A Reckoning
Deferred
From the Editors
January 12,
2007
How do you
ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? That haunting
question, posed by John Kerry to Congress when he was a discharged
Navy lieutenant in 1971, helped to slow, and eventually stop,
a pointless, unpopular war in Vietnam. That question, in part
because Kerry declined to pose it anew when he was a presidential
candidate in 2004, has yet to slow the unpopular war in Iraq,
if anything a more massive US strategic blunder than the Southeast
Asian venture. But the question unmistakably haunts the senators
who shuffle before the cameras to defend or denounce the planned “surge” of
21,500 additional American soldiers into Iraq as part of the
White House’s latest ploy to postpone defeat. The only
politician who can dodge the burdensome query is President George
W. Bush himself, who effectively announced again on January 10
that his successor will be the one scrambling to answer -- and
to ameliorate the anarchy the United States will probably leave
behind in Iraq.
At first glance,
and at second, the domestic politics of the Iraq war are a paradox.
On the one hand, the mere fact of Bush’s televised recital
of yet another “new way forward,” like the Iraq Study
Group report now resting in the Oval Office’s circular
file, shows that the war will never again enjoy public support.
A scant 36 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll
approve of Bush’s escalation, and only 40 percent continue
to believe the war is worth fighting at all. The Democrats, too,
scuttled to rearrange the priorities for their first “100
hours” in control of Congress when they realized their
constituents demand rapid attention to Iraq policy above all
else.
Yet Bush rolled
out the “surge” proposal anyway. Perhaps more perplexingly,
most prominent Democrats are still hiding behind the moribund
Iraq Study Group’s recommendations and even pleas of Congressional
impotence in order to avoid acting on the public’s clear
desire to de-escalate the war without delay. In the Senate, Ted
Kennedy of Massachusetts stands nearly alone in asserting that
troop level increases require Congressional approval. Few senators
in either party savor the “surge” -- conservative
Christian standard-bearer Sam Brownback of Kansas spoke against
it from Baghdad -- but most Democrats appear content to pass
a non-binding disavowal of the president’s plan. In the
House of Representatives, whose members must keep their ears
closer to the ground, Democrats are talking about attaching myriad
strings to the funding for the troop increase, perhaps as a prelude
to bolder stands. Still, only a vocal minority in Congress has
wholeheartedly embraced their newfound power of the purse, for
fear of being called miserly when baby-faced Marines in Baquba
need body armor or, worse, being held accountable for the heightened
violence that could very well afflict Iraq and its environs when
the US departs at last. In their anxiousness to hang the Iraq
albatross exclusively around Bush’s neck, the Democrats
resemble the president, whose determination not to withdraw before
leaving office quite possibly presages the occasional swipe at
the next commander-in-chief for failing to persevere until “victory.” Partisan
rivalry is trumping the bipartisan duty to end a disastrous war.
This pre-positioning
for the “who lost Iraq?” debate, miserably, is only
the surface of the sordid spectacle that is the Iraq war and
its attendant discourse.
The “surge” itself
is without merit. Establishment critics, like the National Security
Network headed by former National Security Council man and Kerry
campaign adviser Rand Beers, chalk the dots on the blackboard
but do not connect them. They note that Bush has ordered extra
troop deployments on four previous occasions, most recently in
an effort to “secure” Baghdad in the summer of 2006,
and that on each occasion the escalation has been followed by
mayhem more sanguinary than before. They retrieve from the memory
hole the facts that, in December, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously
advised against sending more soldiers, while Gen. John Abizaid,
until recently commander of the Iraq war theater, was testifying
in Congress that none of his generals believed adding troops
would “add considerably to our ability to achieve success
in Iraq.” One can consult another Beltway bible, the Iraq
Index maintained by the Brookings Institution, for two additional
data points: The number of attacks on US soldiers rose from 24,496
in 2004 to 34,131 in 2005, while estimates of the number of guerrillas
fighting the US in Iraq jumped from some 5,000 in 2004 to 20,000
by the succeeding year. This latter estimate has not been revised
downward. A logical conclusion, obvious to Iraqis who are polled
on the matter, but still largely unmentionable in Washington,
is that the mostly Sunni Arab rebellion against US occupation
simply grows stronger the longer the occupation lasts.
