The War We Lost by Craven Surrender

Nobody said it would be easy. In fact, they said just the opposite: The enemy was entrenched, implacable and impervious to anything but force. And going to war would cost lots of money at a time when the economy wasn’t so great.

Worse yet, wars are seldom tidy; nor are all the answers known upfront. Sometimes you miscalculate the enemy’s resolve or forces. Usually, you underestimate what it will cost. When officials started tossing out numbers for this one, the original estimate was that it could cost $100 million in the first year alone.

As daunting as that figure was, we decided to fight. Even among those who disagreed over the tactical plan -- should we rely on an aerial or ground assault or combination of both? -- most believed the cause was just. Or, more to the point, that the risk in not fighting was too great: a loss of the lifestyle and freedoms we had come to take for granted.

And so, we went to war.

From the get-go, it was a question of will. Would we have what it took to continue a fight that some said couldn’t be won, against an enemy that often wasn’t seen until it was too late? One reporter, borrowing a phrase, said the war would be nasty, brutish and anything but short. Officials cautioned the public not to plan on a quick end, and that, even when unseen, the enemy might still be out there. And as long as it was there, it intended to do us harm.

“We should prepare ourselves for three to five years to do this,” said one official in January 1999. “We’re going to be in this for a long period of time.”

Even with that caveat, the experts seldom talked of eradicating the threat. Instead, they talked of controlling it, of learning to live with some measure of peace of mind. Reading between the lines, the message seemed to be: The enemy won’t strike every day, but it could strike on any day.

The naysayers, while acknowledging the threat, argued, in essence, that there were just too many of them and that no battle plan -- no matter how smartly fought or highly funded -- would make any difference.

Eventually, lawmakers forked over the money. That came after much discussion, both among them and at public sessions that detailed the depth of the enemy’s malevolence and of the gathering threat.

It was that perceived threat that galvanized support for the war, although in not nearly the dollar amounts once talked about. In fact, some of the fiercer advocates for an all-out war said we were fighting on the cheap.

Still, the war was on, and had a reasonable amount of bipartisan backing.

In the war rooms, the ground-assault advocates won out. Worried about the effects of collateral damage from an aerial attack, the decision was made to go in hard and fast on the ground. Block by block, the battle was taken to the enemy.

By mid-2002, an official said, “We’re kicking their rear. But we’ve got a long way to go.”

Last week, however, with the war raging but still not won, we gave up. Warnings that a surrender would have disastrous consequences fell on deaf ears. The troops were called home; the frontal assaults on enemy strongholds ended.

No one knows exactly what will happen next. The logical expectation is that the enemy, which took enormous casualties, will regroup. No one thinks the threat has disappeared or will come back as anything other than as hostile as ever.

Officials say we simply ran out of money. Historians will say we ran out of will.

They’ll talk about a war begun with the best of intentions in Orange County, but which, ultimately and decisively, failed.

The fire ants won.

Or, rather, the people of California chose to lose.

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Dana Parsons’ column

appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.