None of this
should be surprising. In November 2002, at his request, I wrote a private
memorandum to Gary Hart (a friend going back to the start of the George McGovern
presidential effort in 1971) on how the situation might unfold. Here’s part of
what I said:
“... while the impending war on Iraq may prove to be fairly easy... the
post-war occupation is certainly going to be ugly. Iraq is a huge country. The
oil fields, the cities and the airports will need to be protected. The
protectors will need to be protected. Saddam has 150,000 secret police who will
not physically disappear. There is a large Shi’a population with whom our
relations could deteriorate quickly if their leaders don’t like our rule. Worst
of all there is Al Qaida. They are not in Iraq right now, but they will be. And
they will find plenty of fresh targets in occupied Iraq. Algeria comes to mind;
does anyone remember?”
“... Saddam’s government is ugly, but at present at least the Kurdish
population is protected from him at low cost. The case for putting the U.S.
Army at the service of the rest of the opposition remains totally unpersuasive
and cannot be coherently made. This point becomes obvious when one reads the
screeds suggesting that Iraq might somehow become an oasis of democracy in the
Middle East. They are mostly written by people who fought to the last against a
free vote for the presidency in Florida.”
“Once we have invaded, getting out again is not going to be easy. On the
contrary, it will be very easy for Al Qaida and others to guarantee just enough
turmoil to ensure that it is never quite safe to leave. The choice will
therefore become one of staying and bleeding, or of accepting an ignominious
retreat – think the Israelis from South Lebanon but on a much larger scale.
People need to understand that a decision to invade Iraq is, in effect, a
decision to establish what will be, for practical purposes, a permanent zone
of occupation there....”
“Empire is an economic system. But it is a system that works only in the
presence of an overwhelming advantage of force, a general acquiescence of the
regional leadership, large local security forces, and an absence of determined
opposition. The British held India because, and only so long as, they enjoyed
these advantages. In the Sudan, the matter was already different as early as
the 1880s. The defeat of the successors to the Mahdi at Omdurman was only
because, as Hilaire Belloc put it: “Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim
Gun, and they have not.”
“But in modern conditions the correlation of forces does not lie with
the imperial power. Explosives, mines, booby traps, rockets and similar weapons of
resistance are too cheap and too effective. We will certainly face determined
opposition in Iraq, sooner or later and possibly sooner, once the euphoria following
the overthrow of Saddam wears off and as our other enemies get a chance to
get into the game. The same will be increasingly true of our position elsewhere
in the Middle East. In the face of determined opposition, empire has costs that
no modern democracy can sustain – and certainly not the United States with
our attachment to peacetime prosperity and abhorrence of body bags.”
