WHITE FLAGS of ALL NOTIONS

While not accounted by any disinterested party ‘the winner’ of the Vice Presidential debate, Governor Palin was widely held to have drawn a little blood from Senator Biden with her disdainful dismissal of Senator Obama’s proposal to bring home the troops from Iraq in sixteen months: “Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq and that is not what our troops need to hear today, that’s for sure”. It’s the kind of jut-jawed fundamentalism that gets plain folks whoopin’ and hollerin’ in the small towns where many of the votes are still up for grabs. Joe Biden didn’t squash it flat; Barack Obama needs to do so before the polls open. Because it’s rubbish.

“We’ll know we’re finished in Iraq”, Mrs Palin went on, “when the Iraqi government can govern its people and when the Iraqi security forces can secure its people”. This was less incendiary. Indeed, it was a tacit admission that Senator McCain’s commitment to the famous “surge” and its continued implementation is open-ended. Under successive Presidents McCain and Palin, American troops could still be in Iraq in 2024 at a cost at today’s prices (let alone tomorrow’s) of $10 billion per month. The home economy will be in more tatters than it is now.

The Obama team needs to nail the McCain camp on what they mean when they proclaim that the surge is working and that the troops are winning and that they won’t withdraw until they secure victory. What do they mean by victory? Is Sarah Palin’s answer the official one and how widely will such a resolution be recognized? To Joe Six-Pack and his Hockey-Mom wife sitting at home, it looks easy: American tanks rolling through a town cheered by civilians. That’s what Bush’s proclaimed victory looked like in 2003 in Baghdad. Joe and Honey now know that it wasn’t a victory, that it was just, in Churchill’s phrase, “the end of the beginning”.

What would constitute a situation that John McCain could genuinely call a victory? Any spin-doctor can dress up a picture and make it look better than it is but, in these days of embedded reporters and troops who are used to talking to the media, it’s harder to bamboozle the public than, for example, our leaders found at the time of World War I. What’s more, the media’s interests are global, like everyone else’s, and knee-jerk patriotism is no longer on offer as coverage.

A supporter of the surge, like McCain, is bound to stick with it because he cannot admit that he might be wrong. Unfortunately, most politicians have the same problem. Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, an elegant diplomat and a wily observer of the international scene, is fond of the saying: “The gentle art of saving face may yet destroy the human race”. If we get a President McCain, I hope the Prince emails it to him on his first morning.

Over the weekend, the Commander of the British Air Assault Brigade in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, told The Sunday Times: “We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.

“We may well leave with there still being a low but steady level of insurgency … If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this. That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable”.

The Brigadier’s observations would not be welcomed by McCain who said in his debate with Obama – and Palin repeated the jibe – that to sit down with the enemy “without preconditions” is naïve and self-defeating. But to be unconcerned with saving face is not the same as being irresolute and, quoting Churchill again, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”. Preconditions are too easily an excuse for refusing to talk at all. A truly strong and perceptive and fearless leader is prepared to go anywhere to talk to anyone about anything if it might preserve or hasten peace.

The US is not going to have a victory in Iraq in any form that its homeland will understand. Modern war is not like Wellington winning Waterloo. And you have to wonder whether a remotely recognizable victory is actually worth the cost, in lives and damaged minds and the destruction of communities as well in material ways. When the last American troops do finally leave Iraq, whether in the first term of a President Obama or at the behest of some as yet unknown future incumbent, what will we be able to point to and say “that has been achieved”? The danger for the US is that, by the time its troops leave, the reign of Saddam Hussein will be so far in the past that it will no longer seem to have been any part of the exercise.

And the conundrum that a President McCain or a President Palin would have to face is that as long as there are US troops in Iraq, they will be acting as a spur to insurgency. Whether an American politician thinks it justified or not, the fact is that many if not most Iraqis view the Americans as an invading army and will not rest until they are gone. It is the presence of foreign troops that keeps insurgency alive. just as it would do in any self-respecting country. Was it not the Americans who threw out the British more than 230 years ago? Had the British decided that they would stay until they had ‘victory’, they might still be there.

There is something a new president can do. Reject the Bush administration’s disdain for the rest of the world, go to the UN and ask the security council to agree to replace all national troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan with a non-partisan UN force of peace-keepers. That way, the western allies do not leave the respective regimes in those countries at the mercy of revolutionaries, fundamentalists and terrorists but they do pass the absurd costs of playing global policemen to the organisation whose function is to do just that. I don’t know why Bush and Blair didn’t think of this in the first place. (Well, I do know why but it does neither of them any credit).