DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Grenades in the global economic
cockpit
Tom Engelhardt
interviews Juan Cole
For the first part of
this interview, please click here
On September
22, Tomdispatch posted a piece by Michael
Schwartz, Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense,
which ended:
American withdrawal would
undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq,
awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems
galore, and numerous possibilities for future
violence. The either/or of this situation may
not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single
reality stands out clearly: Not only is the
American presence the main source of civilian
casualties, it is also the primary contributor
to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer
we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is
likely to get - for the US and for the
Iraqis.
The next day, at his Informed
Comment website, Juan Cole posted a response in
which he wrote, "I just cannot understand
this
sort of argument," and then laid out the nature of
his disagreement with it in some detail. This
started several days of debate among various
experts, scholars and bloggers at his site (and
elsewhere), which resulted in Cole rethinking his
position somewhat and issuing an eloquent call for
American ground troops to be withdrawn from Iraq.
(If you haven't read it, you should!)
This
debate and discussion provides the basis for the
second half of Tomdispatch's interview with Cole.
My own thoughts on withdrawal can be found at
Withdrawal on the Agenda, a June 2005 updating of
a piece, Time of Withdrawal, I wrote six months
after the fall of Baghdad. You should also know
that I consider the "nightmare scenario" Cole lays
out below but one (frightening) possibility in
Iraq's future. Based on memories of the Vietnam
era, I'm wary of all predictions about the horrors
that are bound to occur if the United States were
to withdraw, or withdraw too quickly, as well as
fears of a "bloodbath-to-come". This is a complex
issue I hope to take up in a dispatch later in the
week. Meanwhile, onward.
Tomdispatch: Now I want to
turn to the issue of withdrawal. I've been
particularly impressed that, at your site, you
post your own intellectual development, so to
speak - and that includes putting up letters and
essays by people who take you on. This is
unbelievably rare. The reader can actually see a
brain at work, regularly reassessing a changing
situation. It's been especially true on the
question of the withdrawal of American forces from
Iraq. Having gone back recently to read your
site's earliest months, it's obvious that you've
become fiercer and angrier as time has gone on in
relation to the Bush administration. You recently
wrote a piece saying that US ground troops must
come out now, "for the good of Iraq, for the good
of America". Would you discuss the development of
your thoughts on this? Where are you now on the
issue of withdrawal and how it might happen?
Juan Cole: The first thing I
should say is I'm not under any illusion that it
matters a great deal what I think on the subject.
TD: [Laughs.] Neither of us
is exactly capable of withdrawing American troops
from Iraq. I'm endlessly aware of this when people
call for one plan or another. I think, wait a
minute ...
JC: [Laughs.]
When you're talking about the debates I hold with
my readers and the way I put up critiques of my
position, what academic life has to offer is open
debate and being honest about your sources, about
how you come to a conclusion. The whole point of
my blog is to attempt to represent the life of the
mind in a public forum. I view what I do as
different from politics where you want to stay on
message, stay on point. You want to put out an
image, a position and stick to it. You make fun of
your opponent for waffling or being indecisive.
But what serious thinker hasn't gone back and
forth? You'd have to be crazy if you didn't
consider other options than the one you initially
started out with or if, over time, experience
didn't sometimes cause you to take a different
position.
You know, [American poet Walt]
Whitman said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well,
then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain
multitudes." That's the American spirit, so I'm
happy to debate these things, reveal my thinking
and let the world see how one intellectual
concerned with the Middle East deals with the
array of information that's coming at us over
time.
Well, I'm now really worried about
what the outcome in Iraq might mean for the Middle
East, for the United States and for the world. I'm
really, really worried and I can think up some
nightmare scenarios ...
TD:
Give me one ...
JC: Say the
US and its allies draw down their troops - and
it's very clear, the allies are pfffft!
Everybody's announced that, after the December
15th election, they're going to draw down. But if
a withdrawal is done in the wrong way, or
unwisely, here's what could happen:
You've
already got this low-intensity sectarian war going
on in a province like Babel. Twenty-two guys'll
show up dead in the morning, bullets behind their
ears, mafia-style. They'll be Shi'ites or they'll
be Sunnis. So you know the two sides - at night,
when the US can't see them so well - are already
fighting it out with each other. And it's over
land. Babel province was traditionally heavily
Shi'ite. Saddam expelled Shi'ites and brought in
Sunnis. It was part of his planting of Sunnis.
TD: As in Kirkuk ...
JC: That was Arabization,
this was Sunnitization. So let's say the US is not
around much anymore, what's going to happen if you
have a whole brigade of Sunni fighters come down
from Mahmudiyah and attack Hila? That sort of
thing happened in Lebanon during the civil war.
These neighborhood militias can become armies and
leave their areas to wage war against other
neighborhood militias that become armies. Now, if
that started happening, and if the Sunni Arabs
started to win, it's inevitable that the
Revolutionary Guards will come across the border
from Iran to help the Shi'ites. Iran's not going
to sit by and allow Iraq's Shi'ites to be
massacred. If that happened, the Saudis, the
Jordanians and the Syrian Sunnis are not going to
stand by either and let Iranian Revolutionary
Guards massacre Sunni Arabs in reprisal. They're
going to come in. You could simultaneously be
having Kurdish massacres of Turkmen, which would
bring Turkey in. So you could end up with a
regional low-intensity war. Think of the Spanish
Civil War.
