One of the most unfortunate myths
pervading American culture, the American psyche,
and the whole American Weltanschauung - and
it's one for which we might as well go ahead and
blame movie director Frank Capra - is that in most
situations the good guys win.
Morality
triumphs. The greedy and self-interested, the
cruel and mean-spirited are defeated. Ultimately,
or so the myth goes, the bad guys win some of the
battles, but in the end the good guys win the
wars.
Sadly, in the real world, good
doesn't always win. Sometimes, good isn't even
there. When it comes to Iraq, the left, the
liberals, the progressives (for the sake of
argument, the good guys) sometimes seem to have
their heads in the clouds. That's true in
regard
to the crucial question of whether President
George W Bush's stay-the-course strategy can
succeed. The answer, unfortunately, is: yes, it
can.
The
Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as
in the invasion of 2003, is: use military force to
destroy the political infrastructure of the
Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces;
eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of US hegemony
in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the
wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to
the US; create a new political class willing to
be
subservient to US interests in the
region; and use that new Iraq as a base for
further expansion.
To achieve all that,
the president is determined to keep as much
military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it
takes, while recruiting, training, funding and
supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security
force that will gradually allow the US military to
reduce its "footprint" in the country without
entirely leaving.
The endgame, as he and
his advisers imagine it, would result in a
permanent US military presence in the country,
including permanent bases and basing rights, and a
predominant position for US business and oil
interests.
Marshaling the bad news Many progressives scoff at such a scenario.
They argue, with persuasiveness, that the US
project in Iraq is doomed. To prove their point,
they cite (what else?) the bad news. And there
certainly is a lot of it.
First of all,
the Sunni-led insurgency, metastasizing
continually, is a hydra-headed army of armies
representing former Ba'athist military, security
and intelligence officers, assorted nationalists
and Islamists, tribal and clan leaders, and city
and neighborhood militias. It has shown remarkable
resilience. The elimination of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi is not likely to put much of a dent in
the Sunni resistance and may only strengthen it.
Second, Iraq's Shi'ites are restive, at
best, and bitterly divided among themselves. The
two most powerful blocs, with the two most
important militias - the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) with its Badr
Organization and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army -
are to varying degrees unhappy with the US
presence.
The up-and-coming Fadhila bloc,
one of whose leaders was just arrested in Najaf
(allegedly for planning explosives attacks against
US forces), is brooding. Throughout Iraq's mostly
Shi'ite southern regions, Shi'ite parties and
armies are battling among themselves for the
control of important cities, including Basra, and
of Iraq's Southern Oil Company, which produces the
vast bulk of Iraqi oil and has provided a valuable
stream of corrupt cash for Shi'ite party leaders.
Some of them - possibly all of them - are turning
to various factions in Iran for support.
Third, the Kurds, ensconced in the
Alamo-like Kurdish region in the north, are
happily waxing pro-American, even as they quietly
prepare for a unilateral grab of the key oil city
of Kirkuk, of Iraq's Northern Oil Company, and of
other territory contiguous to the Kurdish region -
thus threatening to set in motion an almost
unavoidable clash with Iraq's Arabs, both Sunni
and Shi'ite, and possibly nearby states as well.
Fourth, the US project to create an Iraqi
army and police force is going badly. So far, at
least, the main army and police units have been
reconstituted from the Badr Organization and
Kurdish peshmerga militiamen, none of whom
are loyal to the concept of a unitary,
non-sectarian Iraq, nor have they been able to
grasp basic notions of human rights.
The
Shi'ites, in particular, are engaged in a bloody
campaign of death-squad killings and kidnappings,
along with targeted assassinations aimed at
Ba'athists. It will be difficult, if not
impossible, for the US to use war-hardened,
embittered and power-hungry Shi'ite and Kurdish
forces to keep peace in Sunni areas, including
western Baghdad.
Fifth, of course, the
economic reconstruction of Iraq is, shall we say,
not going swimmingly.
Not surprisingly,
many politicians and generals and most
progressives have adopted a worst-case outlook.
With bad news mounting, they argue that the US
project in Iraq is lost. In truth, I've made the
same argument at various points over the past
three years.
