General Petraeus's 'coy mistress'
"Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime."
I THOUGHT of Andrew Marvell and his four-century-old verse when I read that General David Petraeus had said: "I can think of few commanders in history who wouldn't have wanted more troops, more time, or more unity among their partners. However, if I could only have one, at this point in Iraq it would be more time."
But Petraeus's "coy mistress," the broken Iraqi state, is not about to give in. The stated goal of the Bush administration's escalation of the Iraq war is to buy time so that the warring and hostile factions in Iraq can work out acceptable compromises and power sharing. But the Iraqi factions don't want acceptable compromises and power sharing. They want power for themselves.
The escalation that the Bush administration has put so much faith in is not working. As the term Potemkin village came to mean a scrubbed up and presentable façade in czarist Russia, so can the story of the "surge" be summed up in the tale of the McCain market. Earlier this year, Senator John McCain, in remarks that he would later regret, said that progress in Iraq was being underestimated, and that he was able to stroll through a market in total safety. Only later was it revealed that the flak-jacketed McCain was under heavy protection, and that the market was sealed off by troops with helicopters flying overhead to impose a temporary a normalcy that could and would erupt in car bombings, death and chaos the moment the security blanket was removed.
Yes, it might be possible to pacify Iraq with a million-man American army of occupation over a period of 10 to 20 years. But not even that is a given. The military reality, as Colin Powell warned, is that the United States doesn't have a big enough Army to pacify even the city of Baghdad. One neighborhood can be brought to heel for a while, but as soon as the American troops move on security, falls to pieces again.
The political reality is that Americans are fed up with George W. Bush's bold attempt to reorder the Middle East and impose democracy by military force. What has now been so thoroughly revealed as a recklessness born of ignorance and a stubborn unwillingness to know has brought only disaster that cannot be repaired by a few more months or years of undermanned surges.
So world enough and time are not to be for General Petraeus. September, the month in which Petraeus is to report on progress to Congress, is but weeks away. Only days ago pundits were saying that July is the new September, meaning that Congress was moving toward shutting down the war even before the September reckoning. The Economist magazine said in mid-July that "there is not always a particular moment that defines the point of defeat. Yet historians may one day come to look back at this week as the one in which politicians in Washington came to lose faith in the war."
That may be, but historians are probably going to say that the war was lost when the Americans arrived in Baghdad with too few troops, no orders to impose order, and volumes of misguided plans that never took into account the realities of Iraq.
Yet the Bush administration keeps stalling for time. It was first put about that maybe November should be the new September -- as if progress not realized in September might suddenly be revealed in November. Then Ambassador Ryan Crocker tells us that no "service is done either in Iraq or the US by saying again, 'It's going to be OK by November.' " Now we are told maybe it will take until the middle of 2008, or maybe even 2009, before progress can be demonstrated.
There is talk of withdrawing some troops at some time, as a sop to the rising tide of antiwar disgust, but it is clear now that Bush plans to leave this entire mess to his successor.
In an extraordinary reading of the Constitution, Bush scolds Congress for having anything to say about his war, other than giving him a blank check. But with Republicans continuing to defect, Congress will, in the end, do its duty. Petraeus, at his back, might easily hear, "Time's winged chariot hurrying near."
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 