There is no avoiding it, someday soon there is going to be a reckoning for the neoconservative misadventure into Iraq. It’s hard to predict exactly what will unfold, and there is still time American decisions to effect the outcome, although it’s hard to see how any decisions we make can avert disastrous consequences. Perhaps the best indictator of the degree of peril we are in is the attitude of the war’s architects and greatest cheerleaders. David Rose takes a look at the neo-conservatives in an article for Vanity Fair. Here are some excerpts:
Richard Perle:
“The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity,” Perle says, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic “failed state”—is not yet inevitable, but is becoming more likely. “And then,” he says, “you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”
…Richard Perle is almost as apocalyptic. Without some way to turn impending defeat in Iraq to victory, “there will continue to be turbulence and instability in the region. The Sunni in the Gulf, who are already terrified of the Iranians, will become even more terrified of the Iranians. We will be less able to stop an Iranian nuclear program, or Iran’s support for terrorism. The Saudis will go nuclear. They will not want to sit there with Ahmadinejad having the nuclear weapon.” This is not a cheering prospect: a Sunni-Shia civil war raging in Iraq, while its Sunni and Shia neighbors face each other across the Persian Gulf armed with nukes. As for the great diplomatic hope—that the Iraq Study Group, led by George Bush Sr.’s secretary of state James Baker III, can pull off a deal with Syria and Iran to pacify Iraq—Perle is dismissive: “This is a total illusion. Total illusion. What kind of grand deal? The Iranians are not on our side. They’re going to switch over and adopt our side? What can we offer them?”
James Woolsey:
Now he draws explicit parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, aghast at what he sees as profound American errors that have ignored the lessons learned so painfully 40 years ago. He has not given up hope: “As of mid-October of ’06, the outcome isn’t clear yet.” But if, says Woolsey, as now seems quite possible, the Iraqi adventure ends with American defeat, the consequences will be “awful, awful.… It will convince the jihadis and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types as well as the residual Ba’thists that we are a paper tiger, and they or anybody they want to help can take us on anywhere and anytime they want and be effective, that we don’t have the stomach to stay and fight.”
Eliot Cohen:
“…I’m pretty grim. I think we’re heading for a very dark world, because the long-term consequences of this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just for the region, but globally—for our reputation, for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff.”
…Cohen says his best hope now is not something on the way toward democracy but renewed dictatorship, perhaps led by a former Ba’thist: “I think probably the least bad alternative that we come to sooner or later is a government of national salvation that will be a thinly disguised coup.” However, he adds, “I wouldn’t be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.” And that, he believes, would be “about as bad an outcome as one could imagine.… Our choices now are between bad and awful.”
Frank Gaffney:
“It’s not a perfect parallel here, but I would say it would approximate to losing the Battle of Britain in World War II,” he says. “Our enemies will be emboldened and will re-double their efforts. Our friends will be demoralized and disassociate themselves from us. The delusion is to think that the war is confined to Iraq, and that America can walk away. Failure in Iraq would be a huge strategic defeat.” It may already be too late to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Gaffney says, pointing out that the Manhattan Project managed to build them in less than four years from a far smaller base of knowledge. “I would say that the likelihood of military action against Iran is 100 percent,” he concludes. “I just don’t know when or under what circumstances. My guess is that it will be in circumstances of their choosing and not ours.”
Ken Adelman:
After our lunch, Adelman sends me an e-mail saying that he now understands the Soviet marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who committed suicide in the Kremlin when it became clear that the last-ditch Communist coup of 1991 was going to fail. A note he left behind stated, “Everything I have devoted my life to building is in ruins.” “I do not share that level of desperation,” Adelman writes. “Nevertheless, I feel that the incompetence of the Bush team means that most everything we ever stood for now also lies in ruins.”
David Frum:
Frum admits that the optimistic vision he and Perle set out in their book will not now come to pass. “One of the things that we were talking about in that last chapter was the hope that fairly easily this world governed by law, the world of the North Atlantic, can be extended to include the Arab and Muslim Middle East,” he says. “I think, coming away from Iraq, people are going to say that’s not true, and that the world governed by law will be only a portion of the world. The aftermath of Iraq is that walls are going to go up, and the belief that this is a deep cultural divide is going to deepen.” This is already happening in Europe, he adds, citing the British government’s campaign against the wearing of veils by women and the Pope’s recent critical comments about Islam. As neoconservative optimism withers, Frum fears, the only winner of the debate over Iraq will be Samuel Huntington, whose 1996 book famously forecast a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam.
