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viewpoints on what's at stake in iraq

Occupying Iraq: lessons from a quagmire

A year ago, President George W. Bush stood before a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to “major combat operations in Iraq.” Yet the conflict in Iraq continues. More U.S. soldiers died there in April, most of them in the cities of Fallujah and Najaf, than during the campaign leading to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Bush’s approval ratings have fallen lately, putting his leadership in question. UCLA Today’s Voices Editor Ajay Singh sought some faculty views on what America’s occupation of Iraq means for U.S. foreign policy, terrorism, American values and the Muslim world.

GRANT NELSON, professor of law:

A lot of the opposition to the war in Iraq is simply a surrogate for the hatred of George W. Bush, which goes back to the 2000 presidential election. Still, in hindsight, I wish the war had been cleaner. We probably should have put in more troops and retained the Iraqi army. In a certain perverse way, it’s reassuring there aren’t any weapons of mass destruction, but I don’t think Bush acted in bad faith by concluding they were there — even Clinton thought so.

Iraq is often inaptly compared to Vietnam, where we could have won if we had the political will. Whether Iraq is a morass, I don’t know. But is the overall Iraq project the wrong decision? I don’t think so. I supported Clinton’s decision to intervene in Kosovo, even though the United Nations did not sanction it. And just as we did the right thing in Kosovo, our intervention in Iraq is morally justifiable.

Some would argue we’re too heavily supporting Israel. Even if everything Israel does is not in our interest, it’s the only democratic state in the area. Besides, this war has eliminated a very significant threat to Israel from one of the world’s most heinous dictators, an evil man. Yes, we once supported Saddam Hussein, but that’s realpolitik.

What now? Even sensible people on the left say we shouldn’t cut and run. We can’t create a power vacuum in Iraq. But do we hand over Iraq to the United Nations? It would be nice, but it’s not going to work. We’re going to have to do the job ourselves, with Britain and our other coalition partners.

JOYCE APPLEBY, professor emeritus of history:

As a scholar of early American history, I was among 1,100 historians who petitioned the U.S. Congress on Constitution Day, Sept. 17, 2002, to assume its responsibility to debate and vote on whether or not to declare war on Iraq. The Constitution is clear that Congress has the right to declare war, not the president. At the time, Bush was saying that he might or might not go to the United Nations to seek support for the invasion. He went to Congress asking for permission to use force against Iraq, and Congress gave it.

There is a big difference between a congressional resolution to use force and assuming the responsibility for declaring or not declaring war — and that’s what the Congress is dodging. The Bush administration wants to have it both ways — getting the solidarity and patriotic support for war without dealing with the argumentation and deliberation for declaring war.

I’m not a pacifist, but we have demonstrated in Iraq what a horrible choice violence is. The war in Iraq is not connected to 9/11 — it’s clearly an optional war that could have been averted. It’s very foolish to think that you can introduce 130,000 troops and all the armaments that we’ve introduced in Iraq, and end up with the outcome we want. There are thousands of unintended consequences.

With every poll, so much disgust is mounting to the war. We should be making a much bigger commitment to short- and long-term solutions to problems, such as the neglect of those parts of the world that are in dire poverty and suffering. One of the solutions Bush loathes is to draw on academic experts on the Arab world. They know too much about their subject, and they don’t have the quick, snappy answers his administration is looking for.

RICHARD WALTER, screenwriting chairman, Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media:

What do America bashers hate about America? They hate our culture. They hate our music, our art and especially our movies. They hate what our movies preach, which is, largely, Western, bourgeois, middle-class values that I happen to think are the hope of the world. American popular culture can save the world. Food, clothing, shelter and some of the distractions that people so take to — rock and roll, blue jeans and Chevrolets — can put fundamentalist orthodoxies out of business, be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian.

The other thing America bashers hate about us is what they claim is the American myth: that in this free, democratic society, if you’re poor and humble, if you get educated and work hard, you can rise from your class. I believe this is, in fact, no myth but the reality. At the UCLA film school I see people break into the big time every day, exploiting only their talent and discipline.

