 | FWD 5-JAN-2005
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AMERICAN OPTIONS IN IRAQ
By William R. Polk*
"Informed Comment" www.juancole.com
November 8, 2004
Official inquiries have verified what independent observers have long
said: the invasion of Iraq was not justified; a small, remote and poor
country, Iraq posed no threat to the United States. As in the Tonkin
Gulf issue during the Vietnam war, the Congress and public were
misled. Those of us who said so from the beginning are tempted now to
say "I told you so" but that indulgence doesn't lead anywhere. When I
was the member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council
responsible for the Middle East, I had the duty not to lament past
mistakes but to identify what could be done to pick up the pieces
where they then lay. With the elections behind us and the Bush
administration in office for the next four years, an intelligent
choice among current options in Iraq becomes even more urgent. Now as
a private citizen, I ask what can be done with the current reality?
Iraq is in a terrible condition, its society has been torn apart,
scores of thousands have been killed and even more wounded, its
infrastructure has been shattered, dreadful hatreds have been
generated. Today, there are no good options -- only better or worse --
alternatives. Three appear possible:
The first option has been called "staying the course." In practice
that means continued fighting. France stayed the course in Algeria in
the 1950s as America did in Vietnam in the 1960s and as the Israelis
are now doing in occupied Palestine. It has never worked anywhere. In
Algeria, the French employed over three times as many troops, nearly
half a million, to fight roughly the same number of insurgents as
America is now fighting in Iraq. They lost. America had half a million
soldiers in Vietnam and gave up. After forty years of warfare against
the Palestinians, the Israelis have achieved neither peace nor
security.
Wars of national self-determination, to use President Woodrow Wilson’s
evocative phrase, can last for generations or even centuries. Britain
tried to beat down (or even exterminate) the Irish for nearly 900
years, from shortly after the Eleventh century Norman invasion until
1921; the French fought the Algerians from 1831 until 1962; both
Imperial and Communist Russia have been fighting the Chechens since
about 1731. Putin’s Russia is still at it. There was no light at the
end of those tunnels.
At best, staying the course in Iraq can be only a temporary measure as
eventually America will have to leave. But during the period it stays,
say the next five years, my guess is that another 30 or 40 thousand
Iraqis will die or be killed while the U.S. armed forces will lose
perhaps 5,000 dead and 20,000 seriously wounded. The monetary cost
will be hundreds of billions. Consider what the figures
mean. Americans were horrified when about 3,300 people were killed in
the attack by al-Qaida terrorists on the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001. Iraq has already (at the time of this writing)
lost about 100,000 during the American invasion and occupation.* In
absolute terms that means that virtually every Iraqi has a parent,
child, spouse, cousin, friend, colleague or neighbor or perhaps all of
these -- among the dead. More than half of the dead were women and
children. In relative terms, this figure equates in the very much
larger American society to a loss of over a million people.
It is not only the actual casualties that count. What wars of national
liberation have taught us is that they brutalize the participants who
survive. Inevitably such wars are vicious. Both sides commit
atrocities. In their campaigns to drive away those they regard as
their oppressors, terrorists/freedom fighters seek to make their
opponents conclude that staying is unacceptably expensive and, since
they do not have the means to fight conventional wars, they often pick
targets that will produce dramatic and painful results. Irish, Jewish,
Vietnamese, Tamil, Chechen, Basque and others blew up hotels, cinemas,
bus stations and/or apartment houses. The more spectacular, the better
for their campaigns. So, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem in 1946; the IRA a Brighton (England) hotel in 1984; an
Iraqi group the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. Chechens blew up
an apartment house in Moscow in 2003 while a Palestinian group blew up
an Israeli frequented hotel in Taba (in Egypt) in 2004.
Faced with such challenges, the occupying power often reacts with
massive attacks aimed at terrorists but inevitably also killing many
civilians. To get information from those it manages to capture, it
also frequently engages in torture. Torture did not begin at the Abu
Ghuraib prison; it is endemic in guerrilla warfare. Two phrases from
the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s-1960s tell it all and ring true
today: torture is to guerrilla war what the machine gun was to trench
warfare in the First World War and torture is the cancer of
democracy. Guerrilla warfare and counter insurgency inexorably corrupt
the very causes for which soldiers and insurgents fight. Almost worse,
even in exhausted defeat for the one and heady victory for the other,
they leave behind a chaos that spawns warlords, gangsters and thugs as
is today so evident in Chechnya and Afghanistan. After half a century,
Algeria has still not recovered from the trauma of its war of
liberation against France. The longer the war in Iraq continues the
more it will resemble the statement the Roman historian Tacitus
attributed to the contemporary guerrilla leader of the Britons. The
Romans, he said, create a desolation and call it peace.
