Facing the truth about Iraq

 Those of us in the opinion trade make predictions knowing they become public record. When we’re wrong, there is rarely a shortage of readers waiting to point it out to us. From the beginning, I have felt the Iraq war was a mistake. Should the coming months prove me wrong; should a government there coalesce, should the police and military prove capable of maintaining a civil society, should public services and public safety return to the streets of Iraq, then whatever embarrassment I might experience as a columnist will have been offset by the satisfactions I experience as a citizen. Meanwhile, I’d like to see us get the hell out of there. 

To support this thinking, I’d first like to identify what seem to be our central problems. After that, let’s see if we can, by addressing these problems one at a time, discover a way out. Two columns for the problems, two for possible solutions. Here goes. 

First of all, the conduct of the war has revealed colossally poor judgment. Virtually all our various rationales offered to justify the war have turned out to be ungrounded. No W.M.D.s, no way the war could pay for itself, no “mission accomplished” no adoring crowds but an unforeseen insurgency instead, no way to perform a simple head-transplant on Saddam’s old government. And no end in sight. 

To an alarming degree, Iraq has been a faith-based enterprise from the beginning. Even now, the architects of the war still insist that if we fail, it will not be their fault but instead, it will be our fault: the result of deficient public belief. This isn’t our soldiers’ failure. They have done what their commanders have told them to do. Their commanders have done what their civilian managers have decided. And their civilian managers have failed them and us.

We’ve insisted, as an article of faith, that Iraq wasn’t only ready for democracy, that it positively thirsted for it, ¦that all people do. While it may be true that all people may share a common desire to be left alone and not tyrannized, that is not necessarily a democratic impulse and it does not appear that, for all the lost blood and treasure, Iraq is headed towards democracy. It is, in fact, headed towards Islamist rule towards theocracy. Where voting has been permitted in the Middle East, it has favored Hezbollah and Hamas... which is another way to say that democracy has not been an end but only a means to ends we find unacceptable. 

The insurgency has developed a strategy for winning in Iraq that does not require the defeat of our armed forces. What it requires is the frustration of American desires for as long as required for us to leave. If we want oil, insurgents can easily blow up pipelines, refineries and convoys. If we want to set up a government, they can more easily destabilize it with terror and assassinations. Now we see what it was that the ruthless Saddam Hussein was containing. With Saddam removed, we’ve exposed our next problem. 

We’re not prepared to adopt the methods with which Saddam kept the potential forces of insurgency in check and more humane methods may not suffice. Nor can our dominance on the battlefield be of much use since the insurgency never intends to show up on one. Which reveals our next problem. 

The insurgency in Iraq is conducting a public seminar on how to humiliate the United States. We were more feared prior to our invasion of Iraq than we are after supposedly conquering the country. Sure, we have unmatched ability to blow things up, but we simply cannot simultaneously be humane and defeat an insurgency willing to victimize its neighbors as savagely as this one does. 

Our conduct of the war has, so far, advanced the national interests of Iran more than it has our own. We have removed the Taliban from power to their east, whose presence they did not like, and removed Saddam from power to their West who had defeated them in war and whom they justifiably hated. They have far more influence over the internal affairs in Iraq, especially in the south than they could have dreamed of prior to our invasion.  

The second principal beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq is Al Qaeda, who has a far wider presence and influence in Iraq than prior to our invasion. The third major beneficiaries are certain defense contractors of whom the President and Vice President are particularly fond. For this, we have squandered over 200 billion dollars and buried over 2,000 of our finest young men and women. For this, an additional 15,000 face their futures armless, legless, in pain, disfigured, or haunted with a sickness of heart from which many will never recover. The damage done to Iraq and Iraqis fuels our next problem. 

Islamic fundamentalism is spreading in the Muslim world, most rapidly among the young. Teenagers in the laid-back Caribbean are emailing to imams in Iran and Indonesia for instructions on how to be properly Muslim. Ask yourself how many teenagers outside the USA consider our soldiers in Iraq as heroes. Then ask the same question for suicide bombers. The answers you get prove to you that our current approach is unsustainable. 

