The Ultimate Solution for Ending the U.S. Debacle in Iraq

And other pertinent observations one month into spring

by Leigh Pomeroy

Just as spring is coming in fits and starts this year, so is my normal winter depression refusing to excuse itself from my psyche. Indeed, it seems worse than ever though the ground is warming and the sun is shining.

If you've never had the joy of suffering from true depression, you don't really understand what it feels like to be constantly tired, to lose interest in what's going on in the world, to feel that you are unnecessary and that you don't matter and that if suddenly you checked out from Hotel Earth all you'd leave behind are a lot of problems for other people to deal with — an unpaid bill, as it were.

It's a sucky feeling.

But if you manage to survive such low points, as I seem to have done so for the four decades or so, you often bounce back with a rush of strength and creativity, like Superman suddenly breaking a straitjacket of kryptonite chains.

Perhaps the low feelings come from not being able to express what you really feel or from being stuck in a situation where you don't feel comfortable. Perhaps they come from having to make hard choices between taking the safe route or saying "what the f**k!" and going forth in another, less charted direction. ("The Road Not Taken" meets "Risky Business".)

What does this have to do with Iraq?

As congress dilly-dallies around the Iraq question, there is a thought that I'm sure occupies many minds — certainly millions in the Middle East. It may be spoken in that part of the world, but can't be uttered in the U.S. for obvious reasons.

It is, however, a question of math.

Let's say you have a basket of holy apples. It is a sin to remove these apples from the basket, punishable by death.

But what happens if two of those apples, for example, are rotten? That's fine, you suppose, as long as all the other apples are good.

But what if those two apples are causing the rest of the apples to rot? If you don't remove the two rotten apples, as well as the ones they've affected, then soon all the apples in the basket will rot.

But you can't because doing so is punishable by death.

What do you do then?

It's a classic quandary.

I remember reading many years ago a science fiction story about two intergalactic fleets facing off against one another in what is like a huge chess match. Periodically, the central computer of one will alter its formation to give its fleet an advantage, but nearly instantaneously the central computer for the other will detect the change and counter. The result is a standoff lasting thousands of years.

Ultimately, a crew member on one of the fleets goes bonkers and begins wildly hitting buttons on his ship's control panel, causing the central computer to align the fleet in a totally random pattern. The opposing fleet's computer doesn't know how to deal with this and sends its fleet into disarray. This gives the first fleet just the slightest advantage, whereupon it attacks and rapidly wipes out the second fleet. End of war.

The lessons of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan tell us that if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq, even more chaos would reign than there is today, which is hard for us to imagine. There is only one way, at least in the short term, where a U.S. withdrawal would work, and that's if another police force of equal or greater strength supplanted it.

Yet where would you get such a force? Think about it: There are no good options.

So what is the ultimate solution to the war in Iraq?

It's really quite simple. You take the president and vice president of the United States, equip them the same way you would as any G.I., stick them in an unarmored Humvee, deposit the Humvee in the middle of Baghdad and say, "Have fun!"

Long gone are the days when a general leads his troops into battle. Nowadays they sit back and watch from a comfortable distance away from the bloodshed and violence. Too bad. Perhaps if they had a more intimate acquaintance with the realities of war, they would be less inclined to fight them.

And so it goes for a sunny, mid-April Sunday in year 2007 of the common era.