E-Mail This Article to a Friend What will it take? (continued)
	Related links For more information about the individuals interviewed here, or their organizations: Max Boot, Council on Foreign Relations Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Syracuse University Maxwell School David Cobb, Green Party Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago Divinity School Franklin Fisher, MIT Department of Economics Congressman Barney Frank Peter Galbraith, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Senator Edward Kennedy Michael Lerner, Tikkun Community G. Gordon Liddy Congressman Stephen Lynch John Pastore, Physicians for Social Responsibility Some antiwar sites: Iraq Veterans Against the War Veterans for Peace Bring Them Home Now Vietnam Veterans Against the War Iraq Water Project Campus Greens Cities for Peace National Priorities Project Poets Against the War Veterans for Common Sense

Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

I think we should get the troops out right away. We do have an obligation to Iraq and to the people of Iraq, having created such destruction of the infrastructure and other things, that we cannot withdraw our financial support for them, for perhaps some years to come. But I believe that it is the presence of the American troops there which is one of the causes for the insurgency, and as soon as we can bring them back in an orderly fashion the better.

I’ve just heard an estimate that this year’s and next year’s war budget is going to cost Massachusetts alone about six billion dollars. Just imagine what six billion dollars might do in one state for all of the pressing needs that we have. People will feel the depletion of their health and education services and all the rest, but it will be spread out. There won’t be any reason to directly connect that with the cost of the war, unless somebody points out that the money went there instead of here. That’s a political task for whatever opposition is developing.

There is another cost: the morale of the armed forces. Re-enlistment is down, recruitment is down, it’s not a popular war among the military. That is significant.

I noticed that the governor of Montana, who is a Republican, told the president that he wanted him to send the National Guard contingent of Montana back, because they are expecting forest fires this summer. The National Guards of these various states, having been dispatched to Iraq they’re not available for the sort of things they normally do at home.

Then there is the enormous cost of America’s standing in the world. The reservoir of good will that was obviously there after 9/11 has been totally depleted. And there’s also just the ongoing weakening of international institutions, like the International Criminal Court and the United Nations. To weaken them the way we have with this operation is indeed costly in the long run.

There’s a long list of costs that we are incurring that we are only beginning to become aware of.

We now have a growing opposition that is waiting to be focused and organized in some way. The people are really there — we had these massive demonstrations even before the war started, and now there are Iraq Veterans Against the War, Gold Star Mothers Against the War, and here and there all around the country groups emerging and organizing. The polls have now swung over to where a small majority think the war was a bad idea, which was not the case even a couple of months ago. But now the organizing is there to be done, and I think it’s going to be formidable.

The anti–Vietnam War movement took a while to get going, but became not only effective but I think critical at a certain point in turning the tide. As I recall — and I was involved in that myself — the two major factors that turned it around were the returning veterans from Vietnam who said this is not what we should be doing, we were there and we know; and when religious groups began to get explicit about it. When the Buddhist monks began appearing here, that made a big impact, when they started moving around the country in their saffron robes, pleading with us to end it. They had a certain kind of moral authority. And that sort of thing is beginning to happen. It’s not Buddhist monks this time, but other people in religious and spiritual groups.

Progressive religious movements sometimes are focused on a lot of different issues: on ecological concerns, or fighting AIDS, or poverty, and often on peace as well. As the tide begins to rise on the opposition to the war, that could become something that brings them together on something that is more and more important to all of them.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy

We all hope for the best in Iraq. We all want democracy to take root firmly and irrevocably. America has always promoted human rights, freedom, and democracy. These have been our core values for generations, and we’ve accomplished a great deal without war in nations across the globe.

But the war with Iraq wasn’t initially about democracy and human rights. The White House took the nation to war to keep Iraqi nuclear weapons out of the hands of Al Qaeda terrorists. But there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there was no persuasive link to Al Qaeda.

Obviously, we shouldn’t leave Iraq in chaos or civil war. But the president’s commitment to keeping American troops in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day longer is not enough for our soldiers and their loved ones. They don’t want an open-ended commitment. They deserve a clearer indication of what lies ahead, and so do the American people.

Training the Iraqi security forces is a key element of a successful strategy to stabilize Iraq and withdraw American forces. The Iraqis need to be able to defend their own country.

But it’s clear from the administration’s own statements that they’re avoiding an honest appraisal of our progress or lack of it in training Iraqis. We added a provision to the recent appropriations bill to require the administration to tell Congress every three months how the training is proceeding and how many US troops will be necessary in Iraq through the end of 2006.

