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Friday, June 03, 2005

The Mess in Iraq

To respond to one of the comments directly: yes, I do have a blog sort of my own.  It’s called Public Intelligence and I share it with my lively siblings, one of whom has just posted an interesting riposte to my comments about Iraq a few posts back.  Her objections echo many expressed by respondents here—and compel me to revisit the issue.  (I invite you to go over and read for yourself. )

Pat’s post (I’m assuming it is from Pat; I think I recognize the voice) also suggests a solution. The dilemma, as I phrased it, is how can we withdraw from Iraq without causing even more harm than the harm we are doing by being there. Various people object to understanding our situation in that way and I very much agree that one result of such an understanding is that you can end up prolonging a conflict because you don’t want the earlier deaths to be “in vain.” To use a very crude, but apt, analogy, it’s like throwing good money after bad. (Also, just to be clear, “harm” here is being understood in the grossest utilitarian terms. More harm = more deaths.)

So Pat suggests that we place the decision in the hands of the Iraqi people.  Schedule periodic (say once every six months) plebiscites on whether the US should go or stay. (She considers various objections and drawbacks in her post.) I think the idea is promising.  Oddly enough, I’ve been planning to write against plebiscites (with the Governator as prime instance) in my upcoming posts on the Republican assault on democracy.  And I am worried that Pat’s notion could just be a way of covering the US’s ass. It might be more of a public relations gimmick--giving us a way to leave with honor (to recall an odious Vietnam-era phrase)--than a way to minimize bloodshed. But--and this is a very big but--the insane dynamics of war are so insane precisely because they rarely offer any way to back down short of defeat. And the refusal to cry “uncle” can lead to thousands and thousands of pointless deaths. (Which is not to say that the first deaths in this war were not equally pointless.) So even if it is just a gimmick, any port in a storm. It can still have great overall consequences. In short, a hesitant endorsement of the idea. At the very least, it’s thinking creatively in the absence of any other good options.

Two further thoughts on Iraq. The first is that I do believe that, eventually, we are going to cut and run. The US can’t outlast the “insurgency” and it can’t stabilize the situation. We will do what we did in Vietnam. Make a show of having trained a legitimate, indigenous army and then leave before that army is even close to strong enough to control the situation. There will be a civil war from which some strong-armed authoritarian regime will emerge (Saddam Hussein-lite if Iraq is lucky). I don’t see any reason at all to expect any better than that. Even if the army we leave behind “wins” the war, it will do so by becoming authoritarian. So the only real question for US policy is whether we do any more harm withdrawing tomorrow as opposed to three years from now. But, of course, the question can’t be posed that way in public--or in the government’s foreign policy decision-making. The first casualty in war is the truth.

The second thought is on the insurgents. As Pat notes, there is some reason to believe their violence is much more about killing Americans and those Iraqis who collaborate with Americans than about gaining political power. The evidence? The minute the violence subsided in the immediate aftermath of the January elections, talk of American withdrawal began. The obvious strategy for an insurgency that actually wanted to win a civil war would be to unilaterally stop its attacks for six to twelve months and bide its time. After the Americans leave, it could overwhelm the new Iraqi government.

Of course, it took a long time for the Vietnamese communists to devise that strategy. But here, I think, analogies to Vietnam are completely misleading. It’s being called the “insurgency” for lack of a better name. But notice that there has been next to no information about who these insurgents are or any sense of what they want as a prelude to some sort of negotiated settlement. Partly that’s because we’re in such firm good guy/bad guy mode; no deals with the devil. Partly it’s because, from all accounts, our intelligence on the ground in Iraq is absolutely abysmal. (Our idea of combating the insurgents is to make sweeping arrests, with little idea of who the dragnet is pulling in.) But I think (from what I can glean and guess from, admittedly, a galaxy far, far away) it is also because there is not one insurgency, with some set of articulated aims, but instead thousands of very angry and pretty much independent armed groups who are bound and determined to resist America and all it stands for. And if that is the case, then withdrawal might very well make things better.

Posted by John McGowan on 06/03 at 04:26 PM
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