US roots in Iraq too deep to pull
By Michael Schwartz
Even if most of the commentary on the Iraq Study Group (ISG) continues to be
negative, one can nevertheless look forward to highly publicized policy changes
in the near future that rely for their justification on this report, or on one
of the several others recently released, or on those currently being prepared
by the Pentagon, the White House and the National Security Council.
This is not, however, good news for those who want the US to end its war of
conquest in Iraq. Quite the contrary: the ISG report is
not an "exit strategy"; it is a new plan for achieving the Bush
administration's imperial goals in the Middle East.
The ISG report stands out among the present flurry of re-evaluations as the
sole evaluation of the war by a group not beholden to the president; as the
only report containing an unadorned negative evaluation of the current
situation (vividly captured in the oft-quoted phrase "dire and deteriorating");
and as the only public document with unremitting criticism of the Bush
administration's conduct of the war.
It is this very negativity that brings into focus the severely constrained
nature of the debate now underway in Washington - most importantly, the fact
that US withdrawal from Iraq (immediate or otherwise) is simply not going to be
part of the discussion. Besides explicitly stating that withdrawal is a
terrible idea - "our leaving would make [the situation] worse" - the ISG report
is built around the idea that the US will remain in Iraq for a very long time.
To put it bluntly, the ISG is not calling on the Bush administration to abandon
its goal of creating a client regime that was supposed to be the key to
establishing the US as the dominant power in the Middle East. Quite the
contrary. As its report states: "We agree with the goal of US policy in Iraq."
If you ignore the text sprinkled with sugar-coated words like "representative
government", the report essentially demands that the Iraqi government pursue
policies shaped to serve "America's interest and values in the years ahead".
Don't be fooled by this often quoted passage from the report: "By the first
quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation
on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be
out of Iraq." The ebullient interpretations of this statement by the media have
been misleading in three different ways.
First, the combat brigades mentioned in this passage represent far less than
half of all the troops in Iraq. The military police, the air force, the troops
that move the equipment, those assigned to the Green Zone, the soldiers that
order, store and move supplies, medical personnel, intelligence personnel and
so on, are not combat personnel; and they add up to considerably more than
70,000 of the approximately 140,000 troops in Iraq at the moment. They will all
have to stay - as well as actual combat forces to protect them and to protect
the new American advisers who are going to flood into the Iraqi Army - because
the Iraqi Army has none of these units and isn't going to develop them for
several years, if ever.
Second, the ISG wants those "withdrawn" American troops "redeployed", either
inside or outside Iraq. In all likelihood, this will mean that at least some of
them will be stationed in the five permanent bases inside Iraq that the Bush
administration has already spent billions of dollars constructing, and which
are small American towns, replete with fast food restaurants, bus lines and
recreation facilities. There is no other place to put these redeployed troops
in the region, except bases in Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, none
of which are really suited to, or perhaps eager to, host a large influx of
American troops (guaranteed to be locally unpopular and a magnet for terrorist
attacks).
Third, it's important not to ignore those two modest passages - "subject to
unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground" and "not
necessary for force protection". In other words, if the Iraqi troops meant to
replace the redeployed American ones are failures, then some or all of the
troops might never be redeployed. In addition, even if Iraqi troops did perform
well, Americans might still be deemed necessary to protect the remaining
(non-combat) troops from attack by insurgents and other forces.
Given that American troops have not been able to subdue the Sunni rebellion,
which is still on a growth curve, it is highly unlikely that their Iraqi
substitutes will do any better. In other words, even if the "withdrawal" parts
of the ISG report were accepted by President George W Bush, which looks
increasingly unlikely, its plan has more holes and qualifications than Swiss
cheese.
Put another way, no proposal at present on the table in Washington is likely to
result in significant reductions, even in the portion of American troops
defined as "combat brigades". That is why this statement says that the combat
troops "could be out of Iraq", not "will be out of Iraq", in the first quarter
of 2008.
So, the ISG report contemplates - best case scenario - "a considerable military
presence in the region, with our still significant [at least 70,000 strong]
force in Iraq, and with our powerful air, ground and naval deployments in
Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar ..." Given a less-than-optimum scenario, the
American presence in Iraq would assumedly remain much higher, perhaps even
approaching current levels.
As if this isn't bad news enough, the report is laced with qualifiers
indicating that the ISG members fear their new strategy might not work, that
"there is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq" - a theme that will
certainly be picked up as the right-wing of the Republican Party and angry
neo-conservatives continue to blast at the report.
