The catastrophe that is Iraq is so complicated that it simply can’t be fairly addressed in the blog format. If there is an area where bloggers can rightfully be blamed for non-seriousness, it is in discussion of the consequences of America’s monumental failure in Iraq. A small part of this has to do with a lack of foreign policy expertise or access to unbiased intelligence reports. But a bigger part just has to do with the format. To truly address what I consider to be our options, I think I’d have to write a book. At minimum, I’d have to write a long-form piece more suited to Vanity Fair than a blog. So, it’s not really a lack of seriousness. It’s a lack of space and a lack of time.
There are two long-form pieces available today. One is from the New York Times and the other (indispensable) one is in The New Yorker. I encourage you to read all the way through these two pieces.
The New Yorker piece, in particular, makes a compelling case that the options currently being put forward by Edwards, Clinton, and Obama are the worst of both worlds. They’re worse than a total withdrawal and they are worse that the status quo.
Again, I encourage you to read those two pieces in their entirety. I can’t do justice to them by cutting and pasting, particularly because they challenge some common wisdom on the left.
Since this is a blog and we like discussion, I will excerpt one part here. It relates to ‘David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency adviser who served on Petraeus’s staff in the first half of the year’ and who ‘also served on the strategic-assessment team, which was led by Colonel H. R. McMaster, of the U.S. Army; David Pearce, of the State Department; and Colonel James Richardson, of the British Army.’ He lays out a priority list of American interests in the region.
While serving on the assessment team, Kilcullen drew up a list of core American interests in Iraq, which he later gave to senior officials at the White House and the State Department. In order of priority, the list contained the following items: maintain the flow of oil and gas in the region; prevent the establishment of an Al Qaeda safe haven in Iraq; contain Iranian influence; prevent a regional war; prevent a humanitarian catastrophe on the scale of Rwanda; and restore American credibility in the region and in the world (which Kilcullen called “the master interest,” and which doing all the others would go a long way toward achieving).
Notice that ‘preventing a regional war’ fell far below ‘maintain the flow of oil and gas in the region.’ So did preventing ‘a humanitarian catastrophe on the scale of Rwanda.’ I actually do not disagree with that. The interruption of oil and gas from the region could create a humanitarian crisis in the developed world that would surely ripple across the international markets and cause widespread hardship everywhere.
But this prioritization, cynical as it is, gives just an inkling of how bad our situation has become. In the end, we will have to accept that our policies have caused a humanitarian crisis and regional war…and our lack of resources will force us to save our own skins while we simply try to contain the fallout.
But, again, you really have to read the two pieces to put yourself in the right kind of state of mind to understand how truly screwed we are.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Ambassador to the United Nations, who spent almost two years as the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, trying in vain to bring about a political compact, sketched the possible fallout in stark terms. Without Americans present, he asked, “could it intensify into a terrible situation in which you get massacres, and that not only leads to escalation in Iraq but affects others? The losing side may ask for help from its brethren next door. We cannot stand aside and let these terrible things go on.”
Actually, we’ll have no choice.
One word: Yugoslavia.
It’s too late to prevent a bloodbath. The best we can do is keep a lid on it until we run out of resources, and then it will erupt anyway. The only question is whether we want it to erupt now or later. That’s the devil’s choice that Bush has left us with. Avoiding a humanitarian catastrophe is no longer a plausible option. It was never really an option anyway, as the stabilizing force in Iraq, that is, Saddam’s tyranny, was limited to his lifetime. If he had ruled until the end of his natural lifetime, there would have been a succession struggle among his sons and the other major strongmen, and the whole thing would have fallen apart the same way Yugoslavia did. Iraq was always an internecine war in hibernation.
To be frank, we’re probably better off having it happen now than in twenty or thirty years when technological progress will have given the combatants weapons we can barely imagine today.
Yugoslavia fell apart because Western powers encouraged it to: Germany, specifically, by instantly recognizing Croatia as an independent state once it declared independence.
The same is the case with Iraq. If the US hadn’t destroyed the central government, it might have been possible for the Iraqis, with a functioning state, to have negotiated a more equitable sharing of power and resources between the various sects.
