed to secure the peace. But the President has stubbornly resisted sharing with the American people a detailed assessment of the situation in Iraq: the fact that we may still be there a decade from now at a cost of hundreds of billions. The Pentagon--the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, that is--stubbornly insists that it retain control of all aspects of the Iraq operation and that no increased manpower is needed. Oddest of all, the Pentagon retains its neoconservative fantasy that Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress--who misled the Administration on weapons of mass destruction and on the rose petals that would greet the American liberators--may yet be coronated leader of a population that barely knows who he is.