It’s easy to be dismissive of the paper tiger charges, or hand-wringing about American prestige. Those are the concerns of our imperialists, and they are lamenting our loss of influence primarily because of what it means for U.S. business concerns. Simply put, we don’t need to worry about being put in our place, so to speak, especially if it means that we will make better budgetary decisions and start behaving more like Canada in our foreign policy. What is much harder to dismiss is Perle’s observation that we’ll ‘get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating’.
We need to look at Iraq with clear eyes, which is something that our politicians are not currently doing. So, let me go through some things here.
1. Iraq is currently in a battle of militias. When the U.S. pulls out, control of the country (rather than revenge killing) will become the primary function of these militias. The government institutions (army and police) will be taken over by one militia or another, or merely dissolve with their equipment dispersed to different warring factions.
2. By sheer force of numbers, the Shi’ite militias will be able to dominate in Baghdad and all of the south. It is unlikely that Sunnis will be able to survive in the capital at all. This will force Sunnis to the north and west, where there will be no jobs, insufficient housing…a basic refugee crisis.
3. Even this level of sectarian cleansing may not satisfy the Shi’ites, or allow them to restore stability. It is not unlikely that the Shi’ites will take the fight into Anbar province. This will not occur overnight, but more likely will develop as Baghdad is secured and the militias are organized and equipped with transport and heavy weapons.
4. At some point in this process, the Sunni world is going to intervene. The Saudis, being Arabs, are going to feel more honor bound to intervene than the Turks, but the Turks have a breaking point too. At this point, our two most important regional allies will begin fighting the Iraqi government (if one still formally exists). We’ll be faced with the choice of supporting the Iran-backed Shi’a that we helped bring to power, or supporting our NATO partners Turkey and our best friends forever, the Saudis.
5. Tossed into this witch’s cauldron are the Kurds. Insofar as possible they are going to try to stay out of the intra-Arab struggle, but Kurds are Muslims too (mostly Sunni) who hate Arabs (especially Saddam’s Sunni Ba’athists), and want to hold the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. If Turkey intervenes in Iraq it will spell strife between the Turkmen and the Kurds, and there is no telling how that will shake out.
6. All of this risks a more general war between Iran and the Gulf States, Iran and Turkey. And this will be joined by civil wars raging in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine (at a minimum).
7. Instability at this level has the potential to disrupt energy supplies, or completely shut them off (if, for example, the Straits of Hormuz are closed, or the Persian Gulf is a war zone). As Lee Hamilton said recently, “If we can’t get oil out of the gulf, it isn’t a problem for us in six months, it is a problem for us tomorrow.” This isn’t about high gas prices, it’s about the functioning of modern society. It’s about huge economic dislocations, job losses, another Great Depression, but without functioning mass transit or heat.
All of these considerations are running through the heads of people like incoming House Intelligence Chairman, Silvestre Reyes, when he says we can’t ‘leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan” was before the 2001 invasion by the United States.’
In all of this, the threat of terrorism is but the least of our concerns. The U.S. troops must remain in Iraq, goes the argument, because the risks of regional war and energy disruption as so potentially catastrophic that we can’t risk going down that road. But there are two problems with this reasoning.
First, U.S. policy makers must bow to the American electorate and the economic and military reality. Only a permanent U.S. presence can permanently forestall the risks laid out above, and that is not a viable option because of the politics, because of the costs, and because of the stress it puts on our armed forces.
Second, buying time and hoping for the best might make sense if we had new leadership, new credibility, and some restored goodwill. But nothing in six years has indicated that Bush and Cheney should be entrusted with two more years of ‘stay-the-course’. Simply put, we are unlikely to gain anything but a delay in the day of reckoning. We will lose more lives, spend/waste hundreds of billions more dollars, and further erode our alliances and the divisions within our country by staying in Iraq.
It is for this reason that we should be honest with ourselves and act like adults. We have two choices that make any sense.
1) We pull out and try to assist the international community in preventing a total disaster in the region.
2) We kick Bush and Cheney out of office and add a few hundred thousand more troops, mobilizing the whole country and all our resources to the job of stabilizing Iraq.
Which path is the better one? We may never know, because it looks like we will not choose either one, and instead will continue sliding towards Gomorrah.
