From Iraq to isolationism?

DID SOMEONE designate November as Repudiate-Your-Iraq-War-Vote Month? Or maybe just Quagmire Month, or Let’s-Get-the-Hell-Out-of-There Month?

John Kerry kicked off the trend at the end of October in a speech at Georgetown University. “Knowing what we know now,” he declared, “I would not have gone to war in Iraq.” John Edwards issued a similar mea culpa recently: “I was wrong.... It was a mistake to vote for this war.” On Wednesday, Bill Clinton weighed in: “It was a big mistake.”

Uh-huh. I guess they noticed that voters think so too. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted last weekend, most Americans similarly regret the whole darn thing: 63% of respondents said they disapprove of President Bush’s handing of the Iraq war; 60% declared that it was “not worth going to war,” and 52% wanted the U.S. to withdraw “now” or “within 12 months.”

Accordingly, Senate Democrats introduced a measure this week demanding that the White House create a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. This was defeated in a largely party-line vote, but the Senate ultimately approved -- by a vote of 98 to 0 -- an in-your-face demand that the administration “explain to Congress and the American people its strategy” for doing whatever it is that we’re doing in Iraq.

Whee! Looks like it’s finally time for all responsible politicians -- or at least presidential hopefuls -- to promise that we’ll withdraw from Iraq ASAP!

Somehow, though, I can’t entirely share the festive mood that Let’s-Get-the-Hell-Out-of-There Month seems to have induced in many of my friends.

It’s not that I don’t think we should come up with an exit plan, pronto. I do. As it now stands, we’re almost certainly doing as much harm as good in Iraq. At least, that seems to be what the Iraqis think, and they ought to know. In an August poll, a whopping 82% of Iraqis declared themselves “strongly opposed” to the presence of U.S.-led coalition troops, and 67% said they feel “less secure” as a result of the occupation.

Once the justification for war shifted away from WMD, the only rationale for staying on is if we really are “bringing peace, stability and democracy to Iraq,” as the White House insists. With our presence seemingly increasing instability, not decreasing it, and with most Iraqis as eager as Cindy Sheehan to see U.S. troops withdraw, it’s hard to come up with good reasons for staying.

But, despite the many legitimate reasons to demand a responsible Iraq exit plan, I feel a little queasy about the isolationist instinct that seems to lie beneath some of the antiwar claims. After Vietnam, many on the left decided that all uses of American military power were inherently wrong. And the Clinton-era fiasco in Somalia -- when 19 Marines were killed, prompting a U.S. pullout -- left even many moderates convinced that nothing but the most dire threat to our national security justified risking the lives of American troops. This same sentiment has been voiced a lot recently in the debate about the Iraq war.

Let’s not forget, though, that even when there is no urgent national security issue at stake, the use of American military force may sometimes be both justified and morally necessary.

I’m talking about humanitarian interventions: Had we intervened in Rwanda in 1994, for instance, we might have stopped the genocide that killed nearly a million innocent civilians. In 1999, the Clinton administration finally overcame its post-Somalia paralysis, and the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo saved thousands of lives. Today, stopping the ongoing atrocities in Darfur may yet require outside military intervention.

The doctrine of humanitarian intervention has been badly discredited by the Bush administration, which tried to use it as an alternative justification for the Iraq war when its trumped-up WMD case fell apart. Unquestionably, the doctrine should be invoked only with extreme caution.

Regime change is not a good enough reason to use military force, and neither is democracy promotion. Even when we’re talking about serious humanitarian crises, we need to accept that not every problem has a solution -- and, assuredly, not every problem has an American solution. But in the relatively rare situations in which we can use our military to stop egregious and ongoing atrocities, such as genocides, we should.

So enjoy Let’s-Get-the-Hell-Out-of-There Month. The war in Iraq was unjustified and ill-conceived from the start and has caused untold suffering for Americans and Iraqis alike. If our political leaders have finally acknowledged that, and started to seriously discuss when and how to withdraw our troops, we should be glad. But we should also heed the words of Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School: Let’s not “throw the baby of genuine humanitarian intervention out with the bathwater of Iraq.”