Danger to empire
Why was the ISG so reluctant to advocate the withdrawal of American troops and
the abandonment of the Bush administration's goal of pacifying Iraq? The likely
explanation is: its all-establishment membership (and the teams of experts that
gave it advice) understood that withdrawing from Iraq would be an imperially
momentous decision. It would, in fact, mean the abandonment of over two decades
of American foreign policy in the Middle East. To grasp this, it's helpful to
compare the way most Americans look at the war in Iraq to the way those in
power view it.
Most Americans initially believed that the US went into Iraq to shut down
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and/or simply to
topple a dangerous dictator (or even a dictator somehow connected to the
September 11, 2001, attacks). Of course, had that really been the case, the
Bush administration should have withdrawn almost immediately.
Even today, it could, at least theoretically, withdraw and declare victory the
day after Saddam is executed, since the WMDs and the September 11 connection
were evanescent. In this scenario, the dismal post-invasion military failure
would represent nothing but the defeat of Bush's personal crusade - articulated
only after the Saddam regime was toppled - to bring American-style democracy to
a benighted land.
Because of this, most people, whether supporters or opponents of the war,
expect each new round of policy debates to at least consider the option of
withdrawal; and many hold out the hope that Bush will finally decide to give up
his democratization pipe dream. Even if Bush is incapable of reading the
handwriting on the Iraqi wall, this analysis encourages us to hope that outside
advisers like the ISG will be "pragmatic" enough to bring the message home to
him, before the war severely undermines the US economically and in terms of how
people around the world think about the US.
However, a more realistic look at the original goals of the invasion makes
clear why withdrawal cannot be so easily embraced by anyone loyal to the
grandiose foreign policy goals adopted by the US right after the fall of the
Soviet Union. The real goals of the war in Iraq add up to an extreme version of
this larger vision of a "unipolar world" orbiting around the United States.
The invasion of 2003 reflected the Bush administration's ambition to establish
Iraq as the hub of American imperial dominance in the oil heartlands of the
planet. Unsurprisingly, then, the US military entered Iraq with plans already
in hand to construct and settle into at least four massive military bases that
would become nerve centers for the US's military presence in the "arc of
instability" extending from Central Asia all the way into Africa - an "arc"
that just happened to contain the bulk of the world's exportable oil.
The original plan included wresting control of Iraqi oil from Saddam's hostile
Ba'athist government and delivering it into the hands of the large oil
companies through the privatization of new oil fields and various other special
agreements. It was hoped that privatized Iraqi oil might then break the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' hold on the global oil spigot.
In the Iraq of the Bush administration's dreams, the US would be the key player
in determining both the amount of oil pumped and the favored destinations for
it. (This ambition was implicitly seconded by the ISG when it recommended that
the US "should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as
a commercial enterprise".)
All of this, of course, was contingent on establishing an Iraqi government that
would be a junior partner in American Middle Eastern policy; that, under the
rule of an Ahmed Chalabi or Iyad Allawi, would, for instance, be guaranteed to
support administration campaigns against Iran and Syria. Bush administration
officials have repeatedly underscored this urge, even in the present
circumstances, by attempting, however ineffectively, to limit the ties of the
present Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government to Iran.
Withdrawal from Iraq would signal the ruin of all these hopes. Without a
powerful American presence, permanent bases would not be welcomed by any regime
that might emerge from the current cauldron in Baghdad; every faction except
the Kurds is adamantly against them. US oil ambitions would prove similarly
unviable. Though L Paul Bremer, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US's
three ambassador-viceroys in Baghdad, have all pushed through legislation
mandating the privatization of oil (even embedding this policy in the new
constitution), only a handful of top Iraqi politicians have actually embraced
the idea.
The religious leaders who control the Sunni militias oppose it, as do the
Sadrists, who are now the dominant faction in the Shi'ite areas. The current
Iraqi government is already making economic treaties with Iran and even sought
to sign a military alliance with that country that the Americans aborted.
Still staying the course
Added to all this, from Lebanon to Pakistan, the administration's political
agenda for the "arc of instability" is now visibly in a state of collapse. This
agenda, of course, predated Bush, going back to the moment in 1991 when the
Soviet Union simply evaporated, leaving an impoverished Russia and a set of
wobbly independent states in its place.
While the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton did not embrace the use of the
military as the primary instrument of foreign policy, they fully supported the
goal of American preeminence in the Middle East and worked very hard to achieve
it - through the isolation of Iran, sanctions against Iraq, various
unpublicized military actions against Saddam's forces, and a ratcheting upward
of permanent basing policies throughout the Gulf region and Central Asia.
