Crawling from the Wreckage (34 page)

Tony Blair aimed for a more reflective tone: “I think that probably … we could have done de-Baathification in a more differentiated manner than we did … But the biggest reason why Iraq has been difficult is the determination by our opponents to defeat us.”

Now there’s a novel concept: our opponents are determined to defeat us. No wonder that Blair added: “Maybe in retrospect, when we look back, it should have been very obvious to us.” But the resentful whine in Blair’s voice was entirely genuine: how was he to know they would fight back? Maybe he could have done de-Baathification a bit better, but apart from that, it’s not his fault.

Tony Blair is a fairly bright man, and George W. Bush is not as dim as he seems, so how can they be so obtuse about Iraq? De-Baathification, re-Baathification, retro-Baathification—nothing can change the basic fact that the Baath Party that had ruled Iraq since the 1960s was deeply nationalist and profoundly hostile to the United States (because it is
Israel’s closest ally) and to Britain (because it is the former imperial ruler of Iraq).

Fire all the Baathists, and they will go underground and join the resistance. Leave them in their jobs, and they will be a fifth column of spies and saboteurs for the resistance. Likewise for the empty debate about whether U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer made a fatal mistake by disbanding the entire Iraqi army in the spring of 2003. Disband the army, and several hundred thousand trained men will take their skills and their weapons and join the resistance. Leave the existing army in place and its officers will sell the foreign-occupation troops out to the resistance at every opportunity, while awaiting the right moment for a national uprising against the foreigners.

The original decision to invade Iraq was the fatal mistake; the rest is just consequences. Iraq’s government was crueller and less loved than most regimes in the Arab world, but the United States and Britain would be facing the same kind of resistance movement today if they had invaded Morocco, Egypt or Yemen in 2003. There is no country of over two million people in the Arab world where an invading American army would not soon be confronted by the kind of resistance it is facing in Iraq.

History matters, and for Arabs all recent history is bad. Britain lured the Arabs into revolt against their Turkish overlords in the First World War with a promise of independence, then carved them up into the familiar Middle Eastern states of the present and bound them all in colonial servitude. It also promised Jews a national homeland in Palestine, the state of Israel—which America has unstintingly supported, regardless of Israel’s policies towards its Arab neighbours, for over forty years. Why would any Arab country welcome an invasion by the United States and Britain?

The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was doomed from the first, and Bush and Blair had dozens of experts on call who could have told them why. Either they didn’t listen, or they chose not to ask.

By early 2007, it was clear that the United States was on its way out of Iraq as fast as possible, so the major objective for most of the players became saving face and avoiding blame. All those wasted deaths had to be somebody else’s fault
.

As the people who talked the United States into the Iraq War try to talk their way out of the blame for the mess they made, one dominant theme has emerged: blame the Iraqis. Our intentions were good; we did our best to help; but the Iraqis are vicious, incompetent ingrates who would prefer to kill one another rather than seize the freedom we brought them. It’s not our fault that it turned out so badly.

And it has turned out rather badly, hasn’t it? President George W. Bush will go no further than to say that he is “disappointed by the pace of success,” and his British sidekick, Prime Minister Tony Blair, still insists, “We will beat them [the Iraqi resistance] when we realize that it’s not our fault that they’re doing this.” But practically everybody else in the U.S. and Britain knows that the invasion of Iraq was a huge disaster.

Somebody must be to blame, and it cannot be us, so it must be those brutal, stupid Iraqis. There was no surprise last November when arch neo-conservative Richard Perle, ex-chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, said that he had “underestimated the depravity” in Iraq. He has a lot of blame to shift, so he would say that, wouldn’t he?

It was no surprise, either, when right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer of the
Washington Post
, once an eager supporter of the war, elaborated on the same theme less than a month ago: “Thousands of brave American soldiers have died trying to counter, put down and prevent civil strife. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shias kill Shias and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on [America] is simply perverse … Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.”

Brazen, self-serving distortions of the truth by people who have a lot of explaining to do, are not in the least bit surprising, because if the ghastly mess in Iraq wasn’t the fault of Iraqis, then it would have to be the fault of Americans. Perle and Krauthammer would figure quite prominently among the Americans in question.

But what is one to make of Gary Trudeau peddling the same line in his comic strip
Doonesbury
? The strip runs daily in 1,400 newspapers around
the world, and often serves as the vehicle for political or social commentary from a liberal perspective. It never supported the invasion of Iraq, but this Monday’s strip was a classic exercise in stereotyping and blame-shifting.

An American colonel, planning the day’s operation in the streets of Baghdad, notices that his Iraq army opposite number has not shown up yet and sends a soldier to find him. Cut to the Iraqi army officer: still behind his desk, coffee cup in hand, ashtray full of cigarettes. He says to the young American soldier: “It’s not in my book. Are you sure it’s today?” The U.S. solder wearily replies “Yes, sir. You’ll recall we fight every day.”

Unravelling the message doesn’t take a Marshall MacLuhan: U.S. troops are carrying the burden of the war while lazy, cowardly Iraqis shun their duty. They don’t deserve us.

The strip the weekend before last was even more blatant in blaming the failure on the Iraqis. An American soldier gets behind the wheel of a Humvee and says “Ready to do this, partner?” to the same Iraqi officer, sitting beside him in the front seat. The Iraqi officer is asleep.

As they approach the target house, the Iraqi officer, now awake, says “I know this house. The owner is Sunni scum.” “Well, intel wants us to capture the guy alive,” says the American. “That will not be possible. I am sworn to revenge,” replies the Iraqi.

“Why,” asks the American. “What’d he ever do to you?”

