Winning, and then Losing, in Iraq

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory in Iraq. But he forgot one thing: Beating Saddam Hussein's conventional army was only the first step. In a country full of guns and weaponry, it would be only a matter of time until the occupiers faced ever-increasing harassment in the form of guerrilla warfare.

It is clear that Bush, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their Pentagon advisers exhibited too much hubris in March 2003 when they confidently assumed that they could fight a war quickly using high-tech "shock and awe" to break the back of Iraq's military.

They were both right and wrong. True, the Iraqi army melted away in just weeks, putting up token resistence. But, as we now realize, that was just the beginning, not the end, of America's troubles. The state apparatus in Iraq was an artificial superstructure, easily shoved aside.

But the real opposition to the U.S. occupation would come from less brittle social and religious groupings: In the case of the Sunni Arabs, it was centred within highly organized extended families and tribes, while amongst the Shi'a, legitimacy lay with the clerical establishment in the mosques.

Although Sunnis and Shi'a normally have little time for one another, a solidarity based on Iraqi nationalism and pan-Islam has surfaced as both confronted coalition forces, and also because of the powerful role of religious parties now.

The so-called "neocons," the conservative hawks who have been in the forefront of determining U.S. policy in the Middle East, had assured the White House that Iraqis would greet American troops as liberators. They were as blinded by their theoretical assumptions as were the doctrinaire Marxists who ran Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

Though they consider themselves conservatives, the neocons are in many ways the heirs of the Wilsonian strain of optimism that has periodically shaped American foreign policy: the idea that any country can be molded into becoming a pluralistic democracy.

Too bad they appear not to have read Samuel Huntington's seminal work on The Clash of Civilizations. It provides an essential dose of political realism for those wearing ideological blinkers.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at New York University, in his new book Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, has written that America's weakness is not its need to conquer but its desire to be appreciated by the citizens whose country it invades. But invading armies and occupiers are rarely beloved, no matter how awful the suffering has been.

When the war began, Bush said to the Iraqis, "We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave." Yet Iraqis responded with widespread rebellion. Can the president still honestly believe that Iraq, as he stated on May 4, will become "a model for freedom and democracy?"

American armies are great at fighting wars, but no army is good at reconstructing a country that is composed of people who aren't terribly excited by western style constitutional democracy and tolerance. Too many Iraqis seem more interested in indigenous political forms such as Ba'athist nationalism and Shi'a theocracy than in imported norms of personal freedom and equality. Even the capture of Saddam last December made no appreciable difference.

Clearly, too few troops were assigned to Iraq after the initial victory to properly contend with further resistence. So, unable to control the Sunni triangle, especially a hotbed of resistence like Fallujah, the U.S. has assembled a Sunni Muslim militia to pacify the city. Some of the leaders of the new Fallujah Brigade had been officers in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, which was dominated by Sunni Muslims and accused of human rights abuses against Shi'a Muslims and Kurds. They even still wear their old uniforms.

The American forces have also failed to wrest Najaf away from the Mahdi Army loyal to the radical Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, refraining from mounting a full-scale invasion because its shrine is one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites.

A country unwilling to use the kind of force that would have been necessary for victory in places like Fallujah and Najaf cannot win a war against the kind of insurgency it has encountered there and had better face up to what that means.

Even a Canadian human rights advocate such as Michael Ignatieff, in his new book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, maintains that to combat terrorism, "we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war."

Iraq is not Vietnam, and the world of 2004 is a very different place than it was 40 years ago. Still, there are similarities between these two wars.

The U.S. lost in Vietnam because it was hampered by its inability to bring its superior firepower to bear on the Communist guerrillas. They could retreat across the border into safe areas in North Vietnam, off limits to American forces, and they received aid from their Chinese and Soviet allies throughout the conflict.

In Iraq, too, fighters, arms and money have been flowing into the country from neighbouring Iran, Syria, perhaps even Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Iran and Syria are certainly sympathetic to the aims of the nationalist insurgents. Bush has now imposed economic sanctions on Syria, banning all U.S. exports except for food and medicine, after long-standing complaints that Damascus was undermining U.S. efforts in Iraq.

As well, in both cases the U.S. tried to win the "hearts and minds" of the population and thus distinguished between the mass of the citizenry and the enemy--in one case the Communists, in the other the Ba'athists. No such distinctions were made in World War II: in that total war, all the inhabitants of the enemy state suffered the consequences of the decisions made by their political leaders.

Also, with the revelations that Iraqi detainees have been beaten, tortured and even killed by the American military, this war already has its own, though comparatively mild, version of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when Marines killed some 300 civilians. That crime came to light later and helped turn public opinion against that war.

Atrocities such as these tend to occur when conventional armies find themselves confronting guerrilla forces, enemies who don't wear uniforms and don't adhere to Geneva Convention rules of engagement and treatment of soldiers. There are no definable front lines and troops can be attacked without warning by suicide bombers or by snipers who then fade into a crowd of civilians. Even if they consider themselves "freedom fighters," their methods are those of terrorists The frustration inherent in such situations may boil over and often leads to the type of abuse that was inflicted upon Iraqi prisoners by their American jailers.

Though a contrite Bush apologized on Arab television networks, and Rumsfeld testified before both houses of Congress and took full responsibility for the mess, this, predictably, did them little good among their detractors, both at home and in the Middle East. The torture and humiliation at the Abu Ghraib prison will prove to be the "tipping point" which has made the continuing American mission in Iraq untenable.

The impending defeat and eventual withdrawal of America troops from Iraq--and there is no use pretending that it isn't "really" a defeat--bodes ill for the whole project of bringing any semblance of democracy and modernity to the Arab world.

In order not to prolong the agony, the U.S. military should waste no time leaving Iraq. The exit strategy is simple: Exit!

Some will no doubt respond that a U.S. exodus will "look bad" and that "there will be a vacuum leading to civil war." But who cares if it looks bad? It will look much worse if U.S. soldiers keep getting killed for no identifiable gain and are clearly not in charge of the country.

Nor will they be able to hand over sovereignty after June 30 to any pro-American Iraqi government that will last very long. It will lack legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis. Why not let the United Nations handle the whole mess--they have earned it!

As for civil war--yes, this may follow, given that Iraq is in some sense now a political vacuum. The Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds may fight it out for control of the country or even split it apart. Even if the first two groups are Arab nationalists, the Kurds want no part of a reunited Iraq. You can't nation-build where there is no nation to be built. But that may be the "least bad" outcome.

A worse fate for most Iraqis would be the eventual assumption of power by someone who would be a political clone of Saddam Hussein. That would make this war an even greater farce than Vietnam was.