Back in the 1980s, Saddam
Hussein and [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini fought a
war with one another for eight years, but on the
whole they avoided hitting each other's oil
facilities. Both understood that doing that would
reduce their countries to fourth-world states. So
there was a kind of mutually assured destruction
doctrine between them, which is possible between
states. But in the guerrilla war in Iraq, the
Sunni guerrillas have already pioneered using
pipeline sabotage and oil sabotage ...
TD: I'm actually surprised
that such sabotage has yet to make it to the
Caspian pipelines or elsewhere.
JC: Well, it could still
spread. In August of 2004, when the Marines were
fighting the Muqtada al-Sadr people in Najaf, the
Sadrists in Basra did make threats to start
pipeline sabotage in the south, which really would
have crippled Iraq. In a regional guerrilla war,
there would be a lot of impetus for Sunni
guerrillas to hit the Iranian pipelines, and there
are some Sunni tribes in the oil-producing areas
of Iran who might be enlisted for this purpose. If
the Saudis got involved, then the radical Shi'ites
have an impetus to hit the Saudi pipelines, and
the Saudi petroleum facilities are in a heavily
Shi'ite area. Basically, what we've learned from
Iraq is that petroleum is produced in a
human-security environment in which powerful local
forces want it to be produced. If some significant
proportion of the local forces doesn't want it to
be produced, they can spoil it.
TD: As in Nigeria ...
JC: We have seen this all
over the world. We focus on states, but states
can't provide security for hundreds of miles of
pipeline. It's literally impossible. So think what
you're talking about here. Something on the order
of 80-84 million barrels of petroleum are produced
every day in the world. Saudi Arabia produces 9 of
that reliably, sometimes more. Iran produces 4. On
a good day, Iraq used to produce almost 3. Now
it's down to somewhere around 1.8 million. If you
took all of that off the market, that's about a
fifth of world petroleum production. Do you know
what that's going to do to prices!
If you
don't like $3-a-gallon gasoline, you're going to
really hate this kind of world I'm painting. I
think the price shock would reduce economic growth
globally, plunging some countries into recession
or even depression. This would be a world-class
catastrophe. And it's also not clear, once it
starts, how you stop it.
TD:
In this context, you still called recently for US
ground troops to be brought out now.
JC: Because I'm not
convinced that US ground troops are preventing
this kind of scenario from happening.
TD: So talk a little about
your thinking on withdrawal.
JC: Well, my concern is that
US ground troops are being used at the moment for
things like the Fallujah operation, the Tal Afar
operation or now the Haditha operation. This
essentially means using the troops to attack
cities which are Sunni Arab (or in the case of Tal
Afar, Sunni Turkmen). These are seen as bastions
of the guerrilla movement and facilitators of the
infiltration of foreign fighters into the country.
To empty them of their populations, to flatten
entire neighborhoods, to do extensive
infrastructural and building damage to them, to
reduce their inhabitants to tent dwellers and
refugees, and maybe gradually let them back in to
live in tents on the rubble of their former homes
- this way of proceeding has no chance of success
as an anti-insurgency tactic. People in other
cities see this happening and they sympathize with
their fellow Sunnis.
The hope for
counterinsurgency would involve three things. Of
course, you'd have to hit people who are blowing
up innocent civilians. You'd have to try to stop
that, but you'd also have to open backchannels to
their political leadership and try to find ways to
bring them into the system. And you have to
convince the general population not to support
them. Operations like Fallujah, Tal Afar and
Haditha might have some limited effect - I think
not very much - in fighting the guerrilla
movement. But they do not cause the political
leadership to come in from the cold or the general
Sunni population to think well enough about the US
and its Iraqi allies to start informing on that
movement.
So things are only getting worse
in the Sunni areas. People forget that a year ago,
before the second Fallujah campaign, Mosul was
being held up as a model. It had been governed by
General [David H] Petraeus. It seemed like it
might be possible to woo the Sunni Arabs there.
But during the Fallujah campaign Mosul exploded.
Four thousand police resigned. Guerrillas en masse
took over checkpoints throughout the city. There
were bombings, and it never really has settled
down again. As al-Zaman [the Times of Baghdad]
reported recently, Northern Mosul is now
essentially guerrilla-held territory.
TD: And after 15 months on
the job, Petraeus, who was also responsible for
"standing up" the Iraqi Army, has just been
reassigned to the United States.
JC: He's been replaced,
which indicates to me that the whole thing is not
going very well. It may be that he was given an
impossible job.
So, if the US ground
troops are going to be used in this way, then
they're just creating more guerrillas over time. I
don't see evidence of progress here but of
deterioration. It's looking more and more like
Algeria in the early 1960s rather than the mid-50s
when the French were having some success against
the guerrilla movement in Algiers. Therefore, it
seems to me, we ought to get the ground troops out
and stop using them this way to empty cities,
destroy neighborhoods and pursue what is frankly a
punitive and scorched-earth policy towards the
Sunni Arab population.