Last November, in an article
called "Getting out of Iraq" for Rolling Stone, I
wrote: "George Bush is just about the only person
in Washington these days who doesn't know that the
United States has lost the war in Iraq." I quoted
former Georgia senator Max Cleland, who told a
congressional hearing organized by House
progressives that the US had better get out of
Iraq before the resistance overran the Green Zone.
"We need an exit strategy that we choose - or it
will certainly be chosen for us," said the
grievously wounded Vietnam veteran. "I've seen
this movie before. I know how it ends."
Last week, writing for The Nation,
Nicholas von Hoffman echoed this theme, suggesting
that it's too late to worry about exit strategies:
"We could be moving toward an American Dunkirk. In
1940 the defeated British army in Belgium was
driven back by the Germans to the French seacoast
city of Dunkirk, where it had to abandon its
equipment and escape across the English Channel on
a fleet of civilian vessels, fishing smacks,
yachts, small boats, anything and everything that
could float, and carry the defeated and wounded
army to safety ... [In Iraq,] there is no seaport
troops could get to, so the only way out of Iraq
would be that same desert highway to Kuwait where
15 years ago the American air force destroyed
Saddam Hussein's army."
What staying
the course means Let me now admit to having
second thoughts on this matter. I no longer am
convinced that the US adventure in Iraq is lost.
There is no guarantee that the Bush administration
cannot succeed in its goals there. The only
certain thing is that success - what the president
calls "victory in Iraq" - will come at the expense
of thousands more American deaths, tens of
thousands more Iraqi deaths and hundreds of
billions of taxpayer dollars.
Indeed, this
war would have to be sustained not only by this
administration, but by the next one and probably
the one after that as well. For more than three
years, the US has supported a massive military
presence on the ground in Iraq, while taking
steady casualties. It may be no less capable of
doing so for the next two and a half years, until
the end of Bush's second term - and during the
next administration's reign, too, whether the
president is named John McCain or Hillary Clinton.
At least theoretically, a force of more
than 100,000 US soldiers could wage a brutal war
of attrition against the resistance in Iraq for
years to come. Last week, in a leak to the New
York Times, the White House announced its
intention to leave at least 50,000 troops in Iraq
for many years to come. Last week, too, the son of
the president of Iraq (a Kurd) revealed that
representatives of the Kurdish region were in
negotiations with the United States to create a
permanent US military presence in Iraq's north.
Meanwhile, Bush and his Rasputin, Karl
Rove, took the occasion of the death of Zarqawi to
reiterate their unalterable commitment to victory
in Iraq, whatever the cost. There is no reason not
to take Bush at his word. And there is no reason
not to believe that Rove will orchestrate a
withering offensive against Democrats who question
the president's goal of victory.
The
frightening thing about last week's House and
Senate debates over Iraq was that the mainstream
opposition to the Bush administration - ranging
from moderate Democrats to realist, if
pro-military, moderate Republicans - never
challenges the goal of victory in Iraq.
Yes, a hardy band of anti-war members of
Congress (including Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Lynn
Woolsey and Barbara Lee of California, and others,
joined by John Murtha of Pennsylvania) support the
unconditional withdrawal of US troops. But the
bulk of the Democrats, including the 42 Democrats
who last week voted in favor of the bloodthirsty
Republican war resolution, don't question the
importance of victory in Iraq. They just question
the Bush administration's tactics.
There
are only two ways to thwart Bush's war. The first
is for the Iraqi resistance to defeat the US
occupation. The second is for domestic public
opinion in the US to coalesce around a demand for
unilateral withdrawal. So far, neither the Iraqi
resistance nor the anti-war movement has the upper
hand; and, sadly, so far, they are loath to make
common cause with each other.
Whereas the
Vietnamese resistance had a state, North Vietnam,
and the support of the other superpower, the
Soviet Union, as well as Mao Zedong's China, the
resistance in Iraq is nothing but a grassroots
insurgency. It neither controls a state nor has
the support of any state. (Contrary to the idiotic
assertions of the neo-conservatives and the Bush
administration, Iran is not assisting the Sunni
Iraqi resistance, and that fractured, fractious
movement is getting only the most minuscule
support from its Sunni Arab neighbors.)
There is obviously no love lost between
Iraq's Ba'athists and the kings of Saudi Arabia
and Jordan. The resistance in Iraq would benefit
mightily if elements of the Shi'ite bloc hived off
to join the insurgency; if, say, Muqtada's ragtag
forces abandoned the government to join the
resistance, as they toyed with doing during the
destruction of Fallujah in 2004. That's unlikely,
though.
