Iraq is not like Vietnam

Matt Yglesias has endorsed the position of Steve Simon's pamphlet "After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq" which advises withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we have heard before but Simon does phrase them a bit more clearly.

Leaving U.S. forces in Iraq under today’s circumstances means the United States is culpable but not capable—that is, Washington bears substantial responsibility for developments within Iraq without the ability to shape those developments in a positive direction. In consequence, Iraqi support for the U.S. presence has collapsed. Polls indicate that most Iraqis want the United States to pull out. Moreover, the Iraq war has fueled the jihad and apparently been a godsend to jihadi recruiters—and the process of self-recruitment—as indicated by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the global war on terror. More broadly, the Iraq war has had a very damaging effect on the U.S. reputation in the Arab and wider Islamic world. Authoritative opinion surveys show this as well. The continued presence of U.S. forces is thus a severe setback in the canonical war of ideas, which the Bush administration has correctly assessed as crucial to American interests. [...]

In 2004, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy to Osama bin Laden, said of the U.S. intervention: “America is between two fires. If it stays in Iraq, it will bleed to death; if it leaves, it will lose everything.” His forecast comes disturbingly close to describing current circumstances. It need not, however, be prophecy. More than three years after the intervention began, to be sure, the United States finds itself in an agonizing strategic position. The time has come to acknowledge that the United States must fundamentally recast its commitment to Iraq. It must do so without any illusions that there are unexplored or magic fixes, whether diplomatic or military. Some disasters are irretrievable. Having staked its prestige on the intervention and failed to achieve many of its objectives, the United States will certainly pay a price for military disengagement from Iraq. But if the United States manages its departure from Iraq carefully, it will not have lost everything. Rather, the United States will have preserved the opportunity to recover vital assets that its campaign in Iraq has imperiled: diplomatic initiative, global reputation, and the well-being and political utility of its ground forces. [...]

But raising the prospect of desperate deterioration in Iraq and its environs after an American military disengagement necessarily tends to obscure two things. First, the presence of U.S. forces has not stabilized Iraq thus far. Second, conditions for instability have become structural elements of Iraqi politics. Given these facts, how long should the U.S. keep troops in Iraq, when its military presence only delays an inevitable escalation of intra-Iraqi fighting?

Well said, but I have yet to hear a single advocate for complete withdrawal grapple with the consequences of allowing Iraq to fall into the hands of the forces of Al-Qaeda, or to the influence of its neighbors. One may see shades of the domino theory here and accordingly cry foul, but there is a crucial difference. Vietnam was at the not encircled by powers hoping to divide up the loyalties of its people for various forms of the ideology we are trying to fight. The neighboring countries of Laos and Cmabodia fell to Communist influence so the domino theorists may feel vindicated but at the time we entered, surrounding countries were not trying to make Vietnam a proxy state. The struggled in Vietnam was at it origin, one against colonialism.

Secondly in Vietnam we were not trying to reconcile two sides in a civil war. In Vietnam we were one side in a civil war, and were fighting against a people trying to expel us. The Iraqis may want us to leave but the fighting there is intra-Iraqi, and aimed at establishing hegemony of religious sect.

And thirdly cultural differences in between Vietnam and the Soviet Union would have made a long term alliance between the two untenable. Sino-Soviet relations were always hostile and a people that had been fighting colonial occupation for decades would not have accepted Soviet influence. Nor would they have accepted it from the Chinese with whom there was a centuries old cultural animus. The Iraqi people are not a nation. The territory is the result of European, colonial cartography and the Sunnis will find more to like with Saudi Arabia, the Shiites with Iran, and Kurds with Turkey. Iraq is thus not only already surrounded by various forms of the ideology we are trying to fight but the regional powers who represent it are know to be positively trying to export it.

If we leave Iraq we will leave it to the influence of powers who have international goals and the people will not be so resistant to their influence. The Vietnamese just wanted us, and everyone else, out. The Iraqis are not fighting a war of independence, rather for fear of each other they are fighting one for tribal hegemony.

What?

This has to go down as a classic of obfuscation. The whole presentation here.

Brooks on Iraq

David Brooks has a must read column about Iraq, even if I do detest its ending. He notes the change in US strategy from using the surge to give Iraqi politicians time to make compromises to using it to help local tribes establish themselves as the locus of law and order. And relates an incident which goes far in illustrating just what a mess this war has become.

"In one scene, a Sunni tribal leader has been captured by the National Police, who are about to hand him over to the Mahdi Army to be murdered. He manages to call the Americans on his cellphone, who launch a rescue mission. After a tense standoff, he’s freed and can go back to stabilizing his town.

In other words, as Gordon notes, a former Sunni insurgent and enemy of the U.S. ends up calling the Americans so he can be liberated from America’s supposed allies."

