Iraq’s Future—and Ours
January 2004
<font size=4>
ON NOVEMBER 21, 2003, some minor rocket attacks on the Iraqi oil ministry and on two hotels in Baghdad elicited an exceptional amount of attention in the global media. What drew the interest of journalists were the terrorists’ mobile launchers: they were crude donkey carts.
This peculiar juxtaposition of 8th- and 21st-century technology was taken as emblematic of the entire American experience in Iraq — an increasingly hopeless clash between our overwhelming conventional strength and stealthy terrorists able to turn our own lethal means against us with cheap and ubiquitous native materials. How could we possibly win this contest, when an illiterate thug with a rusty RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launcher could take down a West Point graduate along with his million-dollar Black Hawk helicopter while those upon whom we have been lavishing our aid cheered our deaths and ransacked the corpses?
In an extensive, on-the-ground account of the post-bellum chaos, George Packer in a recent issue of the New Yorker lists an array of missteps that brought us to this sorry pass. We put too much trust in exiled Iraqis; we allowed looters and fundamentalists to seize the initiative right after the war; we underestimated both the damage done to the infrastructure by Saddam Hussein and the pernicious and still insidious effects of his murderous, Soviet-style government hierarchy. Mark Danner, in the New York Review of Books, relates much the same story, emphasizing our tolerance of looting and our disbanding of the Iraqi army as factors contributing in tandem to the creation of the Iraqi resistance, now thriving on a combination of plentiful cash (from looting and prewar caches) and a surplus of weaponry and manpower (from the defunct army).
<font size=5>
Both authors make good points, including about American
naivetE9 and unpreparedness. But lacking in these bleak
analyses of failures and setbacks are crucial and
complicating elements, with the result that the overall
picture they draw is both distorted as to the present and
seriously misleading with regard to the future.
<font size=4>
II
IT IS a genuine cause of lament that many American lives have been lost in what should have been an uncontested peace since the war ended in April. But let us begin by putting the matter in perspective. The reconstruction of Iraq is proceeding well: electrical power, oil production, everyday commerce, and schooling are all in better shape than they were under Saddam Hussein. More saliently, none of the biblical calamities confidently anticipated by critics of the March invasion has yet materialized. Those prophecies of Armageddon featured thousands of combatants killed, hundreds of oil wells set afire, mass starvation, millions festering in refugee camps, polluted waters in the Gulf, "moderate" Arab governments toppled, the "Arab street" in a rage, and a wave of 9/11-style terror loosed upon the United States.
We are an impatient people. In part, no doubt, our restlessness is a byproduct of our own unprecedented ease and affluence.<font size=3> Barbarians over the hills do not descend to kill us; no diseases wipe out our children by the millions; not starvation but obesity is more likely to do us in. Since we are so rich and so powerful, <font size=4>why is it, we naturally wonder, that we cannot simply and quickly call into being a secure, orderly, prosperous Iraq, a benign Islamic version of a New England township? What incompetence, or worse, lies behind our failure even to seize Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein?
But Iraq is not Middlebury or Amherst—and it will not be for another century. What is truly astonishing is not our inability in six months to create an Arab utopia, but the sheer audacity of our endeavor to send our liberating troops into the heart of an ancient and deeply chauvinistic culture that over the past decades had reduced itself to utter ruin. Saddam Hussein and his sons spent those decades gassing their own people, conducting maniacal wars against Iran and Kuwait, launching missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, despoiling the Mesopotamian wetlands and driving out the marsh people, and systematically murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents. Real progress would have meant anything even marginally better than this non-ending nightmare, let alone what we have already achieved in Iraq.
Nor did Saddam Hussein and his sons kill without help. After traveling 7,000 miles to dispose of him, we were confronted by his legacy—a society containing tens of thousands of Baathists with blood on their hands, 100,000 felons recently released from Saddam’s prisons, and millions more who for decades took solace in a species of national pride founded on butchery and plunder. After a mere seven months, are we to be blamed for having failed magically to rehabilitate such people? Should we instead have imprisoned them en masse, tried them, shot them, exiled them?
<font size=3>
Going into the heart of Mesopotamia, American troops passed Iraqi palaces with historic and often ominous names: Cunaxa, whence Xenophon’s 10,000 began their arduous journey home; Gau gamela, where Alexander devastated the Persian imperial army; and, not far away in southeastern Turkey, Carrhae, where the Roman triumvir Crassus lost his 45,000-man army and his own head. Mesopotamia has long been a very dangerous place for Westerners. <font size=4>By any historical measure other than our own, it is nothing short of preposterous that, in less than a year’s time, American troops would plunge into such a cauldron, topple the world’s worst dictator, and then undertake to introduce the rudiments of a liberal society in the center of the ancient Islamic caliphate—all at a cost of a little over 400 lives.