This is the context for the peculiar stance taken by the ISG towards the
administration's disaster in Iraq. Coverage has focused on the way the report
labeled the situation as "grave and deteriorating" and on its call for
negotiations with the previously pariah states of Iran and Syria. In itself,
the negotiation proposal is perfectly reasonable and has the side effect of
lessening the possibility that the Bush administration will launch an attack on
Iranian nuclear facilities in the near future.
But no one should imagine that the "new" military strategy proposed by Baker
and his colleagues includes dismissing the original goals of the war. In their
letter of transmittal, ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton declared:
All
options have not been exhausted. We believe it is still possible to pursue
different policies that can give Iraq an opportunity for a better future,
combat terrorism, stabilize a critical region of the world and protect
America's credibility, interests and values.
This statement,
couched in typical Washington-speak, reiterates those original ambitious goals
and commits the ISG to a continuing effort to achieve them. The corpus of the
report does nothing to dispel that assertion.
Its military strategy calls for a (certainly quixotic) effort to use Iraqi
troops to bring about the military victory American troops have failed for
three years to achieve. The diplomatic initiatives call for a (certainly
quixotic) effort to enlist the aid of Syria and Iran, as well as Saudi Arabia
and other neighbors, in defeating the insurgency.
And the centerpiece of the economic initiatives seeks to accelerate the process
of privatizing oil, the clearest sign of all that Baker and Hamilton - like
Bush and his circle - remain committed to the grand scheme of maintaining the
US as the dominant force in the region.
Even as the group called on the president to declare that the US "does not seek
permanent military bases in Iraq" once the country is secure, it immediately
hedged this intention by pointing out that the US "could consider" temporary
bases, "if the Iraqi government were to request it". Of course, if the Bush
administration were somehow to succeed in stabilizing a compliant client
regime, such a regime would surely request that American troops remain in their
"temporary" bases on a more-or-less permanent basis, since its survival would
depend on them.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the ISG report is its embrace of the Bush
administration's imperial attitude toward the Iraqi government. Although the
report repeatedly calls for American "respect" for Iraqi "sovereignty" (an
implicit criticism of the past three years of Iraq policy), it also offers a
series of what are essentially non-negotiable demands that would take an
already weak and less-than-sovereign government and strip it of control over
anything that makes governments into governments.
As a start, the "Iraqi" military would be flooded with 10,000-20,000 new
American "advisors", ensuring that it would continue to be an
American-controlled military, even if a desperately poor and recalcitrant one,
into the distant future. In addition, the ISG offered a detailed program for
how oil should be extracted (and the profits distributed) as well as specific
prescriptions for handling a number of pressing problems, including fiscal
policy, militias, the city of Kirkuk, sectarianism, de-Ba'athification and a
host of other issues that normally would be decisions for an Iraqi government,
not an American advisory panel in Washington.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Iraqi leaders almost immediately began
complaining that the report, for all its bows to "respect," completely lacked
it. Most striking is the report's 21st (of 79) recommendations, aimed at
describing what the US should do if the Iraqis failed to satisfactorily fulfill
the many tasks that the ISG has set for them.
If the Iraqi government
does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on
national reconciliation, security and governance, the United States should
reduce its political, military or economic support for the Iraqi government.
This could be interpreted as a threat that the US will withdraw - and the
mainstream media have chosen to interpret it just that way. But why then did
Baker and his colleagues not word this statement differently? ("... the United
States should reduce, and ultimately withdraw, its forces from Iraq.") The
phrase "reduce its political, military or economic support for the Iraqi
government" is probably better interpreted literally: that if that government
fails to satisfy ISG demands, the US should transfer its "political, military
or economic support" to a new leadership within Iraq that it feels would be
more capable of making "substantial progress toward" the milestones it has set.
In other words, this passage is more likely a threat of a coup d'etat than a
withdrawal strategy - a threat that the facade of democracy would be stripped
away and a "strong man" (or a government of "national salvation") installed,
one that the Bush administration or the ISG believes could bring the Sunni
rebellion to heel.
Here is the unfortunate thing. Evidently, the "grave and deteriorating"
situation in Iraq has not yet deteriorated enough to convince even
establishment American policymakers, who have been on the outside these past
years, to follow the lead of the public (as reflected in the latest opinion
polls) and abandon their soaring ambitions of Middle East domination. If they
haven't done so, imagine where Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are in
policy terms. So far, it seems everyone of power or influence in Washington
remains committed to "staying the course".
Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology and faculty director of the
undergraduate college of global studies at Stony Brook University, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, as well as on American business
and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and Social
Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with
Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.
