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Well, we broke it. Saddam Hussein’s police state held together a country composed of rival Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Kurds, in the same way that Marshal Tito’s dictatorship held together the unnatural state of Yugoslavia, cobbled together out of rival Slavs, Croats, Albanians, and Montenegrans, among others. After Tito’s death, Yugoslavia disintegrated into the genocidal Balkan civil war between Croats, Serbs, et al, in which the U.S. intervened through the U.N.. That war was resolved through a negotiated peace treaty which produced separate Balkan nations for each of the major ethnic groups. Why would anyone with a knowledge of history expect that deposing Saddam Hussein would not result in exactly the same scenario: a genocidal civil war between rival religious/ethnic groups once police state repression was removed? Missouri Rep. Ike Skelton, new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, compares the administration’s conduct of the Iraq war to the disastrous Allied campaign on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli during World War I, described in the 1926 book Perils of Amateur Strategy. "I sometimes wonder whether the administration isn’t laying the groundwork for the sequel. It’s that old saying: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot."
Why would anyone with a knowledge of history expect that deposing Saddam Hussein would not result in exactly the same scenario: a genocidal civil war between rival religious/ethnic groups once police state repression was removed?
There is a major difference in Iraq relative to the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the Balkans. In Iraq, we seem to have a proxy war being fought, where the Sunni Saudi Arabians are supporting the Sunni insurgents, and the Shia Iranians are supporting the Shia insurgents. As a professor from the U.S. War College said on National Public Radio, there is no instance in history where an insurgency was ever successfully suppressed when that insurgency was being supplied with arms and warriors by major nations outside the arena of conflict. One side argues we must keep combat troops in Iraq until a stable national government and competent police and military is in place which can keep national order. If we pull out, they fear, Iraq will slide into outright civil war. The nightmare scenario they seek to forestall is this civil war being resolved through the emergence of one or more Taliban-like radical Muslim theocratic states. Such state(s) would be sitting on top of the world’s second-largest known petroleum reserves. Such state(s) could sponsor international terrorism and destabilize the other Persian Gulf oil states fueled by oil revenues: the Taliban on petrochemical steroids. They argue that the lesson from successful suppression of past insurgencies such as the Phillipine Insurrection, Huk Rebellion, and Malayan Emergency is that resolution requires 10-15 years of persistence, adapting tactics, and iron will. CIA’s Michael Hayden: "An al Qaeda victory in Iraq would mean a fundamentalist state that shelters jihadists and serves as a launching pad for terrorist operations throughout the region and against our own homeland." And unlike what happened after Vietnam, the enemy will "undoubtedly follow America home if we withdraw." Finally, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals have fled to other countries, a brain drain which will accelerate if we are not committed to remaining until self-governing order in Iraq is achieved. The other side argues that we should pull out our combat troops. They point out that over 80 percent of Iraqis polled want us to leave. In poll after poll, a vast majority of Iraq citizens say they think we are in Iraq as an occupying force to control their oil, and approve of murderous insurgent attacks on U.S. troops. Some analysts have argued that our presence as an occupying force in a nation which has resisted invaders for thousands of years is the mainspring driving the insurgency. If we left, they predict civil violence would virtually collapse because the Iraqis would not put up with it - expelling or killing foreign jihadists - when a "legitimate" foreign target for the violence was no longer present. Our withdrawal from occupation of Iraq would also undercut the resentment which is the main recruiting force for Muslim fundamentalist groups throughout the Middle East, they argue. Indeed, in Turkey which is the most moderate and secular majority-Muslim nation in the Middle East, the most popular movie in late 2006 was Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, a crudely anti-American film showing a group of Turkish Rambos on a rampage against "evil" American soldiers. Another reason for withdrawal: the Sunni v. Shia civil war is a proxy war supported by Shia Iran on the one side and Sunni Saudi Arabia, with collusion from Sunni Jordan and Egypt, on the other. I think this covert but abundant flow of explosives, arms, money, and jihadist combatants from states in the region makes the Iraq situation non-comparable to the Balkan War, the Phillipine Insurrection, and all the other insurrections cited as precedent in the history of warfare. It appears to me that the continuing presence of U.S. military forces in strength in Iraq is only capable of maintaining a status quo. I suspect that the Sunni and Shia states acting out their regional power interests in Iraq have carefully created the conflict level which serves their interests best through moderating the flow of support to their agents. Our newest intelligence consensus indicates that further outside support of the civil war in Iraq is unnecessary; it has become self-sustaining and is not amenable to political reconciliation. In February, 2007, the new National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus judgment of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, says that the involvement of Iran (or Syria) "is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics." In other words, interdicting Iranian support of Iraqi militias will not have much effect on sectarian violence at this point. The NIE concludes that, while a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces would "almost certainly" lead to much higher levels of violence, prospects for political reconciliation in Iraq remain low, and Iraqi security forces would be "hard pressed" to take on