The Iraq Oversight

With the incoming Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, backing Rep. John "Redeploy From Iraq to Okinawa" Murtha to be House majority leader, evidence is growing that the Democrats are going to try to address the Battle of Iraq earlier rather than later in the 110th Congress. With one of the nation's leading conservative columnists, George Will, calling Iraq "arguably the worst foreign-policy disaster in U.S. history," it looks like Iraq is going to be flyspecked from many angles. Yesterday, President Bush met with members of the Iraq Study Group he has appointed to take a fresh look at the issue. We welcome all the scrutiny. While the Congress proved in 1975 that it can be dangerous, the victory camp has a strong case to make and could yet come out of this process the winner.

Our GIs, for starters, have made enormous achievements in Iraq. A wicked dictator, Saddam Hussein, has been removed from power, tried by his countrymen for his crimes, and sentenced to the gallows. And the Iraqi people have astonished the doubters by voting three times in their first free elections in generations. In January 2005, 8 million of them voted for a temporary parliament.* In October 2005, about 9.8 million Iraqis voted in a referendum and by an overwhelming margin approved a new constitution. In December 2005, nearly 12 million Iraqis voted for parliament. Iraq now has a free press and the beginnings of a capitalist economy, where little more than three years ago both the press and commerce had been controlled by Saddam's Baathist regime.

If this ranks as a disaster, well, we can only surmise that those who call it such weren't particularly committed at the start. It is true that America has lost nearly 3,000 of its GIs and that every combat fatality is a sadness of infinite dimensions. But measured against our population, our mission, and our gross national product, this war has been less of an infinite sadness than any of our other struggles, including Vietnam, to which Iraq is often compared. For all the efforts of the left wing to marshal on Capitol Hill a phalanx of soldiers to protest and testify against the war, the evidence suggests that the vast majority of our volunteer military supports the war.

Nor, for all the trumpets being sounded for retreat, is Iraq ready for American forces to withdraw. It's true that enemy insurgents are making life difficult for their countrymen. But contrary to the counsels of the left and Mr. Will, Iraq could get a lot worse. If that happens, the Democrats who now control Congress will bear a portion of the responsibility. As recently as October 30 in London, a former deputy prime minister of free Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, warned that if American troops leave immediately, "things will get much worse." He said Iraq could devolve into sectarian cleansing resulting in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. Nor is Mr. Chalabi a shill for the administration. In the first number of this newspaper, issued April 16, 2002, Mr. Chalabi warned in a page one interview that American planning for post-war Iraq was "abysmal" and of the possibility of widespread looting if military police were not trained.

Consider such catastrophes as Darfur, Rwanda, or Bosnia, places where widespread massacres or humanitarian disasters have taken place for lack of international intervention. If such a disaster took place in Iraq after Americans decided to leave, to whom would the blame attach? The same American left that blamed Ariel Sharon for the massacre of Lebanese and Palestinian Muslims by Lebanese Christians at Sabra and Shatilla would make America culpable for the massacre of Iraqi Sunnis by Iraqi Shiites, and vice versa.

The damage of a hasty, Murtha-type retreat could well extend beyond Iraq to American shores and to American interests. The deputy police commissioner for counter terrorism in New York, Richard Falkenrath, said of Iraq last week in an interview with the Sun: "If we withdraw and the country collapses, it can become another training ground, a failed state awash in weapons and explosives." The Web log Talisman Gate, maintained by New York Sun columnist Nibras Kazimi, posted recent comments by the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who told Americans, "We have not quenched our thirst for your blood," and warned, "We shall not rest from jihad until we … blow-up the House of Filth known as the White House."

This is one of the points President Bush understands. If we retreat, they will follow us, he warns. None of this is to argue for a permanent American occupation of Iraq. A successful outcome will be measured in part, by the success of the Iraqis in assuming the defense and policing of their own country, though it took Japan and Germany many years. No doubt the entire project would have been better with a stronger role for Iraqis from the beginning. But whatever one thinks of the American decision to invade Iraq to begin with, the thing to remember is that things could get worse. Oversight from the new Congress represents an opportunity for the administration to join with those hawks among the newly empowered Democrats to make the case for a policy of victory.

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* Wrote Mr. Will after that vote: "It is a humbling privilege for the rest of us to share the planet with the defiant Iraqis who campaigned and voted, and the coalition's superb warriors who made voting possible."