Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

The conversation in Washington is about the consequences of withdrawal. The Surgin’ General, David Petraeus, warns that an early withdrawal would lead to an "increase in sectarian violence". Small businessman and House Minority Leader John Boehner pleads for more time for the surge - he suggests we will see results in the "next three to four months." Ayman al-Zawahiri endorses President Bush’s strategy in Iraq. The White House sets the record straight by agreeing with al Qaeda that Iraq is the "central front of al Qaeda’s global campaign."

There is consensus between the Bush administration and al Qaeda that the United States should continue its fiasco in Iraq - but for different reasons. In Washington, there seems to be a general consensus that withdrawal from Iraq will have catastrophic consequences. On the one hand, this argument is used by the war advocates to justify prolonged involvement; while on the other hand, this argument causes the opponents of the war to mute their calls for withdrawal. Everyone wants to look tough and not lose their "national security" credentials by sounding weak. I am reminded of the same kind of group think that took place when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

A few days ago CNN posted an article on the front page of their web site with the blaring title "No safe way for the U.S. to leave Iraq, experts warn". Enter the fear mongering:

"Everyone wants the troops home — the Iraqis, the U.S., the world — but no one wants a precipitous withdrawal that produces a civil war, a bloodbath, nor a wider war in an unstable Mideast," Shepperd said, adding that the image of the United States was important too.

"And we do not want a U.S that is perceived as having been badly defeated in the global war on terror or as an unreliable future ally or coalition partner."

…

Shepperd said Iraq’s neighbors would be drawn into the all-out civil war likely if U.S. forces left too quickly. Iran could move in to further strengthen its influence in southern Iraq; Turkey likely would move against the Kurds in the north; and Saudi Arabia would be inclined to take action to protect Sunnis in western Iraq, he said.

The oil sector could also get hit hard, with Iran potentially mining the Persian Gulf and attempting to close the Straits of Hormuz, putting a stranglehold on oil flow, Shepperd says.

"Oil prices would skyrocket," he said — perhaps soaring from current prices of about $60 a barrel to more than $100 a barrel, with consequent rises at the gas pump.

And that could bring further trouble, Shepperd added. "Saudi Arabia will not allow increasing Iranian dominance to endanger its regime and oil economy."

On top of that, Iran could speed up its nuclear ambitions, causing a "daunting and depressing scenario" of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East with Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Turkey trying to get a nuclear bomb, Shepperd says.

The above is the "kitchen sink" argument. It is the same kind of argument used by Cheney, Rice, Bush and the rest to get us into Iraq. It is now being used to keep us in Iraq. It is Cheney’s "One Percent Doctrine" - but I like my phrase better.

I would like to put forward a different thesis. It is not a new thesis (I, as well as others, have made this case numerous times in the past). However, it is a view that has been pushed to the side since the so-called surge debate took control of Washington. In a sense, the "surge" has succeeded - it has succeeded politically in Washington by changing the nature of the debate. A cynic would say Americans and Iraqis are dying because the politicians in Washington are either trying to keep their drapes or measure for new ones.

Here is how I see it: The continued military presence of the United States in Iraq is creating the conditions for instability in the region. The nightmare scenario that everyone warns against if the U.S. withdraws becomes more likely the longer the United States remains in Iraq. The United States has been an enabler of ethnic cleansing in Iraq. Our presence has been the prime mover in tearing Iraqi societal structure apart. We have balkanized Iraq and continue to do so. Under our protection, rival forces in Iraq have armed themselves and organized under sectarian and tribal factions. We have introduced tools of ethnic cleansing, like the Baghdad Wall, to try to bring order to chaos. In doing so, we are underwriting the collapse of Iraqi society along ethnic lines.

The Bush Administration’s failure in Iraq has been comprehensive. Two million Iraqis have fled the country and now live as refugees, primarily in Syria and Jordan. Another two million have fled their homes and relocated along sectarian lines within Iraq. The United Nations estimates that about 50,000 Iraqis flee their homes every month in what has now become one of the biggest population shifts in recent times.

Iraq is a continuing tragedy. The massive death toll in Iraq continues to rise daily. The steady flood of refugees from Iraq continues to destabilize neighboring countries. Like it or not, Syria is already a party to the conflict - and it is not because terrorists are flooding Iraq from Syria, it is because refugees are flooding Syria from Iraq and overwhelming its economy. Chaos is being spread outward from Iraq.

