The question came from my five year-old son sitting in the backseat of the car.
"Dad, what would happen if our team lost at war?"
After I did my double-take – our team, what, lost, war, uh, well, hmmm – I realized it was not a question I had really thought about.
Now, I understand that he was probably looking for some reassurance that we would be okay. That life would continue to be filled with school, baseball, fishing, bike-riding and all the other things that constitute life to a five year-old kid. But, darn if it wasn’t a good question. What would happen if we lost the war? And for that matter, what would happen if we won?
I first tried to tell him we don’t have to worry about losing because we have the best army.
"But dad, sometimes the best baseball team loses."
You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you son.
So I gave him the simple answer. "Well, if we win, the country we are fighting will be run by people who like us. And if we lose, it will be run by people who don’t."
But it’s not that simple, because defining victory isn’t that simple. We’ll have won when Iraq becomes a free and open democracy. When a thriving economy provides jobs for today and hope for the future. When investment in educational opportunities enlightens the citizenry and brings their society into the twenty-first century.
We’ll have won when people in neighboring countries witness the transformation in Iraq and demand reform in their own nations, leading to peaceful overthrow of tyrannical regimes and the establishment of democracy throughout the region. We’ll have won when a voice at the ballot box eliminates the need to make oneself heard through suicide bombings and terrorist attacks.
That’s when we will have won.
Anything short of that will be defeat. After all, this is a war on terror. If we do not eliminate tyranny, hatred and despair throughout the entire region, then the Middle East will remain a festering pool of warring factions, religious zealots and desperate fanatics bent on gaining the upper-hand at home and causing pain and destruction abroad.
So it begs the question, if those are our goals, if that is what constitutes victory, are we going about it the right way? Is victory even possible? There are no easy answers. In fact, there only seem to be more questions.
Have we simply taken the lid off centuries of hatred between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq? Will that hatred manifest itself as a bloody civil war? What if anarchy in Iraq spills over to its neighbors and we see turmoil topple autocratic, but relatively stable regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria and elsewhere? What if radical Islamic fundamentalists bent on destroying western society gain control of the bulk of the region’s oil fields?
If any or all of those things happen, are we prepared to stick it out in the Middle East? Are we willing to put even more American lives at risk? Is putting more lives at risk the answer? How many lives?
So many questions, no easy answers. But they are questions we need to ask and answer. Otherwise, we’ll learn the answer to my son’s question. What if our team loses? It’s not one I wish to learn.
