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Aug. 4, 2005 - When it dawned on me the other day that I would soon be writing my 100th Shadowland column—this one, in fact—the first thought I had was: "That's enough." It seemed to me, thinking back over the last two and half years, that I had told what were essentially the same stories many times in many different ways. Before the invasion of Iraq, I had warned against the dangers of occupation, the likelihood of civil war and the spawning of new terrorist movements. "After the shock and awe, the sweets and flowers, the anarchy and atrocity, Iraq could well be called disarmed and dangerous," I wrote the week Saddam Hussein's statue was hauled down in Baghdad.

I was wrong about the sweets and flowers. We never saw them. But all the rest came to pass even more quickly and brutally than I’d anticipated. So there is an undertone of sadness and anger, but also of genuine incredulity, that runs through many of the columns. And that just won’t go away. Every day there are new events that hammer home the same essential problem: a basic misreading by this administration of the realities of the Middle East and, because of that, a fundamental negation of common sense.

Giving a speech in Grapevine, Texas, yesterday, at the beginning of another of his “working vacations,” President George W. Bush touched once again those resonant chords of pride and patriotism he plays so well. News had just broken about the 14 Marines killed by a single roadside bomb in Iraq, bringing the military’s two-day toll to 21, and Bush talked about how proud we all are of the soldiers serving there—as indeed we should be. Then, with his good ole boy knack for exasperated disbelief, he told us again why he’s never going to set a deadline for leaving Iraq:

"You know, my—I hear all the time, well, when are you bringing the troops home? And my answer to you is, soon as possible, but not before the mission is complete," reads the White House transcript of his speech. "Why would—why—why would a Commander-in-Chief—(applause)—it makes no sense for the Commander-in-Chief to put out a timetable. We're at war. We're facing an enemy that is ruthless. And if we put out a timetable, the enemy would adjust their tactics."

The president said that “as Iraqis stand up, Americans and coalition forces will stand down.” Meanwhile, democracy is aborning, and he repeated his idea that “a democracy in the heart of the Middle East will be a major blow to [the terrorists’] desire to spread an ideology that's hateful and dark and negative.”

Well, as I’ve found myself saying often over the last couple of years, let’s hope. But the insurgency in Iraq has grown worse, the terrorism (which is related but not always the same) has grown worse. And as that Iraqi Army stands up, you can bet its generals will see democracy as an obstacle in their efforts to crush their enemies. The United States has a record dating back at least a century trying to establish what used to be called “apolitical constabularies” in countries it occupied. But as soon as its local men got strong, and the U.S. military decided it could leave, those locals became strongmen.

Looking back over the 99 previous Shadowland columns, there's a narrative there. The historian Barbara Tuchman might have called it "the march of folly": a story of grand designs with unintended consequences,  the bold strokes of vainglorious men—President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—foiled by the complex nuances of societies that they evidently thought they could dominate without bothering to comprehend. They were going to fight a pre-emptive war to build permanent peace. What they gave us was a war we never needed to fight, and no hint of peace in sight.

In the days and months that followed the invasion of Iraq, as it became obvious there were no weapons of mass destruction, you had to marvel at the twisted logic that led us into the conflict in the first place. For Rumsfeld, I wrote in June 2003, "the absent evidence is, precisely, the proof of the need to invade, conquer and occupy, because only then can you prove what you knew to be true but had no facts to substantiate."
I kept trying to get away from these themes, but the sheer irrationality of the Iraq project kept drawing me back. We had won the war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to all intents and purposes, and we'd thrown that victory away. Then the disheartened American public set about mythologizing the rationales for war until ineluctably, inescapably, the death toll mounted among American soldiers (it surpassed 1,800 this week), Iraqi civilians and journalists. Eventually, as predicted, it also claimed innocent lives in many different corners of the world.
You could see from the start that all of this would have a corrosive effect on American society as occupations are always corrosive for the occupiers. And I tried to give historical context to our experience, drawing on examples as disparate as the Crusades, the Spanish-American War,  the American Civil War,  Central America  (especially El Salvador), Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and, of course, Vietnam. I tried to resist the temptation to oversimplify complexities or gloss over ambiguities  in what truly is a land of shadows.  And the bad news just kept coming, taking its toll on me, on my family—on so many families.