The failure in Iraq is so immense that it becomes difficult to grasp its scope. Sometimes it helps to focus the mind by considering the barbarity at its most basic level. Consider the following story from Iraq tucked into a larger article about the Baghdad Wall as reported by the New York Times two weeks ago:

 

Mr. Maliki’s announcement came as sectarian violence continued across Iraq, with a horrific execution by Sunni Arabs in Mosul of 23 members of a small religious sect, known as Yezidis.

The Yezidis, who are most numerous in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, practice an offshoot of Islam that combines some Muslim teachings with those of ancient Persian religion.

…

But the most chilling attack was the one in Mosul. It followed the marriage in early April of a Sunni Arab man and a woman from the Yezidi faith, the police said.

The police said that when the woman married, she converted to Islam, which angered some of the Yezidis. She was kidnapped and as she was being brought back to her tribe, a crowd gathered and stoned her to death, said Brig. Gen. Muhammad al-Waqa of the Mosul police.

The Sunni Arabs in the area demanded that the Yezidis turn over the killers, and the police also put out a warrant for their arrest. In one Yezidi-majority town east of Mosul, residents found leaflets saying, ‘’Unless you turn them over, we will never let any Yezidi breathe the air.'’

The Yezidis refused. On Sunday afternoon, armed men stopped minibuses traveling from a government textile factory in Mosul, where many Yezidis and Christians were known to work. The men dragged the passengers off the buses, checked their identity cards and lined the Yezidis up against a wall and shot them, killing 23 people and wounding three, General Waqa said.

Iraq is disintegrating. Our continuing presence furthers this disintegration. The Bush administration is responsible for creating and then enabling the chaos. Hanging one’s hat on a "surge" in Baghdad seems to miss the totality of the collapse that has been wrought on Iraq.

America will withdraw from Iraq, either now or sometime in the future - that much is certain. The strategic and moral question that faces the United States is this: Does remaining longer in Iraq help or hurt stability in Iraq, stability in the region, and American national security when the eventual pullout occurs? I think the answer is clear.

We can continue to listen to "experts" spin stories about the turning point coming in the "next three or four months" or after another Friedman Unit, or we can begin to prepare the ground for an orderly withdrawal. Just know that with each passing Friedman Unit, the inevitable withdrawal will leave a more unstable wake.

As President Bush puts the "final touches" on his "new" Iraq policy this weekend, Washington waits with bated breath for the fight to come. Having called up his Surgin’ General, David Petraeus, Mr. Bush is ready to embark on his Iraq escalation against the will of the American public and its elected Congress.

It is time to consider the consequences of Mr. Bush’s policy of escalation in Iraq.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Bush’s policy is based on the ideological fantasies of the neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute. The neo-conservative of the moment is AEI’s Fred Kagan. In his report, entitled "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq", he lays out the "new way forward".

Throughout history, when small minds have attempted to think big, the results have been catastrophic for the world. This period of history is proving no different.

Mr. Kagan declares in the first lines of his report:

Victory is still an option in Iraq. America, a country of 300 million people with a GDP of $12 trillion, and more than 1 million soldiers and marines can regain control of Iraq, a state the size of California with a population of 25 million and a GDP under $100 billion.

Pride is not a strategy. The strategy in Iraq should not be based on a need to demonstrate the might of the American military-industrial complex. The strategy in Iraq should be based on the long term national interest of the United States of America.

Mr. Kagan continues:

Iraq has reached a critical point. The strategy of relying on a political process to eliminate the insurgency has failed. Rising sectarian violence threatens to break America’s will to fight. This violence will destroy the Iraqi government, armed forces, and people if it is not rapidly controlled.

Victory in Iraq is still possible at an acceptable level of effort. We must adopt a new approach to the war and implement it quickly and decisively. [Emphasis added by me.]

He has reached the opposite conclusion from most sane observers of the fiasco in Iraq. It is precisely our reliance on a military solution, and not a well thought-out political process, that has led us to this point in Iraq. Our failure to plan for "Phase IV" operations after toppling Saddam Hussein has contributed to the chaos in Iraq - and the time for a do-over has long passed.

So, what will be the consequence of the Kagan delusion, if implemented? If the Kagan plan fails, we will have sacrificed Iraqi and American lives for another stab at the ideological pie in the sky. However, the real danger lies in the success of the Kagan plan. Most observers have so far argued that his plan will fail and therefore should not be attempted. I believe the greater danger lies in the plan’s success.

