The Iraq Question

One of the things that I try to do when I'm on vacation in the States is to pay attention to the questions friends and family ask about the Middle East. This isn't always helpful. "How come you live in the Middle East, but you still don't have a tan?" asked one beach-crazy cousin last week. But more often than not, people ask me questions about my life in Lebanon or Syria or Iraq -- Are you safe? Do you have Arab friends? What do you do fun? -- that testify to the curiosity that Americans have about this region. But on this recent trip -- which ended when I returned home to Beirut on Tuesday -- I was overwhelmed by one particular question, a question asked by almost everyone, and one which I was unable to answer: What should we do about Iraq?

One reason I find it so difficult to come up with any convincing response to the Iraq question is that I have little moral authority on the subject. I'm not there. Besides reporting from the safety of Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq and the rare, furtive day-trip into Mosul or Kirkuk, I haven't been in Baghdad -- the real Iraq --since July 2004. I stopped going to Baghdad and Arab Iraq because I thought I could no longer be effective there, because the growing dangers seemed to make it impossible for me do good work. Since I left, I've been humbled by the quality of stories written by my colleagues at TIME and elsewhere who continue to report from Iraq. They found a way to do what I thought was impossible.

Moral authority on Iraq matters now more than ever, as we are faced with a seemingly impossible choice. Do we abandon millions of Iraqis to their fate and watch the country become one giant terrorist training factory sitting on the world's third largest pool of oil? Or do we continue the surge and send more troops on the doomed mission of bolstering the Iraqi government, which in fact is led by a bunch of Shia warlords just waiting to resume their real business of killing Sunnis? At such a moment of moral confusion, we need to someone who will make us belive in the impossible, who will lead us on a way where there is no way.

Sadly, those are exactly the leaders we don't have, ones willing to take moral responsibility for the Iraq war. When you or I really screw up and want forgiveness and help solving whatever problem we created, we apologize and take responsibility for our actions. But that's exactly what the Bush Administration has avoided doing. The commutation of Scooter Libby -- the one official set to pay the price for misleading the American public about the reasons for going to war -- is just the latest dodge. Why should citizens and soldiers support an administration that won't bear the consequences of its actions? Perhaps we shouldn't be asking what to do about Iraq. Perhaps we should ask what to do about America.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut