POLITICS
A Middle East Solution
Part I: We Must Leave Iraq Now
(A few months ago, we handed our travelling correspondent Don Rose no
small assignment: come up with a solution to the Middle East Crisis. A veteran
of the Civil Rights movement in Chicago, the 1968 Democratic Convention riots
and several national political and social action campaigns, Rose has always
been an original thinker on some of the most intractable political and social
issues of our time. Here, then, is the first of his four essays in search
of a Middle East Solution. Each is devoted specifically to a single issue:
Iraq, Israel, Iran and the future political landscape. This first essay makes
the case for pulling American troops out of Iraq now.)
Lyndon Johnson was regularly advised to declare victory in Vietnam and get the hell out. He didn’t and the war dragged on and on until there was no way to declare or even define victory. Ultimately we were treated to that humiliating sight of the last Americans scrambling onto a helicopter from the roof of our Saigon embassy.
Let’s not overdo the parallels with Iraq, but do let’s take a hard look at the situation there after three long years. Nearly 2,500 Americans and what may be close to 100,000 Iraqis—though our government claims a mere 35,000— have died in this war. Our government concedes we have spent upwards of $400 billion so far on the Iraqi operation, but independent experts agree the true costs are certain to reach a trillion dollars or more -- even if we quit today. That larger amount includes subtle hidden costs like the $5 per barrel hike in the price of world oil that is directly attributable to the war itself.
It is hard to imagine any significant progress anywhere in the Middle East unless and until we get out of Iraq, therefore I’m starting the larger discussion of how to find a Middle East “solution” with this most significant issue.
The President says he will not pull out of Iraq as long as he holds office, but the fact is, it’s clearly time to pack up and get out with all possible speed. Congressman John Murtha is absolutely right. The human, social and actual dollar costs of this war are far too high to continue, especially when the best outcome we can hope for an unending and debilitating morass of human suffering.
More to the point, the consequences of “staying the course” can be worse than those of pulling out. The American people are being told that total chaos will reign if we leave now, but the current presence of 135,000 American troops does not seem to be holding us much above that level today.
Some of the war’s supporters fall back on the old, and nonsensical arguments that our Iraqi war pits patriots against subversives, and pulling out now would somehow brand us “wimps” in the eyes of our world allies. So let me remind you: there’s nothing patriotic or manly about squandering American lives and dollars. And saving lives is the highest calling for both patriots and heroes.
Whether you believe it was a good idea to invade Iraq in the first place or whether you were against it from the start (as I was) you have to admit things have gone wrong — terribly wrong. Military miscalculation, bad intelligence, cultural ignorance and political bungling of the highest order have, in only three years in the Iraq, made 20 years of bad decisions in Vietnam look small by comparison.
It doesn’t matter at this point whether you think the Bush Administration was misled by its own bad intelligence or misled us by manipulating its intelligence and lying outright. That’s for history—or some future tribunal to determine. What we know now is there were no weapons of mass destruction, no links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and no serious terrorist threat coming from Iraq.
Yes, getting rid of Saddam was a good thing, but it hasn’t made the world any safer.
Quite the opposite.
The country we devastated in the name of a “war on terror” has become a nexus for worldwide terror—a breeding ground and training ground worse than Afghanistan under the Taliban. The number of foreign terrorists in Iraq has more than tripled in the past two years—estimates are they number at least 1300—and terrorist incidents worldwide continue to expand.
The unspoken goals of the invasion were to establish a permanent U.S. military base in Iraq; control the oil production and thereby get a better handle on the worldwide price of oil. Establishing a government more sympathetic to Israel may also have played a part, though I doubt it was the prime motivation for the invasion.
The Bush administration, of course, denies that oil had anything to do with our Iraqi invasion. But ask yourself a simple question: would we be there at all if Iraq’s chief national product was hummus and falafel? (Or conversely, don’t you think we’d be in Darfur in a flash if there was oil under that blood-soaked piece of earth?)
In any event, none of these goals is worth the
price we’re paying—which includes a total loss of prestige worldwide.
Yes, it was good thing to see Iraq holding genuine elections for the first
time in its history, but the elections proved a central point in this argument:
there are very few true Iraqis—there are only self-identified, self-interested
Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds.
To fully understand the situation here and its consequences we must understand that Iraq is not a true nation. It is a tripartite country whose boundaries—merging three separate Arabic and Kurdish provinces—were drawn by the British a century ago.
The allies of World War I ratified this in 1919-20 when the winners sliced and diced the remains of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. That’s when they balkanized the Balkans, stitching together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, to say nothing of huge parts of Africa and, yes, the Palestinian Mandate, which we now know as Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Interestingly enough, virtually all of those constructs burst apart late in the last century—most of them violently, like Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, but some peacefully, like Czechoslovakia. So we must bear those examples in mind as one possible outcome in Iraq, whether we pull out now or sometime in the future.
More importantly, we must recognize a fact that hardly anyone in the Bush Administration or the media makes clear: There is not one, but two wars going on in Iraq.
