Lets call him Nigel. He makes a nice living advising the British Government on Iraq. On his desk he has a framed picture of himself with Tony Blair. He said to me, "Of course you know who the British and Americans really want as President of Iraq?"
I didn’t. I said "Who?"
"Well they wouldn’t admit it but you do know who George Bush and Tony Blair want to rule Iraq."
I thought Alawi? Chalabi? I said "Who?"
"You know. Think." He looked at me with that typically British combination of bemusement and scorn and whispered the answer. "Saddam Hussein."
Of course he is right. While no one can deny that Saddam was a brutal tyrant, nor can any one deny that Iraq is much worse off today than it was under Saddam. A Baghdadi acquaintance who spent six years in Baathist jails told me that things were better when Saddam was in power. Now he sees his neighbors kidnapped and killed. Now he worries for his family’s safety every day. Unfortunately anarchy is far worse than tyranny.
Not only was our invasion a disaster for the people of Iraq, it has also been a disaster for America. If we had hoped that the invasion would increase Iraqi oil production and so reduce our dependency on Saudi Arabia, we were wrong. Iraq produces less oil today than it did in February 2003 and oil prices have tripled. If we had hoped that a successful regime change would increase US power and influence in the Middle East we were surely wrong. Now we are not only seen as malevolent, we are also seen as incompetent. Admittedly, Halliburton (along with Nigel and myself) have profited greatly from our misguided adventure but surely our improved bottom lines are not enough to make even Dick Cheney think the Iraq invasion has been anything but a disaster.
Our military, despite the fact that we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined is shockingly ineffective. A few months ago, I went on a raid in Diyala province with American and Iraqi soldiers. Intelligence sources had told the Americans the location of homes owned by leaders of Al Qaida in Iraq and so 6 Blackhawks and 200 soldiers struck the homes at dawn. We crept up to the houses, knocked in the doors, and burst in. We found only women and children. The fighting men knew enough not to sleep in their own houses. For a few hours, we patrolled the area, found a few weapons caches, and then, we went away. While we were in the village, with our soldiers, with our attack helicopters, we controlled it. As soon as we left, as soon as we returned to our base, control naturally reverted to the insurgents.
What is to be done? The first step, of course, is to oust the corrupt and idealistic idiots that maneuvered us into war but unfortunately, that will not improve the current situation. More American troops might have. been effective back in 2003 but now our army is already stretched to the breaking point and considering the ratio of combat to support troops in the US military, even upping our forces by 100,000 men would only put another 15,000 riflemen on the ground. While withdrawal might satisfy most Americans it will not prevent further violence within Iraq nor would it rectify our terrible mistake. Colin Powell said before the war "If you break it, you own it" and we have certainly broken what had been the cradle of civilization. We do have a responsibility to the poor people of Iraq.
The war in Iraq today is between Sunni insurgents and Shia militias. We are in large measure just ineffectual bystanders The unity government is a joke: the police and interior department are fundamentally just part of the Shia militias. President Maliki’s parliamentary coalition is dependant on militia support. Today both sides in the Iraqi Civil War (and have no doubt, it is a civil war) see us as enemies, albeit not particularity efective ones.
And yet, America is not totally impotent. We have massive firepower, we have control of the air. Our war in Afghanistan was at first successful because we had allies on the ground. Our air power alone could not have defeated the Taliban but using it as artillery to smash enemy positions allowed the Northern Alliance to take and hold the ground. If we had concentrated on Afghanistan instead of starting another war Afghanistan could have been a success story for the United States.
So here is my modest proposal. Pick one side, and support it. Personally I favor supporting the Sunnis. They are the traditional rulers of Iraq, they are in large part more educated, more secular and their victory would not strengthen Iran, currently the only winner from this invasion but, if betraying the Shia majority yet again seems unconscionable, then support their militias against the Sunni insurgents.
If our not inconsiderable firepower were allied to one group of the other, a certain level of order could be imposed. We would obtain some bargaining power over whichever side we allied ourselves with and perhaps could limit their brutality. Any kind of stability would be better for Iraq and for the US than the anarchy that is Iraq today.
You might object that my proposal is immoral, and I would agree with you but our invasion was both immoral and stupid. You might object that the American people could not back such a cynical move and I would agree with you again. Unfortunately, American foreign policy ever since Woodrow Wilson has masked its self-interest behind an idealistic and moralistic screen that has blinded us to our brutality without convincing the rest of the world of our disinterestedness.
Perhaps then, if we want a moral foreign policy, we should abjure the dubious pleasures of empire. Perhaps that is the deepest lesson of the Iraq war. Nonetheless, currently we have a responsibility to the poor people of Iraq, who we have injured and insulted for a quarter of a century, first by supporting their tyrant, then by imposing sanctions that destroyed their economy and now by plunging their country into a Hobbesian hell.
Ever since 2002, when we knew this war was inevitable, I wondered why the US government was willing to engage in such a risky policy. I recently read the best explanation yet, written by a neocon months before the invasion. He called it the Ledeen doctrine http://www.nationalreview.com/... "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." In other words, we destroyed Iraq just to demonstrate we could, hoping that our show of force would cow the world into submission. Clearly we have failed. We need to be realistic about what military power can achieve but we also have a responsibility to the people of Iraq whose lives we have destroyed.
Our current policy, based on the delusion of a unified Iraqi government committed to defending the interests of all Iraqis is doomed to failure. We need to recognize what is actually going on in Iraq instead of filtering it through our hopes and our internal political situation. Since we cannot turn back the clock, since we cannot remedy a quarter century of mistakes, our best hope is to use our military power to affect the civil war between the Shia and the Sunni. Pick a side. Allow them to impose order. Hope our influence can limit brutality. And learn the lesson that America is best as a republic, not as an empire.