June 13, 2003

IRAQ EXIT STRATEGY: WINNING WAR, LOSING PEACE?

by Srdja Trifkovic

Since WMDs were not the real reason for attacking Iraq, the question of the war’s true purpose remains unresolved. Almost two months since President Bush announced that “major combat operations” had come to an end the United States appears strangely uncertain of its post-war mission. Dozens of American soldiers have died in accidents and, much more worryingly, in hit-and-run attacks by assailants unknown: mysterious “diehard Saddam loyalists,” Tehran-prompted Shiite fanatics, and bandits who thrive on chaos are all suspected. The number of “peacetime” casualties—averaging a soldier a day—may soon exceed that of combat losses suffered in March-April. The cost of lives apart, keeping some 160,000 U.S. troops in situ costs $3 billion a month (a hundred million a day, seventy grand a minute). Furthermore, the cost of Iraq’s reconstruction—a pressing task regardless of the country’s final political framework—is also unknown, including the distribution of potentially lucrative contracts among many Western hopefuls.

From the realist perspective the cost of Iraqi occupation would be lamentable but necessary and therefore tolerable, if the purpose of blood and money thus expended was spelled out with clarity, honesty, and coherence. This has not been done so far. Since there is no statement of purpose, no exit strategy, and no timetable, widely divergent views and scenarios are vying for the status of “policy.” Although candidate George W. Bush campaigned against Clinton-era “nation building,” his administration now finds itself engaged in the second such operation in the last two years. As we enter what promises to be a long, hot summer of Arab discontent, the mission in Iraq remains open to ad-hoc definitions and manipulative interpretations by special-interest groups within and around the Bush Administration.

The confusion surrounding post-war strategy in Iraq was the subject of a Cato Institute conference last Tuesday (“Getting Out and Moving On: The Second Gulf War and Its Aftermath,” June 10). A dozen analysts of different persuasions shared the podium in two sessions. The resulting debate was somewhat unusual for Washington, where many policy scribes refuse to talk to people who are not their political and ideological allies.

The debate was opened by John Hulsman, the Heritage Foundation Realist-in-Residence, who sees two dangers in Iraq: leaving the place too soon, and staying too long. The first won’t happen: nobody within the Administration is suggesting that the U.S. should pack up and quit regardless of subsequent outcomes. The second danger is real: in the flush of victory the rhetoric in Washington is all too often millenarian, Hulsman says. This rhetoric treats “Iraq” as a nation-state, as a defined and a potentially stable polity that needs a strong dose of American political and economic models of good life. In reality, he warns, the goals, challenges, and expectations of different ethnic and religious groups within Iraq are not reducible to a common denominator. Three different Ottoman provinces of old have not forged a sense of common destiny or common nationhood over the past eight decades. Being an “Iraqi” does not come before one’s Sh’ia, or Kurdish, or even local, tribal-clannish identity.

Since repeated attempts at centralization have failed, in Hulsman’s view the best the United States can do is to recognize this reality and to promote decentralization within a loose framework of the country’s external borders:

First, the Kurds should be given self-rule, and their autonomous polity can be viable in view of the substantial fossil fuel reserves in the northern third of the country. (Oil revenues should be divided on the basis of two-thirds to the regions, one-third to the center.) At the same time Kurdish separatism should be strongly discouraged, and secessionists should be threatened with the unleashing of the Turk if they get too bold.

Second, the Shi’as in the southern third, the country’s plurality, should be allowed to build an autonomous Allahocratic polity—if that is indeed what they long for—and to enjoy the fruits of their own region’s oil wealth. At the same time they should be made aware of the price to be paid—including U.S.-sanctioned re-imposition of Sunni dominance—if Basra’s links with Tehran become too close for America’s comfort.

Third, the Sunni Arabs in the middle (just over a third of the population) should be encouraged to find a silver lining in what is “objectively” a bad scenario for that erstwhile ruling stratum. They will no longer lord over the rest, but Baghdad will still be the capital and the commercial center and the country will remain one in terms of international law and internal commerce.

Hulsman’s model is self-avowedly not exciting. It relies on a mix of rewards and threats for each of the key groups to fit into an American interest-based model of country management. It is non-millenarian, it takes into account “the world as we find it, not as some of us want it to be.”

Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, countered Hulsman’s expose with an unabashedly ideological blueprint for culture-altering action by the U.S.. His concept was stated vis-Ð-vis Iraq but he claims that it may apply to any other polity in the region. The goal for Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, should be democracy. The people want it; the countries need it, even without knowing it. The question is whether it is doable, and how America can make it happen. In Muravchik’s view, democratizing the Middle East is not only a moral imperative but also a demand of U.S. national security. September 11 was a quantitative watershed—thousands of Americans were killed, not dozens, as in Somalia, or hundreds, as in Beirut—but it was not a qualitatively new event. Assorted Arab and/or Islamic terrorists had been killing Americans for years, and 9-11 merely raised the benchmark. The next stage may be to kill Americans not by thousands but by tens or hundreds of thousands, but the underlying threat is the same. It is rooted in the “sick political culture” of the Middle East, delusional, tyrannical, and violent. It is diseased, but it can be cured by democracy.