significantly more security responsibilities. After "breaking" Iraq, we’ve been paying for it at $2 billion dollars a day and 100 U.S. troop lives a month, on average. However, the Bush administration’s Iraq policy at this point seems to be to put broken Iraq back together better than it was when we broke it. Is this possible? What is the most realistic consequence of our remaining in Iraq and attempting to subdue the insurgency through a "troop surge" or any other stratagem; versus our doing a phased withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq? To meaningfully assess this question, we need to review some ill-reported historical background on Iraq, international terrorism, and the Bush administration’s motives for invading Iraq. Failing to follow military doctrine: Mortimer B. Zuckerman writes that "Putting 21,500 more troops into Baghdad may well be repeating the error of under-commitment, which doomed Bush’s Iraq venture in the first place." According to our War College, the canonical figure for both counterinsurgency and stability operations is 20 security personnel (military and police) per 1,000 citizens to repress an insurgency and maintain order. The 4 million Kurds enjoy stability under 70,000 peshmurga fighters. The remaining 22 million Iraqis would require 440,000 security personnel. The U.S. has had 135,000-160,000 troops in Iraq at a given time; there were about 10,000 British and Australian and other coalition troops, and some 60,000 Iraqi security personnel capable to assist. At best, we have had 230,000 security personnel available, yielding the ability to stabilize 11.5 million Iraqis, or half the population. Zuckerman cites June, 2006’s, "Operation Together Forward." The first stage of this planned "joint effort" was to be made by 26,000 Iraqi soldiers backed by 7,200 U.S. troops. Only 9,000 Iraqi soldiers turned up for it. State II was to have six battalions of Iraqis join an additional 5,500 Americans; two showed up. A half year into "Operation Together Forward," the U.S. has committed 15,000 soldiers to the mission, while Iraqi combat forces involved in this "joint" operation to pacifiy Baghdad streets have never numbered more than 10,000. We are in a stalemate reminiscent of trench warfare in World War I: we spend a lot of money, material, and suffer troop casualties, but can’t get anywhere. When you do not have enough security personnel to stabilize the entire territory, military doctrine calls for selecting a limited area, stabilizing it and holding it to prevent re-penetration by insurgents, then slowly expanding the boundaries of that held territory outwards. Within the held territory, you have security so infrastructure rebuilding and restoration of a civilian economy and governance can commence. The U.S. has instead played a game of Whac-a-Mole, jumping around the country whacking at insurgents when they pop up here and there - and therefore everywhere. The Al Qaeda connection: Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979, the same year Ayatollah Khomeni took over Iran. With U.S. support (totaling $5 billion) Hussein attacked Iran on September 22, 1980, as an American proxy. Because Hussein established a secular dictatorship and was a U.S. agent, in 1992 Ossama bin Laden included Saddam Hussein on his list of leaders in Muslim states who were to be murdered to clear the way for Muslim theocracies. The Shia in Iraq have a centuries-old rivalry going with those in Iran. If it were not for the superordinate goal of opposing the U.S. occupation, the natives of Iraq would probably not welcome either Al Qaeda or Iran’s involvement. The Neocon Iraq agenda: In September 2000 the Project for the New American Century published its report outlining how the U.S. could fill the world power vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union, establishing a pax Americana. The Project’s recommendations were copied verbatim over into the first National Security Strategy issued by the Bush administration. No wonder. The principals of the Project include Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, John Bolton, Stephen Cambone, Eliot Cohen, and Devon Gross, all of whom ended up in senior policy positions in the Bush administration. In respect to Iraq, the Project prescribed invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein and set up permanent U.S. military bases to stabilize and control the Persian Gulf oil supply. To carry this out, they had to come up with an "excuse" for invasion that would sell to Congress and the U.S. public; so they did. To me, the "bottom line" is that we might as well perform a phased withdrawal from Iraq, starting immediately. I reason that remaining there as a military occupying force cannot win the outcomes we seek because of the reaction we provoke as an infidel invader, and because we cannot afford to put enough security forces into a nation of 22 million to achieve pacification. We are in a stalemate reminiscent of trench warfare in World War I: we spend a lot of money, material, and suffer troop casualties, but can’t get anywhere. Breaking the stalemate by withdrawing our combat forces, but continuing training and supply assistance as requested by the Iraqi government(s), may not lead to exactly the short or long-term outcomes we desire, but it will produce change and opportunity to get somewhere better. At the least, a principled withdrawal by the U.S. permits us to work on changing the U.S. image internationally, representing our imperialist bully behavior as an aberration of the Bush administration’s neocons - but we’re all better now. In summary, Omar Bradley’s testimony to Congress about the prospect of extending the Korean War into mainland China applies to our invasion of Iraq: "The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." We need to get "all better now" as quickly as ever we can. Restoring America’s moral authority is ultimately the most effective shield against terrorist attack we can employ. Richard Lance Christie is a polymath who has done research in psychoacoustics, hallucinogens, and the rules governing the formation and change of human cognitive schemata and states of consciousness; and designed, programmed and run management information and health delivery systems. He is currently involved principally in furthering ecological restoration and conservation and organic agriculture. He lives in Moab, Utah. |
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