TD:
I've been calling it the Carthaginian solution.
JC: Yes, and in the context
of modern guerrilla war it's possibly the worst
way to proceed. But unlike some of my friends to
the left of me - and I'm not sure it's even a
left-right issue since the libertarians feel the
same way - I think it's really dangerous just to
up and leave altogether and allow Iraq to fall
into civil war. People say the most amazing
things. Like, "Well, Iraq is already in civil war,
so why would it matter if we left?" No! No! No!
This is the stage before proper civil war. The
difference is a matter of scale. You have hundreds
of people a week being killed by guerrilla
violence in Iraq. That's different from thousands
of people, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of
thousands. I mean we've seen it in other countries
- Cambodia, Afghanistan, Congo - you can lose a
fifth of the population in this kind of struggle.
I think it's outrageous that people would say,
"Let's just up and leave and let what happens
happen." I know the Bush administration has
mismanaged this thing so badly that one's tempted
to say, let's get them away from this before they
do any more damage, but do we want a genocide on
our conscience?
I know one person who
said, "Well, once we're out, whatever happens is
not our responsibility." Is that really true? You
can invade a country, overthrow its government,
dissolve its military and then walk away, and a
million people die, and that's not your problem? I
don't understand this way of thinking.
TD: Let me change the
location of this to Washington for a minute. You
noted recently that the Arab press referred to the
antiwar demonstrators in Washington as "the
American street", which I found amusing, and you
also pointed out the virtual absence of Democratic
legislators, except for some members of the
Congressional Black Caucus, even marching in the
demonstration, no less addressing it. When we're
thinking about Iraq and the future, other than a
rising popular opposition to the war [which comes
from many places, including simple unhappiness
that we're not winning], it seems as if the
political opposition doesn't exist. To exaggerate
only slightly, half the Democrats in Congress are
still calling for sending more troops - which
don't even exist - into Iraq. I was wondering what
you made of this, given your recent call for
getting American ground troops out?
JC: Well, the first thing to
say is that the Democratic Party is about as
influential on Iraq policy as you and I are.
Whatever position Democratic legislators took
wouldn't necessarily be a policy position in the
sense of having any hope of being implemented as
long as Bush is in the White House. And I think
they're fearful of looking weak on foreign policy
...
TD: ... The result of
which is that they become unbelievably weak ...
JC: The strategy may be talk
tough and let Bush fail.
TD:
You recently called that "a dangerous strategy".
JC: There's tremendous
dissatisfaction in the country over the Iraq war
and Bush foreign policy, which could turn into
grassroots victories for Democratic candidates in
2006, if they could figure out how to address it
and provide leadership on these issues. This is
why I did one of my columns suggesting we turn to
using Special Forces and air power to support
Iraqi forces. Treat them like the Northern
Alliance was treated during the Afghan War, even
though I'm seeing this as an exit strategy rather
than an entry strategy. I did this mainly to
suggest that there are other stances the Democrats
could take. You could say we need an exit strategy
for Iraq that would be smart militarily and
politically, and doesn't just involve 1975-style
withdrawal from Vietnam with people hanging from
helicopters but also doesn't involve being quiet
and letting Bush dig his own grave. I think, first
of all, that that's cowardly. Second, it's not
good for the country not to have a debate and not
to have leadership on the other side of an issue.
TD: Do you think Bush has
dug his own grave?
JC: I
mean, this is one of the great foreign policy
debacles of American history. There's an enormous
amount at stake in the oil Gulf, and Bush is
throwing grenades around in the cockpit of the
world economy. So I think he has dug his own grave
with regard to Iraq policy. Most politics in the
United States, though, focuses on domestic issues.
TD: Despite the usual
centrality of domestic issues, I happen to think
that, above all else, the war has driven the Bush
people ever since the post-invasion period. When,
for instance, you look at the latest AP/Ipsos
poll, what's bothering the evangelicals now above
all else? It's the war.
JC:
Yes, they are upset about what happened in Iraq
because Bush made an alliance with the religious
Shi'ites, which meant an alliance with Islamic
fundamentalists who have now put a Koran veto on
legislation in Iraq. You know, the evangelicals
were dreaming big. They thought Iraq was going to
be a missionary success, that they would make the
Iraqis into Protestants. But any missionary who
showed up in Iraq now, we'd soon be seeing him on
video pleading for his life. None of their
objectives with regard to Iraq have been achieved.
This is something, by the way, that the
evangelicals have been dreaming of since the
1850s. It's how the American University in Beirut
got there. The Presbyterian missions were the ones
that originally tried to missionize the Middle
East and they failed all along the line - and they
continue to fail. The Bush moment was a moment in
which those nineteenth century dreams of
evangelical missionizing and imperial might being
melded together were briefly revived. Now it's
become clear to them that this is just not going
to happen, so they're angry, they're disappointed.
You can understand that.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