The American people, especially our men and women in uniform and their families, deserve to know how much real progress is being made and how long our forces will be in Iraq. Hopefully, the administration will submit these reports in good faith, and not attempt to squirm out of this vital information.

Ultimately, we need a political solution to Iraq. We can’t rely on a military solution to politically inspired violence. Iraqis need to feel they have a legitimate, functioning government. They need to feel secure, have basic services that work, and have jobs. So far, they do not.

Congressman Stephen F. Lynch

During my visit to Iraq six weeks ago, I asked both General George Casey and General David Petraeus for an estimate on when we could begin drawing down the number of troops in Iraq. It was their cautious estimate that if the training of the Iraqi Defense Force and the Iraqi Police Force continued at the current rate, it might be possible to begin some initial reductions within 18 months. They cautioned that the timetable was dependent upon the ability of the new government to achieve and maintain some level of stability within Iraqi society.

The military command in Iraq did caution that if the insurgency experienced a resurgence — which has since occurred — the timetable for reductions would be delayed.

I also visited Amman, Jordan, to investigate the progress of training at the Iraqi Police Academy. There were approximately 3500 police in training. While there were some examples of success in Iraq — namely the election process, which saw eight million Iraqis turn out to vote at 521 polling places that were secured by Iraqi Defense Forces and Police — there is considerable evidence that progress is extremely slow.

Last week, General John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, offered us a sobering picture of the situation in Iraq and of our involvement in that country. Specifically, we now know that we will probably not be able to draw down the 138,000 American troops in Iraq for, perhaps, several years.

It is noteworthy, I think, that when I spoke directly to our frontline troops on the ground in Tikrit, inside the Sunni Triangle, they opposed the idea of a gradual drawdown of troops. They are of the opinion that the remaining troops will face greater vulnerability. The response of the troops has been, "We came here together, we should leave here together."

I appreciate the courage and commitment of our troops, and I will continue to do everything I can to get them home safely and as soon as possible.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School

Whatever a person thought of the war in the first instance, once one has committed to the course of armed conflict, you incur a responsibility, and that responsibility involves dealing with the situation until it is stabilized. In this case, that is until the Iraqis are capable of dealing with their own security matters, which is clearly not the case at the present moment. How long that’s going to take is anybody’s guess. It’s absolutely foolhardy for people to set arbitrary deadlines for an American pullout. It may not require the commitment of the number of troops, and — hopefully, please God — you won’t be seeing the kind of casualties we’re seeing now, but I can imagine some kind of contingent in Iraq for a long, long time.

You’ve got a recipe for civil war in Iraq unless you’ve got a stabilized political situation. They’ve made some good steps, heroic steps under the circumstances, to cobble together a functional system, which would be a kind of federal system with the participation of every major group. The political and military must go together; you can’t separate those two questions.

There are some benefits that are often lost in these reflections, because people are not thinking in strategic terms. I am on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, and I was there for a speech the president gave on its 20th anniversary. He made it very clear in that speech that 50 years of supporting autocracy in the Middle East — in the context of the Cold War, and very understandable for realpolitik reasons — had not made that region better for the people involved, and had not made it safer, and had to come to an end. The only way to achieve some kind of long-term stability is for these autocratic regimes to be replaced by some form of democracy. It doesn’t have to look exactly like American democracy, but some form of representative government.

It’s a vision, really, of liberal internationalism, that as more countries stabilize themselves internally, not through autocratic rule but some sort of representational rule, the world will be better for all involved. And the world will also be more peaceful.

For all the gripes about the United States, it’s still the case that people look to the United States to stay the course on this. There are people taking a lot of risks on this, and if we don’t stay the course, we let all those folks down. If the situation in Iraq went south completely, there might be a cascading series of effects for the region as a whole. You would not be able to stop Iran going forward with a nuclear program, unless you used military force against them.

I’m reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr before World War II, when he was fighting those in the pastorate who were opposed to standing up to Hitler. They were saying things like, "We will become fascists if we fight fascism." And Niebuhr attacked this in the most caustic terms: that was an example not of concern for the people of Germany, not of concern for the Jewish people, not of concern for what kind of world we’re going to live in, but a concern for your own moral purity. And that is not Christian responsibility. We heard during the Cold War that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was going to dement us. We hear this every single time this nation is either trying to defend itself or intervening on behalf of those who can’t defend themselves. The grand sweep of the Christian tradition is not pacifism, it’s not crypto-pacifism, it’s not functional pacifism, it’s just war. If you’re going to evaluate Iraq, the justified war tradition is the framework that you must deploy, and not some ephemeral crypto- or pseudo-pacifism.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com