1 Boring Old Man

We humans do love to think, to theorize about the meanings of things or to scheme about how to make things change. Pragmatism isn’t so much a philosophy. It’s more a way of looking at truth, a way of putting a check on our penchant for theorizing by carefully evaluating the results. It could be thought of as a way of applying the scientific method to all ideas, but the simplest version is in the old saying, "the proof is in the pudding." No matter what we thought when we started, what matters is where we ended up.

Harry Reid recently said, "The War is lost." Vice President Cheney immediately [and predictably] attacked Reid’s statement as defeatist. Liberals and Democrats agreed with him just as immediately – "at last someone spoke the truth." It’s easy to understand what Senator Reid was getting at. President Bush has opposed any re-evaluation of the War in Iraq – insisting that the only option is to "win." Reid was countering this now seemingly absurd idea. He was being a "pragmatist."

• the US would eliminate Iraq’s threatening weapons of mass destruction
• the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves wtih the US

Rationale ‘A’ quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.

That left us with premise or rationale ‘B’. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we’d overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren’t interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war’s supporters had in mind. Not crazy about a secular government, certainly not wild about one aligned with Israel and just generally not ready to be America’s new proxy in the region. Most importantly, those early months showed clear signs that anti-Americanism (not surprisingly) rose with the duration of the occupation.

This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. As the occupation continued, anti-American sentiment — both toward the occupation and America’s role in the world — has only grown.

I would submit that virtually everything we’ve done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial.