The American invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest geopolitical blunders in history. Unfortunately, it will almost surely get far worse before it gets better, not least because “The Decider” is still at the helm for another two years. Even the not-so-subtle promptings of the Baker commission have produced little impact on this most stubborn – and stubbornly wrong – of American presidents, except perhaps an even deeper digging in of his heels.
In Vietnam, a relatively clean exit was possible, with, frankly, not so significant effects from the war on the United States. That may not seem accurate given the anguish of individual Americans and even the country at the time, but in a relative sense it surely is. America in the 1970s, happy and prosperous, bore no relation whatever to Germany or France or even Britain following World War II, or for that matter, Vietnam in the 1970s. We may well have lost the war, but – notwithstanding the domestic turmoil it engendered – no defeated power was ever so insulated from the costs of that defeat.
The same is unlikely to be true once we depart from Iraq. Instead, that mistake retains the capacity to grow vastly more disastrous, possibly multiplying the carnage within Iraq, sucking in surrounding powers into an internationalized civil war, and jeopardizing energy supplies to industrialized economies around the world.
America and most Americans will still be carefully insulated from those effects, but because the exit itself will not be “clean”, Iraq is likely to be a gift which keeps on giving for a long time. While its invasion of Afghanistan had little direct effect within the Soviet Union, the ultimate consequences were severe (leaving aside the fact that the war – and the United States – helped create and arm the radical Islamic jihadi movement which now threatens the West), leading, along with other factors, to the dissolution of the Soviet Union less than a decade later, an idea which was unthinkable just a year before it happened.
Is the United States going to become the Un-united States, then, because we’ve made a hash of Iraq? Doubtful. But it is equally doubtful that we get out of this easily. Indeed, even if we only count what has been spent so far in terms of American lives, money, military power, prestige, credibility and honor, the costs are already enormous. My guess is this just the beginning, and that would be true if we were packing up and leaving tomorrow.
Alas, we are not. On that score, two things seem to me painfully clear now. One is that George W. Bush’s priorities in Iraq are George W. Bush – period, full stop. No great surprise there. Still the magnitude of what is being sacrificed to preserve this man’s incredibly fragile sense of himself is breathtaking. The second observation follows from the first. Bush’s seems to believe that his only possible “way out”, absurd though it is, will be to continue the war for the next two years as he has for the last two. That is, simmering on a medium flame, neither high enough to raise a boil, nor low enough to go cold.
Since either extreme would represent an end to American involvement, he won’t let it happen. Instead, Bush will hand the war off to the next American president, who will most assuredly be a Democrat for the same reasons that Robert Gates, a man with a whole lot of historical baggage, sailed through his Senate confirmation hearings in one day. Just as Gates’ greatest asset (simultaneously both necessary and sufficient for his confirmation) was that he wasn’t Donald Rumsfeld, so the same logic will apply in 2008. Assuming Bush does not change course dramatically in Iraq, any Democratic nominee for president (yes, even the pathetic John Kerry) will stomp any Republican nominee in that election, and the Republican bloodbath of 2006 will look like a warm tubby in comparison.
But, so be it, thinks W., whose loyalty to the GOP will ultimately prove not much stronger than his loyalty to the Constitution (which is to say essentially non-existent). He will have achieved his crucial singular objective, serving the needs of his crucial singular constituent, whatever the cost (to other people, of course). The demand for an exit from Iraq will be at epic proportions by January 2009, and President Hillary (?) will proceed accordingly. Thus, Bush will always be able to say that he did not lose the war, and that had we just stayed a bit longer we would have won.
Even more remarkably, there are some who will always believe that, just as they follow a similar dogma about Vietnam to this day. After all, some 30 percent or more of Americans still approve of the job this guy is doing as president, a figure that never fails to astonish me. I mean, what would it take that the guy hasn’t already done for them to disapprove?!?! I used to joke that even evidence that he was a pedophile would not dissuade some of these folks from their admiration for this least admirable of men. Ha-ha, eh? The GOP handling of the Mark Foley scandal has proven my little quip not altogether so funny anymore. Especially if you happen to be a congressional page.
Meanwhile, back in “the reality-based community”, the Iraqi and American houses are on fire, but the tsunamis headed toward both will hardly dampen the flames, for they are massive waves of gasoline. The time has long ago come for some honest talk about realistic solutions to the mess Little George has made in our shared sandbox. Unfortunately, regardless of whether one supported the invasion of Iraq or not, and regardless of the neoconservatives’ once grand ambitions for the world, such solutions now appear to be scarce in the extreme. As with global warming, there is the scary feeling that having allowed this fool to roll dice for six years in a real-world game of Risk, the situation no longer permits any solution worthy of the name.