Fred Kagan’s plan is a strategy for ethnic cleansing. If implemented, the Bush Administration will actively participate in a policy of ethnic cleansing in Iraq. They will make the American military and the American people complicit in their policy.

Mr. Kagan’s plan focuses on Baghdad as the center of operations. His plan is to clear, or "ethnically cleanse" if you will, the Sunni parts of Baghdad:

We must send more American combat forces into Iraq and especially into Baghdad to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.

These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shi’a neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.

The Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki and the Shia militias of Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim have been quietly following this policy for well over two years now. Finally, they will get some American help.

As the United States debates what to do in Iraq, this country’s Shiite majority has been moving toward its own solution: making the capital its own.

Large portions of Baghdad have become Shiite in recent months, as militias press their fight against Sunni militants deeper into the heart of the capital, displacing thousands of Sunni residents. At least 10 neighborhoods that a year ago were mixed Sunni and Shiite are now almost entirely Shiite, according to residents, American and Iraqi military commanders and local officials.

To prepare for the American assistance, the Maliki government this weekend unveiled their plan for ethnic cleansing, or "fighting terrorists", as they like to call it:

Maliki’s words appeared intended to counter the perception that the plan would focus on combating Sunni insurgents. An aide to Maliki, Hasan Suneid, a Shiite Muslim lawmaker, told the Associated Press that the Iraqi army would devote 20,000 additional troops to the capital and begin by combating Sunni insurgents in western Baghdad.

…

Maliki’s speech provided few details about the tactical or strategic changes guiding the forthcoming effort. But his aides described an effort that relies on U.S. troops to combat Sunni insurgents on the outskirts of Baghdad. Those areas are where the Sunni insurgents plan and manufacture the deadly explosives that detonate regularly in the city.

"Maliki believes that it is in this ring that the attacks are coming from," one of his aides said.

The Iraqi forces would target the most violent neighborhoods, and commanders would have a greater degree of autonomy in their assigned sections of the city, Askari said.

Maliki believes that if the additional troops can effect a decrease in violence over the next two months, then he can negotiate more effectively with Shiite militia leaders in the city and improve his chances of disarming them, his aides said.

Mr. Maliki and Mr. Kagan are in complete agreement. The way to secure peace is to decrease the violence by ethnically cleansing Baghdad of Sunnis. Then, the Shia militias will make nice and peace will reign. Call me biased, but having lived through such a plan of "pacification" in my own life, I can smell ethnic cleansing better than most.

Baghdad is important. It is important because the sectarian fault lines of Iraq run through it. Throughout the American occupation, Baghdad has been coming apart along sectarian lines. Once mixed neighborhoods are being slowly ethnically cleansed into Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. Now Mr. Kagan is advocating helping the Shia eliminate the remaining Sunni neighborhoods west of the Tigris River. When Iraqi forces and militias go into Sunni neighborhoods they will go in to settle sectarian scores, not to hunt "terrorists". The United States government should take no part in this.

The path to national reconciliation in Iraq does not go through Baghdad - only the path to Iraq’s disintegration goes through Baghdad. The path to a stable Iraq goes through Iraq’s oil fields in the South and in Kirkuk, appeals to shared Arab nationalism, and access to the Persian Gulf through the Shatt al-Arab. A smarter man than Mr. Kagan would consider how oil revenue sharing, pipelines to the Gulf, and interests of Iraq’s neighbors such as Iran in said access to Gulf can be weaved together into a way forward that does not lead down a path of further violence. Instead, a small mind has come up with a recipe for ethnic cleansing - and Mr. Bush is set to endorse it.

It is up to the newly muscular United States Congress to prevent American complicity in the ethnic cleansing and massacres to come. A massacre of Iraq’s Sunnis will push us toward that regional war that everyone claims they fear. It is time for Congress to step up and prevent any further loss of American and Iraqi lives in the service of ideological midgets.

 [Cross posted at Taylor Marsh]

Iraqi Shiites have chosen a new candidate to replace embattled Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The new face of Iraq will now be the Islamist hardliner Jawad al-Maliki. The world has breathed a collective sigh of relief at this news.

