Editor's note: This article was
written before the outraged reactions from the Arab
world to the sexually demeaning photos of the Iraqi
prisoners were recorded, and which prompted the
following response from Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the
University of Michigan and author of Informed
Comment : "I really wonder whether, with the
emergence of these photos, the game isn't over for the
Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody
siege of Fallujah and the Shi'ite uprising of early
April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think
that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the
Iraqi Arab public?"
WASHINGTON - One year
after President George W Bush declared the end of major
combat in Iraq, the United States appears to be
teetering on the brink of strategic defeat in its
Mesopotamian adventure.
Even as Bush last Friday
reiterated his ambition to bring "freedom and democracy"
to Iraq and the Middle East, a series of recent policy
reversals - capped by Friday's announcement that a
former Ba'athist general will take charge of an
all-Iraqi security force in Fallujah - suggests that an
increasingly desperate Washington will settle for far
less.
Indeed, over the past two weeks, the
administration appears to have almost entirely
jettisoned the neo-conservative vision of an ardently
pro-US Iraq led by Iraqi National Congress (INC) chief
Ahmed Chalabi, opened wide to US and Western capital,
and eager to serve as a convenient base for
destabilizing Syria, Iran and even Saudi Arabia if it
gets out of line.
The defeat of the
neo-conservatives, whose influence has been exercised
primarily through the offices of Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has been
made abundantly clear by the mandate the administration
has given United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi
to essentially handpick the leadership of the new Iraqi
government that will gain "limited sovereignty", as one
State Department official put it, after June 30.
That the world body has been given such an
important role severely undercuts the maximalist
objectives of the neo-cons and other right-wing
unilateralists, whose main aim in going to war in Iraq
was to demonstrate that Washington did not need the UN
to "legitimate" its role as the ultimate guarantor of
global security.
Brahimi's apparent decision to
exclude Chalabi, for whom he is said to have the
greatest contempt, drew strong protests from the INC
leader's neo-con supporters in the Pentagon and outside
the administration, who were then further infuriated by
Brahimi's statements that current Israeli policies -
fervently backed by the neo-cons - are "poison" for the
entire region.
Bush's refusal to back away from
the Algerian diplomat confirmed that the balance of
power within the administration, at least on Iraq, has
shifted decisively toward the realists.
Finally,
the decision not only to forgo a major attack on
insurgents in Fallujah, but to also withdraw Marines to
positions outside the city and recognize a new,
Ba'athist-led force to guarantee security there, defied
the hawks' increasingly shrill insistence that failure
to crush the uprising and capture or kill those
responsible for the deaths of four US private-security
contractors in early April would mark a strategic defeat
for the occupation.
The deal, which clearly
caught Pentagon civilians off-guard, appears to have
been negotiated by commanders on the ground and approved
by the National Security Council staff in the White
House - one more indication that neo-cons have fallen
from grace.
But it also indicated a larger
policy already announced by Coalition Provisional
Authority chief L Paul Bremer recently - that, in the
words of Iraq specialist Juan Cole at the University of
Michigan, "the United States has embarked on a policy of
re-Ba'athification, rehabilitating thousands of
ex-Ba'athists and putting them to work".
This
policy reversal, too, has been strongly opposed by
Chalabi - who had been in charge of the program to
eliminate members of former president Saddam Hussein's
Ba'ath Party from the public face of Iraq - and his
allies in Washington.
But while the
administration no longer appears to be heeding the
neo-cons on Iraq policy, the big question is whether
these policy reversals will save the US occupation and
Washington's minimum goals of putting in place (with
Brahimi's help) a broadly representative government that
can both ensure stability and go along with the
indefinite presence of several discreetly situated US
military bases.
On this, opinions in Washington
are deeply divided, but a growing number of analysts
believe that policy changes might be too little, too
late.
The foreign policy establishment was
shocked by an interview in the Wall Street Journal by
retired General William E Odom who, among other posts,
served as director of the National Security Agency under
former president Ronald Reagan (1981-89). "We have
failed," he said last week, adding that even if an Iraqi
election takes place next January as scheduled, "anybody
that's pro-American cannot gain legitimacy".
Calling for a swift withdrawal, Odom, who is
based at the conservative Hudson Institute and has never
been inclined to traditional isolationism, warned that
the continued presence of US troops - let alone a major
military crackdown against Iraqi insurgents - was simply
radicalizing both Iraqis and other Arabs, risking the
destabilization of the entire region.
"The issue
is how high a price we're going to pay ... less, by
getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later?"
His analysis was bolstered by the results of a
detailed survey of 3,500 Iraqis throughout the country
in late March and early April released last Thursday by
the Gallup organization, CNN and USA Today. It found
that 57 percent of Iraqis want the US occupation forces
to leave the country "immediately", defined as "in the
next few months". When the generally pro-US Kurdish
sample (representing about 13 percent of the
population), was excluded, the percentage of Iraqis
favoring an immediate withdrawal rose to two-thirds.
The detailed survey largely confirmed reports
that the vast majority of Iraqis have become very
disillusioned with US and other occupation forces over
the past 13 months. While pleased that Saddam Hussein is
no longer in power, four out of five non-Kurdish Iraqis
said they now regard the coalition forces as "occupiers"
rather than "liberators".
Moreover, the survey
was conducted before the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf,
which, according to most published reports, further
alienated Iraqis from the occupation. "If these poll
results are to be believed, we've already lost the war
for hearts and minds," noted one congressional aide,
whose boss initially supported the war.
"I don't
believe that the American public generally understand
what happened in the first half of April, which is that
the US lost control of Iraq to a set of popular
uprisings and was forced to re-conquer the country,"
Cole told IPS.
But the cost in both Iraqi and US
lives was unexpectedly high. More than 130 US soldiers
were killed in April, more than the number that died in
the first six weeks of last year's war itself; indeed,
more than any one-month military death toll since just
before the last US combat troops withdrew from Vietnam
in 1973. The fighting forced the administration to put
off scheduled troop withdrawals and consider sending in
more soldiers.
The political result here has
been a sharp drop in public confidence in Bush's Iraq
policy, according to a New York Times/CBS poll released
last Thursday, which also found that a record 58 percent
of the US public now believe the invasion has not been
worth the cost in lives and resources.
Cole said
the decision to pull back from Fallujah, as well as
other recent major policy reversals "may have taken us
back from the brink, but we could be back there at any
time".
Indeed, even as the Marines were pulling
back from Fallujah, the Pentagon was expediting the
shipment of more heavy tanks and armored vehicles to
Iraq - precisely the kind of weapons that
counter-insurgency specialists say will make it more
difficult for occupation troops to win "hearts and
minds".
The Associated Press reported last week
that the army had even requested ski areas in the Sierra
Nevada mountains that were using five howitzers to
prevent avalanches to return them immediately for use in
Iraq and Afghanistan - another indication that the
military is both overstretched and preparing for the
worst.
