There is one reason we are still in Iraq today and one reason only. Getting out now, or anytime prior to George Bush’s last day in office, would be an admission by the Bush administration that its policies, competence, and use of resources were an abject failure. (This of course assumes that a democratic, peaceful, oil producing, model of compassion between Shiites and Sunnis fails to appear in Iraq over the next few months). Bush has rarely admitted serious errors despite their abundance over his term in office. He continuously repeats whatever sound bite he has adopted despite the evidence seen clearly by anyone who isn’t blindly invested in his support.
We are going to stay in Iraq so that Bush can save face at the cost of another 2,000 or so American lives and 11,000 Iraqi deaths. And in 2009, the Iraq mess will be dumped in the next President’s in-box.
The sound bites continue unabated. “It is better to fight the terrorists over there rather then here.” “We can’t interfere with the generals as they pursue their military strategy.” “Any action taken to change strategy or deny funding is surrendering to the enemy.” “If we leave the terrorists will take over Iraq and use it as a base.”
These are all assertions that are unsupported by analysis or facts. Is our military presence in Iraq helping to defeat terrorism, or is it a catalyst for creating terrorists and giving them a broad field to practice and develop their skills of bomb making and suicide attacks? Unless you examine this question you have no idea whether our presence is helping or hindering the fight against terrorism . Analytical assessment, though, is hardly a strong point of this administration. Instead of spending our resources fighting the terrorists in existence on 9/11, we have increased their numbers, given them an arena to become more deadly, and will be facing the ramifications from this enemy for years, even after we eventually leave Iraq. North Africa is already seeing increased terrorist activity from people who were trained in Iraq by al Qaeda.
Why does the replacement of Generals who disagree with the Bush/Cheney agenda with those who support their position not qualify as interfering with Generals on the ground. General Shinseki wanted 200,000 soldiers and was laughed at by Wolfowitz and Rumsfield and immediately replaced. General Abazaid felt the surge would not work and was quickly retired. A report today on NPR reported on the Pentagon picking yes-men to staff senior military positions – replacing non-political generals with those who parrot the administration approach.
Why is Democratic proposed Iraq funding through August considered defeatist, but when the Republican Minority leader says it is OK to reconsider funding in September/October that is patriotic?
Will the terrorists take over as soon as we leave? It is hard to believe that the Shiites would want to allow Sunni-oriented terrorists to control Iraq and deprive the Shiites of the power that they believe they deserve due to their majority status. Even the Sunnis in Anbar province have decided to join forces with us to rid their homeland of Al Qaeda insurgents. The probability is that antipathy to the US will be replaced by joint Shiite/Sunni action against non-Iraqi Arabs. Then the real battle for control of Iraq begins and that is going to happen inevitably whenever we depart.
We are now being told to expect an increase in American deaths over the next four months. How can our enemy decide how many Americans to kill at a time and place of their choosing while we are being told that we are making progress in stabilizing Iraq? The only surges in Iraq that are succeeding are the number of American deaths and the number of educated Iraqi’s leaving the country to join the one million who already have left.
Even if we were to prevail and created a safe and secure country, it is questionable whether Iraq could survive as a functioning society. Kenneth M. Pollack, director of research and senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and former director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council., writing in The New Republic on 5-21-07 argues that we are not committing sufficient civilian resources. Once again we are failing to properly plan and to fund what needs to be done. (But lets not raise taxes). We tried an invasion and occupation on the cheap and four years later we are in a morass experiencing the results of that failure. Now we are doing the same thing when it comes to building an infrastructure that a functioning government needs to exist.
General Petraeus has repeatedly said, all that the military can do is create a secure "space" (both literal and figurative) in which political and economic efforts can start to take hold. What Iraqis desperately crave (and deserve) is to be able to live their lives safe from criminals, terrorists, and ethnic cleansing; to get jobs that enable them to put food on the table; to have access to clean water, adequate gasoline, and regular electricity; and to enjoy social and governmental structures that provide these things and fix problems when they arise. The soldiers can handle the first clause of that sentence; the rest can only be provided by civilians. And, while there are plenty of problems on the military side of the equation in Iraq, the problems on the civilian side are far worse.