The impasse over the Premiership is now finally broken and both the Sunnis and the Kurds appear ready to accept this new choice for Prime Minister. The American Ambassador to Iraq sounds downright giddy at the prospect of al-Maliki becoming the Prime Minister. The Washington Post reports:

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said the choice of Maliki was "a good step in the right direction. He’s an Iraqi patriot. He’s a strong leader."

Lost in all the euphoria at seeing progress in Iraq is whether or not this is progress in the right direction for Iraq or the United States. I had written in an earlier article that the likely replacement for al-Jaafari would either come from his own Dawa party or from the SCIRI. I had also suggested that neither outcome would be a positive outcome. We now have our answer. Ibrahim al-Jaafari has been replaced by another Dawa party member albeit one that is more hard-line. In fact while Ibrahim al-Jaafari has been the titular head of the Shiite alliance, al-Maliki has done all the heavy lifting. It is no surprise then that he would ascend to the Premiership.

Jawad al-Maliki has been the spokesman for the Dawa party and the Shiite alliance. He was involved in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution and more significantly was a member of the de-Baathification committee set up by the United States. He has been a critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and has close ties with the Shiite militias, especially the Mahdi Army.

After the recent raid by the U.S. military on a mosque in Sadr City, al-Maliki referred to the American Military operation as a "criminal" act. Responding to the raid, al-Maliki urged the United States to hand over security operations to Iraqis:

Jawad al-Maliki, a senior spokesman of the Shia Islamist Alliance and ally of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister, said: "The alliance calls for a rapid restoration of security matters to the Iraqi government."

al-Maliki apparently wants the Interior Ministry, which is controlled by Shiite militias, to be in charge of security in Iraq. This would allow the militias to continue their brutal ethnic cleansing operations with impunity.

After pushing hard for al-Jaafari’s ouster, the United States has gotten a more pro-Iranian Dawa party member. We have certainly come full circle in the Middle East. We have put in power in Iraq a person Saddam Hussein had sentenced to death. We have put in power a person who was involved in terrorist activities against not only Iraq but also Western and American targets in the Middle East. We have put in power a party, the Dawa party, that invented the modern suicide car bombing - a party that was involved in bombing the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and in the killing of 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut.

We have brought democracy to the Middle East. We have handed over Iraq to an Iranian nurtured and funded Islamist alliance (Dawa and SCIRI). I do not believe this is what the American people bargained for when we embarked on the invasion of Iraq. If we are holding out the hope that these Islamist parties whose stated goal is to bring about an Islamist revolution in Iraq will somehow smell the sweet scent of Democracy and become torchbearers of freedom and liberty, we are likely to be as disappointed as Dick Cheney was when we were not greeted as liberators. This is a far cry from the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction and the defeat of al Qaeda.

When my five-year old daughter accidentally does something wrong she is in the habit of saying, "Look what you made me do!." In response, I try to explain to her the concept of personal responsibility, of free will, of taking credit or blame for one’s actions. I suspect that it is a lesson that most parents teach their children at an early age.

My daughter’s protestations came to mind when I heard the President’s latest speech seeking to defend his Iraq policy.  The President laid blame at the feet of Saddam Hussein for the chaos in Iraq. According to the official White House transcript, the President said:

These are the kinds of tensions Iraqis are dealing with today. They are the divisions that Saddam aggravated through deliberate policies of ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence. As one Middle East scholar has put it, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was "a society slowly and systematically poisoned by political terror. The toxic atmosphere in today’s Iraq bears witness to his terrible handiwork." 

For the sake of argument, let me agree with the President that Saddam Hussein’s policies created the conditions for sectarian strife in Iraq. If that is and was indeed the case, why did the Administration not anticipate this sectarian strife? Why trot out this argument now? This argument is wholly inconsistent with what we were told before the war - that it would be a cakewalk, bed of roses, etc. If we grant the President the benefit of this argument, then the Administration appears completely unprepared and incompetent, now by its own admission, in dealing with post "Mission Accomplished" Iraq.

It seems to me that in trying to find someone, anyone, to blame for the debacle in Iraq, the Administration has finally and inadvertently admitted failure and defeat. I think it is long past time that the Administration accepted the reality in Iraq and its role in bringing about that reality. There can now be no doubt that the invasion of Iraq was ill conceived; and the decision to invade Iraq and unleashing the very predictable sectarian strife and responsibility for that decision lies solely at the feet of the President and this Administration.

I have the same hope for this Administration that I have for my five-year-old: that they accept responsibility for their actions.