Of course,
the battles in the “Sunni triangle” are only one
component of the Iraqi maelstrom. For two and a half years, Baghdad
and its surrounding provinces have been consumed by a steadily
intensifying civil war pitting the Sunni Arab militants against
the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and, the White
House is now compelled to admit, sizable elements of the US-trained
Iraqi army and police forces. Nominally loyal to the Iraqi government
formed after the December 2005 elections, these forces are thoroughly
penetrated by communal militias, including the Mahdi Army, the
Badr Brigades of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI) and the peshmerga fighters of the twin Kurdish
parties. In the understated phrasing of the Iraq Study Group,
it is unclear “whether [these forces] will carry out missions
on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda.” The
International Crisis Group is more forthright: “The [Iraqi]
government and security forces should not be treated as privileged
allies to be bolstered. They are but one among many parties to
the conflict and not innocent of responsibility for much of the
trouble.” Some security service units are participating
in the sectarian cleansing that is forcing Sunni Baghdadis to
the west of the Tigris River that bisects the capital, while
Shiite Baghdadis flee to the eastern bank. None of them, as the
Iraq Study Group pointed out, can curb the criminal gangs who
frequently wear police uniforms. Civilians, of course, are the
vast majority of the civil war’s victims.
Washington’s
preferred narrative of the Iraqi civil war, composed by neo-conservative
columnists the moment they could no longer deny the internecine
conflict, and purveyed by Bush on January 10, is that “al-Qaeda
terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger
that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause. And they responded
with outrageous acts of murder…in a calculated effort
to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy
worked.” This story, while tailor-made for Bush’s
dogged attempts to cast Iraq as “a struggle that will determine
the direction of the global war on terror,” starts somewhere
in the middle of the historical record. While terror attacks
directed at Shiites began in the summer of 2003, the extremist
salafis were not successful in inciting wider sectarian strife
until after a series of decisions by the US and its Iraqi proxies
had convinced the mass of Sunni Arabs that, in post-Saddam Iraq,
they were the enemy. There is no room in Bush’s narrative
for such events as US colonial overlord L. Paul Bremer’s
dissolution of the Iraqi army, or the blanket debaathification
pursued by SCIRI and Ahmad Chalabi, or the torture and sexual
humiliation at Abu Ghraib, or the razing of mostly Sunni Arab
Falluja in November 2004 after the US had twice balked at similarly “back-breaking” assaults
upon the Shiite Mahdi Army.
Nor is there
time for the White House to acknowledge that Iraq’s final
descent into the inferno, after the bombing of a Shiite imam’s
tomb in Samarra’, came after the discovery of secret jailhouses
wherein the new Iraqi Ministry of Interior, then controlled by
SCIRI, tortured Sunnis, and the passage of a new constitution
that polarized Iraqis almost precisely along sectarian and ethnic
lines. Indeed, the logic of the Iraqi civil war is embedded in
the logic of the entire post-Saddam political transition, by
which efforts at national reconciliation have continually been
sidelined by communal parties playing a zero-sum game. It is
a logic of which the world saw a vivid and grotesque illustration
on December 30, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s
government chose the date when Sunnis (but not Shiites) begin
celebrating the Feast of the Sacrifice to hang Saddam Hussein
before a crowd of jeering loyalists of Muqtada al-Sadr. By Muslim
tradition and the Iraqi constitution, there are to be no executions
on this holiday. Maliki’s order to go ahead, therefore,
was akin to saying that Sunnis are not real Muslims. One of the
worst war criminals of the late twentieth century was thereby
transformed into a symbolic victim of the very sectarianism he
so ruthlessly practiced while Iraq’s dictator. Given all
this history, why does Bush believe the US can now succeed at
brokering the national reconciliation that is to be the political
backdrop to the “surge”?
The president
asked himself this question in his January 10 speech. His main
answer was that, in the past, “political and sectarian
interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into
neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence.” In
other words, Bush believes Maliki will now give “a green
light” to US incursions into Sadr City, the base of the
Mahdi Army. If Maliki does so, despite his government’s
reliance on the Sadrist ranks for its semblance of legitimacy,
then the US will be fighting on two fronts, as it briefly was
in the spring of 2004. Bush’s national reconciliation strategy
thus relies upon a still greater exercise of military force.
No wonder he warns Americans to expect more blood and gore “even
if our new strategy works exactly as planned.”
Certainly,
the economic initiatives attached to the “surge” hold
out meager hope for brightening this picture. Bush vowed, for
instance, that Maliki’s government will spend $10 billion
of its own oil money on reconstruction projects, thus presenting
itself as service provider and employer to Iraqis from whom it
has previously been distant at best. Leave aside for a moment
that this amount is less than two months’ US expenditure
on its military presence and its super-embassy on the Tigris.
A new book by British scholars Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala, Iraq
in Fragments, suggests that the time for such “hearts
and minds” projects is long since past. With the collapse
of the Iraqi state following the invasion, and the wildly oscillating
governing strategies of the US-British occupation authority,
the country was effectively fragmented (into many more parts
than the three envisioned by champions of “soft partition” like
Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware). By the time of the “handover” of
nominal sovereignty in 2004, many localities had ceased depending
on Baghdad for essential services. About electricity, for example,
Herring and Rangwala note that notoriously low supply in the
capital was partly caused by the sabotage of residents (not insurgents)
of the southern provinces where the US located its big new power
plants. “Stop sending our electricity to Baghdad!” read
a note left near one set of cut power lines.
