The Most Important Resolution for 2006

The Iraq war currently enjoys all the popularity of the voracious eagle in "March of the Penguins." Just as the predator in that film picked on our unsuspecting, plodding friends, the war in Iraq has swallowed up tens of thousands of innocent lives and spitted out many more with crippling injuries. The daily grind of casualties, combined with the war's seemingly aimless, winless and boundless nature, has produced a profound turnaround in America's political climate, giving rise to a new majority of Americans who have come to oppose the war, an emboldened media ready to call its progress into question, and a number of high-profile politicians willing to criticize the war and call for a scaling-back or redeployment.

And yet, despite the sea change in sentiment about the war, those who have assertively put forth the single demand that would bring the quagmire to an end -- withdraw the troops now -- have been met with a reception far colder than anything the penguins had to cope with down south. The prevailing feeling has been that, while the war may not be going well -- and, indeed, may even be ruinous -- there is no real alternative to it. This idea can be broken down into two main elements: One, fighting terrorists in Iraq prevents them from striking America again, making Iraq a kind of flytrap for our own security; two, now that the war is underway, we must "finish the job" and fix the mess we created by invading in the first place.

Both of these arguments, however, are predicated upon false and pernicious assumptions, ones which are not only shared by the presiding regime, but were used to bait most of us into supporting this disastrous venture in the first place.

Consider first the notion that our continued presence in Iraq will prevent terrorists from attacking the United States. This idea has been peddled by the president in many of his speeches, and well exploits the fears and anxieties of the public in the aftermath of Sept. 11. But is it really true that fighting in the streets of Baghdad will preclude ambulances from having to race down the streets of New York once again? Not according to the State Department.

In an April 2005, the department decided to hide statistics on international terrorism from Congress. The reason soon became clear: There was a "dramatic up-tick" in terrorist incidents compared to the previous year, according to those congressmen who were briefed privately by the State Department after complaining about the ruse. Larry C. Johnson, the former senior State Department official who first exposed the agency's decision to conceal the data said, "Last year was bad. This year is worse. They are deliberately trying to withhold data because it shows that as far as the war on terrorism internationally, we're losing."

Of course, this should come as no surprise. If the world, America included, is supposed to be safer because all the terrorists are "trapped" in Iraq, one would be hard-pressed to explain why the streets of Madrid, London, and Bali were recently bathed in innocent blood after the war in Iraq was well under way. As is well-known from the public propaganda of Islamist terrorists, American bloodletting in Iraq was, in fact, a prime motivator for conducting these attacks around the world, not an impediment. And meanwhile, most of the fighters operating in Iraq, Islamist or otherwise, are Iraqi natives; according to U.S. intelligence, foreigners comprise only four percent to ten percent of their ranks.

The idea that terrorists are being baited and trapped in Iraq, thanks to the war, is rendered even more absurd by another stark reality: More than 2,100 American soldiers have been killed there, most of them long after the president declared, "Mission accomplished." Clearly then, it is the soldiers who have been trapped and baited -- deployed thousands of miles away from home to fight a war based on pretexts we now know were lies, and ill-equipped for a counterinsurgency their commanders never even imaged would take root. Indeed, the toll on the troops has been so severe that, according to a July 2004 survey conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine, 15 percent to 17 percent of returning troops suffer from "major depression, generalized anxiety or PTSD."