“A member of his family killed a member of mine,” replies the Iraqi officer, cigarette dangling from his lips. “What? When did this happen?” asks the shocked American.

“1387,” replies the Iraqi officer. “What is the MATTER with you people?” screams the American.

Get the message? These Ay-rabs are not only lazy, they are so savage that they harbour murderous grudges over six centuries; even Americans cannot bring these people to their senses; let’s get the hell out of here; it isn’t our fault that it all went wrong.

Getting out of Iraq is the least bad thing the United States can do now, and the sooner the better. If Americans must manufacture racist fantasies about the victims in order to salve their pride on the way out, then so be it. But it is a shameful, childish lie.

So, if they are on their way out, what happens next? I wrote the following piece three years ago but I don’t think I would change a word of it today
.

The war in Iraq is clearly lost, both on the ground and in the court of American public opinion, and the pullout will probably begin about ten minutes after the new U.S. president is inaugurated in January 2009. That’s only eighteen months from now, so it’s time to think about what happens next.

The American withdrawal will not stop with Iraq. Iran is going to be the new great power in the region, and the little Arab oil sheikhdoms on the opposite side of the Gulf will probably close down the U.S. bases on their soil in order to keep Iran sweet. There will be no Iranian troops in Iraq, however, and Iran lacks the military capability for adventures in the further reaches of the Arab world even if it had the desire.

After Iraq, there will be huge resistance in the United States to any more military commitments in the Middle East, so for the first time in forty years the status quo in the region will not be backed by a U.S. military guarantee. Beyond forecasts of civil war in Iraq, however, there has been little effort to discern what the Middle East will actually look like after the U.S. troops go home.

There is already a civil war in Iraq, and it might even get worse for a time after American troops leave, but these things always sputter out in the end. There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or minus Kurdistan, and regardless of whether or not the central government in Baghdad exercises real control over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad, Mosul and the Syrian border.

The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a training ground for Islamist extremists from all parts of the Arab world by the American invasion. Once the American troops are gone, however, the action will soon move elsewhere, for the U.S. defeat in Iraq has dramatically raised the prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world and beyond.

The real price of America’s Middle Eastern adventure will be paid not in Iraq itself, but in the Arab states that still have secular and/or pro-Western regimes. The main (and generally outlawed) political opposition in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria and
half a dozen others has been Islamist revolutionaries for many years already, and now some of them are going to win.

It’s not possible to predict
which
Arab states will fall under Islamist control, and they certainly aren’t all going to: the pipe dream of a world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely that. But it will be astonishing if one or more of the existing Arab regimes does not fall to an Islamist revolution in the next few years.

For the citizens of the country or countries in question, this could be a big problem, since it would probably mean not democracy and prosperity but just more decades of poverty and a different kind of tyranny. For people living outside the Middle East, however, it would probably make little difference.

Islamist-ruled
states
are not the same as bands of freelance fanatics. If they have oil to export, then they will go on exporting it, because no major oil producer can now do without the income that those exports provide; they need it to feed their people. And they would have little incentive to sponsor terrorist attacks outside the region, for they would have fixed addresses, and interests to protect.

For Israel, however, the situation has changed fundamentally. For the first twenty years of its existence, Israel was a state under siege. For the past forty years, since the conquests of 1967, it has had the luxury of debating with itself how much of those conquered lands it should return to the Arabs in return for a permanent peace settlement. (The answer was always “all of them,” but that was not an answer many Israelis would hear.)

Now the window of opportunity is closing. Before long, some of the Arab states that Israel needs to make peace with are likely to fall to Islamist regimes that have an ideological commitment to its destruction. (Hamas’s capture of the Gaza Strip is a foretaste of what is to come.) Israelis trying to evade hard choices have long complained that they had “nobody to negotiate with.” This is about to become true.

The invasion of Iraq was America’s biggest foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam, and the Middle East will be a very different place as a result. But, as with Vietnam, the consequences for the West of U.S. military defeat in Iraq are likely to be smaller than people expect. Five years from now, the oil will still be flowing, terrorism will be a minor nuisance, and America’s reputation will have recovered.

Unless, of course, the Bush administration decides to attack Iran before it leaves office. Then the heavens really would fall.

The famous “surge,” by itself, could not have created the interval of calm that has allowed the United States to make a relatively dignified exit from Iraq. By 2007, the Sunnis, once the core of the resistance, had lost the civil war against the Shias decisively and disastrously, and most formerly mixed neighbourhoods of Baghdad had been entirely cleansed of their Sunni residents. It was the Islamist fanatics of “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” and their local extremist allies who had dragged the Sunnis into that civil war, and it was now a matter of survival for the Sunni community to get rid of them and end that war
.

The traditional Sunni authorities and the non-Islamist leaders of the resistance had been pushed aside (and sometimes assassinated) by the extremists, and the survivors were ready for a temporary truce with the Americans while they dealt with this more urgent problem. In fact, they were willing to collaborate with the occupation forces in destroying the power of al-Qaeda and its allies, and so, by 2008, the daily toll of violent deaths in Iraq was dropping fast
.

The irony was that in this safer and more stable environment, the Iraqi government that had emerged from the 2005 elections, an alliance of Shia and Kurdish parties, no longer depended so heavily on American troops to protect it—and was thus much more able to resist American demands. Throughout 2008 the Bush administration persistently tried to get Baghdad to grant the United States permanent military bases in Iraq as part of the withdrawal agreement, but to no avail. The final deal required all American troops to be off the streets of Iraqi cities by mid-2009, and gone from the country entirely by the end of 2011. So what did the whole bloody exercise achieve, if anything?