Tom Power - November 28, 2005
Exit Strategies in Iraq
11/28/2005
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Exit Strategies in Iraq
“Exit strategy” has recently become the coin of the political realm in Washington DC and across the nation. Influential Republicans as well as the less timid Democrats are demanding something other than an unlimited time commitment for our occupation of Iraq. The responses from President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have been aggressive and nasty: People raising these questions, they tell us, are undermining our troops and supporting the enemy, at best cowards, at worst unpatriotic. Efforts to gag political expression are just one of the many steep costs of going to war.
Bush’s primary response has been that if we begin planning to leave Iraq, we are handing a victory to the “terrorists.” The opposite may be closer to the truth.
Saddam Hussein, because he was a megalomaniac, opposed al Qaeda as did the religious rulers in Iran. Our invasion of Iraq drew those who sympathized with al Qaeda to Iraq just as the Russian occupations in Chechnya and Afghanistan mobilized violent Islamic fundamentalist responses there. We brought the “terrorists” to Iraq. We also helped defeat the moderates in Iran and brought back exclusive power to the mullahs and their followers. Who knows what other pro-American “dominos” will fall as we ignorantly try to transform the Middle East with sheer force of arms.
If we were to begin to end our occupation of Iraq, it is not the pro-Hussein terrorists who would win, quite the opposite. We already know the basic outlines of what will emerge once we leave. It is enshrined in the new Iraqi constitution: The Shia in the south, who outnumber all other ethnic groups in Iraq, and the Kurds in the north will set up their own states, protected by their own ethnic militias. The Iraqi Shia had trained their armed forces in Iran even while Saddam was still in power. The Kurds developed their effective army struggling for independence not only from Hussein but also from Iran and Turkey. The United States protected and armed them after the first Gulf War in order to challenge Saddam. Now they have effectively set up their own state and do not intend to compromise their newly established independence.
These two groups have effective military forces and police and can take control of the oil wealth in the south and the north. They are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. The people who are not capable of taking care of themselves are the Sunis, Saddam Hussein’s religious and ethnic group. We disbanded his army and pushed many of those soldiers into committing their skills to the insurgency that is terrorizing Americans and others in the Greater Baghdad area. It is in the Suni areas that we are struggling desperately to establish an effective military and police.
The irony, here, is that we are trying to train and arm Saddam Hussein’s followers. We need to do that because if we withdraw, the Kurds and Shia will move to consolidate their new power and make permanent the defeat of the Sunis. When we leave, the Suni insurgency will be crushed in a civil war that the Shia and Kurds will almost certainly win.
The result will not be stability in the region. Neither Turkey nor Iran will tolerate an independent Kurdish state that intends to join with fellow Kurds in those two nations. The Shia, unlike the Sunis and Kurds, are not secularists. The Shia will insist on the melding of religion and government. The new constitution already authorizes that. Although the Iraqi Shia will not submit to the dictates of their fellow Shia who rule Iran, there will be a common religious bond and a simmering anti-Americanism. That is already clear within some of the Iraqi Shia political-religious groups who have leading a Shia effort to force the Americans to end their occupation.
It is very unlikely that al Qaeda could survive in a Shia and Kurdish Iraq. They would be defeated by an ethnic nationalism in the north and an Islamic state in the south. Al Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq need the American occupation to energize it, bring it new recruits, and lend it legitimacy among the general population. Our occupation has always been the source of the energy supporting al Qaeda in Iraq.
That does not mean that the American withdrawal, which will inevitably come, will be pretty. But then the American invasion and occupation were not pretty either. We made a mistake, just as the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan and Chechnya and we did earlier in Vietnam. Dominant military powers do make costly mistakes. Great Britain’s handling of the American colonies was certainly one. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union were two others.
The ideological moralists in the White House believed that we were invincible because we were the only remaining superpower in the world. They believed our invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” The President, with an obscene and arrogant strut, enthusiastically went along, declaring victory in a staged event before the real war had even begun. That type of national arrogance and ignorant belief in cultural or religious superiority has brought pain and suffering to many powerful nations in the past. Let us hope that rationality and humility combined with a revival of our traditional rejection of imperial designs will save us from the same fate.
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