A Will Without a Way

The conservative canard about the “will to win in Iraq.”

By Jesse Singal, University of Michigan

As popular support for the Iraq war has plummeted and as the logic driving its supporters has grown ever more contorted, I’ve found myself increasingly annoyed by a nagging, consistent trend. Everyone, it seems, who propagates the heated, overblown rhetoric that serves as the engine for the Iraq escalation is obsessed with the concept of “will.” The condescending questions recycle themselves every few months: Do we have the will to win? Do the Iraqis? Has the will of the American people waned? (Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saw this as more important than anything, arguing that “The real center of gravity of this war is not out on the battlefield, it’s back here in Washington, D.C. because it’s a test of wills.”) “Lack of will” has replaced Saddam as the rightwing bogeyman that threatens us.

There is a contingent within our government that sees will as a panacea. Its members appear to believe quite literally in the old cliché, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” This has led to disastrous consequences. The most salient example of the will obsession can be seen in the way escalation advocates address their ideological opponents (who by now make up a sizeable majority of the population.) The Weekly Standard’s Noemis Emery recently wrote that, if the escalation fails, it will have been Democrats who “telegraphed to the enemy that our will was cracking, and we would shortly be leaving.” This argument is astounding; it suggests that anyone who criticizes a war effort damages that effort by portraying our will to win as less than universal. Will, in other words, is more important than tactical prescience or long-term planning – two elements Emery sees as less vital to the war effort than unflagging confidence in the Iraq misadventure.

But it’s not just pundits who obsess over will: The Bush administration itself has consistently put will above all else during every phase of this war. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently asked Bush why he thought the surge would work, she said he replied, “Because I told them it had to.” (Pelosi smartly asked Bush why he hadn’t simply done this earlier.) Again, we see the same, disturbing assumption that will is the most important factor in military confrontations. If Bush, and the rest of us, could only muster the sufficient will to beat back Sunni and Shiite insurgents, to remove Mahdi Army fighters from Iraq’s official army and police forces, to prove to Sunnis that there will be a place for them in postwar Iraq, then things would certainly settle down.

The obsession with will cuts both ways. The conservatives who believe that with enough will we can win in Iraq also believe that any terrorist’s will to destroy us means he may actually do so. However, there is a strong argument to be made that the sort of terrorism we’re fighting does not pose an existential threat to the United States. The terror groups Bush constantly lumps together have not coordinated a united front against us. Few have any real capability to do us harm on anything but a sporadic, small-scale level. Many of their agendas have more to do with local regimes than with us. Yes, there are real, dire threats – loose nukes (a problem without a military solution) being the scariest among them. But the tone of the rhetoric suggests that, since many of the disparate terror groups in question have the will to destroy the U.S., there is a real threat they will be able to do so. This is an absurdly simplistic assumption, but there are few better ways to justify sustained military action than to invoke an existential threat. This does not mean that there are no terror groups seeking to kill American civilians. But this current obsession with will—the conflation of the desire to do something with the ability to do something—causes us to vastly overestimate the strength of our enemies and to critically misunderstand the proper response.

“Will” makes for great rhetoric; it’s a feel-good word. After 9/11, Americans were bound together by their will to defend America from further attacks and to rebuild what had been destroyed. It was inspiring. But will has no place in closed-door strategy sessions. Will is no substitute for studying the complex history of the Middle East, for understanding what the invasion of a country entails, for putting into place the proper safeguards against military quagmire. And the tired line that those opposed to this war, to the escalation, or to any element of Bush’s ineffective strategy show our enemy that we “lack the will” to succeed is a despicable attempt as misdirection. The hell-like conditions in Iraq have nothing to do with will—they are the result of hubris, intellectual laziness, and incompetence. Maybe those are the qualities that commentators like Emery should be focused on instead.

Related Stories

• Gender-Neutral Housing Comes to Princeton
• Campaign Communications Director, Repower America
• Toke Up Marijuana Laws
• Send a Health Care E-Card
• The Battle for Pittsburgh