The one offered by the Iraq Study Group (Baker) report, for example, is a bad joke, because it is built on a series of assumptions, each one of which is implausible, and all of which collectively constitute epically irresponsible fantasy. To wit: The commission assumes that an Iraqi government exists, per se, which can implement its collective will, also assumed to exist. The report assumes that this government could achieve strategic goals which the richest and greatest military power that the planet has ever known has been unable to accomplish. It assumes that Iraq’s neighboring states have a great deal of sway within the country, that they have a greater interest in checking chaos there than in benefitting from it, and that they can be persuaded by an administration in Washington which has spent six years bullying them and which still refuses to talk to them. It assumes that sectarian strife won’t amplify as US forces are withdrawn, either in response to the Iraqi ‘government’ standing up, or failing to. The report assumes that Iraq can be put together again, after all the sectarian violence, hatred and desire for vengeance which has been sown. And, perhaps most absurdly, it assumes that George W. Bush will adopt these anodyne and therefore hopelessly insufficient prescriptions – in toto, no less, as the commission strongly urges – though he had already begun distancing himself from the report weeks before it was released, and is now instead floating trial balloons about a ‘surge’ which would actually increase American forces in country.
(Oh, by the way, we know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have unanimously opposed this plan. That they would allow their opposition to become public knowledge is indicative of the degree to which Bush has lost their trust. More importantly, remember that the president – frequently and rightly harangued for his poor judgement in not sending sufficient troops to Iraq – has repeated his explanatory mantra for this world-class goof with religious regularity, always claiming that he listens to his commanders when it comes to determining the number of troops needed in Iraq. Something tells me we won’t be hearing that line this time...)
For Iraq, in sum, there are many non-solutions on the table. Baker’s ISG report is only the most prominent and disappointing of the lot. For several years now it has looked like there are simply no answers for this disaster, even disregarding whatever political persuasion one brings to the table. As with the doomed passengers on the Titanic, once the iceberg was struck there was little choice but to wait to die.
But there is one possibility that still exists for solving this crisis and preventing further destruction to Iraq and beyond. The sad truth is that the best-case scenario for Iraq at this point would be to partition it. To see why, let’s begin with a painfully honest inventory of the stakes, capabilities, possibilities and alternatives now on the table:
● First, it must be understood that we are long past being able to dream of optimal solutions. What remains is to identify the least-worst outcome given the cards that have already been played.
● It is also time to recognize what everybody outside the Oval Office has now come to understand – namely, that Iraq is not only plunged into sectarian domestic strife, but in fact now represents one of the worst cases of civil war on record.
● Moreover, Humpty Dumpty will not be going back together again, except possibly under a Saddam-like strongman employing Saddam-like violence (hardly a preferable solution, even if it could be achieved). Too much trust has been destroyed, too much sectarian hatred provoked, and too much blood spilled to reasonably expect a unified Iraq in the foreseeable future.
● And, even apart from the fighting, such unity hardly exists today. The Kurds have established a separate country in all but name, and the Shia are almost equally jealous of their autonomy. Refugees who aren’t fleeing the country altogether are migrating to their ‘‘correct’’ regions, to avoid being slaughtered. Whole neighborhoods are ethnically purifying themselves. The UN estimates that 3.4 million of a total population of 25 million Iraqis have already become internal or external refugees from the violence and peril surrounding their former homes. Even worse, by the most credible estimate another two-thirds of a million are refugees of another sort, having been permanently relocated to new homes underground (if you catch my drift here).
● The United States must recognize the limitations of its capabilities, particularly in the politically feasible context of a volunteer-only military, a condition extremely unlikely to change in the future, especially for purposes of saving Iraq. American forces simply cannot prevail in the sort of guerrilla insurgency type of conflict which is today consuming that country. Nor can they prevent combatants in a civil war from destroying each other if the playing field for that contest is an urban landscape in which the multiple factions are intertwined and essentially undetectable from one another.
● American military forces are capable of high effectiveness, however, at both providing large-scale logistical support and fighting a conventional war in which territorial borders are established and defended. The United States also remains the richest country on earth, and therefore has the capacity to reach far into its deep pockets for purposes of rebuilding what it has now destroyed.