So who believes that the Iraqi
resistance can fight on indefinitely against the
combined might of the US armed forces and
US-supported Shi'ite and Kurdish armies, as well
as militias, especially with ongoing US
divide-and-conquer efforts that involve
blandishments offered to the less militant wings
of the insurgency?
Still, it's not
impossible that the resistance can hold on long
enough to effect at least a stalemate. But its
ability to do so might depend, in part, on the
ability of the US anti-war movement to undermine
the administration's commitment to staying the
course in Iraq.
Was Iraq a
'mistake'? Until now, truly anti-war
Democrats have represented a minority force within
the party. In opposition, they have largely been
eclipsed by moderate Democrats and realist
Republicans, both seemingly content to argue that
the war in Iraq was merely a "mistake" and an
inefficiently prosecuted "failure" without
confronting the war itself.
In fact, Nancy
Pelosi, the House Democratic minority leader who
(half-heartedly) supports Murtha's get-out-now
position, used both of those words over and over
during last week's debate. Both words are deadly -
and probably wrong as well.
The war in
Iraq was not a "mistake". It was a deliberately
calculated exercise of US power with a specific
end in mind - namely, control of Iraq and the
Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains
so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its
perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its
goals were unworthy and remain so.
Few
Democrats, and almost no Republicans, have been
willing to challenge Bush's war on these terms,
however. Neither have most of the Bush
administration's so-called mistakes truly been
errors: the brutal dismantling of the Ba'ath Party
and the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces,
widely castigated now as "mistakes" by many Bush
critics, were meant. They were thought out. They
were planned with purpose. They, too, were
deliberate actions aiming at US hegemony in Iraq.
Nor is the war simply, or even largely, a
"failure". As cruel and brutish as it is, it is
grinding its way toward its goal. Victory for the
United States in Iraq, as evidenced by the
recitation of bad news I cited earlier, is by no
means certain. But it is far too early to call it
a failure. To do so at this stage is Capraesque.
It assumes that bad guys don't win. But sometimes
they do. And on Iraq, the jury remains out.
The danger of emphasizing the supposed
"mistakes" and "failures" of the Bush
administration's Iraq policy is that it plays into
a notion held by an increasingly large component
of centrists in both parties - that, although the
war itself was a "mistake", the only rational
option for the US now is to win it anyway. There
are countless variations on this theme emanating
from both Democratic and Republican centrists.
You hear it in the argument that, although
the war was wrong, we now have a moral obligation
to stay and prevent civil war. You hear it in the
argument that the US must be strong against the
threat of global "Islamofascism", and that by
leaving Iraq we will hand al-Qaeda and its allies
a victory. There are other variations of the same,
but all of those who make such arguments (while
criticizing Bush for his alleged incompetence and
mismanagement) end up arguing that the US has no
choice other than to stay.
In my
discussions with them in recent weeks, several
have brought up secretary of state Colin Powell's
absurd argument about the Pottery Barn rule: if
you break it, you own it. Well, yes, we broke
Iraq, but we don't own it. (In fact, the Pottery
Barn itself, a US home-furnishings chain, has no
such rule. If you mistakenly break a piece of
pottery in one of its stores, you aren't actually
liable.) The US has absolutely no moral imperative
to stay in Iraq. It has a moral imperative to
leave - and to apologize.
Just as the
anti-war movement in the US can strengthen the
resistance in Iraq, the Iraqi resistance can aid
the anti-war movement. The cold reality of the war
in Iraq is that, had it not been for the Iraqi
resistance, there would be no US anti-war
movement. Had Iraq's Sunnis collapsed in disarray
and meekly ceded power to the Shi'ite-Kurdish
coalition empowered by the US invasion, Bush's
illegal war in Iraq might have succeeded far more
effortlessly.
But here's the truth of the
matter: led by Iraq's Ba'ath Party and by Iraqi
military officers and their tribal and clan
allies, a thriving insurgency did develop within
months of the March 2003 invasion. Some of the
resistance is, of course, still made up of Iraqis
passionately loyal to the person of Saddam
Hussein. But studies of the insurgency show that
most of its fighters are loyal to the Ba'ath
Party, whose origins were among left-leaning Arab
nationalists, or they are loyal to a more specific
version of Iraqi nationalism, or they simply
oppose the foreign occupation of their country.
