Last week saw an important victory in Iraq. After a tough battle -- including a first half that was fought to a scoreless standstill -- al-Quwa Jawiya won the nation’s first post-Saddam soccer championship. The match featured other notable victories in addition to that celebrated by the winning side and its supporters: the game actually took place in spite of crushing violence throughout the country, no fighting took place during the match, and the player who accidentally netted an own-goal for losing side Al-Meena can thankfully not expect to be executed by Saddam’s late son Uday, the sadistic former minister for sport.
But as far as victories go in Iraq, this one is particularly noteworthy only because of the absence of other meaningful accomplishments there lately.
Indeed, it seems there’s not much good news to report in Iraq. According to iCasualties.org, which monitors combat deaths in Iraq, the United States has so far suffered between one-fifth and one-quarter of all its battle dead in the months since the second George W. Bush term began in January 2005. It would perhaps be unfair to type from the relative safety of my living room in our nation's capital that the situation in Iraq is worsening. I can’t say for sure. But it’s safe to say that it’s not getting much better – if at all.
This also seems to be the conclusion reached by a small but growing number of bipartisan members of Congress, who are increasingly calling for the administration to articulate and hasten an exit strategy.
Bush, for his part, has declared as recently as a couple of weeks ago that we’ll stay until we accomplish our goals there. But these claims mean little, given the president’s dual habits of yelling “Goooooooool!” at inappropriate times and moving the goalposts so close that, in the end, no goal is logically out of reach. (How many times can the president trumpet our trifling ability to build schools?)
If we aren’t retreating yet, our goals in Iraq and the region have seen a steady dimunution for some time. As the invasion commenced Bush defined our mission as one “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Those goals gradually shrank: we were there “to see the Iraqi people in charge of Iraq for the first time in generations." And, since first stating so in his inaugural address, the Bush team has been hammering home the decidedly amorphous goal that our troops are slogging along “to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way."
The absence of clear goals -- especially ones actually worth fighting for, continued violence and the growing call for an exit strategy present a clear challenge to anyone still defending our presence in Iraq. And these issues bring up a question that all but answers itself: how -- if at all -- would victory look any different than defeat?
At this point it seems pretty clear that victory in Iraq will look much like defeat might have looked two years ago. Iraq as an ally of Iran? The country a haven for terrorists? Democracy absent liberty? These are no longer possibilities, they’re likelihoods. And from these presumably follows that victory in two years would look like today's defeat, and victory in four years will look like defeat in summer 2006.
If, like our goals, victory itself is becoming more and more meaningless -- and more like defeat would have looked a few hundred days before -- our Iraq policy has but one direction to go. We mustn’t simply formulate an exit strategy, we must exit. Now.
Like social security, public education, and the drug war, the difficulties or failures of a government program are not reason to continue (or increase funding for) that government program. The opposite is true, libertarians know. Clearly, the loss of hundreds or thousands of American lives over the next decade to, among other things, help Iraqis "find their own voice" is an absurd and illogical pursuit.
Leaving Iraq now would have negative consequences for the U.S. at home and abroad. But any benefits of staying are far outweighed by the enormous costs: thousands of American lives and billions of dollars spent.
That today's victory may well look like yesterday's defeat in Iraq is reason enough to call off the whole mess. It’s time to call our players off the pitch, pat them on the back, and let the Iraqis score -- or give up -- their own goals.