By the way, Osama Bin Laden’s father made his fortune by following the American model. He’s not a member of the Saudi royal family — he was a contractor who built palaces and highways to become a multibillionaire. Bin Laden has a rage against his father for this, I say, because it mirrors the American ideal. Likewise, George Bush has a rage against his own father. I can prove none of this, but the reason we’re in Iraq is that Bush wants to make up for what he perceives to be his father’s mistake in not removing Saddam during the first Gulf War. This past year’s events give us pause. Was it a mistake — or wise policy — to stop at the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border in 1992?

I’m a registered Democrat but I supported the war. I really believed there might have been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that it might have had ties to Al Qaeda. I believed what Bush said. Now I’m convinced that it wasn’t just bad intelligence, it was good intelligence, and he was lying about it. But now we are in Iraq. We can’t simply pick up and go home tomorrow. This is not Vietnam.

I felt strongly we should get out of Vietnam. I avoided the draft by going to college. Am I ashamed? Yes. I wish I had the courage to turn in my draft card and do what more honorable men did, who believed, as I did, that we shouldn’t be in Vietnam because it’s not the American way to burn villages to save them. And this may not be terribly relevant to our efforts to democratize Iraq, but it’s interesting that communism has failed all around the world — except where we have opposed it militarily: in Vietnam, North Korea, China and Cuba.

VINAY LAL, associate professor of history:

The view that the Bush administration has taken is that although things might not have gone exactly as planned — no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq — the fact that a dictator has been deposed is a sufficiently good outcome, and that despite all the violence of last month, this war still sufficiently qualifies as a “just war.” I disagree. This is a war of aggression — and there’s much more at issue than describing it as illegal and unjust.

The United States has not historically been particularly bound by notions of legality. So when people argue that this is an illegal war, the assumption is that in the ordinary course of things the United States usually follows legal norms, and that in Iraq’s case, it didn’t. But in fact, the United States has consistently violated international law and treated decisions adverse to its own interests with utter contempt. In that sense, this war is part and parcel of a very long-standing American foreign policy.

On the other hand, it’s a bit too simplistic for the left to say that this war is the most aggravated manifestation of American foreign policy gone wrong. There are other factors at play, notably globalization, which isn’t just about the global reach of McDonald’s, Madonna and sports like basketball. What really gets globalized, and is much more insidious, is various forms and categories of knowledge, such as economic and cultural models of development and the “free market.”

Advocates of globalization hold that it’s good for everybody, and in that sense it’s a form of fundamentalism. It tries to operate on a “clean slate” — it wants to wipe out all previous history — and its model is that you become a fulfilled being only when you become a consumer. This contributes to a kind of anxiety among Muslims about what will happen to the Islamic worldview — the notion that Islam provides a certain anchor in life.

EDWIN S. SHNEIDMAN, professor emeritus of thanatology:

No matter what the provocations, a war that confronts the Muslim world is an enormous, history-bending event. It isn’t just the arithmetic of it — Muslims are a large part of the global population. Historically there has been tension between the Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds, which is paradigmatically represented in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Going into Iraq is not the same thing as liberating Paris in World War II. We are a foreign force trying to liberate a country we don’t quite understand. All we have is some sense that Iraq is not united and that it was held together by a brutal dictator.

I don’t hate Bush. As a citizen and a grandfather of a 20-year-old, I fear him. It’s almost as if he and Cheney are a folie à deux, a folly of two. They seem incapable of coming up with radically new ideas, and so does everybody in their inner circle. The only one who comes close is Colin Powell, secretary of state, and he evidently has been marginalized.

This war is not a conservatives versus liberals issue. People who have loyalties to the Republican party tend to defend the president’s policies. I feel we entered this war without proper reflection. Bush has no voices in his inner circle that accurately reflect Iraq’s cultures. The fact that there is no planned exit strategy implies that there is no good exit strategy available. People say the war on terror has to be fought, but we need to appreciate that the nature of war has changed over the past 100 years. There is a whole new concept of suicide bombing, which renders battleships and warplanes obsolete. And when that’s tied to some fervor — religious or otherwise — it’s a very dangerous and disturbing tactic, and we’re stuck with that.