Opinion: Incorporating lessons from Iraq

Rather than destroying a country in order to save it, turn to the hard slog of nation-building.

Mort Rosenblum November 10, 2009 06:55Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

An explosion rocks Baghdad during air strikes March 21, 2003. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

PARIS, France — Early in 2003, in liberated Basra, traffic blocked my monster GMC so I bumped over a divider to hang a U-turn. My sidekicks, Mohammed and Mohammed, were appalled.

Iraq lay in ruin, with thousands dead. But my friends’ families had taught them civility and social order, even under an evil dictator. I was an alien scofflaw.

After years in an altered reality — survival of the foulest — an impromptu U-turn might explode a booby trap or spark some loony at a checkpoint to open fire.

Basra comes to mind whenever someone far away proposes to exit quagmire by declaring victory and going home.

Going home, eventually, is pretty much inevitable, as it was in Vietnam and will be in Afghanistan. But that is rarely victory.

Outsiders can bust up a place, hand the keys to new masters and skulk out a back door. Yet without regard to human nature, geopolitical theory is only wishful thinking.

The younger Mohammed and his dance-loving sisters were happy in school. Their father’s salary bought an SUV, food and fancy electronics. He cursed Saddam in private so no one troubled him.

The older Mohammed, a petroleum engineer, hurried home from self-exile in Sweden after the invasion. He wanted to help build that better Iraq so many expected at the outset.

Both moved quickly from disillusionment to disgust and then on to despair.

Young Mohammed’s sisters stayed home behind locked doors. Rumor had it that gangs of toughs, masking twisted libido with religious fervor, carried off schoolgirls.

Before long, this was more than rumor, and that was a minuscule sidelight to all the rest. Look around post-surge Iraq today.

No one today can say within the nearest 100,000 how many noncombatants have died needlessly since 2003. Each faction has its army. Corruption is incalculable.

Iraqis have developed those first crude homemade bombs into a global phenomenon, ubiquitous in Afghanistan and now spreading to East Asia, South America and Africa.

During Vietnam, Peter Arnett found an American major in the smoldering remains of a provincial capital. “So,” he asked, “you had to destroy the town in order to save it?”

That Ben Tre logic applies to Basra, Baghdad and most of Iraq. The metaphor is stretched in Kabul, already half-trashed by warring homeboys, but the lesson is dead clear.

The point is not how many foreign troops patrol territory that humbled Genghis Khan and Alexander. Afghans need the opposite of musclebound military thinking.