The USSR was a tyranny, too, like Yugoslavia and Iraq. And yet, when it fell apart, there was no bloodbath. Why? Because Western countries had less of an opportunity to meddle.
I can’t believe how smug people like you are. And you probably call yourself a progressive.
If the US hadn’t destroyed the central government, it might have been possible for the Iraqis, with a functioning state, to have negotiated a more equitable sharing of power and resources between the various sects.
If if if…
The point is, the US did destroy Iraq’s central government. The US did meddle. The damage is done. The pot’s broken. And the US is now not a solution but a major part of the problem.
Immediate US withdrawal would mean…what, as far as Iraqis are concerned? Bloodbaths, hordes of refugees, breakdowns of basic public services. Exactly the opposite of what they have now?
Immediate US withdrawal would probably mean de facto Iranian dominance over much of Iraq. Oil prices would zoom upwards to a permanently higher level. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?
After the end of the Cold War there was only one cogent reason for the US to play imperial politics in the Middle East. Cheap oil. George H. W. put it in thinly-veiled terms during Desert Storm: “the American Way of Life is not negotiable”. By that he meant that American access to cheap oil is not negotiable.
Thirty years ago that much-maligned fellow Jimmy Carter proposed an alternative, but the American people didn’t buy it. Now, with cheap oil due to fall victim to geological reality anyway, the sooner Americans begin to make the break towards genuine energy independence the better off they’ll be. And there’s no sharper incentive to do so than the magic of the marketplace–higher prices.
There might be less painful and more equitable ways of making this transition. Rationing, for example. But since many Americans have been brainwashed into believing that Big Government Doesn’t Work–unlike WW2 when oddly enough it did work–they’ll wind up doing it the old-fashioned way.
As Winston Churchill put it: “Americans always do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
in Yugoslavia. I saw a Michael Parenti video on Youtube called “Lies, War, and Empire” and he mentioned that a judge in his trial said there was no evidence Milosovich was committing genocide. Then he conveniently died. He wrote a book about it called “To Kill a Nation”. It is another example of going to war for humanitarian reasons and destroying the last vestiges of socialism because it was such a threat to capitalism.
Alexander is right. Remember, this war isn’t fought on behalf of the people of Iraq, and not being fought on behalf of Americans, or the Western World. It is being fought on behalf of Big Oil. The whole oil revenue sharing law is about giving the oil companies control of the oil. Oil Oil Oil. Get it, people? Blood doesn’t matter. Oil matters.
If you look at a map of what had been Yugoslavia as it is today it resembles the region as was dissected under the Nazis. The same geopolitical dynamics driving the Nazis in 1942 drive the Germans today. The problem was that the Nazis badly served their corporate masters, and in some ways presumed that they were more powerful than their corporate masters.
Ultimately the profit from oil is the most important thing in this war. If Iraq collapses and there is genocide it will be regrettable for Oil, but it is only important in how it affects the control of the resources. A fractured, weakened country? Easier for corporations to negotiate for the oil. Utter chaos making it impossible to extract the oil? Three dollars a gallon goes to five dollars a gallon. And when the Iraqi oil finally comes back online, under Oil’s control, maybe it can be sold for ten dollars a gallon.
Did I mention OIL?
Mostly true, but it’s not as if oil (and gas) is not a legitimate national concern (for us, the world, and Iraq). The problem is not that American corporations want to pump oil out of Iraq, the problem is that they can’t pump oil out of Iraq.
Politicians are sometimes frank about our oil interests. Bill Bradley flatly says that we’ve gone to war twice in Iraq for oil interests, without saying that it was not legitimate on that basis. Rather, he argues, we need to get to a situation where the world does not rely on America to provide stability for the shipping lanes and the steady supplies into the pipelines.
We’re not there yet.
Any political party that doesn’t take energy costs into consideration isn’t going to be a majority party for very long. We can wish otherwise, but it is true. Invading Iraq was not good for the oil industry in the long-term. They would like to keep oil at about $28/barrel, to prevent innovation but still make good profits. Oil this expensive opens up new fields for exploration, but it also spurs investment in energy conservation and alternative fuels. That’s good for the long-term, but not for Big Oil.
