How is Bush going to get himself out of this mess?
Alf Young
'THINGS are going as they are going." US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's characteristic way with words – this at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday on progress on democratising Iraq – somehow manages to mix the hopelessly banal and the utterly chilling in one short sentence.
"Some things are going well and some things obviously are not going well." One is tempted to search for complex, hidden meanings whenever the man some American commentators call Rummy speaks. Maybe Rummy's public stock-in-trade isn't rum at all. Maybe it's just unshakeable, missionary self-belief, regardless of the consequences.
At a time scarred by murder and mayhem, kidnap and constitutional chaos across large tracts of Iraq, one might have thought that the man now officially fingered – along with his brooding deputy, Paul Wolfowitz – by President Bush's own national security adviser as pushing, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with a map of Afghanistan unfurled across the summit table at Camp David, for an early military invasion of Iraq instead might at least betray some small hint of contrition. But, no.
Since four American security contractors were butchered and burned in Falluja last week and some of their remains strung up from the girders of a bridge, Iraq has tottered back towards the abyss. We have the spreading armed uprising led by the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al Sadr and the American military command's promise that it will be crushed with overwhelming force.
The deployment of overwhelming force spells only one thing. Innocent civilian deaths on a grand scale. An occupier so openly dismissive of any responsibility for "nation-building" risks becoming, once again, trapped in a spiral of escalating hatred and violence. As someone once put it, a mammoth trapped in a tar pit.
The skies above Iraqi slums are once again thick with Apache helicopter gunships. American bombs rain down on mosques. Old enmities fester anew. Radical groups, previously unheard of, have kidnapped three Japanese civilians and eight Korean evangelical Christians. Happily the Koreans were later released. But two Israeli Arabs and a British contractor are also missing. The Arab television station al Jazeera once more has global distribution rights to a tape of terrified hostages, blindfolded and at knife point, facing the threat of being burned alive unless their government, in Tokyo, withdraws its presence from Iraq.
There are renewed explosions in Baghdad's green zone and three southern Iraqi cities are partially controlled by armed militia, by what the American-led occupying forces choose to call "insurgents", men with ready access to an apparently inexhaustible supply of small arms and rocket-launched grenades. The human toll, on both sides, is mounting alarmingly once more. We have another bitter intifada in the making in the Middle East.
More troops, both American and British, are being dispatched. Adding to the military stretch confronting the coalition, in Afghanistan, where elections are scheduled for September, forces loyal to the Uzbeck warlord General Dostum have occupied the northern town of Maymana in a direct challenge to the authority of the American-backed Kabul regime.
And in the midst of all this bloodshed and mayhem, with the handover of power in Baghdad supposedly less than three months away, the senior US administrator, Paul Bremer, sees fit to request the resignation of Iraq's interior minister, Nuri al Badran, the man nominally in charge of police and security forces, apparently because he is a Shi'ite, not a Sunni, and has unbalanced the interim government.
George W Bush – a president already "tired of swatting flies" in his first months in office, according to his national security adviser – now finds the coalition he so proudly leads as a self-professed "war president" embroiled in a hornet's nest that is, in large measure, of his administration's own making.
Even if, as polls suggest, the vast majority of Iraqi opinion is peace-loving, glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein and wants nothing more than the opportunity to live a better life and elect their own government, free from fear, the disaffected minorities that have now taken up arms in both the Sunni and Shi'ite communities don't just control more and more backstreets. They have seized the initiative in the evolving dynamic of Iraq at a critical moment, with George W Bush just seven months away from his own electoral date with destiny.
The harder the Americans hit back, the more a corrosive sense of national humiliation can be spread among Iraq's unemployed young. Every innocent family destroyed in these spreading firefights makes recruitment to the ranks of the proliferating anti-American militias that much easier. The Iraq war is not over, as President Bush claimed aboard that aircraft carrier in the Pacific this time last year. It has entered a deeply disturbing new phase at a time when all Bush's response options look thoroughly unpalatable.
He can throw much more military might than is currently planned at the problem, but that will simply encourage more people to portray Iraq as his Vietnam in the making. He can throw a lot more money at a speedier reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure and economy and start directing more of the contracts towards local entrepreneurs. But how is a tax-cutting president, already shamelessly beholden to corporate America and running a vast federal deficit, going to pay for that?
He can try to boost the significance of the June 30 handover of power. However, that risks straying into the kind of patent exaggeration that makes people doubt your original intentions even more. Without clear evidence that Bush plans a progressive military withdrawal in the wake of that political transition, who in Iraq will doubt that some kind of American presence in their country is likely to prove permanent?
In any case, how can a president who has staked his all on planting a model of democracy in a region of absolute rulers contemplate leaving Iraq at a time when those with guns are already seizing the streets. Of course, he could eat humble pie and appeal to the United Nations to help get him out of this whole mess. But, like nation building, this American administration doesn't do humble pie.
So there's nothing for it but to hope, in Rummy's inimitable terms, that the good days start outnumbering the bad. That's all that's left to do when you embark on regime change in another country, without devoting too much thought to what happens when the dictator is toppled. You can't, as Sir Max Hastings observed the other day, market democracy as if it were shares in Enron.
Max was explaining why he now hates George Bush. I wouldn't go that far. There's more than enough hate in this world already, I think. But I do expect our prime minister, when he flies to Washington next week, to tell the American president he has to change direction on Iraq or they may both pay the ultimate electoral price.
theherald.co.uk
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