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SPENGLER
The devil and L Paul
Bremer
A devilish
thought is forming in the back of the American mind:
which is better, to have Iraqis shooting at American
soldiers, or at each other? During the Cold War, Moscow
stood to gain from 
instability, and Washington sought to stabilize
allied regimes (Iran being the exception that proved the
rule). Now, with no strategic competitor, America can
pick up the pieces at its leisure. As in finance,
volatility favors the player with the most options ( Geopolitics in the light of option
theory, Jan 26, 2002).
No one in
the Bush administration wants to let slip the dogs of
civil war. On the contrary, the White House still hopes
that Iraq will set a precedent for democracy in the
Muslim world. Yet civil war is the path of least resistance, so
clearly so that the punditry of the world press has
raised the alarm with one voice. A Google news search
turns up 900 hits for the search terms "Iraq" and "civil
war". What is so bad about a civil war? No
self-respecting state ever has been formed without one.
All the European countries had at least one (some of
them called religious wars). America has had two. The
Middle East and Africa have them all the time (Civil War: A do-it-yourself
guide, Aug 29, 2003). States are founded on
compromise. Civil war is just nature's way of telling
the diehards to slow down.
For the time being, the
US proconsul in Iraq, L Paul Bremer, has offered the
devil his little finger. Washington hopes that the
threat is mightier than the execution. Leslie Gelb's
November 25 call for a three-state solution ("Kurds in
the north, Sunnis in the center and Shi'ites in the
south") demarcated an extreme option for the Bush
administration. In effect, Bremer is warning the
Shi'ites that an electoral coup would push the Kurds
towards independence, the Kurds that overreaching would
provoke the Shi'ites, and the Sunnis that partition
would leave them an impecunious rump state far from the
oil fields (Will Iraq survive the Iraqi
opposition? Dec 23, 2003).
Fear of
the Kurds and Shi'ites is supposed to make the Sunnis
more cooperative. As Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius reported from Baghdad on January 16: "Iraqis
fear that their country is drifting toward civil war.
[Bremer's] polls tell him 57 percent of Iraqis would
feel less safe if American troops pulled out tomorrow.
In Baghdad, that figure is 65 percent; in Basra, it's 67
percent."
To flush determined irregulars out of
hiding among the civilian population, the occupier must
persuade the civilians to turn them out. America cannot
win the hearts and minds of the Sunnis. As former
overlords, the addictive taste of mastery remains in
their mouth. Elements of the Saddam Hussein regime used
to power and privileges will not return to humble lives
without fighting, and to pacify the Sunni triangle the
Americans must kill a large proportion of the diehards
(More killing, please! Jun 12, 2003). "Oderint dum
metuant
," said Cicero - let them
hate us as long as they fear us.
But it is not
likely that the specter of partition alone will be
enough to frighten the Sunnis into good behavior. Bremer
may have to give the devil his due, and do more than
show the Iraqis the instruments of torture. Last year I
predicted that America will end up "recruiting Turks to
patrol Basra, Kurds to patrol Tikrit, Shi'ites to occupy
Baghdad, while offering bribes, territory and other
inducements to Iraq's neighbors to meddle. The result
would be a ghastly mess, perhaps even a state of
perpetual war, but one for which the US could take
limited responsibility." (How cherry-picking militant Islam may
win, Oct 3, 2003).
Only within the
strange, sad subculture of diplomats does it matter
whether Washington meets the June deadline for Iraqi
elections, preserves the territorial integrity of Iraq,
and so forth. It is not within America's power to
determine such things. Over time we will learn how many
regime holdovers prefer death to humiliation, how much
the Kurds will risk for autonomy, or how boldly the
Shi'ites will play their hand. None of this matters to
American voters, who cared not at all that no weapons of
mass destruction caches turned up. They continue to
support the Iraqi incursion as a response to an external
attack. Does anyone imagine that Americans will care now
if Iraqis kill each other or not? For that matter, will
Americans care if Turkey and Iran become embroiled in a
regional war in the aftermath of partition? Throughout
the 1980s, they did not notice that Iraq and Iran were
fighting a full-scale war.
In the meantime,
Washington is struggling to improve the quality of its
counterinsurgency forces on the ground. As I suspected
(Why America is losing the intelligence
war, Nov 11, 2003), America has enlisted
Israeli help to train special forces, as Seymour Hersh
reported in the December 15 New Yorker. Even if the US
could recruit and deploy a sufficient number of capable
personnel, their success still would depend on the
willingness of the locals to work with them. The more
the locals fight each other, the more they will need the
US. Recall that Afghani tribal fighters welcomed
American Special Forces precisely because already they
were losing a civil war with the Taliban.
Context is everything. Fewer than 3,000 British
officers controlled India, Sir John Keegan observes (in
Intelligence in War), many of whom "wore a version of native dress,
spoke Indian languages and prided themselves on their
immersion in the customs and culture of their soldiers".
Irregular forces under British officers put down the
1857 Sepoy rebellion and then became the regular British
army, Keegan adds. This would not have been possible,
however, had not the European powers stumbled into a
perpetual civil war between Hinduism and Islam marked by
countless smaller conflicts. Once Pax Britannica had
settled over India, the last rebels were suppressed, and
the last recalcitrant maharaja had succumbed to carrot
or stick, Hindus and Muslims combined to throw the
British out.
Americans are accustomed to happy endings. President
George W Bush wants to be remembered as the benefactor
of the Muslim world, not as a second Genghis Khan (George Bush, tragic character,
Dec 9, 2003). Only in the paranoid imaginings of the
Muslim world has Washington set out to destabilize the
region.
Nonetheless, the tragedy will proceed as
Washington at each step discovers that its only viable
option is the one that pushes Iraq closer to
dissolution.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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