Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war."
So declared Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the occasion of the title character's murder. While some may claim "Lie 'havoc' and let slip the F-14s" more accurately describes the current administration, Bush's war in Iraq shows that this centuries-old formulation for military conflict holds to the present day.
Bush surely cried havoc, but his proclamations of crisis have failed to bear out. He said that there were weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld even said that they knew where those weapons were. Now, yellowcake aside and far short of weapons themselves, the administration is looking for weapons programs, the existence of which they are also having a difficult time proving. Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has recently gone as far as saying that the Iraqis destroyed their stockpiles in the early 1990s.
Bush also said that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda, ties that now look tenuous at best. He has admitted, contradicting his VP, that Iraq had nothing to do with September 11. Meanwhile, the Iraqi occupation has mobilized terrorists against America. Only now, under American control, is Iraq becoming the terrorist nest that Bush once claimed it was under Saddam.
Bush now says that we've freed the Iraqi people from a despot. While this is certainly true, it was not the causus belli claimed at the beginning of the conflict, and it is intellectually dishonest to claim it as such today. For all of Bush's criticism of "revisionist history," one might fairly expect that he'd be above it himself. Apparently not.
Nor is havoc being restored to order as Our Dear Leader predicted. Iraq's oil, as Bush's request for $87 billion now makes clear, will not be sufficient to pay for reconstruction.
And while, as a flight suit-clad president told us from the deck of an aircraft carrier, major combat operations have concluded, more U.S. soldiers have died in combat since his triumphalist proclamation than before, with new reports of casualties daily. It seems that when Bush challenged terrorists to "Bring 'em on," they listened.
The Bush administration is now learning the hard way that the dogs of war do not readily return to their kennels.
Bringing chaos to order is not difficult, and as such, America could easily topple the Hussein regime with little foreign aid. Bringing order to chaos, however, is a completely different matter, and it is a task at which the Bush administration is proving itself inept. It's time to give others a say.
Internationalizing the reconstruction does not mean conceding to all foreign demands. The French request that Iraqi sovereignty be restored within weeks is by any account silly. However, it does mean ceding some control to the U.N., a policy against which the right ardently argues.
But why? On Monday, Dan Gomez said it will mean Syria and Saudi Arabia will have a say. True, but they will not have the only say, and regional input, as opposed to unilateral U.S. fiat, is a good thing. He also said that Americans might die under U.N. leadership, but Bush is accomplishing that just fine on his own. And for all the right may say about the U.N., I can't ever see Kofi Annan saying "Bring 'em on."
We need more money and more troops: more money to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure that our bombs destroyed and to decrease Iraqi antipathy and support for terrorists; more troops so that we can start guarding soft targets like U.N. operations and pipelines and enough troops to provide a deterrent.
While it may be counterintuitive that more boots on the ground means less casualties, think of campus security. As in Iraq, the police here have a good response time to wrongdoers, but some here want line-of-sight policing to deter the crime in the first place. This reflects what is needed in Iraq. Only an overwhelming force will cause guerrilla forces to give up hope and thus give up their fight, an overwhelming force that the U.S. and our small "coalition of the willing" cannot provide on our own.
So that the U.S. can secure more aid and troops for Iraq, and so that in turn the U.S. can secure Iraq itself, it is time to internationalize the reconstruction. Yes, this will require diplomacy and negotiations, but that is how foreign policy is supposed to work. At some time in his life, Dubya will need to learn to play well with others. As the saying goes, there's no time like the present.
Kevin Collins is a College sophomore from Milwaukee, Wis.
