There is no easy way to leave a bad relationship with honour. But the longer you stay in it, the more dishonour and bad faith grows. Even lovers become colonizers and occupiers. The United States had had a long affair with Saddam Hussein. Now, we must end it by leaving Iraq to the Iraqis.
George Bush 1 didnt see it that way. After the 1991 war Saddam stayed in power because, as then defense secretary Dick Cheney said, conquering and having to administer Iraq and specifically Baghdad was a fools errand. Even in defeat however, Saddam sought to keep a semblance of sovereignty for Iraq and his own power as a bloody tyrant.
Then Bush 1 lost his presidency to Bill Clinton, whose secretary of state Madeleine Albright pressed an embargo already in place against the Iraqi people. Opponents to this nuanced strategy whined that it cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis including thousands of children. No matter. She said that the embargo was worth it as a means of punishing Saddam and keeping him in his cage an infelicitous metaphor signaling high policy thinking was taking place in Washington.
Inside the cage, however, Saddam did not show the proper respect. He kept the nation unified by killing thousands of his citizens with the silent assent of the United States and other nations. Regime change was called for in congressional resolutions and assented to by President Clinton. This phrase was American national security state parlance for a slow squeeze through covert operations, tepid support for local groups, punctuated with bombings to create discomfort, trauma and destruction of military targets invariably accompanied by collateral damage, that is, civilians who were unlucky. The Democrats thought this would award power to the more pliable Iraqi gangsters who were waiting in the wings. It didnt.
From secrecy to theology
Bush 2 ascended to the presidency having lost the popular vote. It seemed clear he was a nationalist with modest purposes. After 9/11 his pose changed and he became a triumphal nationalist seeking vengeance. A failed oilman, blessed with voices from God, he was helped by a Congress which met in less than deliberative circumstances because anthrax strains were found in Senate and Congressional offices. Although of military quality, the source of the anthrax has never been found. Nonetheless, a Patriot Act was passed which put the United States into limited martial law.
In these trying yet exhilarating circumstances Bush would simultaneously redeem his familys honour and transcend his fathers accomplishments. Where his father (as a former head of the CIA) believed in the grey world of the spymaster, Bush 2 lived in the world of good against evil a doctrine of self-deception. Anointed by God he would bring freedom and democracy through surgical strikes and shock and awe. After all, progress and freedom was the American purpose and to have a war of election (another name for aggressive war) was surely not a moral problem. On the contrary the very fact that a nation had chosen to go to war and stepped up to the plate against evil, proved the rightness of the cause.
Of course the national security bureaucracy had doubts. But the CIA and department of defense (DoD) were told to repeat their intelligence studies until they got them wrong.
The military was won over to the enterprise as long as it was relatively costless in American casualties and provided for the honing of new technologies under battlefield conditions. The military commanders knew that Iraq was no imminent threat to the United States. The DoD doubted that there were weapons of mass destruction, and if there were, that they existed in operable form. The question became: why not?
The war itself must not be judged in terms of having anything to do with Iraq. It was an American domestic affair of self-definition a sole superpower showing it could spread its wings and show its credibility through the shock and awe of preponderant military power. In this state of political grace several superpower features are necessary: deception and lies; propaganda; refined modes of military communication (fighting wars to test out new schemes to fight wars); and, retain its overwhelming military dominance in all types of weaponry from strategic nuclear weapons to torture.
Of course there was also vulgar materialism either through intention or consequence. It did not escape the Bush 2 administration that securing bases in the former Soviet Union and its allies was a means of controlling fuel to the west and Japan. It would not have to fear unstable oil prices or that competing nations might become too powerful economically, for they could always be brought to their knees on an energy leash pulled by the United States.
The least worst solution
So, the question is what should be done now as so much pain and suffering continues as a result of this war of election in Iraq?
It is important to grasp that if Bush 2 and his advisors decide to leave Iraq they will do so for internal political reasons. They will change the storyline and images on television in much the way Reagan successfully did when he withdrew from the Lebanon and then declared war on Grenada. American leaders in desperate circumstances have no compunctions about abandoning their ideals and local allies alike.
Bush and Cheney may have cried crocodile tears for the suffering of the Iraqi people under Hussein but leaders and bureaucracies are seldom moved by humanitarian reasons in international politics. For them human rights constitute a political value only to the extent that they further or mask other purposes including defeat. This is especially true where a domestic political miscalculation has been made.