The USSR was a tyranny, too, like Yugoslavia and Iraq. And yet, when it fell apart, there was no bloodbath.
Does Chechnya ring a bell? In any event, the vital difference between the USSR and Yugoslavia or Iraq is that the USSR was always a Russian state, and when the USSR broke up, the Russians were (for the moment) content to keep Russia in one piece and let the other major ethnic states go without a fight. In Yugoslavia and Iraq, the ethnic and sectarian differences did not and never have fallen along the comparatively neat geographic boundaries that were present in the USSR.
I can’t believe how smug people like you are. And you probably call yourself a progressive.
I’m not being smug, I’m being realistic. Just because we might wish for a happy ending in Iraq doesn’t mean one is actually possible.
And no, I don’t call myself a progressive. That’s a label used by people who are too cowardly to stand up and be counted as liberals.
OK read them. Now what? NYT- “librul rag” New Yorker-“Glossy Librul rag”. Again- Now what?I knew this before reading these pieces. The folks that need to read this will either”1-deny the truths or 2- won’t read these pieces! Back to step 1! NOW WHAT?
I try and contribute and I listen and read prodigiously and what I am hearing is that the growing consensus – bot dems and goopers- is: Bush wins!!!!! US loses!! How is that?
I hear folks telling me that the dems don’t have the votes!Well, for anyone who really cares- that is bull!!
400 days to go but maybe way way way too much time. He and his minions can destroy not ony the USA but might just do the WHOLE WORLD!
That’s what I get from the two pieces.
From the New Yorker piece:
I’ve heard this song before. Over and over and over again.
What about Biden’s plan a three way division along ethnic lines? Its what the Iraqis seem to want. Is it unrealistic?………..running for cover now.
Packer’s take on it:
Eight pages of the supercilious George Packer, what a waste of time that was.
I didn’t find him to be disdainful. I think he raised the proper questions. If I have a criticism it is that he didn’t make a case for withdrawal more forcefully, but he is trying to make people understand the costs and potential costs of that approach. And if we want to know why Dems are reluctant to unilaterally force a withdrawal, that is must reading.
“Dems [i.e. CYA office holding Dems and Dem policy entrepreneurs] are reluctant to unilaterally force withdrawal” because they are core less.
I wrote this back in January.
I’ve seen nothing since that changes my perception in any way. All the discussions about what to do now in Iraq miss the point entirely. What we do now in Iraq is in my view largely irrelevant. Continue the surge or begin withdrawal now. Withdraw a few thousand or several thousand or all of them Six months, nine months, two years. All of those options are on the margins, deck chairs on the Titanic. What will happen in Iraq will happen, with or without us, sooner than we choose and whether we choose or not. We are way past that.
The die was cast when Bush said, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.” It was cast in concrete when General Shinseki was fired for being honest about how many troops it would take to pacify Iraq. It was recast in fine granite when Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next person who brought up the need for post-invasion planning.
The issue at hand is larger than what happens in this or that neighborhood in Iraq. It is larger than Iraq. We are fast approaching a catastrophe greater than any of the twentieth century. Yes, greater than either of the WW’s, greater than the Holocaust.
What will happen in Iraq will happen. With or without us. A little sooner perhaps, or a little later, it will happen. And it will not be contained in Iraq. Inevitably it will suck in Turkey, Iran, the Saudis, Syria and Jordan. Does anyone imagine it will stop there? Israel, Europe, China, Russia. All have big stakes in what happens in the Middle East. And, oh yeah, we’re not the only ones who have nukes.
Yes, it’s about the oil, but not just the oil. We have opened a door we cannot close. Our children and our grandchildren will live with the consequences.
If you realize that the policy for a long time, but certainly for the last 7 years has been to set the seperate factions to warring against one another, wait til their competing fanaticisms have weakend their militaries and their civic institutions, and then step back into the ruins to salvage the remaining resources from the wrecked societies.
anyway, that’s how you’d hafta read the policy if you read it off the consequences of the the policy.
this is exactly the epistemological stance one needs to adopt to understand that the Busheviks are NOT really the consumate fuck-ups they appear to be; but given the damage to all the important institutions and instruments of democratic self-governance they have wrought, without any significant opposition, they have been remarkably astute users of their power in the service of their CorpoRat masters.
