Fareed Zakaria has an interesting take on the present dilemma. It may be too late for a large success in Iraq but it's not too late, in his view, to avoid a "humiliating failure."
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Still Time to Avoid Failure
Sept. 8 issue — Last Friday’s bomb blast in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, presumably by Baathist terrorists, might mark the beginning of internal violence among various groups in Iraqi society. If so, we may be in for a hellish ride.
IRAQ HAS ONE of the most violent histories of any country on the globe. In comparison even with other states in the Middle East, Iraq’s modern history has been marked by turmoil, coups, bloodshed and mayhem. Consider the fate of its rulers:
Faisal I: Installed by the British in the wake of a violent revolt, he ruled for 10 years and was one of a handful of Iraqi leaders to die of natural causes, in 1933.
Ghazi I: Faisal’s son, he witnessed a coup against his prime minister three years after being installed and then, in 1939, died mysteriously. The official explanation was that he drove his car into a lamppost.
Faisal II: The young king, his regent and almost the entire royal family and entourage were killed in a bloody coup in 1958.
Abdul Karim Qassem: Qassem came to power in the coup of 1958. In 1963 he was killed in a coup himself.
Abdul Salam Arif: Arif came to power in the 1963 coup, which unleashed a wave of massacres across the country. Three years later he died mysteriously in a helicopter accident.
Abdul Rahman Arif: Brother of the above, he lasted about as long. In July 1968 he was ousted in the Baathist coup and exiled to Istanbul.
Ahmed Hasan-al-Bakr: Became president after the 1968 coup and stayed in power until 1979, when he stepped down for reasons of “ill health” in favor of his deputy, Saddam Hussein.
And this has been the history of violence among only the Sunni of Iraq, who have always been able to rule over the Shiites, Kurds, Turkomans and others using brutal means. Saddam, who took brutality to an entirely different level, destroyed whole villages of Kurds and Shiites during his reign. The memories of most Iraqis are filled with stories of terror, torture and murder. If score-settling among these groups begins, that would mark a new phase in Iraq’s blood-soaked story—potentially one that will prove even more destructive.
To make matters worse, Iraqis have proven to be strong nationalists. In every war in which Iraq has participated over the last half century, Iraqis have fought tenaciously—even when they knew they were going to lose. Americans who had fought in Vietnam, and then again in the first gulf war, recalled that their fire fights with Iraqis were more intense than anything they had experienced from the North Vietnamese.
Keeping peace in a country like this cannot be easy. That is why the Bush administration’s attempts to do so unilaterally and on the cheap have been such a disaster. In a remarkable interview last week, Gen. John Abizaid, head of the Central Command, told The New York Times that he needed more troops. This seems to contradict what Donald Rumsfeld said two days earlier, which could be a sign of more internal wrangling, or could mark the beginning of a turnaround. Abizaid attempted to disguise the shift by saying that critics were wrong; he needed no more American troops and instead only wanted foreign forces. But almost no one urging a buildup has been suggesting American troops. For one thing, there are no more American troops available. We would have to move divisions out of Europe or East Asia or mobilize the National Guard. Other than a few neoconservatives, who cannot bear to utter the words “United Nations,” everyone understands that more troops can only comein the form of a multinational force under U.N. mandate.
Abizaid’s explanation for why we need foreign forces is even more remarkable. American troops, he explained, were fueling Iraqi nationalism that was morphing into anti-Americanism: “You can’t underestimate the public perception, both within Iraq and within the Arab world, about the percentage of forces being so heavily American.” But who underestimated this problem of Iraqi nationalism? Certainly not those of us who argued from the day the war ended that the operation should be multinational, with full U.N. authorization. It was the administration itself that argued that American troops were going to be welcomed as liberators; that the postwar period would require few forces; that Iraqis disliked the Europeans and the United Nations, and that America would have absolutely no legitimacy problem.
Abizaid’s interview is a powerful admission that on the two most important postwar issues—the number of forces and the nature of the occupation—the Bush administration got it badly wrong. The only question now is, will the administration finally recognize its errors? It might already be too late to achieve a great success in Iraq. But it is not too late to avoid a humiliating failure.
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Write the author at www.fareedzakaria.com. |
