Vietnam Parallels
The grim drumbeat of negative news has forged a consensus among Americans and Iraqis: Both have had enough. Despite concerted efforts by the Bush administration to link Iraq to the greater war on terrorism, a clear majority of Americans now believe that the war, which has cost more than $320 billion in national treasure and the blood of more than 2,700 fallen warriors, was a blunder.
Even once-strong supporters of the war in the Republican Party have begun to openly voice their growing pessimism on Iraq. For their part, an overwhelming majority of Iraqis now blame the U.S. military presence in their country for provoking the violence, and seven in 10 want U.S. forces out of Iraq within a year, according to a September poll by the independent Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
"Perhaps the most striking trend to me is how much less optimistic the Iraqi people are about the future than just a few years ago," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy expert at the Brookings Institution whose "Iraq Index" has tracked reconstruction and security operations in post-Saddam Iraq.
O'Hanlon considers the Iraq mission to be so close to outright failure and civil war that he recently proposed that the U.S. and Iraqi governments consider a "voluntary ethnic relocation plan" to get in front of a potential wave of ethnic and sectarian cleansing and genocide that could kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The drawback to the plan, he concedes, "is that if you implement it prematurely or fail to time it just right, you could ignite exactly the kind of ethnic cleansing you're trying to avoid."
Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon intelligence analyst, is a longtime Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The reality is that the United States went to war in Iraq without the fundamental tools to win, because we simply do not have the civil-military structures to do nation building on this scale," he said.
As a result, U.S. authorities have spent nearly $40 billion in U.S. aid and Iraqi funds in a reconstruction effort with very little to show for it, he noted, and rushed elections and a constitutional referendum that actually exacerbated sectarian divisions.
Most recently, on October 11, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi parliament passed a federalism bill that would allow the formation of autonomous regions in the country, including what many see as a Shiite mini-state in Iraq's south. The measure passed despite the strong objections of, and a boycott by, the Sunni coalition. The Sunnis fear a dismemberment of Iraq and a diminution of their power, although the law did include a concession to their concerns by putting off the formation of such regions for 18 months.
"We've now reached a point where no matter what military action or strategy the United States adopts, it won't matter unless the Iraqis can reach some form of political reconciliation," said Cordesman, who concedes that such an accommodation will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve under current levels of violence. "So this remains a very high-risk operation, with some unfortunate parallels to Vietnam. In Vietnam, we also focused on pacifying major areas of the country but ignored the fact that there was no functioning central government to hold it all together."
Diplomatic Midget
How did it come to this? How did the world's only superpower, with the post-9/11 wind at its back, end up in just a few short years contemplating an ignoble and potentially generation-shaping defeat in Iraq? In its spirit of bipartisanship, the Iraq Study Group has pledged to look only forward and not to rehash the miscues of the Iraq enterprise in another exercise of finger-pointing.
While it is true that whole bookshelves are now groaning under the weight of tomes detailing the myriad mistakes made in post-Saddam Iraq, experts say that some inconvenient truths must be confronted to appreciate the limited options that the United States has left in Iraq.
It is increasingly clear, for instance, that although the United States may possess a superpower military, its forces are simply too small and ill-organized for long-term occupation and counterinsurgency warfare, and that any reconfiguration is likely to come too late for Iraq.
The Bush administration has also focused on elections as the centerpiece of its democratization agenda, yet recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown conclusively that institution building, a functioning government, and the rule of law are at least as important in turning around failed states. The United States lacks the essential and expensive tools for that kind of large-scale nation building, and neither the administration nor Congress has shown much inclination to sacrifice other priorities to acquire them.
"The big problem is that the United States today is a military colossus and a diplomatic midget, and that has made for a very unbalanced national security policy," said Joseph Collins, a professor at the National Defense University who was deputy assistant secretary of Defense for stability operations. "The State Department and U.S. AID are only shadows of what they need to be if we're going to conduct this kind of nation building, but Congress just refuses to fund those activities. That leaves a lot of overstressed soldiers in Iraq doing tasks they're not trained for."
No Way Back
Finally, while the largely unilateral approach that the Bush administration adopted in invading Iraq worked OK in the short-term phase of regime change, it has left the United States bearing the overwhelming burden of the nation-building effort and the counterinsurgency campaign.
History suggests that it requires at least a decade, and probably much longer, to end an insurgency. With the Atlas who has shouldered the Iraq campaign now beginning to shake before the halfway point, few nations are willing to step into the shadow of an imploding state.
"If you look at the relevant historical experiences with insurgencies, the United States might be in a better position in Iraq at the end of a decade or so," said Brian Jenkins, a senior counter- terrorism and counterinsurgency expert at the Rand think tank. "But not necessarily. Israel was in southern Lebanon for 18 years, and the situation just got worse until it became intolerable."
In the meantime, the U.S. presence in Iraq will continue to galvanize Islamic radicals worldwide and drain America of blood, treasure, and moral standing.
That has to be weighed, Jenkins said, against a precipitous withdrawal that could lead to all-out civil war, massive ethnic and sectarian cleansing, and a major psychological victory for Qaeda and Islamic extremists. "The basic problem with the equation is that the costs and downsides of Iraq are all front-loaded and being felt today, while the potential upsides are dependent on a reasonably successful and still murky outcome some years down the road."
Kenneth Pollack is the director of research at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Formerly a Middle East analyst at the CIA and the National Security Council, he was a leading proponent for toppling Saddam Hussein, authoring the book
The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Today, Pollack confesses to having trouble sleeping at night because he's contemplating Iraq.
"The situation in Iraq weighs very heavily on me, because there is just no denying anymore that the country is flat out in a state of low-level civil war, and the trend lines are heading toward an all-out civil war, which I think will be absolutely catastrophic," Pollack told
National Journal.
Even at this late date, he said, the Bush administration is repeating its original "fatal flaw" of not committing adequate troops, resources, and civilian personnel to the campaign, most recently by undercutting the commander's requests in staging the battle of Baghdad.
"One of the many tragedies of Iraq is that we now have experienced military commanders with sound strategies, and we are still failing to adequately support them with the necessary troops, civilian personnel, and funds," said Pollack, who briefed senior Bush administration officials in the White House last February on the need to secure the Iraqi capital and to win the support of its citizens with rapidly reconstituted government services.
"They insisted that I was exaggerating the problem of the militias and that the new Iraqi government would just make the insurgency go away. Frankly, I was stunned by their attitude," Pollack said. "So we have passed another seven months of missed opportunities, during which Iraq's problems have all gotten worse. My real fear is that we've already passed the make-or-break point and just don't realize it. Historians in five or 10 years may look back and say 2006 was the year we lost Iraq. That's my nightmare."
Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54
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