Sooner or later, somebody’s going to have to be
irresponsible enough to
suggest a sane way out of Iraq. The futility
of expecting the Bush administration
to acknowledge its epic bungling is obvious.
The president speaks in tired
formulas that no longer even seem calculated
to persuade. "The only way our
enemies can succeed," George W. Bush said recently,
"is if we forget the lessons
of Sept. 11—if we abandon the Iraqi people to
men like [Abu Musab al-]
Zarqawi." Most Americans now understand that
occupying Iraq has made the
U.S. more vulnerable to terrorism, sapping U.S.
military strength while sowing
fanatics like dragon’s teeth. Polls show that
66 percent believe, correctly,
that Bush has no realistic plan to extricate
U.S. troops.
Name-brand Washington Democrats aren’t much better.
Ever since Bush
bum-rushed Congress into writing him a blank
check before the 2002
congressional elections, the "responsible" (i.
e., safest) position on Iraq has been
to appear on TV yakfests prating about America’s
commitment, sacrifice,
determination, etc. Some even emulate GOP faculty
lounge toughs, accusing
skeptics of Bush’s noble plan to turn Mesopotamia
into Iowa of lacking
patriotism or failing to comprehend that terrorists
are evil.
These lofty sentiments are made more acceptable
because, apart from the
uniformed military, nobody’s sacrificing a damn
thing. (I’m a fan of
"Operation Yellow Elephant," a tongue-in-cheek
effort to get Young
Republicans to enlist. Maybe they should try
some Democratic Leadership
Council keyboard warriors, too.) They disguise
the reality that America’s
first pre-emptive war has turned into a political
and strategic disaster,
and that the longer American and British troops
remain in Iraq,
the worse things are apt to get.
Since everybody’s so fond of World War II analogies,
here’s mine: Iraq
is Dunkirk. If we want to win the greater war,
we need to pull out ASAP.
We’re overextended, overexposed and surrounded.
The U.S. never sent
enough troops to begin with and reinforcements
aren’t coming.
Strategically, the greatest beneficiary of Iraq’s
"regime change" has been
neighboring Iran. The winners in January’s elections
were two Shiite
religious parties and Kurdish nationalists. The
Kurds have long been allied
with Iran, with its large Kurdish minority.
Both Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s
Dawa Party and SCIRI—the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq—seek a religious state
much like Iran’s. The two countries have exchanged
recent high-level state
visits. The Iraqis apologized for Saddam Hussein’s
brutal 1980s aggression
against Iran, vowed that nobody (guess who) would
be allowed to attack
Iran from its territory and promised reparations.
The Iranians pledged oil
pipelines and refineries.
These actions have driven the Sunni Arab insurgency
to new levels of
barbarity. Sunni fundamentalists hate Persian
Shiites even more than
Americans, who will be leaving some day, after
all, while the Iranians
remain. "We are capturing or killing a lot of
insurgents," a senior Army
intelligence officer recently told The New York
Times. "But they’re
being replaced quicker than we can interdict
their operations. There is
always another insurgent ready to step up and
take charge."
Apart from understanding that it’s a bizarre mixture
of Islamic
fundamentalists and Baathist militarists, American
officers privately
admit they know no more about the insurgency
than they did the day
Saddam’s government fell. By slaughtering Shiite
civilians (and turncoat
Sunnis), the insurgents are clearly trying to
start a civil war and prevent
an Iraqi constitution formalizing their hereditary
enemy’s power over
them. After all, Sunnis have run Iraq since the
days of the Ottoman Turks.
Should a three-way civil war get under way—Sunni
insurgents fighting
against Iranian-trained Shiite militias, with
Kurdish peshmerga troops
retreating to defend their own territory—hardly
anybody thinks coalition
troops can prevent sheer bloody chaos from overrunning
the country.
Last week, veteran New York Times correspondent
John F. Burns filed a
somewhat tardy analysis suggesting that civil
war has already begun—tardy,
because Burns now tells us that when Ambassador
John Negroponte arrived
in Iraq last year (he’s returned to Washington
to become intelligence "czar"),
his team" called the departing Americans ‘the
illusionists,’ for their conviction
that America could create a Jeffersonian democracy
on the ruins of Saddam
Hussein’s medieval brutalism. "Needless to say,
that wasn’t the official line
at the time. Now, Burns writes, senior American
officers privately admit that
all this brave talk about training an Iraqi army
—" As Iraqis stand up, we
will stand down" was Bush’s cinematic line—may
consist largely of
equipping rival tribes and factions for a slaughter.
Furthermore, if we’re
going to be bloody-minded about it—and it’s about
damn time somebody
was—the only outcome bad for American security
would be an al-Qa’ida
friendly government in Baghdad. That outcome
seems unlikely now, but
more likely the more Iraqis we kill. Remember
that tough-talkers telling
you differently predicted a "cakewalk" and insisted
that Iraq had no
history of ethnic violence.
Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.