Can it be done? Muravchik’s categorical answer is “yes”: two-thirds of all governments around the world are now democratic, he claims, which is twice the score of three decades ago. Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians have all chosen the path of liberty. Although no Arab country is democratic, and there has been little progress over the years, he sees no intrinsic reason why the Arab-Muslim world cannot change. It had been claimed that Japan could not become democratic because of its cultural traditions, and similar claims had been advanced at different times about Germany, about other Asian, Latin American, or traditionally Roman Catholic countries—and all have been proven wrong. Iraq can and should be made democratic under American guidance, Muravchik argues, even if it takes years to achieve—but the task is not beyond the United States, the main engine of the spreading of democracy in the world. It entails training a new elite and building new institutions. The first task is to have elections for the constitutional assembly; a general election should follow the adoption of a democratic constitution. All along, strong American presence and commitment is essential to success.

Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at Cato Institute, presented a diametrically opposed view. He warns that a long period of military occupation is the surest way to turn victory into defeat. The United States can be “engaged” in Iraq without maintaining a quasi-permanent armed presence on the ground. Maintaining permanent bases in a hostile landscape is not militarily justified, and the latest war proves that temporary facilities and long-distance operations will get the job done. Keeping an occupation force to “promote democracy” is even less justified, as it will produce the opposite result. It will breed resentment and anger, and provide recruits for terrorist networks. Every day that the U.S. remains in Iraq in the pursuit of a particular system of government, Preble says, the moderates will grow weaker and the extremists will become emboldened: “This is the classic Catch-22 of nation-building efforts. The harder an occupying government tries to build a nation, the higher the likelihood that the citizens of the nation being 'built' will grow to resent the efforts of well-meaning foreigners.”

Preble’s view is that American efforts in Iraq should be limited, focusing solely on the swift transitioning to an Iraqi interim government empowered to move toward self-rule. Beyond that, the United States must be willing to accept the wishes of the Iraqi people and should not assume that a friendly government can or should be imposed at the barrel of a gun. It is possible that a “democratic” Iraq will not be friendly to the United States, but the only American concern should be whether it threatens American security.

The second session, chaired by Doug Bandow, started with Alan Tonelson’s frontal attack on neo-Wilsonian impulses in American foreign policy making, manifest in the “mission” to bring democracy to the Middle East. This urge is dysfunctional and dangerous, Tonelson says, it is bound to increase risks and undermine U.S. security. The claim that we must resolve social, political and economic underlying reality that produces threats to the United States is the blueprint for disaster. The “problems” with Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries are nothing but the defining and enduring problems of human condition. Only a spontaneous, organically evolving process of day-to-day interactions may produce enduring political institutions. Even of those problems could be solved by the United States, doing so would produce the risk of imperial over-reach or else demand America’s wholesale shift to war economy footing. What we need instead is more hedging, in the Middle East and elsewhere, including a meaningfully national-security-oriented immigration policy. In U.S. foreign policy the answers begin at home.

Leon Hadar pointed out the parallel between the aftermath of Gulf War One and the situation today: in both cases we encounter inflated expectations and exaggerated claims (“Peace Process Reloaded”). What we’ll get instead is another addition to the graveyard of Great Middle Eastern Expectations. The latest episode in the “peace process” is reminiscent of G. B. Shaw’s quip about marriage as “triumph of hope over experience.” In Iraq, too, the old British imperial script is being re-enacted with a neo-Wilsonian soundtrack. The promoters of “democracy” in the region should realize that the Middle East is a kaleidoscope in which everything impacts everything else. An outside power may enter and change the configuration, but it cannot control the outcome. The result of American “engagement” may prove detrimental to U.S. interests: is an ultra-religious Shia Iraq better than Saddam’s Iraq? “Democratization” of the Middle East would bring to power various forces far more hostile to the United States than many current (undemocratic) regimes are right now. It is far more advisable to engage the Europeans, to whom this region matters far more than to the United States, and to lower the expectations. In Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, Hadar concludes, American policy-makers should resist “social conceit” and pursue specific and definable interests.

On balance most participants were in agreement with this view, but pessimistic about the ability and willingness of the Bush administration to refrain from a long, dangerous, and ultimately self-defeating entanglement. In informal discussions after the conference several analysts have expressed the opinion that the Iraqi mission is already in trouble, and may turn into a major electoral liability for the President unless an exit strategy is devised and applied in the very near future.

All rights reserved, ¿ÞÓÛÕÔØ - 2003. ÓÞÔØÝÕ.

Design and maintenance - www.proxy.co.yu     web master