Category: Iraq

Joseph Stiglitz calculates the cost of Iraq.

As part of a continuing series that looks at previous efforts of a Western government to run Iraq as a functional, non-despotic entity, here’s a cartoon from the London Daily Express from December 1922. It’s reprinted in The Mesopotamia Mess, a useful compilation of press reports from the 1920s and 1930s detailing almost exactly the same morass that the US is now in:

By green-lighting Turkey’s invasion of Iraq, the U.S. is alienating the Kurds, one of the few groups in Iraq who still view(ed) us as allies. Ken Silverstein has an e-mail from a former U.S. official who works in northern Iraq:

The United States is being skillfully handled by the Turks, who are dragging the U.S. into a policy disaster in Kurdistan. The Kurds have moved a lot of fighters and equipment quietly into the area, and are prepared to strike the Turks. Massoud [Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader] has issued all the press comments he can to publicly warn that Kurdish patience is gone. The United States is either ignoring the signals or missing them…The Kurds can and will bloody the Turks badly in a fight.

And the beat goes on.

A reader writes:

I’m sorry, but Anthony Cordesman’s list is something that I cannot even ingest. I work in the computer field, where it is common to white board the process flow for a project or program to be created and, invariably, somewhere in the middle of that flow will be a critically important box that has an arrow coming into it, and another exiting. The text in that box will be akin to "something magic happens here".

I read that list and all I can comprehend is "something magic happens here", and "something magic happens here", and "something magic happens here"…

A reader writes:

Like many people, including yourself, I’ve been asking myself the question of whether to withdraw from Iraq or stay there until some hoped-for peace is achieved after an indefinite number of more years and deaths.

The other day I met a young Iraqi doctor studying on my Master’s degree program. After some conversation about his life and his losses in the war, I described the uncertainty some Americans feel about what the best thing is to do at this point and asked him what he thought.  Until that point he had been very calm and matter-of-fact about describing his experiences, but this question obviously shocked him.  He regained his composure, laughed a little, and said, "you’ll excuse me, but I think your question has such an obvious answer."

He proceeded to explain that there was no more need for Americans to fear leaving a vacuum behind; that the opportunity to avert that had passed several years ago, and that Iran had long since filled the vacuum.  Now, he said (to paraphrase), U.S. troops staying in Iraq only prolonged the killing and pain.  As an obstetrician, he likened it to labor pains that would eventually cease, but first the foreign body, as it were, had to leave the host.

Naturally one man’s perspective shouldn’t be taken as "the answer", but I was struck by how little we hear of the opinions of Iraqis themselves on the matter of whether or not we should continue to occupy their country.  Efforts to illuminate their perspectives, whether through interviews, Iraqi editorials, or references to Iraqi blog posts are conspicuously absent from the discussion I’ve observed.  Perhaps it’s because it seems obvious to some that they’d want us to go, but still I don’t see why they would be excluded from the conversation.

While some argue there are greater issues at stake, I’m inclined to agree with my colleague that we may no longer be (if ever we were) able to influence them.

By the way, the Iraqi doctor also felt that Sen. Obama was the candidate most likely to get the U.S. out of Iraq and as such supported his campaign.

"The Shi’ah problem is probably the most formidable in this country. We were discussing it last night at an extremely interesting dinner party in my house…  ‘Abdul Majid said "What are you going to do if the chief mujtahid, whose voice is the voice of God, issues a fatwah that no Shi’ah is to sit in the Legislative Assembly … or when a law is being debated, suppose the mujtahid cuts in with a fatwah that it’s against canon law and must be rejected, irrespective of other considerations?" Imagine the Pope excercising real temporal authority in Italy and obstructing the Govt at every turn, and you have the position.

The remedy is, over time, that which has been found in Italy. Pope and mujtahid end by being regarded merely as silly old men; but we haven’t reached that stage here yet. But if you’re going to have anything like really representative institutions – always remember that the Turks hadn’t; there wasn’t a single Shi’ah deputy – you would have a majority of Shi’ahs. For that reason as ‘Abdul Majid wisely said, you can never have 3 completely autonomous provinces. Sunni Mosul must be retained as a part of the Mesopotamian state in order to adjust the balance. But to my mind it’s one of the main arguments for giving Mesopotamia responsible govt. We as outsiders can’t differentiate between Sunni and Shi’ah, but leave it to them and they’ll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it’s the only way of getting over it.

I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil," – Gertrude Bell,  October 3, 1920. 

by Reihan

Last year Kevin Drum wrote a smart post about “Chaos Hawks.” I found the post particularly interested because I suppose I’ve become a “Chaos Hawk.”

