The war with Iraq is filled with gambles. The last six months have been almost exclusively a period of uncertainty and a time of anxious waiting for outcomes that border between the unpredictable and the surreal, which is why the recent shift in U.S. objectives seems so strikingly odd and poorly timed.

A gamble like this — saying Saddam has to go into complete exile for Iraq to avoid war — only complicates the U.S. position.

For a number of reasons:

The new requisite to avoid war — Saddam Hussien’s complete exile — is much less likely to be supported by the U.N. There is no resolution in the works to legitimate invasion for the purpose of exiling Hussein; and at the pace U.N. officials are moving — coupled with their conservative temperament — one is not likely to be drafted.

Which leaves Bush’s ultimate military push at even stranger odds with the whole melting pot of anti-war sentiment — since the U.S. still wants to want to feign regard for the U.N. and they cannot do so by calling for and going ahead with things the U.N. does not support. Plus, changing objectives — especially weeks or even days before the conflict starts — leaves allies and potential allies compromised as well.

Mission creep — the gradual changing of war objectives over time — has never fared well in U.S. foreign policy, and now such a policy shift can only help to weaken an already meager international support structure for the Iraq campaign.

In fact, this recent and subtle change of objectives — in the climate the U.S. is trying to work in and around presently — may be even more detrimental than going ahead without the support of the United Nations, which has been the most heated point of contention between supporters and dissenters.

U.S. wars and conflicts governed by changing objectives have never proven successful; ending in demilitarization, reoccupation, withdrawal and other conclusions that are big on death and low on effectiveness, ending in a sad shaking of heads and moments of silence.

And now Bush — on the biggest gamble of his career — has waffled on his objectives before the troops have set in, which doesn’t bode well for the United States. Shifting objectives in a climate this uncertain will have dire consequences for everyone involved, directly and indirectly.

What those consequences will be cannot be known concretely, because the unpredictability of world affairs — especially when they are connected the way they are in war — seems open for any and all possibilities good and bad, ground for near-textbook chaos theory logistics.

So, it is obvious that the gambles Bush continues to make are ours as well, whether we like it or not — a pretty depressing fact when the situation is viewed from afar. It’s further depressing when you realize the point of no return has been crossed and even the most favorable outcome is a war, just one on a smaller scale.

Even the smallest-scale war is being governed by positions that continue to be shifted and nuanced and a history that illustrates no precedent for what will be, except that mission creep seems to have little promise.

With gambles like these — policies, defined by change and may include abstract causes and battles for things that have not been agreed upon or backed up — only one thing is certain:

There is a memorial in Washington, D.C., that holds 58,229 names of men and women who served their country and who died or went missing by doing so. The people on this wall died in battle or while captive in prisons, from bombs and missiles and gunshots.

They died, too, from things that were out of their control — things that dealt with neither knife nor gun, but what results when an army of great size sends its soldiers abroad for a reason it cannot state specifically.

And if this wall can show us anything, it is that there is no room for uncertainty in this line of work; in this sort of gamble, the odds are high, and when you lose, you lose big.

John Ross is a senior in comparitive studies and English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].