First, there is the guerilla war against the occupation—against us and the so-called coalition forces. We experience this war whenever a “coalition” soldier, vehicle or encampment is attacked and every time a shell is lobbed into our so-called “green zone.” What we are seeing in Iraq is a phenomena common to virtually every occupying force in the world today.
As long as we are seen as occupiers, not liberators,
we must expect some ongoing level of attack. Remember, 87 percent of Iraqis
want us to set a firm timeline for withdrawing, and even Saddam’s enemies
within that country say they do not want to be under the yoke of occupiers.
Occupying forces hardly ever “win,” as the British in Ireland
will tell you. By getting out now we will end that war, save lives and quell
a substantial part of the insurgency, which is averaging 75 attacks per day
and increasing the bloodshed.
While we fend off the attacks aimed at us, we find ourselves simultaneously
in the midst of a second war that is indeed more complex and more problematic.
It is essentially a civil war based on ethnic and religious differences, exacerbated
by an historic brutal domination by the minority Sunni Arabs against Shiites
and Kurds under Saddam’s Baathist regime.
One can argue about the precise level of civil warfare here: Is it yet a full-scale civil war? What level does it have to reach before it meets a particular definition of civil war? How many Iraqis must die at the hands of other Iraqis before we can acknowledge this?
Fortunately it has not yet reached the scale, say, of America’s own civil war or that in Rwanda. But there are many forces involved and many causes—the traditional Sunni-Shiite conflict, Baathist remnants trying to recapture the glory days of Saddam, Al Qaeda terrorists dipping into both the civil conflict and the battle against the occupation, Iran giving aid and succor to their fellow Shiite Muslims—though the Iranians are ethnic Persians rather than Arabs like the Iraqis.
The point is, we are virtually powerless to stop this war short of picking a “side” and tripling our ground troops to support it. Even then, we will not be able to “end” the conflict. We can only police it. There are an estimated 18,000 total “insurgents” today—a number that would be cut dramatically if the war against the occupation ends.
The government forces—thanks to us—have the superior equipment and training to deal with the balance of the insurgency, even at this juncture. They allegedly have a security force numbering 232,000, including 54,000 who are fully-trained . If we pull out it is possible the conflagration will grow—but it is more likely to diminish and the government forces will be able to quell the insurgency.
The worst-case scenario is that, with us gone, there is an all-out civil war and one side wins. That’s what happened in our civil war. Of course it appears to be happening even with us right in the midst of it all. We may or may not like the winning side, but there are lots more governments in the world we don’t like either.
No outcome is certain. It’s possible that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda forces grow in power and his side wins (though that is far less likely if we’re not around as a rallying point). It is also possible that Iraq will break apart into something like its original components: three independent nations. Certainly the Kurds, who are the most truly democratic of the group, would not mind that at all.
Former Ambassador to Croatia and Middle East expert Peter W. Galbraith makes an extensive case for this as perhaps the best solution, even though Turkey will not be happy with a Kurdish nation at its borders. But breaking apart is only one possibility, not an absolute outcome.
The point is that Iraq, whether one nation or three, is entitled to self-determination without the United States and its allies mired right in the middle of its troubles. We are nothing more than a gigantic irritant at best, a cause of the increasing violence. Why should we lose more American lives, bankrupt our economic future and absorb worldwide disdain to continue to play such a role?
We can organize a staged withdrawal and begin bringing troops out by the fall. It is also possible that we can negotiate with either the U.N. or NATO to phase in as peacekeepers to protect the oil fields and help stablilize the country during and after our withdrawal--so long as it is clear that such troops are not simply the new forces of occupation. We can continue to give financial and technical aid to the elected government to help quell the Sunni and Al Qaeda insurgency, then give the Sunnis a fair-share seat at the table, thereby helping prevent dissolution.
Consider a further benefit if we withdraw.
Thomas Friedman, the author and columnist, who was for the war from the start and who does not yet favor withdrawal, makes a startling and telling point: getting out of Iraq would be a good, bloodless, anti-Iran strategy.
Friedman makes several supporting arguments: if it later comes to the point where Iran’s nuclear facilities are “surgically” bombed to slow down their development of nuclear weapons, there would be no U.S. troops settled in neighboring Iraq to retaliate against. And without the U.S. occupying the country and providing a religious rallying point, Shiite Arab Iraq will be seriously unlikely to fall under the power of the Persian Shiites of Iran. Persian-Arab hostilities have been going on for centuries and will keep the Iranians at bay, absent a common enemy—us.
Friedman believes, however, that we may have some
way of “succeeding” in Iraq—but no one can really define
success, let alone tell us how to get there. Absent “success”
he eloquently notes “The one strategy that won’t work for us,
but would be ideal for Iran, would be for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq as
bleeding sitting ducks, babysitting a stalemate and absorbing everyone’s
wrath—including the wrath that would naturally be directed toward Tehran.”
That’s right, Tom. I hope it won’t be too much longer before you
come all the way over and recognize that “success” in Iraq will
be as elusive as those weapons of mass destruction. Three years ago the president
stood under that “Mission Accomplished” banner and declared that
the shooting war was over. Let’s not make a liar out of him.
Let’s declare victory, get out and let history take its course.
Coming up next week. Part II: The Israel Dilemma.