Now, however, after one of the most miraculous victories in military history, we demand an almost instantaneous peace followed by the emergence of a sort of Iraqi Continental Congress. We demand the head of Saddam Hussein, forgetting that Adolf Eichmann disappeared for years in the post-Nazi archipelago abroad, and that neither Ratko Mladic nor Radovan Karadzic has yet been scooped from the swamp of the Balkans. Our journalists describe the chaos besetting a society allegedly traumatized by American war that in reality is struggling with the legacy of its own destructive past. In Iraq we are not trying to rebuild the equivalent of a flattened Hamburg or a Tokyo among the equivalents of shell-shocked and thoroughly confused Germans or Japanese. We are attempting something much more challenging: to impose a consensual system upon spared peoples, who in liberation did far more to destroy their own country (the losses to pillaging ran to about $12 billion) than we did in either the war or the ensuing occupation.
III
MOST OF the Baathists among our current enemies in Iraq chose to flee rather than stand and fight. The homes of Saddam’s henchmen were not all bombed. Their friends were not killed. Their pride was only temporarily lost — to be regained, evidently, upon their discovery that it is easier and safer to murder an American who is building a school and operating under strict rules of engagement than to take on Abrams tanks barreling into Baghdad under a sky of F-16’s.
Such are a few of the ironies entailed in our stunning military success, even if overlooked in analyses of the recent turmoil. And there are still more. Hard as it may be to accept, a rocky peace may well be the result of a spectacularly rapid victory. Imagine our war instead as a year-and-a-half continuum of active combat, stretching from the late-March 2003 invasion until the scheduled assumption of power of the Iraqi provisional government this coming July. Now suppose that over the course of this time frame, about 5,000 of Saddam’s hardcore killers had either to be killed, captured, or routed from the country if there were ever to be any chance for real peace to emerge. Somehow, under conditions of full-scale combat, one suspects the job would have been much easier.
<font size=5>
Of course, we must not wish the war would have lasted that
long in order to allow us freely to destroy Saddam’s
remnants, but we must at least appreciate that short wars
by their very nature often require messy clean-ups. After
the shooting stops, the aid workers arrive; the hard-core,
hypercritical journalists remain; and soldiers must build
rather than shoot.
<font size=4>
Here, too, a little historical perspective helps. The U.S. and its allies do not have a good record of achieving quick and easy peace after quick and easy victory. Recall our twelve-year, 350,000-sortie, $20-billion experience maintaining no-fly zones in the aftermath of the four-day ground phase of the Gulf war; the thousands of Europeans and Americans who are still in the Balkans after the seven-week victory over Milosevic; the ongoing international effort to pacify Afghanistan after the United States and its indigenous allies routed the Taliban in a mere six weeks. It is simply much more difficult for static and immobile peacekeepers under global scrutiny to deal with resurgent, unconquered, and itinerant enemies. If things are rough now in Iraq, it is because they were not so rough during March and April.
There are other, cultural aspects to our dilemma as well. Many Americans have come to believe that war is the worst thing that can happen to humans. It would probably not have been easy in 1991 to convince them of the need to prolong our "highway of death" in southern Iraq, even if doing so would have prevented Baathist troops from escaping to Basra and killing innocents; or of the need to bomb Serbians in Sbrenica in order to prevent them from killing women and children; or of the need to annihilate fleeing Taliban fighters to prevent them from drifting back into Kabul months later to shoot young Frenchwomen trying to feed the poor and hungry.
<font size=5>
What such Americans have forgotten is that there can be
much worse things than war. Stalin, Hitler, and Mao killed
far more off the battlefield than all those lost in World
War I and II; bloodbaths in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda
transpired in "peacetime" precisely because there were no
troops around to thwart the mass murderers. And then there
is the lesson of General Patton’s "unforgiving minute"—
that brief window when the enemy collapses and flees and
for that evanescent moment can be hit with impunity and
made receptive to dictated terms. Whether out of
exultation at our stunning success or from a misplaced
sense of clemency, we chose to forfeit that rare
opportunity.
<font size=4>
What is more, in the immediate aftermath of the war we disbanded the Iraqi army, not out of oversight or folly but on the idealistic grounds that we wished to build a force untainted by Baathist officers and ideology. Not only did we thereby lose an opportunity to corral and systematically audit 400,000 soldiers in their barracks, but to the shame of wartime flight we added the greater ignominy of peacetime irrelevancy, soon to be exacerbated by shared unemployment and poverty.
If some of the constraints on our military conduct have been self-imposed, others are functions of (nonmilitary) reality. These days, our officers have adjusted to the fact that they operate in a topsy-turvy world, one where human-rights activists are capable of being largely silent about 80,000 Muslims killed in Chechnya but grow shrill when an occasional house of a killer in Tikrit is leveled or the family of a fugitive Baathist mass-murderer is interned. A William Tecumseh Sherman or a George Patton would have pointed out that the Sunni Triangle could be pacified only after the majority of its residents came to understand the hard way that they had much to lose and nothing to profit by indifference to or complicity with the Baathists. Their uncompromising and straightforward tactics are not thinkable today, when military officers are understandably more spooked by the prospect of media stories alleging American brutality than by the enemy.
Cont'd........ |