As long as the Chaos Hawks are able to panic the public into believing that withdrawal will result in a Middle East in flames and ten dollar gasoline at home, no Congress will have the backbone to defund the war and force a pullout. This means that it’s time for more sensible regional professionals to screw up their courage and tell the truth: pulling out won’t be pretty, but if it’s done prudently neither will it be Armageddon. The sooner we figure this out, the sooner we can leave Iraq.

Why was Drum so confident that there would be no regional conflagration?

Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East. Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade. No regional conflagration.

All this seems to depend on how one defines “regional conflagration,” of course. Jordan and Pakistan and Turkey might quibble with Drum’s characterization, and of course the anti-democratic turn in Algeria may have indirectly increased the reach and lethality of Islamist terrorists. Then, of course, there is the question of scale, and prospect of regional rallying effects and proxy fighting and the fact that Iraq is one of the big swing producers of oil. This doesn’t seem like a totally trivial fact. I realize that this immediately makes American motivations suspect, but consider how our allies in the region and around the world will really react, not rhetorically react, to an American decision to “cut our losses.” Of course, we shouldn’t let allies dictate our foreign policy. John Bolton agrees with you there. But it’s worth thinking through the practical implications.

This overfamiliar debate came to mind as I read Tom Engelhardt on the surge strategy.

As a start, the surge-followed-by-pause solution the Bush administration whipped up is a highly unstable, distinctly impermanent strategy. It was never meant to do much more than give Iraq enough of the look of quiescence that the President’s war could be declared a modest “success” and passed on to the next president. It relies on a tenuous balancing of unstable, largely hostile forces in Iraq — of Sunni former insurgents and the Shiite followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, among others. It is unlikely to last even until the November presidential election.

And it’s true that this is a vexing balancing act. Juan Cole observes that new tensions are arising between Sadrists and the Badr Brigade.

But what does that mean, exactly? Does it mean a new round of violence, or that both factions will be forced to look to the U.S. as a guarantor of a tenuous peace? John Robb, a staunch critic of the war, recently observed that thanks to the Anbar Awakening, there is a strange sense in which

the US is now leading both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency in Iraq.

Which suggests that though the situation is certainly not great, it is not great in a way that requires a different framework. The anti-imperialists are right: we find ourselves in the role of an imperial umpire. If you have a strong ideological objection to, say, our “our garrisoning of the southern part of the Korean peninsula for well over half a century with no end yet in sight,” as Englehardt does (and as I do, for different reasons), well, indulging your strong ideological preference will have a very high cost. As long as casualties glide downward, there is good reason to believe that the United States will be in Iraq for decades, and that key Iraqi actors and other regional and global allies and, yes, powerful domestic commercial interests (i.e., the 299 million Americans who depend on auto-mobility) will want us there.

Which of the three remaining candidates would be most able to withdraw troops from Iraq? I didn’t say most likely, I said most able. To my mind, the answer is John McCain. When he says the war is done, it will be. If he decides we have done all we can, he will be able to muster a majority to get out. Would he ever do such a thing? Probably not. But Jon Chait reminds us that McCain’s neocon credentials are of relatively new vintage and coincided suspiciously with his own personal career needs:

McCain originally opposed intervention in Bosnia and worried about a bloody ground campaign before the first Gulf war (see "Neo-McCain," October 16, 2006). McCain’s advisers include not only neoconservatives but also the likes of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. It would hardly be unimaginable for McCain to revert to his old realism, especially if Iraq continues to fail at political reconciliation. He could easily be the president who ends the war.

I agree. Especially if the military leadership persuades him the alternative could be the destruction of US global readiness. Of the three leading candidates, I think Clinton has the least chance of withdrawing. She’s too weak and polarizing to bring the country together on the matter, and too afraid to do anything that could be used, however unfairly, to taint the Democrats as weak on security. Her promise to end the war is about a bankable as her husband’s promise to end the gay ban.

The Onion explains:

In The Know: New Iraqi Law Requires Waiting Period For Suicide Vest Purchases

Michael Barone is always worth reading. I think he’s wrong in prematurely judging the surge a success, but this is an interesting insight:

Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006, I believe we entered a period of open-field politics, in which voters and candidates are moving around — a field in which there are no familiar landmarks or new signposts.

Those were the headline stories that showed that government was broken at home and that the Iraq occupation would be for ever. Voters want a competent government and no Mesopotamian empire. Who can give them both?