If Washington fails to address these problems, the likely result is that the surge will fail, just as other efforts have failed--even those that employed the right military strategy, tactics, leadership, and resources.
The first and most basic problem is that we simply do not have enough people with the kinds of skills to help the Iraqis rebuild their local economies and political systems.
This shortage is not particularly surprising. The State Department recruits and trains men and women to serve as Foreign Service officers responsible for conducting diplomacy; they don't have many people who know how to rebuild a power grid or maintain an irrigation system. Nor does the Department of Agriculture, for that matter. Its personnel do things like draw up regulations for the care and feeding of livestock and determine subsidy policies for certain crops--few, if any, actually know how to care for and feed livestock or how to rotate crops. Fewer still have any idea how to do those things in an underdeveloped, war-ravaged, Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern country. But, while it may be understandable, it is still a huge problem that the administration must fix quickly.
But the problem, alas, is even more complicated than that. If a new slew of civilians were to arrive in Iraq, they would still fall within a dysfunctional chain of command, where civilian and military bureaucratic cultures clash frequently.
In the military, it is critical that the commander on the spot be given the latitude to immediately make decisions based on what he sees in front of him, and the same is true for the civilians waging the battle for Iraq. They, too, need to be able to do what they think best based on the circumstances as they find them.
One particularly meddlesome constraint has been a guideline effectively forbidding civilian personnel from venturing out beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad or military Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in the field.
There are no easy solutions to any of the problems listed above, but the Bush administration has denied itself one method of potentially alleviating many of them by refusing to engage the international community, and the United Nations, in the process of reconstruction. The United Nations is hardly a perfect organization, but it has the ability to reach out to a range of actors that the U.S. government--and particularly the Bush administration--cannot. The United Nations has a number of agencies with some real competence in the basics of nation-building. In addition, it can call upon a vast array of NGOs that have the very skills and experience that so few Americans possess but that are so desperately needed.
Such changes would likely require a U.N. political framework for reconstruction, possibly headed by a U.N.-authorized high commissioner (or some equivalent title), such as worked so successfully in Bosnia and East Timor. And that would mean sharing authority with the United Nations, a concession to which the U.N.-phobic Bush administration has seemed allergic since the fall of Baghdad. This could also be helpful in another way: A U.N.-authorized high commissioner could be empowered by the Security Council to override the wishes of the Iraqi government. It is for that reason that a number of high-ranking military officers have welcomed the idea--it would mean that it was someone else's job to tell the Iraqi government that it cannot block elements of the surge that would threaten the militias.
One of the worst of the Bush administration's many mistakes in the early days of the occupation was the decision to prematurely hand back sovereignty to an Iraqi government dominated by thugs and thieves. This has created countless problems for Iraq, but the biggest obstacle it creates for the surge is this: Right now, most Iraqis look to militias, not the central government or the Americans, for security and basic services. The key to undermining the militias--and the insurgents--is to make it possible for the Iraqi people, most of whom dislike the insurgents and militias, to look to their own government for security and services. But the Maliki government is dominated by militias, many of which inevitably will oppose U.S. efforts to marginalize them.
The extra troops, and the changes in strategy and tactics will do little more than prolong the stalemate. They may be just enough to keep Iraq from spiraling into unbridled mayhem and all-out ethnic cleansing, but they will not be enough to pull the country out of its nosedive and set it on a path toward sustainable stability, let alone eventual prosperity. And that means that, in January 2009, our new president will face the same awful set of choices that confronts us today. Only it will be worse, because, by then, we will have squandered more time, more money, more Iraqi and American lives, and probably our last chance to save Iraq.