Although we have understood Osama Bin Laden as a terrorist, we have not understood him as a theologian, which is how many of the world’s people see him. Islam is being torn as the Protestant Reformation tore at Christianity. At issue is whether Islam can reconcile itself with modernity. It seems to have never occurred to us that we might have to defend or explain modernity. If we in the West cannot discuss what we have become in theological terms, we are left with only the blunt and reactionary instruments of force. These may protect us for a short run but cannot solve our problem over the long haul. 

Our unilateral conduct of the war has isolated us from the rest of the world, and even from our friends, to an unprecedented degree. If our dearest objective is safety from terrorists, then it would make sense if the rest of the world gave a damn about what happens to us. If our objective is empire, however benevolent, our enemies and even our friends will form alliances to thwart our hegemony, which is what we’re seeing now. If we insist on the unilateral right to preemptive war - and that our treatment of prisoners need not conform to the norms of the most advanced nations - we will end up more feared than the terrorists. 

Because we’re so bogged down in Iraq, we are effectively limited in our ability to respond with force anywhere else in the world. And every tin-pot dictator on the planet knows it.

Finally, we have insisted on the old colonial proposition that Iraq must remain a single nation. Meanwhile, our invasion has unleashed forces always latent in the country that threaten to split the place into three units which, after some inevitable ethnic and sectarian cleansing, might even make a brutal kind of sense. We are not prepared to duplicate the means by which Saddam held the country together, and lesser means may not suffice. 

Even if we give Bush the benefit of the doubt and grant him only the most benevolent of motivations for invading Iraq, the cascade of calamities his decisions has either unleashed, or failed to contain, is staggering. Next, we begin our search for solutions.

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Getting us out of Iraq

We’ve spent the last two weeks reviewing the problems we face both in Iraq and in our war on terrorism. We’ve concentrated on Iraq and I’d like to continue to do that. We cannot just walk away, though. To do so would (ironically) turn Iraq into just the threat that Bush had erroneously scared us with three years ago. With American forces gone, not only would American access to Iraq’s petroleum be problematical but the revenues generated by petro sales would likely fall into the hands of people as nasty as Saddam ever was, and far more dedicated to doing us harm.  

Colin Powell once likened our Iraq policy to an antique shop: You bust it, you bought it. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether this administration had some hidden agenda or was simply stupid. We need a new management team, a regime change here at home. In light of the massive record of error and miscalculation, the present administration (almost entirely devoid of personal military experience) should be replaced. Removing Rumsfeld would be a good first step.  

Second, we should consider allowing Iraq to divide itself into the three ethnic and sectarian pieces that make it up. It appears to be on the road to collapsing into three pieces anyway. So why not get a little credit by assisting in making it a more orderly process. As each sector stabilizes itself, we declare victory and depart. This surely won’t be either as simple or harmonious as it sounds, but large constituencies will get what they want. The Turks will go ballistic over the prospect of an independent Kurdistan, but if they want admission to the European Union, they’ll be forced to behave themselves, and the Kurds will be both oil-rich and genuinely grateful. Here, if anywhere, we might actually get the oil-rich Middle Eastern buddy we’ve been pining for. 

In southern Iraq, the Shiites will have lots to fume about, but they finally will have been delivered of Saddam Hussein and, thanks to us, will have a shot at getting what they’ve always wanted. Will they remember to thank us? Probably not, but at least our troops will be safely out of there. The Sunni mid-section around Baghdad will remain the most problematical. They’ll have the least oil to sell, for example. Here, we might have to maintain a presence longer than we’d like, but we can withdraw increasingly to our heavily fortified bases as things slowly gel.

We will have to guarantee the territorial integrity of the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds from neighboring Iran and Turkey, leaving whatever forces Iraq develops to maintain order internally. As it is, the forces we’ve organized in Iraq are already segregated along ethnic and sectarian lines. There is no blended national army there now. To whatever extent the Iraqis need to unify themselves, they can do so, or not, as they like, and on their own. The United Nations would be more able to assist them in such a project than we could be. 

Such a strategy would, with a stroke, undo many of the problems we’ve spent the last two weeks explaining. Al Qaeda, stripped of its pretenses of defending Iraqi sovereignty from the evil Americans, would itself become the unwanted foreign presence in Iraq. If need be, we could retain a sufficient military presence in the Sunni sector to give Iran pause. Otherwise, we’d have our army back if we needed it to counter more legitimate threats in Iran, North Korea or Pakistan.

