Good Luck!

I read in Sunday's New Tork Times how Gen. Gary E. Luck, the retired general your military folks sent over to Iraq to assess the situation there, is preparing a report that will recommend that much more effort go into the training and fielding of Iraqi troops for the protection of the populace. More advisors, more resources. Better training, better weapons. And soon, devoutly to be hoped, fewer American soldiers in harm's way. In view of which, I find myself unable to resist the awful pun: Good Luck! (Sorry! The poor general must have suffered from it all his life!) In this instance, though, it does seem especially appropriate.

The sad truth is, Bush, I personally don't have too much faith in those Iraqi troops. In the first place, they have been too long promised--and that promise, like so many others in this dreadful fiasco of a war, has fallen way short of fulfillment. We did talk, didn't we, a couple of days ago, about your Rice's bald-faced prevarications in her confirmation hearings… with the candidate for the highest foreign policy office in the country insisting that the count of troops already trained amounted to 120,000, while Senator Joe Biden's count, on the strength of reliable on-the-ground military reports from that troubled territory, amounted to a mere 4,000 ready to go? I'm afraid I was more ready to believe the Senator.

And here's the other thing that leaves me thoroughly unconvinced that the good General's recommendation would ever be realizable in hard, practical terms: I recall quite clearly (don't you, Bush? Yes, surely…) the frankly abject performance of those supposedly crack Iraqi troops--the Republican Guard, wasn't it?--as early as your Dad's initial invasion of the country, some twelve years ago: they threw down their weapons and surrendered as soon as we, their enemy, appeared on the horizon. The TV screens showed them lining up by the roadside, waiting to be captured. Such images don't get easily erased. And it was pretty much the same thing with your own, more recent invasion, Bush. In the face of American might, they disappeared--wisely, I have to add--like gophers down a hole.

Not that I'm blaming them. Who'd want to risk his life for the likes of Saddam Hussein? No one with an ounce of sense in his head. And yet… and yet… I can't help feeling that there's more to it than this. Is it possible that these men are smart enough to be less trainable than our guys? Does their warmest heart (like that conscientious objector's in the e.e.cummings poem) recoil at war? Are they ever, I wonder, seriously, going to be the army that your generals want and need them to be? Are they ever going to embrace the iron discipline it takes to want to be a kill-and-be-killed fighting force? To stop at nothing in defense of freedom?

I don’t see it as just a matter of courage, either. Look at the courage it takes to simply participate in an election over there! No, there's another, more complicated factor at work here, and my inexpert judgment is that it has more to do with history… and loyalty: a quality I know you set great store by. I'm no historian, but a public television broadcast about T.E.Lawrence last night reminded me that the map of the Middle East was created, after the bloodbath of World War I, by a secret agreement between France and Britain--an agreement which betrayed every promise the perfidious Brits had made to persuade the Arab tribes to fight with them against the Turks. The illusion of a united and independent Arab world was snatched away from them, and Iraq was cobbled into existence out of a patchwork of angry and resentful tribes. It's hardly surprising, then, that that deep, gut-level, historical loyalty to nationhood that can be used by politicians (such as your good self, Bush) to summon men to fight is in short supply in that part of the world.

As I see it, you're going to need a whole lot more than Luck to find some resolution to this quagmire you've created. I wish I could be more optimistic for you. I just don't see it happening.