Somewhere in America recently, there was a conference on international strategy. After presentations by three scholars, the floor was opened to questions from the audience. After ten or so, this:
“My question to the panel is, What is the path to success in Iraq?”
There was a damburst of laughter in the audience …
The questioner was a Navy Commander from Syracuse, and the question was being asked at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. A “damburst of laughter”—remarkable.
After the guffaws subsided, the panel (which included John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt) offered their opinions, which amounted to this: there is no path to success in Iraq. Mearsheimer was the last to respond and concluded with a literary comparison:
I remember once in English class we read Albert Camus’s book The Plague. I didn’t know what The Plague was about or why we were reading it. But afterwards the instructor explained to us that The Plague was being read because of the Vietnam War. What Camus was saying in The Plague was that the plague came and went of its own accord. All sorts of minions ran around trying to deal with the plague, and they operated under the illusion that they could affect the plague one way or another. But the plague operated on its own schedule. That is what we were told was going on in Vietnam. Every time I look at the situation in Iraq today, I think of Vietnam, and I think of The Plague, and I just don’t think there’s very much we can do at this point. It is just out of our hands. There are forces that we don’t have control over that are at play, and will determine the outcome of this one. I understand that’s very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans believe that they can shape the world in their interests.
But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don’t control, and I think that’s where we’re at in Iraq. [link added]
At that point, according to Philip Weiss (to whom we owe this account), “[t]he panel was over. For a moment or two there was stunned silence, and then applause—at once polite, sustained and thunderous.”