The world has caught up with a lot that I wrote two or three years ago. The misgivings of a few of us in 2002 and 2003 who were immersed in the universe of terrorism and counterterrorism have become the conventional wisdom of the majority today. The big picture is clear enough. So why go on?

For the record.

The same grim lessons keep having to be learned and relearned month after month, but if we keep explaining them, and eventually in fact learning from them, there really may be some reasons to hope.  The Middle East is not all dust and death. Not nearly. Not even Iraq. There are imaginative people trying against all odds to create reasonable futures out of the chaos of today in Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon  and the rest of the troubled Muslim world—which now stretches deep into Europe and the United States. There are nongovernmental organizations—and people at the benighted United Nations—struggling against the odds to impose some order on this chaos.

The record is, precisely, what reminds us that knowing the past is the only reasonable way of gauging the future.  And what the record ought to be telling us right now is that President Bush's refusal to set a clear timetable for a full U.S. and Coalition withdrawal from Iraq is a terrible mistake, and always has been. In the beginning, it was plainly disingenuous. Until the fall of 2003, the Bush administration had no intention of relinquishing control of Iraq, and even the nominal transfer of sovereignty was going to be a process lasting years. As Bush described it in September 2003, there would be a "constitution, elections and then the transfer of authority." Less than two months later, after 61 Coalition troops were killed in the first two weeks of November 2003, the administration completely reversed course and decided to go for sovereignty first—to share blame, if not real authority. By June of last year the situation on the ground in Iraq was so bad, however, that instead of handing over that sovereignty in a solemn public ceremony, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer bumped up the date by a couple of days and made his own very quiet departure look more like a clandestine escape than a graceful exit. Elections came later, in January of this year, and were indeed a great expression of the Iraqis' desire to rule themselves. But the job of writing a constitution, which the elected Iraqi government is supposed to wrap up less than two weeks from now, is far from finished. Secretary Rumsfeld made clear on a hit-and-split trip to Baghdad last week that Washington is getting impatient. He bluntly warned the Iraqis against extending their own timetable by six months, as their laws would allow. If they meet the Aug. 15 deadline, if the constitution is ratified, if there are new elections in December—then that's supposed to create enough political cover for Washington to draw down the number of American troops in Iraq by late next year.

But even then, tens of thousands will be left. Many Iraqis say they want the Americans to stay, at this point, to prevent even greater chaos than they’ve got. But if the troops that remain are a holed-up force, protecting themselves in fortresslike camps, they won’t be doing much to protect the locals. For many Iraqis—and more importantly for the Iranian mullahs who are the closest allies of the current top Iraqi leadership—a long-term American presence just won’t be acceptable. Not surprising, then, that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (long an exile in Iran), has already started raising publically the question of a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. If the country slips deeper into the chaos of civil war, American troops will be identified with one faction or another, and attacked by the rest. Perhaps the Pentagon will be satisfied with bases in Kurdistan. But in the end, U.S. forces will be asked or ordered out of whatever is left of Iraq. Will that be the moment when, to use President Bush’s phrase, “our troops are coming home with the honor they have earned”?

It would make much more sense for the United States to take the initiative and make a clear commitment not just to “draw down” but to withdraw completely by, say, the end of next year or, at the latest, the summer of 2007. To do so would force the Iraqi politicians and the Iraqi military to get their act together fast, or face extinction. It might well be true that terrorists will claim a victory if the United States withdraws, but to refuse to withdraw is, in fact, to let them set our agenda, even as we provide them with an ideal training ground and recruitment tool. President Bush frequently says that "we will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer." But what is that actually supposed to mean? In the Middle East, where time is almost always fluid—a factor of inshallah, God's will, and an indeterminate bukra, or tomorrow—"as long as we are needed and not a day longer" signifies strictly nothing.

Yet the Bush administration isn't willing or able to finish the job on purely American terms either. "Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight," he said in June. You see the implication here: if they think we will fight for them, they won’t fight for themselves. If you believe that argument, and there’s much truth to it, then you ought to believe that the greatest motivator of all would be news we are leaving for good.

But no. President Bush suggested in June that “sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level,” he said, “our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders." As I recall, the sober judgment of many of those military leaders was that we shouldn't go into Iraq in the first place. Their advice was not only unheeded, it was derided.

So here we are, stuck in this shadow land together for many more months and years to come. The most and the least we can do, I figure, is try to keep the record straight.