Back to Capra country The
anti-war movement in the US developed not out of
intellectual and moral opposition to the war
itself, although that is at its core. It grew
because mainstream Americans became increasingly
disturbed by the prolonged war that followed the
2003 invasion. Many Americans grew outraged over
US casualties. But the fact that a prolonged
insurgency followed the invasion and that US
casualties mounted is the result of the Iraqi
people's unwillingness to submit to a US diktat.
Viewed from that standpoint, it's at least
worth asking: Who are the good guys and who are
the bad guys in Iraq? Are the good guys the
American troops fighting to impose US hegemony in
the Gulf? Are the good guys the US forces who have
installed a murderous Shi'ite theocracy in
Baghdad? Are the good guys the marines who
murdered children and babies in Haditha in cold
blood? Are the good guys the US officers who
brought us Abu Ghraib, or the generals who signed
off on their methods, or the administration that
set them on such a path in the first place? Who
was it, after all, who pulverized the institutions
of the Iraqi state and society?
So if the
US "cavalry" aren't the good guys, who then can we
cast in that role? If Frank Capra went to Iraq,
how would he divide the place neatly into good
guys and bad guys and assemble his feel-good
morality play? Certainly, most Americans still
believe that the Americans are the good guys, even
if 62% (according to one recent poll) no longer
believe that the war in Iraq was "worth fighting".
But my argument here is: Capra could make
a plausible argument that, in the hell that Iraq
has become in 2006, with resistance fighters
killing US soldiers and vice versa, there's at
least as much good on their side as on ours, if
not more.
That raises, once again, the
question of a dialogue with the Iraqi insurgents.
For the past year, off and on, US Ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad has conducted secret talks with
the resistance and has openly made a distinction
between Zarqawi-style jihadis and former
Ba'athists and military men.
Since the
creation of the new, allegedly permanent
government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,
Iraqi government officials once again have raised
the idea of talking to the resistance. An aide to
Maliki even suggested an amnesty for armed
fighters who have killed US troops. That's a good
idea, and it has been raised more than once since
2003. In this case, though, an ignorant Senator
Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate
minority leader, expressed outrage at the idea of
an amnesty. According to the Washington Post,
which first reported the amnesty idea, the Maliki
aide who suggested it was fired.
Personally, I'm suspicious of Khalilzad's
dialogue offers. By dangling the idea, Khalilzad
is more than likely using a divide-and-conquer
tactic, enticing some insurgent leaders to join
the new Iraqi regime. How else to interpret the
offer at a moment when Bush is insisting on an
unconditional US victory in Iraq? People
knowledgeable about the resistance know that the
only basis for serious talks with the insurgents
is the offer of a US withdrawal from Iraq in
exchange for an accord.
Still, whether one
thinks the resistance fighters are good guys or
bad guys that we need to talk to, the left, the
anti-war movement and progressives don't have to
wait for Khalilzad. The time for talking to Iraq's
Ba'ath, former military leaders and Sunni
resistance forces is here. And now that Zarqawi is
dead, the nature of the Iraqi insurgency is partly
clarified. It's a lot harder for supporters of the
war to argue that extremist, head-severing
Islamist extremists are its dominant face. In
fact, of course, they never were.
Some of
the anti-war movement's more perceptive leaders
have already started the dialogue. Tom Hayden, the
former California state senator and activist, has
been talking to the Iraqi resistance in London,
Amman and elsewhere. Some members of Congress,
such as Jim McDermott, have traveled to Amman to
do the same thing. The Bush administration might
not be ready to do it openly - yet. But wars end
either with the utter defeat of one side or the
other, or with a negotiated settlement. I'll take
that settlement.
Robert Dreyfuss
is the author of Devil's Game: How the United
States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He
covers national security for Rolling Stone and
writes frequently for The American Prospect,
Mother Jones, and The Nation. He is also a regular
contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post,
and other sites, and writes the blog The Dreyfuss
Report.
infrastructure of the
Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces;
eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of US hegemony
in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the
wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to
the US; create a new political class willing to
be
subservient to US interests in the
region; and use that new Iraq as a base for
further expansion. 