● There is clearly no possibility of external assistance for the United States in Iraq. As if a completely unwarranted invasion of a sovereign state in an act of naked imperialism wasn’t alienating enough (and this is precisely how the invasion appeared to most of the rest of the world), six years of high-handed arrogance in dealing with our allies has precluded any chance of additional support for the current mission. Indeed, even Tony Blair’s Britain – Bush’s most steadfast ally – is now making noises about withdrawing within the year. If anything, external support for bailing America out of Iraq under present conditions will continue to diminish. It will certainly not increase. There is no deus ex machina for the United States in Iraq. Arrogant sole superpowers can fall to their knees and pray to cardboard deities all they want. There is no one around to rescue them.
● All that said, and however much both Iraqis and Americans might want the US out of Iraq, it must be understood that any precipitous departure of American forces would likely accelerate the Iraqi civil war into a yet more massive bloodletting. Similarly, a phase-out of US forces, sans any other strategic changes to current conditions, would only create a phase-in of a power vacuum, likely to be filled by wider violent clashes of even deeper intensity.
● In terms of domestic American politics, George Bush appears unable to withdraw from Iraq under present circumstances, since he rightly perceives that whatever scraps of his historical legacy that remain as yet unwritten are joined at the hip with that country’s fate. While it seems unlikely that others in the Republican Party would allow Bush to continue unchecked forever, dragging them over a cliff until the party consists only of W, Laura and Barney, forcibly removing him from office would be equally suicidal for the GOP. Thus, for the period of the next two years, this means that for any proposed solution to the Iraqi crisis to have a chance at being adopted, it must allow Bush to save face, and therefore it cannot take the overt form of outright defeat.
● Finally, at the risk of stating what is obvious to almost everyone in America – although not necessarily to the president – it must be noted that remaining locked on the present course of neither escalating nor retreating, neither winning nor losing, and all the while destroying but not building, not only does not represent a solution, but leaves us on the same arc of incremental deterioration we’ve lived these last several years. Or, more likely, accelerates us into something far worse when the crisis tips beyond some critical mass turning point lurking out there on the near horizon.
Given these parameters as an unfortunate but unavoidable predicate, the question then becomes one of finding the least-worst solution which can fit the straightjacket they impose. There is hardly much to choose from, but fortunately one option exists which best promises the benefits of ending the violence, preventing its further spread, and giving all the actors involved an imperfect solution, though one which is vastly preferable to the alternatives.
● Step one is to recognize that Iraq as we’ve known it can no longer continue to exist. However painful it is to all concerned, the best solution – perhaps the only solution – is now to partition Iraq into three autonomous states, one each for Sunni, Shia and Kurd. For some reason, many find the disintegration of existing states a troubling notion, but there is no inherent reason why it should be, particularly in a case like Iraq or Yugoslavia, where the cobbled-together prior polity was an improbable creation from the beginning. Both the former Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia show us that multinational states can be successfully unraveled, and even with minimal or zero violence. On the other hand, both Yugoslavia and Chechnya demonstrate the costs of unsuccessful forced marriages.
● As stated above, the two objectives that American forces can successfully achieve in Iraq are logistical support and territorial defense. There will need to be a great deal of movement of refugees between the three newly created states. American forces can do much to facilitate safe passage in that process by establishing secure transit corridors. And those same forces can then successfully protect each emergent state’s new and clearly defined territorial borders from the possible hostile ambitions of the other two.
● Similarly, American forces can successfully assist in helping to defend the borders of these new states from any external encroachment by existing neighboring states. This is the sort of mission for which they are well suited, and in a least one case, for which they are very likely to be necessary. Turkey, or least Turkey as its government construes itself, would be one of the biggest losers and angriest protagonists in the case of Iraqi partition, since it has been adamant about preventing the establishment of a Kurdistan on its borders, and has threatened the use of force to prevent that outcome. In truth, such a new country is not itself a threat, but only the magnet-like pull it would be presumed to exert on other Kurds long residing within Turkey. If the integrity of the Turkish state could be guaranteed, a new Kurdistan would therefore represent far less of a problem than Turkey now imagines. In any case, although significant damage would be done to American relations with Turkey, this is a price which must unfortunately be paid (and certain side deals, along with the above-described guarantee, could mitigate such damages considerably). But in the end, the positioning of American forces on Turkey’s border would certainly prevent an invasion of the new Kurdistan.