The chatter
of pundits indicating that Washington and its Iraqi allies will
decide what happens next in Iraq, sustaining as it does the illusion
of actual governance emanating from the walled-in Green Zone,
was only the second most offensive utterance of the evening.
Shame of place belongs to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), whose official “Democratic
response” to Bush revolved around the demand that “the
Iraqis stand and defend their own nation.” Durbin’s
call begged the question of which Iraqis he means, since in the
next sentence he referred to a civil war and government death
squads. But the real insult was delivered though his petulant
tone, the clear implication of which was that Iraqis are ungrateful
for a regime-changing war that, three and a half years after
the invasion, has left hundreds of thousands of them dead and
turned an additional 3.7 million into refugees or internally
displaced people. “We have given the Iraqis so much,” Durbin
actually said. “Every time they call 911, we are not going
to send 20,000 more American soldiers.”
So the Democrats,
too, figure they can only sound patriotic if they erase the agency
of the US in bringing Iraq to its present impasse. Their blame-the-Iraqis
conceit is all the more cynical since they are pointedly not
doing everything in their power to extricate American soldiers
from their Mesopotamian entanglement. Instead, they are issuing
meaningless calls for “phased redeployment” of those
soldiers in 4-6 months, safe in the knowledge that Bush will
not oblige so long as the legislators also promise to “provide
our soldiers every resource they need to fight effectively.” The
Democrats know, as Bush argued, that “failure in Iraq would
be a disaster for the United States,” or at least for its
long-time, bipartisan “forward-leaning posture” in
the oil-rich Persian Gulf, and they are not eager to hasten the
reckoning either. There is no escaping the realities that US
withdrawal from Iraq would be a retreat under fire; it would
further tarnish the Pentagon’s desired image of invincibility;
it would be seen as a triumph for radical Islamist insurgency;
it would “embolden” Iran and Syria in their defiance
of US dictates, and possibly inflate Iranian ambitions in the
Gulf; it would sacrifice billions of dollars in sunken costs
and abandon four handy “enduring bases.” The US would
pay all these strategic costs without having installed a predictable,
pliable partner regime atop what are likely the world’s
second-largest petroleum reserves. Iraq, indeed, is not Afghanistan.
Loath to be
the man who “lost Iraq,” but more to the point, dedicated
to the worldview that Iraq is America’s to win or lose,
Bush had little choice but to up the ante. He had to fortify
the linkage between Iraq and “the decisive ideological
struggle of our time” in the broader Middle East. He had
to herald a bipartisan commission that will expand the active-duty
military “so that America has the armed forces we need
for the twenty-first century.” He had to rattle his saber
at ebullient Iran, ordering another aircraft carrier to the Persian
Gulf and a raid upon the Iranian consulate in Erbil. He left
out only a reference to “hunting down al-Qaeda” by
helicopter in Somalia. His problem is that he has employed this
near apocalyptic rhetoric for so many years that it now rings
hollow, even in the post-September 11 United States.
There are
signs, indeed, that a resurgent American public will break, or
at least crack, the bipartisan dam of denial and avoidance of
blame for the Iraq debacle. The initial reaction of Sen. Harry
Reid (D-NV), then the incoming Majority Leader, to the “surge” proposal
was acquiescence in a “short-term” increase of troops.
According to Hany Khalil of United for Peace and Justice, Reid’s
office was “pelted with phone calls” by anti-war
activists and angry Democrats who voted in November 2006 for
a substantive “change of course.” A few days later,
the senator rejected Bush’s plan unequivocally. Those who
viewed Bush’s oratory on CNN heard chants of “Stop
the war!” just underneath the voice of the White House
correspondent as she delivered her initial post-speech report
from outside the presidential residence. United for Peace and
Justice is building a national mobilization in Washington for
January 27, and a host of local demonstrations will take place
in the preceding week. The peace movement calls, as do we, for
an early and expeditious US withdrawal from Iraq, with eyes wide
open about the possible consequences for Iraq, but eyes also
open to the fact that these consequences -- civil war, refugee
flight, fragmentation -- are already occurring, and no longer
in slow motion.
Withdrawal
does not absolve the United States of its responsibility to Iraq.
In the short term, the US owes asylum to the thousands of Iraqis
who have worked for the military, the embassy and American contractors,
and it owes years of hefty contributions to the international
body that the UN should constitute posthaste to care for Iraqi
refugees in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. Washington should also
exert great diplomatic energy to restrain Iraq’s neighbors
from meddling in the Iraqi civil war, though it would be naïve
to expect none. But, first and foremost, Congress must restrain
the White House from all further escalations in the Persian Gulf,
and the public must disabuse Congress of the comforting notion
that if it blocks the “surge,” it can wash its hands
of the war itself.
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