Five years and 4,000 US deaths into the Iraq war, it is no longer clear what a reasonable exit strategy might be. In November, America will either elect a bellicose war veteran who thinks US troops could remain in Iraq for “a thousand years” or “a million” so long as they prevent “American casualties” — or a Democrat who has promised swift withdrawal but is politic enough to leave the details vague. Neither outcome offers much hope that America’s endgame will be smarter than its bungled occupation. No candidate has dared to suggest how they would handle the genocidal chaos that could follow a collapse of the Maliki government, nor how they would prevent the surge-created partitions from metastasizing into a regional war. And so a conflict that may end up costing between three and five trillion dollars, according to the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, will be passed to a president eager to march further into the quagmire or to one whose good intentions will be constrained by whatever “facts on the ground” are left by the final months of this administration’s military and political guesswork.
The recent violence in Basra has given the lie to President Bush’s claim that last year’s troop increase “opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror.” In the reality-based community, the real legacy of the “surge” has been a series of uneasy truces among militias, the rebranding of armed killers as “Concerned Local Citizens” whom are well-paid to refrain from attacks on US troops, and the surrender of ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods to communities forced to subsist in war-made slums until the country’s stagnant economy is somehow resurrected. Michael Klare, an American professor of sociology who recently visited Baghdad described the capital as “an urban desert of half-destroyed buildings and next to no public services, dotted by partially deserted, mutually hostile mini-ghettos that used to be neighbourhoods, surrounded by cement barriers reminiscent of medieval fortifications.” Klare points out that the UN High Commissioner on Refugees estimates that the heavy fighting associated with the troop “surge” displaced 800,000 last year. By fall 2007 “what had once been a city split between Sunnis and Shia had been transformed into a 75% Shia capital … no longer a city, but a ghettoized collection of micro-city-states.”
This surreal situation has opened the door to a major strategic defeat for the broader US war on terror. Having entangled itself in the Gordian knot of intra-Islamic rivalries, the current US administration has found itself hopelessly out of its depth in both cultural and regional issues. Ahmed Chalabi, the man who could have been Iraq’s president had the Pentagon had its way, nicely summarized the situation when he quipped to an American journalist that “The American tragedy in Iraq, is that your friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, and your enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region.” The recent gaffe by John McCain — that it is “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al Qaeda is going back into Iran and is receiving training”— suggest that while he understands the drift of Chalabi’s witticism, he hasn’t yet grasped such bothersome details as Iran’s sectarian affiliations.
Insularity has plagued America’s post-9/11 foreign policy almost from the beginning. Every schoolchild knows that around 3,000 Americans perished in the September 11 attacks, but what about the others who also died that day? By leaving them out of the equation America missed a valuable opportunity to make a more persuasive case for its subsequent actions. For too long since then the United States’ political calculus seems to have ignored the wider world. Many of the worst mistakes in Iraq have flowed out of this regrettable self-involvement. Stephen Holmes, a political scientist at New York University raises this problem forcefully in The Matador’s Cape, his searing analysis of American folly in the global war on terror. “Around 350 of those killed on 9/11 were non-Americans,” he writes, “Do they not count? Are Americans reluctant to mix their blood with the blood of non-Americans? Why did no politician stand up and say that Americans take special pride in their country’s capacity to shelter refugees, immigrants and travellers and that we all mourn the tragic deaths of our ill-fated foreign guests? One of the gravest injuries done to the country that day was an injury to a national tradition, namely the shattering of the legend that the United States could offer safety to foreigners escaping from political turbulence and violence in the rest of the world. Yet almost no one said so. Why not?” The decision not to take body counts of the Iraqi dead — even though each milestone of US combat deaths has dominated the headlines — and the largely unstated assumption that whatever mess the occupation leaves behind will be the Iraqis’ problem, and theirs alone, has amplified this impression of America’s indifference.
If the next president fails to address this perception candidly, the US will likely find itself shouldering even greater responsibilities for the war, militarily, politically and financially, at the same time as it tries to ward off an economic recession (depression?), and a spiralling deficit.
Iraq has tended to slip from view as America’s credit crisis deepens and its overstretched presidential campaigns limp towards a climax. But our long, dishonest decade is ending with the realization that the consequences of this war will probably be more severe and enduring than any American politician dares admit. There are no good solutions left in Iraq and until America is willing to wrestle truthfully with the manifold failures of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld triumvirate, its thinly disguised holding operation will force it to remain fatally embroiled in a conflict that still has no end in sight.
