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Bush duped Americans to get false support for Iraq invasion

[ Posted On: 2007-01-24 ]

The current debate in the United States on what to do with Iraq seems to produce recommendations that are at best ambiguous. This is because they avoid confronting the central issue - how the US has defined the violence in that country. In calling it part of its "war on terror," the US has denied itself political legroom to seek a more effective strategy i.e. to negotiate with insurgents.

Part of the failure seems to lay in the ambiguity of the US invasion itself. The Bush administration officially claimed that it invaded Iraq to disarm it of weapons of mass destruction. That mission proved to have been ill founded, in which case the US should have immediately withdrawn from Iraq.

However, the administration also claimed that Saddam Hussein was sponsoring terrorism. This claim proved to be false. Later, it added that it was to remove a tyrant and democratise Iraq. The administration possibly hoped that Iraq could then be used as a springboard for other democratic movements in the Middle East.

Americans supported the war for the first two reasons; they would never have done so for the third. My suspicion therefore is that the war in Iraq was fought for reasons that were not openly stated by the administration - like access to its oil. Therefore Americans were misled in their support for the invasion. If this suspicion holds any water at all, then the invasion enjoyed false democratic legitimacy.

This explains the paralysis in finding a clear strategy for either staying in or exiting Iraq because such a strategy hinges strongly on what the mission was and therefore how to define its success.

First of all, in claiming that Iraq is a frontline in the "war on terror," the Bush administration may win some political legitimacy at home. The flip side of this claim is that it bands Iraqi insurgents with Al Qaeda terrorists. This strategy tends to create a common destiny for both and therefore may become central in forging an alliance between them.

Yet a more intelligent and practical strategy may be to separate the Iraqi insurgents from Al Qaeda. This could be strategically critical as it would help the US seek accommodation with insurgents while isolating Al Qaeda and therefore sustaining war against it.

Negotiation

Current evidence would support such a strategy. Al Qaeda is small in Iraq, contributing only two percent of the violence. America is right to reject any negotiation with Al Qaeda. But it should seriously consider negotiating with Iraqi insurgents. This is because insurgents want to rid their country of foreign occupation, while Al Qaeda has, as its central objective, an apocalyptic ambition of a global spread of terror. It would be unwise for the US to get entangled in a nationalist war against Iraqis as the lesson of Vietnam so amply teach.

Second, the insurgents are fighting an internal civil war whose resolution can only come from either one side winning a decisive military victory, or both sides finding accommodation with one another more attractive than further combat. The presence of US troops on Iraqi soil involves the US army in a civil war, but on one side.

Backed by US military might, the Iraq Shiites lack an incentive to build a strong military and security apparatus to sustain the current government. No amount of preaching and conditionality can force the Iraq government to change its ways. The only credible weapon the US can use to force the Iraq government to pull up its security socks is to begin a phased withdrawal - a decision the Bush administration seems reluctant to undertake.

In any case, there is some evidence that left alone the Iraqi society can develop its own mechanisms of containing sectarian violence. For example, the emergence of militias in support of the different religious factions is an important indication of the internal process of change that can produce a strong national security apparatus. The US is too removed from local realities. It cannot contain militias by an administratively driven agenda of "training” Iraqi armed forces to achieve a given level of combat effectiveness. Three years of this effort have produced little. Now evidence suggests that elements in official security services are behind some of the violence.

The presence of US troops does not create the right conditions for the emergence of a leadership with the skills and motivation to build an effective official security infrastructure. That is why the most effective security outfits in Iraq today are private militias. Many Iraqis, including leaders in the government, rely more on militias for their security than the official armed forces. In the circumstances, electoral competition is not the best way to establish a government with sufficient capacity and motivation to build an effective military and security machine in that country.

Utopian mission

In setting establishment of democracy in Iraq as its objective, the Bush administration has given itself a utopian mission that is very likely to be counterproductive because of the region’s peculiar social structure and history. Secular regimes in the Islamic Middle East tend to succeed only when they are highly authoritarian while democratic governments have tended to be highly religious. This has been the case with Egypt, Syria, Libya and Saddam’s Iraq, as well as Iran, Palestine under Hamas and Algeria in 1990. The choice facing the US in Iraq is having a repressive secular regime or a theocracy.

Therefore, if America wants any semblance of democracy in Iraq, it should be willing to settle for a theocracy of sorts. The US may then need to negotiate with a strong insurgent leader who may even be strongly anti America. This could work because even bitter enemies can find common ground. The US did find common ground with Iran in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is highly probable that an anti American theocracy in Baghdad may share US desires and therefore help US efforts to destroy Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Therefore, in seeking a solution to the current quagmire in Iraq, America does not need to look for those with whom it shares common values, but common interests. Right now Iraqis want a government that can end civil strife - democratic or authoritarian, secular or theocratic. It is unlikely that American political and military engineering will establish that. It is time for the US to seriously consider a phased withdrawal not because it has failed but because it cannot win.

Democracy does not thrive amidst anarchy. There is even no evidence that democracy can create the right conditions for ending the current violence in Iraq. To achieve stability now, Iraq needs strong leadership that can re-establish the state’s monopoly over violence. Such leadership would most probably be in form of an autocrat or a theocracy capable of militarily defeating the various insurgent groups, cajoling and bribing some and bullying others into acquiescence. The presence of US troops to underwrite the security of the country and the stability of the government undermines such possibilities.

Tough choices

In fact, choices facing the US in Iraq are stark. It can abandon its ambitions of establishing a democracy, containing the violence and re-building strong Iraqi security forces and begin a prompt but phased withdrawal. This will certainly be at the price of short term escalation in violence. However, such a withdrawal may create the right conditions and incentives for a militia leader like Muktada Al Sadar to effectively wrestle control of the state from other competitors and re-establish the state’s monopoly over violence.

On the other hand, the US can stay put and use all sorts of threats to force the current government to pull up its security socks. This will delay, but may not stop the descent into further chaos. It is unlikely that further US stay in Iraq will strengthen Iraq forces - whatever amount of training the US gives them. Its net effect will be to prolong the final resolution of the conflict in Iraq, but at a great price for both US and Iraqi citizens in terms of lives lost, economic opportunities destroyed, political divisions engendered and money wasted.

The fear that Iran will exploit its religious links to the Shiites in Iraq to increase its power in the region if the US troops withdraw from that country is overstated. On the contrary, it is US presence in Iraq that undermines both the military and diplomatic leverage the Bush administration can use in the Middle East to block Iran from continuing its nuclear enrichment programme.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Andrew M. Mwenda is a John Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Contact him at: amwenda[at]stanford.edu

| View Profile & All Articles By: Andrew M. Mwenda |

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