Rhetorically speaking, George W. Bush’s most seductive
argument for invading Iraq
is that it’s better to "fight the terrorists
around the world so we do not have to face them
here at home." That’s what he said during his
disastrous first debate with Sen. John Kerry.
You hear his supporters repeating the formula
every day. For some, it’s like this:
Arabs killed Americans, so fighting terror means
killing Arabs. Unfortunately, like much of
his scripted, action/adventure film dialogue,
Bush’s false dualism has prevented people from
grasping the nature of the terrorist enemy, the
vastness of the Arab world and the limits of
American power. The obvious problem, as Kerry
reminded Bush, is that Iraq didn’t attack
the United States, al-Qa’ida did. Maybe some
insurgents attacking American targets in Iraq
are allied with Osama bin Laden, maybe not. It’s
almost beside the point. Many didn’t exist
until the U.S. took down Saddam Hussein, a glorified
mob boss who tolerated no dissent.
Now there are so many guerrilla groups that U.S.
military planners can’t keep them straight.
"Unlike a classical insurgency," Brig. Gen. Erwin
Lessel told The New York Times, "these
groups don’t offer anything. They’ve got differing
goals, competing ideologies, and don’t
offer anything positive."
They agree about kicking foreign invaders out
of Iraq, period. What’s more, Lessel’s only
referring to Sunni insurgents. Shiite rebels,
like those loyal to so-called firebrand cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr, currently negotiating with the
government, have their own ideas.
For now, al-Sadr’s making nice; six months out,
who knows?
Meanwhile, al-Qa’idaterrorists keep plotting their
hellish schemes on their own mysterious
schedule. See, that’s the thing about the Iraq
invasion even Kerry won’t say: It didn’t
demonstrate American strength, it demonstrated
our vulnerability. It didn’t teach our enemies
to fear the awesome might of the U.S. killing
machine. It showed exactly what bin Laden,
a cunning propagandist, told them: Americans
have no compunction about slaughtering Arabs
from the air. But they lack the ruthlessness
to occupy Islamic countries for long. "[T] here is
nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than
the American invasion and occupation
of Iraq," writes CIA anti-terrorist expert "Anonymous"
in his chilling book, "Imperial Hubris."
Basically, he argues that the U.S. either needs
to reduce friction with Muslims by helping settle
the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, stop propping
up dictators like former CIA client Saddam or
prepare for total war across the entire region.
"Shock and awe," they called it, like a rock band
on tour. Intent to prove their theories, White
House and Pentagon philosophers of empire, most
of whom had never been to war, ignored repeated
warnings that 130,000 U.S. soldiers, most of
them support troops, couldn’t possibly bring
order to a nation as big as California.
Recent press accounts of Bush administration "planning"
sessions on Iraq read like "Catch-22."
Knight-Ridder’s Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
write of a meeting between war planners
and intelligence officials at a South Carolina
air base days before the invasion. The Army lieutenant
colonel giving the briefing showed a slide describing
the Pentagon’s plan for rebuilding Iraq after
the war. "To be provided," it read.
So here’s the new plan, literally as I write:
According to the BBC, Bush now says an Islamic
republic in Iraq would be OK if that’s what voters
choose. "I will be disappointed," he said in
an Air Force One interview. "But democracy is
democracy."
Is that the flip-flop of little Republican feet
I hear? Is that what Bush meant by "Mission accomplished"?
Does he not grasp that" Islamic" and "republic"
go together like all those People’s Democratic Republics
they used to have in Eastern Europe? The mind
reels. Would that be a Shiite Islamic Republic allied
with Iran? A Sunni Islamic Republic holding tea
parties for al-Qa’ida? With or without veiled women
and mandatory beards?
If that’s all the White House hoped to accomplish,
U.S. troops could have torn down that statue of
Saddam and pulled out the next morning. Iraq
could have gotten its now inevitable civil war started
and more than a thousand patriotic Americans
would not have had to die there.
That said, letting the Iraqis impose a theocracy
upon themselves may be the least bad outcome of the
Bush administration’s folly and incompetence.
For months, I’ve been directing angry rightwingers to a
Mercator projection, pointing out that the "Arab
world" stretches from Morocco to Pakistan. We simply
cannot wage war upon the entire region; there
aren’t enough of us. In terms even Bush might grasp, Iran
alone, a non-Arab Islamic republic far more unified
than Saddam’s fragmented kingdom, is roughly 2.5
times bigger than Texas, with much more difficult
terrain. But never mind. Fearing defeat in November,
Bush has signaled that he’ll declare victory
and bug out. Next question: Who gets the blame?
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little
Rock author
and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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