March 19 marked the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. People on all sides of the aisle admit by now that this war, or at least the way it was fought, was a terrible mistake.
What is there to say on a grim anniversary of what has become the largest American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam?
The initial reaction from many students at UCLA is “I told you so.” While this may be therapeutic, it will do nothing to help the safety of American troops and the hope for some form of fragile peace in a war-torn country.
The president has an approval rating of 36 percent; the American people have clearly lost faith in a commander in chief that even conservatives are now abandoning. People on all sides are looking for an answer they know the current leadership cannot provide.
The simple answer many proposed is to bring the troops home. If Iraq erupts into civil war, this may happen anyway. Donald Rumsfeld himself asserted at a recent Senate hearing that it would be primarily Iraqi security forces, not Americans, that would fight in the event of civil war. And without American support, it would take a miracle for the newly formed government to stay in power.
In the all but inevitable power vacuum, it is likely that a religious autocrat would take power, with the Kurds forming an autonomous state. This would greatly expand the power of Iran, which is already a threat to world peace. This growing power would also threaten Saudi Arabia and Israel, our chief allies in the region. The growing instability would facilitate terrorism far more than Saddam Hussein ever did.
But staying in Iraq will become less and less of an option as time progresses. Many on the right say that America has already done its job, and it’s not the U.S.’s fault if Iraq collapses into civil war. This is a direct contradiction to Colin Powell’s reference to the Pottery Barn rule in regards to Iraq: If you break it, you own it.
It seems that we may break Iraq into pieces and abandon putting it back together again. America is forced to choose between the death of our own soldiers and the continuing deaths of people we tried to save.
And though we may still be forced to make this terrible decision, there is one final thing that the U.S. can do before we leave, something that we rarely do.
Imagine that we lived in a country with the political and moral strength to recognize our mistakes and that we did this in an effort to show real leadership and humility as part of a true world community. We need to apologize for going after nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, for ignoring the advice of the rest of the world, and for an imperial hubris that made a desperate situation even worse. We need to admit that we were wrong, and that we are sorry.
There will always be foreign policy challenges that require our leadership, leadership that the world still needs. We need to work with the rest of the world and become a partner rather than a superpower. We need to calm the hatred for our country that has grown since the Iraq invasion because we might need help dealing with future conflicts.
If we choose to end this sad chapter in our history, we need to learn from our mistake.
Savage is a second-year political science student at Lewis and Clark University in Portland, Ore.