The Bridge on the River Tigris

I have been thinking of The Bridge on the River Kwai since taking in the US debates about a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq. I remember that my mother, a World War Two veteran, was terribly upset about the ending of the movie. She'd gotten caught up in the building of the bridge, and to the point where she forgot it had to be blown up if you were on the Allied side.

She understood on one level, but the bridge building was such a triumph of ingenuity and will in the face of severe adversity that she couldn't bring herself to think about -- well, to think about what was actually going on.

What's actually going on in Iraq? The overriding situation is that the United States ignored the Number One rule of regime change, which is that if you're going to topple a government, you are responsible for security until the country gets on its feet.

So why are we having debate about how long to stay in Iraq and what we're going to do if Maliki's government does not perform according to US-set benchmarks about taking over security responsibilities?

I don't consider that toppling Saddam's regime was an imperial act. But it is the height of imperial hubris for the US to hold another government to a standard that the US refuses to meet.

Again and again over a period of years, and from every quarter in Iraq, the Iraqis asked the US for one thing: to provide adequate security. We flagrantly refused to do this while our Secretary of Defense concentrated on modernizing the US military. Now, after years of occupation, we're mustering military actions to create adequate security amid much US debate about whether to stay on Iraq.

There is a mad quality to all this debate. We have hundreds of excuses about why we screwed up in Iraq, but given the terrible situation we found in the country and the understandable resistance to our presence from Iraq's neighbors, even the best-managed stabilization program might have floundered.

So is there something in the American DNA that prevents us from acknowledging that you can't just flounce away when you screw up in the course of a regime change your government brought about?

If Maliki's government is a mess, if Turkey and the Kurds are causing problems, if sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing stalk the land, if the Iraqi police force is stuffed with death squads and half the Iraqi military is in league with Baathists or Tehran -- what does any of that have to do with the US responsibility to maintain order in Iraq?

Why don't we try something new? Set out benchmarks for the US bringing security to Iraq, then act to meet them? After we have met the objectives, then is the time to question how Iraq's government is doing and when we should leave. But it is so obvious that America has the greatest responsibility for security that debates on Iraq external to the issue are as mad as the story of The Bridge on the River Kwai.