We must abandon the fantasy that democracy can be imposed on a civilization from the top down. For all their patriotic rhetoric, there are many reasons to believe that the Bush team doesn‘t really understand democracy as a grass-roots, bottom-up process. We didn’t need the CIA to tell us that a society in which the tribe is the largest social institution, a society that considers conversion from Islam to any other religion to be a capital crime and goes berserk over cartoons is not a candidate for democracy. Even had Iraq begged us to come teach them the mysteries of a democratic society, it would have been difficult. We didn’t need spies; any seasoned traveler in the Middle East could have told us this. We need a new management team that can make a clean break from previous policies.

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Seeking a global strategy for our security

 The insurgency in Iraq defines victory not in terms of defeating our forces but in frustrating our desires. That should be our general strategy for countering global terrorists. Frustration of desires is a game two can play. 

Limiting the availability of nuclear weapons should be job one. It’s going to be harder now than it once was but we need to re-affirm our previous arms limitation agreements with the Russians and negotiate some with the Chinese as soon as possible. Most urgently for us, we need to insist (and possibly pay for) improved security for the vast arsenal of nuclear artillery shells and other nuclear ordinance built during the Soviet era. It is far easier to steal or purchase a nuclear weapon than it is to build one. This will remain true for years to come. Don’t forget, the two nations with the real capacity, right now, to destroy our country are Russia and China, not Iran or North Korea. 

More dangerous than countries that might get nuclear weapons are the countries that already have them. Of these, the countries that have nukes and are vulnerable to an Islamist take-over are the most dangerous of all. The fastest way for Al Qaeda to get nuclear weapons (other than buying some out of Russia) would be to topple the regime in Pakistan. I worry we’re not thinking about this enough.

 We need a foreign policy that genuinely champions the little guys all around the world. By little guys, I mean ordinary working men and women. At present, our politicians haven’t the slightest clue what such a policy would look like, either here or abroad. They need to be replaced with politicians that do.  

We can no longer assume that our mission is to bring democracy to a thirsting world. The world insists on not wanting the things we want for it, and when we insist, even when our intentions are good, we come across as tyrants, not as liberators. Which is why we need a profound shift in focus from changing regimes to finding ways to be the little guy’s friend. Not everyone either wants democracy or is ready to live in one, but the desire to be free of oppression and exploitation is truly universal. How can we tap into this? 

We need to rebuild our relationships with the global community. This requires our seeking allies, not vassals, respecting the rights of prisoners, renouncing our “right” to a military first strike leading the world on issues of collective security like global warming.

 We must seek ways to strengthen the hand of Islamic moderates, and welcome any Islamic immigrants who are willing participants in the cultures they’ve moved into. If we treat all Muslims as potential terrorists, we play into the hands of terrorist recruiters. And we miss the genuine goodness of most Muslims. If we embrace the manly allure of the clash of civilizations model of reality, we will have accepted the terrorists vision for the future and we’ll end up living in their world, not our own. 

Where there are efforts underway to build bridges between faiths, like the Parliaments of the World’s Religion,s we should support such ventures and report on their accomplishments. We need forums where the people who disagree most can meet and seek alternatives to violent conflict. The terrorists have no interest in peaceful process, but surely the majority of the world’s people put more of their hopes on it than on the threat of war. 

Solid intelligence, security and the judicious use of military force can keep us safe for the short run but we should be perfecting other strategies for the long haul. If our only answers are violent, then we’ll be trapped by our own limitations until eventually, what we fear most will find its way to us.  

It is not enough to criticize the President for his shortcomings in Iraq (and elsewhere). We need to offer alternatives. When I was a boy, I studied debating. In that pursuit, I learned that a good argument rested on two legs: desirability, and possibility. I can’t fault Bush for wanting to bring democracy to Iraq. But it wasn’t possible to do it, nor did the Iraqi people ask us to. Now, within the limits of the possible, we have to ask in a new way how we can both look to our safety and also be a blessing to the world, understanding that the two are connected. Within the limits of my information and my capacities, I’ve attempted to begin such a discussion, here where I live.

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