● The bad news for the American military in all of this is that defending the borders of these three new countries would represent an enormous task, and very likely one which would require equally enormous personnel resources to accomplish. The first bit of good news is that the 140,000 American forces now stuck trying to keep the domestic peace could largely be available to be deployed for this alternative mission once partition ended Iraq’s civil war.
● Moreover, once rough national homogeneity was established within each of the three new states, we could expect a fairly rapid construction of real governments, with real sovereignty, and with the genuine capacity to provide for domestic and external security. Thus, American forces would at that point be assisting popular and powerful governments in deploying loyal and motivated forces for purposes of defending their own borders.
● Additionally, it is possible that under such an approach other world powers would be willing to contribute forces to help underwrite this solution, as opposed to heretofore being unwilling to facilitate the imposition of American hegemony in the region. Particularly because so much is at stake for the world, one might readily imagine countries like France, Germany, Japan, Canada and Australia assisting in the process of undoing George Bush’s Mesopotamian debacle, conceivably even joined by Russian, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian or Nigerian boots on the ground. Large contingents of military forces from other far-flung countries might even be deployed for these purposes under the flag of a traditional United Nations interpositionary peacekeeping mission.
● For the Sunnis, who have long dominated Iraq despite their minority status, partition brings with it the opportunity for continued control over their own destiny, not a small thing considering the alternative of being a reviled and endangered minority within a Shiite-dominated Iraq. On the other hand, Sunnis would be much disappointed at the lack of oil revenue to which they’’d be entitled based purely on the natural positioning of underground fields. Some sort of financial or territorial compensation must therefore be factored into the plan to provide the Sunnis with a significant portion of oil revenues.
● The United States is responsible for unspeakable carnage, human suffering and physical damage in Iraq. Even if its motives for invading were pure – which most of the world does not believe to be the case – it’s negligence and worse in the occupation have been shameful and criminal. America owes the Iraqi people a tremendous debt, which can begin to be repaid through the transfer of large sums of money from American taxpayers to the citizens and governments of the three newly created states. Such sums would go a long ways toward helping these countries establish themselves, and would go some ways toward rebuilding America’s reputation in the region and the world. Reconstruction dollars would not be wasted, as they are now, by insurgent targeting of such projects, and presumably would be used this time to create indigenous jobs, rather than to line the pockets of American contractors.
● Finally, history has shown that partition is an ugly business with a myriad of personal tragedies attendant to it. It should therefore only be adopted in desperate circumstances, when all the other alternatives are far worse. Unfortunately, that is precisely Iraq’s story today, such that only the sectarian violence of the past and the likely much worse destruction of the future make partition appear as a preferred alternative. That said, it still must be a voluntary process, though in truth there will be few who will be willing to live as minorities in their traditional homeland, especially given the degree of hatred produced in recent years. Indeed, that is already the case, and desperate mass internal migrations are already effectively partitioning the country. Far more of that would now be occurring if more Iraqis had the resources, connections and sufficient security arrangements to move as well. In any case, no one should be forced to leave home against their will, and any subsequently created government guilty of ethnic cleansing or internal repression of minorities should be punished accordingly by the international community, and prevented from continuing such mass human rights violations.
From one perspective, the notion of partitioning a foreign country – the idea of the imperial metropole deciding a people’s fate from a capital thousands of miles away – is as abhorrent as it is reminiscent of the sheer arrogance which has characterized American diplomacy during the George W. Bush years. Yet even those who would be sensitive to such concerns must remember how far down the road to Hell we’ve now come, and – more importantly – must understand that the other alternatives are far worse. There are no good choices for Iraq anymore, only least-worst ones. There is no more room for complete cultural sensitivity in solving this crisis under conditions in which the remaining compassionate alternative is simply to save lives.
A sensibly implemented partition plan is clearly the least-worst outcome for Iraq, the region and the world. It can very likely end the violence there. It plays to the strengths of the United States, rather than its weaknesses. It is a plan which would allow Bush to get out, claiming some measure of success, however absurd such a claim would be in the greater scheme of things (indeed, one or more of the new states created might even approximate a democratic form of government, as Iran does today). It will create stability in the region. It will keep oil flowing and thus avert the precipitation of a global economic depression. And it allows America to begin the process of buying back some of the good will it has so profligately squandered in the last six years.
We must swallow hard, make those sacrifices and reparations which at least begin to atone for the damage done, and partition Iraq. Only this solution – not George Bush’s stay the course, and certainly not the Baker commission’s vagaries about possibly moving a few battalions to this position or that – can save the people there, and indeed can save us, from a fate even worse than the present disaster.
