I asked myself last night to clarify my position on the war for my readers. Here is what I came up with, more as a mental exercise I think, than anything profound. I think many of you share some of these frustrations.



Nearly ten years ago I was a student sitting in a lecture hall in the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London. As a young American romping around England for a college year abroad, I soaked up plenty of the culture. I even managed to take in a few lessons from the esteemed faculty of that institution, many who are still world-class scholars in the history, conduct, and theory of warfare.

One of those lessons, one that struck me later, in 2003, was the notion that there is no mono-causality in warfare. The Bush Administration was then selling a war in Iraq to a reluctant international community. This concept is simple enough for students to grasp and it means, in plain language, that all Wars are bigger than the matches that ignite their fodder, and that when studying warfare, particularly the history of conflict, you must the causes of war to understand the roots of the conflict. There is no single cause to any war but instead long cultural, political, economic, and often-diplomatic reasons for armed hostilities to begin.

When we went to war in Iraq, the Administration, as it was apt to do, was intent on simplification. It was mono-causality at its finest. To the Bush Administration, Saddam Hussein was an aggressive threat to his neighbors, a supporter of terror, and a proliferator of Weapons of Mass Destruction. He was an immediate threat and had to be stopped as all fascist dictators must be stopped, in order to make the world a safer place. Over time this simplification has been dissected and exposed as a poor attempt at public deception. A mono-cause is a simplification and it meant that the public was not fully prepared for the ramifications of this war, and now, the public wants out of Iraq.

This initial and continued simplification has destroyed the President’s credibility with the majority of Americans, say except for a slim part of the base, and it has severely harmed the Republican elected officials who have ridden on his coattails since. To be identified with this flawed path to war is to be identified as a conspirator in the mono-causality racket, this tragic simplification of the reasons to wage war.

What is a part of this, of course, is the public’s general feeling that they have been deceived. The initial cause of this war was plain enough in 2002-2003. When you make something so complex, so plain, there is the risk of losing content, and in this case, the public was never prepared for this to be a guerrilla war of indefinite length. Since the conflict has begun, there has been a growing perception that the initial cause of waging war was a sham and that the continued logic behind waging this war of choice, is another deception.

The reliance on single messages doesn’t just apply to the causes of the war either. The Bush administration seems to despise nuance. The President likes to appear resolute rather than intellectual. This is a shame because the public craves, more than anything, a reason to justify the lives lost and the limbs mangled. This is not to mention the civilians killed and the incalculable destruction of Iraqi villages and neighborhoods. Strength is all fine and good when a national capital is under attack, but even the strongest leaders of history, one thinks naturally of Churchill, Lincoln, and Pericles, were men of words as well. These men were facing horrible tests to their leadership and they felt the need to articulate their case for war to the public in a way that is now refreshing in its complexity.

President Bush has made no effective case for the continuation of this war other than the lame logic that we can’t leave just yet. If we do, then what little we have created in Iraq will fall apart. This is not enough substance for us to buy. Nor is it enough for Republican Presidential hopefuls to run on.

As Republicans, whether conservative, moderate, or libertarian, look to their leaders in the next year, as a party we should seek a candidate who is able to provide an alternative model of leadership than the one that hasn’t worked - President Bush. Bush may seem resolute to many, but he seems simplistic to many more, and his poor ability to communicate with the people has cost him moderate support for this war from within Republican ranks as well as with the public in general. His mono-track approach, the with us or against us foreign policy that led to Iraq, is insufficient to explain the continued loss of life once the initial cause of the war proved to be a fallacy and dissipated like smoke in the wind.

The next Republican presidential candidate has to, in order to be competitive, be a person of nuance and a person of communicative ability so that the public can hear from a person of authority (and authority doesn’t just come from the seal of the President on the podium) why we are continuing to wage war in Iraq beyond the usual rhetoric, which we are frankly tired of hearing. The Bush model is not enough to sustain this conflict and it is high time that Republicans showed some intellectual fortitude and complexity on the multifaceted issues of foreign policy, diplomacy, and the case for continued war