Tis is of course an indictment of the utter incompetence of the Bush administration in managing the war, traceable to the liquidation of all experienced civil servants, including the army, and their anathematization for petty reasons of politics and PR. Rajiv Chandrasekeran's work on this is great reading though I should mention it is the only book length treatment of the subject I have read. These are reasons to detest Bush. They do not stand as arguments in favor of ending the war or the strategic benefits of withdrawal. Christopher Hitchens recently said that the surge should be supported even if it is not succeeding, and incurred some vitriolic criticism from Andrew Sullivan who asked "so are we to support a policy regardless of its effect?" No not, regardless of its effect, we should support it because of its goal. Anyone who recognizes the necessity of preventing the collapse of Iraqi society into sectarian anarchy, and the loss of a geopolitically central state to the forces of militant (though is there any other kind?) religious fanaticism, would not be hard pressed to find reasons to support the entire effort of which the surge is integral. Sullivan of course wishes to withdraw from Iraq and a reading of his blogs on the subject reveal a disconcerting comfort with the prospect of a sectarian bloodbath.

The encouraging part is that we have found a more effective way of moving toward peace in Iraq, if an imperfect peace founded on tribal thuggery. This may be all we can hope for and if so it will prove how tone deaf to culture was and is the neoconservative belief that democracy can be started in a country without correlative traditions and institutions. As Brooks notes:

"The surge was intended to bolster the “modern” — meaning nonsectarian and nontribal — institutions in the country.

But the surge is failing, at least politically, because there are practically no nonsectarian institutions, and there are few nonsectarian leaders to create them. Security gains have not led to political gains."

Possibly, and I have oft wondered if a more lasting and in the long run beneficial solution for Iraq is a dictator in the vein of Pinochet who would genuinely help the country rather than run it as an oil financed fiefdom. For the neocons' this is unpalatable and likewise for the American people who would not tolerate a view of themselves as exporters of autocracy. I myself cannot fully reconcile supporting the creation of a regime I myself would not tolerate. A facile "ends justifies the means" logic is barely serviceable.

He ends with a paragraph that makes me wince on grounds of stylistic preferences:

The key questions now are: Can U.S. troops help Iraqi locals take control of their own neighborhoods? Is it worth more American lives to help them do so? And, if so, how?

Yes, David, I happen to be reading your column and the august newspaper that publishes it to answer those very questions. I don't expect your column to lay them to rest but I don't need to be patronizingly reminded of them.

Iraq going forward

Andrew Sullivan has a post up calling Bill Kristol a thug. I didn't read the article which led Sullivan to this accusation but based on what I have seen of Kristol's rhetoric, I will assume the charge is legitimate. The most unfortunate thing about Kristol being that his great influence in Washington makes the presence of someone capable of this sort of vitriol even more poisonous, as opposed to a Malkin who shrieks from the fringe.

But Sullivan goes on to rehash all the current objections to the continuation of the war. It was bungled, Bush has instituted a torture regime, it was a terrible lack of foresight that we didn't anticipate the Sunni-Shia civil war, new terrorist sanctuaries have been created, ect. He is right to claim that those conservatives who equate dissent with treason are engaging in the worse kind of thought stopping agitprop, but this as well as Sullivan's objections to the conduct of the war don't constitute any kind of critique of whether or not the war ws in the first place worth fighting, or whether or not it still remains so. The most common objection to the war is that it as been bungled. This is an indictment of Bush and his incompetence not the war itself. To object to the fact that the war was bungled implies that if it simply weren't managed so badly then it would not have been a mistake to fight it. But if it was at one time a worthy cause I don't see how mismanagement of it makes it now not worth the effort. I fail to see how the fact that a mess was created means that the mess is not worth fixing.

Assuming we are acting as mediators between Sunni-Shia civil war, we are accomplishing this:

1. We are forestalling what will be one of the most terrible genocides in recent memory until a regional government can strengthen itself enough to control these murderous factions. If you don't believe this then only small amount of research into the way they treat each other will suffice to convince you.

2. We are denying force which represent only the most abject ideological darkness control over a region second only to Israel in strategic importance. Consider the motivation for the first Gulf War.

3. We are fighting and defeating jihadists in the arena that has become their cause celebre. The truth of this last point was borne out by the death of Abu Musab-al Zarqawi, the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

These are goals worth attaining and those who object to this war know it. They don't criticize the nobility of the cause but claim that it was not prosecuted to their liking. They never bother to explain how Bush's incompetence in waging war, now means that the war is not worth waging. They don't offer any constructive solution to the Iraq problem but only criticism (valid though it is) of the way it has been conducted. The morality of abandoning the country to the most retrograde of ideologies- which, by the way, we have already done to the Kurds who have until now done nothing but prosper from our presence- and the consequences, are rarely discussed.

What The Hell?

Lindsay Graham's odd view of our military

At about 2 mins Graham and Webb start discussing whether or not the troops support the war and Graham repeats the often heard mantra "they want to win... let them win." Well obviously they want to win. This idiotic, jingoistic philosophy somehow encompasses the belief that people in opposition to the war believe that soldiers enlist in the military to lose wars. But more important it seems strange to me that Graham, and the right, conceives of the military as some kind of autonomous body of policy formulation. Does he understand that the military is under civilian control and that what the troops want to do is no more important than what I want them to do? I may be crazy but I thought that political leaders (the president) were elected to command the military to serve the interests of America as expressed by the people. I wasn't under the impression that the military made up its mind about what it wants to do and we the citizens who they apparently serve must defer to their wishes despite what we find our interests to be. According to Graham the military apparently commands itself. I'm quite sure that the situation was similar in South American military juntas.