The second option is "Vietnamization." In Vietnam, America inherited
from the French both a government and a large army. What was needed,
the Nixon administration proclaimed, was to train the army, equip it
and then turn the war over to it. True, the army did not fight well
nor did the government rule well, but they existed. In Iraq, America
inherited neither a government nor an army. It is trying to create
both. Not surprisingly, the results are disappointing. Most Iraqis
regard the government as an American puppet. And the idea that America
can fashion a local militia to accomplish what its powerful army
cannot do is not policy but fantasy. It is true that in the days of
their Iraqi empire, the British used such a force composed of an
ethnic minority, the Assyrians. But the British wisely used them only
as auxiliaries to their army and air force. The Iraqi Interim
Government has similarly used Kurds as auxiliaries to American
forces. An Iraqi army is unlikely to fight insurgents with whom
soldiers sympathize and among whom they have relatives. The best
America might gain from this option is a fig leaf to hide defeat; the
worst, in a rapid collapse, would be humiliating evacuation, as in
Vietnam.
The third option is to choose to get out rather than being
forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the
harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy
need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed and made
unambiguous. The initial steps could be merely verbal. America would
have first to declare unequivocally that it will give up its lock on
the Iraqi economy, will cease to spend Iraqi revenues as it chooses
and will allow Iraqi oil production to be governed by market forces
rather than by an American monopoly. If President Bush could be as
courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria when he
admitted that the Algerian insurgency had won and called for a peace
of the braves, fighting would quickly die down in Iraq as it did in
Algeria and in all other guerrilla wars. Then, and only then, could
elections be meaningful. In this period, Iraq would need a police
force but not an army. A UN multinational peacekeeping force would be
easier, cheaper and safer than creating an Iraqi army which in the
past destroyed moves toward civil society and probably would do so
again, probably indeed paving the way for the ghost of Saddam Husain.
A variety of "service" functions would then have to be
organized. Given a chance, Iraq could do them mostly by itself. It
would soon again become a rich country and has a talented,
well-educated population. Step by step, health care, clean water,
sewage, roads, bridges, pipelines, electric grids, housing, etc. could
be mainly provided by the Iraqis themselves, as they were in the
past. When I visited Baghdad in February 2003 on the eve of the
invasion, the Iraqis with whom I talked were proud that they had
rebuilt the Tigris bridge that had been destroyed in the 1991
war. They can surely do so again.
In its own best interest, the Iraq government would empower the Iraq
National Iraq Oil Company (NIOC) to award concessions by bid to a
variety of international companies, each of which and NIOC would sell
oil on the world market. Contracts for reconstruction paid for by
Iraqi money would be awarded under bidding, as they traditionally
were, but to prevent excessive corruption perhaps initially supervised
by the World Bank. Where other countries supplied aid, they could be
given preferential treatment in the award of contracts as is common
practice elsewhere. The World Bank would follow its regular procedures
on its loans. Abrogating current American policies that work against
the recovery of Iraqi industry and commerce would spur development
since any reasonably intelligent and self-interested government would
emphasize getting Iraqi enterprises back into operation and employing
Iraqi workers. That process could be speeded up through international
loans, commercial agreements and protective measures so that
unemployment, now at socially catastrophic levels, would be
diminished. Neighborhood participation in running social affairs and
providing security are old traditions in Iraqi society and allowing or
favoring their reinvigoration would promote the excellent side effect
of grass roots political representation. As fighting dies down,
reasonable security is achieved and popular institutions revive, the
one million Iraqis now living abroad will be encouraged to return
home. In the aggregate they are intelligent, highly trained, and well
motivated and can make major contributions in all phases of Iraqi
life.
In such a program, inevitably, there will be set-backs and shortfalls,
but they can be partly filled by international organizations. The
steps will not be easy; Iraqis will disagree over timing, personnel
and rewards while giving the process a chance will require American
political courage. But, and this is the crucial matter, any other
course of action would be far worse for both America and Iraq. The
safety and health of American society as well as Iraqi society
requires that this policy be implemented intelligently, determinedly
and soon.
About the Author: A former Member of the US State Department’s Policy
Planning Council, responsible for the Middle East, he was Professor of
History at the University of Chicago and founding director of its
Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His latest book, Understanding
Iraq, will be published in March 2005. He is now the Senior Director
of the W.P. Carey Foundation.
http://netipr.org/~uneoo/ (Burma HR Activity)
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