There is concern that if the US leaves Iraq democracy will fail. The Middle East and perhaps the world will revert to the Middle Ages, even the Dark Ages. There will be a bloodbath, civil war; the Shia will win and they are theocratic; Turkey will grab off Kurdistan for itself, the bases the US is building in the former Soviet Union will be lost and therefore oil supplies will become problematic for the US and the west. Thus, Iraq must be occupied for at least a generation.
There are different forms of democracy, but none includes domination by an outside power. What the United States and Britain are attempting has nothing to do with self-rule and inclusivity, the basis of democracy. As we are reminded every day in the United States, self-rule and inclusivity are not easy conceptions to put into practice. They take continuous struggle. What is also clear is that neo-colonialism, and imperialism are not the same as democracy.
Furthermore, if the US and its allies stay in Iraq there is every reason to expect that the traditionalists who believe in sexual domination by men and a revolt against modernism especially in its scientific and educational form will spread. For there will be no room for civil society to grow or political groups to find the means of composing their differences through non-imposed compromise if the US stays and all parts of the society are committed to getting rid of the occupier.
As for the bloodbath argument, they are hardly new. To stop them, the United Nations was created after the second world war. Perhaps, it was thought there was a role for reason and a shared morality, hence the genocide treaty.
Tragically, the US had no interest in applying the genocide convention to the African case or building a permanent international force vested in the UN. Bloodbaths can only be prevented where leaders and people have reason not to organise or participate in them. This means that an international context must be created that clarifies, applauds and enforces limits of behaviour. This is not the task of any one nation. It is the task of a universal UN which builds on the Declaration of Human Rights and the various human rights covenants to enforce them as part of national and local law. But note that such a structure is light years away from the present situation. Indeed, even writing about such matters may appear to be quixotic.
As a result, we must look to another kind of history: the history of experience. American colonies after the revolutionary war were deeply split among themselves. Millions became refugees and went to Canada; there was a struggle between classes, regions of the country, religion and around slavery. This standoff lasted for seventy years and was pasted over in a jerrybuilt constitution which continues to hold even as it is radically changed. But there was no bloodbath.
By 1860 the regional compromises could no longer hold and a civil war occurred. 600,000 people died and no doubt a generation or more of suffering was one of the results of Americas civil war. The British were told to stay out of the civil war or else Abraham Lincoln would expand the war and grab Canada.
Much of the world has gone through horrifying bloodbaths and continuous wars. None is in a position to lecture the Iraqi people.
Perhaps the Shia may win a democratic election which is not rigged. Of course democracy may not come out the way either the occupier or any group contending for power intended. In that case there is indeed the danger of civil war. But that is why legitimate authority must be found among the contending parties. It cannot be imposed especially where the occupier has an agenda freighted with all sorts of self-interested purposes.
But no one should assume that all who owe fealty to an ideology or religion march to the same beat. During the cold war the assumption was that there was one religion, communism, in many states. And the assumption was that all were in agreement about the meaning of the communist religion. Nothing could have been further from the truth to anyone who had the slightest knowledge of Soviet and Chinese communism. Islam too differs substantially and where civil society has roots as it did in Iraq even during the tyrannical reign of Saddam, it is not likely that people will readily surrender to a particular sect even if that sect is the majority.
No occupying power can choose the leaders of the occupied. Poisoned at this stage of history, by cries of self-determination and independence, no inchoate state or people will accept its dependence. What it can control is its own internal dynamics.
The question of a separate state for the Kurds remains. The United States used the Kurds, first encouraging independence and then double-crossing them in a complex set of relations between the US, Iraq and the Soviet Union authored by the winner of the Nobel prize for peace, Henry Kissinger. The Kurds who have struggled among themselves between the Barzani and Talabani groups have now found basic agreement, each accepting and willing to fight for relative independence inside an Iraqi state. At this stage the Kurds have a clear view of their limits and they would be so informed by the United States and Russia just as Turkey would be so informed.
No one can win Bush 2s war, least of all the United States. The best strategy for the US is to get out now before its military forces become utterly demoralised, and before insane discussions occur calling for weapons of mass destruction such as bunker-busters and mini-nukes to be used as serious ways to obtain victory.
The Americans are not in Iraq in good faith, cant alter this, will never gain legitimacy in Iraqi eyes and should leave as soon as possible. Dire warnings about what will happen express fears about Americas loss, not Iraqi realities there, the people can and must sort their country for themselves.