This means what exactly?? Forgoing the daily trips to McDonalds & Starbucks? Having to give up the “two cars in every garage” (& three parked on the street) mentality that has governed this country for 40 years?
Spending far less on automobiles & related infrastructure and much more on public transit (like “personal rapid transit” – google it) and its related infrastructure?
Not being 2% of the world population & consuming 25% of its resources?
Yeah – the expression “humanitarian crisis in the developed world” is a hard one to pin down, but I think it means that the “We are the world” generation might be a little bit inconvenienced.
remember the last time the stock market really crashed? How’d that turn out?
It definitely wasnt what Iraqis are suffering today – neither was it Ethiopia or Darfur or Bangladesh.
But the solution for it was the repudiation of unbridled capitalism – something we have forgotten in the last 70 years or so.
Perhaps you ignore the coup attempt against Roosevelt or the rise of the National Socialist party.
Do either of these constitute a “humanitarian crisis”?
Now if you’d have mentioned bread-lines & Hoovervilles …
THe problem,though, as I see it, is unwillingness to face the fact that the Oil/Automobile Age is coming to an end, while there is time (and I believe there is STILL time) to make the transition in an orderly fashion.
Instead, we will do it chaotically & wastefully, as usual.
Talking reality is cheap.
There`s nothing anyone can do about reality. No one is going to make a new reality & that while we study that one, a new one will be created.
No matter what anyone comes up with, the reality will always be, that this was/is the most vile, irresponsible waste of human lives for , (name your poison), bush`s legacy, the corporate machine, oil, war profiteers etc, & no matter when the US leaves, that reality will forever remain, an ugly stain on the page of history. Further, it is bush`s war, & I will never accept, that this reality is by design. There is no time or place in the future, that one will be able to say, “We did the right thing”. Never, ever.
I read 8 pages of talk, that I knew before the US went into Afghanistan to get Osama. Funny how he`s still the same recorded artist now.
Flag draped coffins on a moebius strip.
Okay, I’ve read the articles now — and thanks for linking them, Boo.
It would appear that what we have here is a major paradigm shift. While Bush & Cheney continue to prattle on about victory, the military is strategizing for withdrawal, where victory is not only unachieved and unachievable, but virtually indefinable. Victory against who or what?
First reaction: It would be hard to find, in the entire history of the world, more pseudo-intellectual, brain-dead morons than the neocons and the oil industry. No, what they planned for was “mission accomplished.” The fact that this is what they actually wrought is an index to their utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy. This country has been run by carnival barkers, card sharks and other assorted con-artists, and the only reason some people still believe that this is just what they were planning is because they still can’t accept that such powerful operators don’t know what the f–k they’re doing.
Second reaction. Back to paradigm shift. Although it seems that victory is off the table, and exit is hardly less of a challenge, the geopolitical factors, little discussed in these articles, are still there. In short, any degree of success in the withdrawal/stabilization process will bring renewed efforts on the part of the US to take advantage of whatever degree of stability is achieved. Which is likely to exert new destabilization pressures, if not from Iraqis themselves, then from other actors in the neighborhood. It’s like the famous monkey trap. Big oil has its hand in the box, and theoretically could remove it, but cannot let go of the banana.
The logical conclusion to this puzzle is this: along with the efforts to internationalize, stabilize, and withdraw from Iraq, must come an effort to prosecute the power-hungry traitors whose combined brilliance actually brought us to this pass, put them in prison, throw away the key, implement stringent government controls and at least partial nationalization of the oil industry. These guys have had their fun long enough at out expense, I think we’ve had enough of it.
Or does anyone have a better idea?
Sorry, that should have been “at OUR expense.”
creation of debates on what to do in Iraq obviously can not be solved until we sift through every grain of sand on the planet earth but while we are doing that we fail to notice the meteor about to hit earth.
Weapons of Mass Distraction.