Max Boot, I am going to address your ideas with a respect I don’t really think they deserve. Let’s start with this idea:
I brought up the analogy [of Iraq and Germany] only in a very limited context–to demonstrate what I meant by a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq. I didn’t mean years of fighting. I didn’t mean years of occupation. I meant years of the same sort of presence we have in Germany to this day.
This is the same rhetoric John McCain is using to explain his call for a century-long occupation of Iraq. McCain doesn’t want to fight for 100 years. He wants to peaceably occupy for a 100 years. We’ve done more than a half-century in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, so why can’t we do the same in Iraq? But I’m not going to get bogged down on questions of legitimacy and culture because Boot anticipates all that with this:
[Andrew] Sullivan thinks it’s impossible to imagine that we could have this sort of long-standing military presence in the Mideast without perpetual fighting. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that the U.S. already has a string of bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other Middle Eastern countries. Having visited many of these installations I haven’t noticed a lot of fighting there. In fact they are peaceful and relatively uncontroversial.
Okay…we do have to mention legitimacy here for a moment before moving on. We did not invade Kuwait, Qatar, or the UAE under false pretenses. We brokered deals with their elites. They bought protection in exchange for granting naval and air bases for our armed forces. But let’s ask ourselves if our bases there are ‘relatively uncontroversial’ or not. Here’s a snippet from bin-Laden’s 1998 fatwa declaring war on American citizens.
The Arabian Peninsula has never — since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas — been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations.
Sounds like our bases on the Arabian peninsula were just a tad controversial. Let’s be a little more specific, shall we?
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
So, Max Boot, with this predicate, let’s examine your next paragraph, shall we?
Granted, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was more controversial: Osama bin Laden cited it as a justification for his campaign of terrorism. But we now know that was simply a pretext, since his calls for violence in his homeland have not ended even though we have withdrawn our troops.
Okay, Max, now that I’ve provided the relevant quotes from Usama bin-Laden, you can see that you ignored the plural tenses of ‘land(s)’, ‘ruler(s)’, and ‘(all) its ruler(s)’. We reacted to 9/11 by moving our largest air base from one spot on the Arabian peninsula (Saudi Arabia) to another (Qatar) and it didn’t do a thing to satisfy bin-Laden. That doesn’t mean bin-Laden’s original protest was a mere pretext. It means you didn’t read his original protest very carefully.
But you’re right about one thing. Our presence in the UAE and Kuwait and Qatar is tolerated better than our presence in Iraq. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of them is that the people of those countries don’t have a vote and they also don’t have much freedom of speech. Additionally, they don’t have much in the way of human rights. They are resource-rich states where a narrow crust of super-enriched elites are hyperconscious of their own lack of legitimacy and their inability to protect themselves from attack. In short, they are perfect vassal-states. Bin-Laden has something to say about this, too.
Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
You see? Qatar was already a paper statelet. But Iraq needed to be made into a paper statelet, utterly dependent on the United States for protection. Now, the point here isn’t to say that I agree with Usama bin-Laden’s interpretation of U.S. policy. What’s more important for our discussion is just how more accurate bin-Laden’s portrayal sounds in 2008 than it did in 1998, when he made these statements. After all, you are about to argue the same exact thing that bin-Laden predicted you would argue over a decade ago.
…lots of Iraqis may well want an American presence to reassure competing sectarian groups that their historical enemies will not slaughter them. That is essentially the role that NATO troops still play in Kosovo and Bosnia, years after the end of the conflicts that brought them there. That is the kind of role I envision American troops playing in Iraq.
To recap, bin-Laden asserted that the U.S. was using it’s bases in Arabia to prepare for the invasion and destruction of Iraq. The purpose was to divide Iraq against itself, make them dependent on us, and thereby protect Israel’s security. It was on the basis of this analysis that bin-Laden stated:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
I read bin-Laden’s fatwa not long after he issued it. At the time I thought he was a raving lunatic not only because of his determination to kill Americans but because I didn’t see any validity in his analysis. Bill Clinton was not about to invade Iraq. He was trying his best to get a decent outcome for the Palestinians.
But let’s not discuss Israel and Palestine. Let’s discuss the prospects of Iraq behaving like Germany because they are so terrified of each other that they will willingly suffer 100 years of humiliating foreign occupation by unbelievers.
It’s not going to happen. Not only that, but as long as our foreign policy gives the appearance of validating bin-Laden’s conspiracy theories, our presence in Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait, will also cause violent blowback. Our best allies in the region are all autocrats of one level of brutality or another. No democratic Arab polity would be a willing ally of the United States under any other terms than abject vassalage, or under dire threat of invasion or imminent civil war.
Your next point doesn’t follow logically from your previous points and, thus, doesn’t make much sense.
The broader point is that the success of American military interventions has usually been closely related to their length. The longer we stay, the more successful we are. When we get out too quickly–as we did in Haiti in the 1990’s–the situation often goes to hell. So if we want to secure a lasting victory in Iraq we need to stay around for a good long while.
You’re getting bogged down in terminology. ‘Victory’ is not an applicable term for a foreign occupation. The applicable term might be ‘success’, but not victory. No one suggests that a withdrawal of troops from Germany would spell defeat. Let’s stop talking about ‘victory’. Just as importantly, let’s not judge success and failure based on length of occupation. It’s not the historical measure that you think it is. If Iraq is never going to accept a long-term presence of American troops, then it won’t help to stay longer. That goes for all talk of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’, too.
But I get the sense that [Josh] Marshall and Sullivan, like many of their antiwar compatriots, don’t really care about whether we win or lose in Iraq. They simply want to get out, and damn the consequences. That brings up another historical analogy that I’m sure they would rather forget: the way we pulled out of South Vietnam after the defeat of the North’s Tet and Easter Offensives when a decent outcome (namely the long-term preservation of South Vietnam’s independence) was within our grasp. A lot of antiwar voices back then said it would actually be good for the locals if we left, just as they now say it would be good for Iraq if we skedaddled. Tell it to the Vietnamese boat people or the victims of the Cambodian killing fields.
Even Nixon and Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was doomed and they negotiated for four years merely to obtain a ‘decent interval’ between our withdrawal and South Vietnam’s collapse. In that period, over 20,000 Americans lost their lives. We are arguing that it is not necessary to repeat the past. It’s not indifference. It’s realism.
