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Disunity Over Iraq Frustrates a Retired General–and the Rest of Us
As we reported earlier, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said much more than “Iraq is a nightmare” in a recent speech. Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal has dissected the general’s speech and found a theme: if we’re going to fight a war, we all need to get on board. The administration, the Congress, the press, and the American people.
Armies don’t win wars, nations do.
From Henninger’s “Wonder Land” column today:
• Congress and politics. “Since 2003, the politics of war have been characterized by partisanship as the Republican and Democratic parties struggled for power in Washington. . . . National efforts to date have been corrupted by partisan politics that have prevented us from devising effective, executable, supportable solutions. These partisan struggles have led to political decisions that endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield. The unmistakable message was that political power had greater priority than our national security objectives.”
• The bureaucracies. Gen. Sanchez argues that “unity of effort” was hampered by the absence of any coordinated authority over the war effort of the bureaucracies: “The Administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the Department of State, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure.”
“Clearly,” he says, “mistakes have been made by the American military in its application of power. But even its greatest failures in this war can be linked to America’s lack of commitment, priority and moral courage in this war effort. . . . America has not been fully committed to win this war.”
He says leaving Iraq is not an option, and he has no doubt about the threat: “As a nation we must recognize that the enemy we face is committed to destroying our way of life.”
In sum, what Gen. Sanchez is describing here is a nation that is at risk and is in a state of disunity. Does disunity matter? He is saying that in war, it does.
In politics, a degree of disunity is normal. But in our time, partisan disunity has become the norm. The purpose of politics now is to thwart, to stop.
We may have underestimated how corrosive our disunity has been on the troops in Iraq, and how deeply it has damaged us.