Iraq: problems and solutions

The picture in Iraq seems to get bleaker, darker, with every passing day.

Alan Richards of the University of California has no words of encouragement whatsoever:

"I have been reading the debate . . . on "What next in Iraq?" ("Unilateral withdrawal? UN forces? Staying the course?") with great interest. There is a way, however, in which I am troubled by what I perceive as a tacit assumption--a very American assumption,--underlying most of the discussion. It seems to me that even "pessimists" are actually "optimists": they assume that there exists in Iraq and the Gulf some "solution", some course of action which can actually lead to an outcome other than widespread, prolonged violence, with devastating economic, political, and social consequences. I regret to say that I think this is wrong. There is no "solution" to this mess; it is sometimes not possible to "fix" things which have been broken. I can see no course of action which will prevent widespread violence, regional social upheaval, and economic hammering administered by oil price shocks. This is why so many of us opposed the invasion of Iraq so strenuously in the first place!"

Stirling Newberry draws the parallels between the US war in Iraq and the USSR's war in Afghanistan:

"In short, the United States is fighting its own version of the war that, according to the foreign policy intellectual establishment, either brought down or hastened the fall of the USSR."

George Hunsinger notes that: "Back in September 2002 James Webb, assistant secretary of defense and secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, raised a specter that has come back to haunt us. "The issue before us," he wrote in the Washington Post, "is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years.".......On June 19 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that America's involvement in Iraq is indeed "a generational commitment.""

Hunsinger points out that "It is not surprising that the occupation lacks wide popular support. Civilian casualties - already in the tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands - are steadily on the rise. Among children malnutrition has doubled and mortality has tripled. Hospitals still lack basic medicines and equipment, water and electricity are in short supply, half the population is unemployed, and prices for food are inflated. Car bombs, assassinations, kidnappings, deadly roadblocks, stagnant sewage, and strikes from American forces are a daily occurrence. At least one million refugees have fled the country.

Those who insist on "staying the course" overlook the unpleasant fact that the occupation is the main cause of the insurgency, not its cure. Outstripped and illegitimate, it will only bring more death and destruction."

Even as far back as May last year (and a great deal has happened since then) Hunsinger was warning that "America may have lost the war in Iraq". Back then he quoted "Gen. William E. Odom, director of the Hudson Institute, a pro-administration think-tank" stating bluntly that "We have failed".

"In an interview which rocked the foreign policy establishment, Odom told the Wall Street Journal he had abandoned all hope for success in Iraq. Predicting a radical Islamist regime hostile to the West, one prepared to fund terrorist organizations, he called for the swift withdrawal of U.S. forces. Otherwise Iraqis will be radicalized even further, he warned, risking the destabilization of the entire region.

"The issue is how high a price we're going to pay," Odom insisted, "less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later." Any "continued U.S. troop presence is a losing proposition. Once you've done a stupid thing, you don't fix it by keeping doing it. Our troops are exposed; we're going to take more casualties without any capacity of destroying the enemy. That's a losing proposition.""

Meanwhile, in Turkey, the World Tribunal on Iraq has been trying to establish a true account of the build up to and effects of the invasion. According to Arundhati Roy the tribunal's aim was "to examine a vast spectrum of evidence about the motivations and consequences of the US invasion and occupation, evidence that has been deliberately marginalized or suppressed". This body of evidence will surely prove to be a great source of information for concerned activists and writers. But, even as these herculean efforts are made to move public perceptions away from the official line and towards an accurate view of events past, the new and perhaps much darker chapter described above is unfolding; a chapter which, just like its predecessors, will be subject to the distortions of Anglo-American PR.

In this morning's Guardian, Sami Ramadani, a refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime and senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, describes the notion that US withdrawal will lead to civil war as a fiction as powerful as WMD. Ramadani says that the occupiers must take their share of responsibility for the growing sectarian strife.

"Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, millions converged on Karbala chanting "La Amreeka, la Saddam" (No to America, no to Saddam). For months, Baghdad, Basra and Najaf were awash with united anti-occupation marches whose main slogan was "La Sunna, la Shia; hatha al-watan menbi'a" (no Sunni, no Shia, this homeland we shall not sell).

Such responses were predictable given Iraq's history of anti-sectarianism. But the war leaders reacted by destroying the foundations of the state and following the old colonial policy of divide and rule, imposing a sectarian model on every institution they set up, including arrangements for the January election.

When it became clear that the poorest areas of Baghdad and the south were even more hostile to the occupation than the so-called Sunni towns - answering the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's call to arms - Bush and Blair tried to defeat the resistance piecemeal, under the guise of fighting foreign terrorists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was promoted to replace Saddam as the bogeyman in chief, to encourage sectarian tension and isolate the resistance."

Ramadani is certainly right to say that "the occupation is the problem and not part of any democratic solution in Iraq". He says that within "The occupation's sectarian discourse .....Iraqis are portrayed as a people who can't wait to kill each other once left to their own devices. In fact, the occupation is the main architect of institutionalised sectarian and ethnic divisions; its removal would act as a catalyst for Iraqis to resolve some of their differences politically."

As regards the second half of this last sentence I would only say that while this is true, the extent to which peace and reconciliation would follow a US withdrawal depends on the extent to which ownership of what Ramadani describes as the "muqawama al-sharifa (the honourable resistance)" lies with ordinary Iraqis, and not with extremist groups jostling for power and influence. Even if one accepts, as I've argued before, that these extremist groups are in a minority, it must still be ensured that, in a country with a barely-functioning security apparatus, armed groups with their own agendas are not permitted to impose their will through violence, or the threat of violence. Removing the US, the greatest of these groups, can only help. But would this be sufficient? An impartial force, in the shape of a sizable UN peacekeeping contingent (apparently 500,000 troops are needed to do the job properly), would in my view still be required in order to monopolise the option of violence and ensure that the new Iraq was formed through entirely peaceful means. The occupation has severely damaged Iraq as a society and its no slight on Iraqis to say that they’ll require some outside help to start afresh. That help’s owed to them in any case (something that western anti-war protesters who are content to call for nothing beyond troop withdrawal seem willing to forget).

Returning to Alan Richards’ view that there is “no ‘solution’ to this mess”, it seems to me that, whilst we have to take a realistic view of the situation, these assertions achieve little, except encourage us to walk away from our responsibilities. To search for a solution, however slim the chances of success, is less a conceit based on some “very American assumption” that the problem can be fixed, and more an expression of a natural human urge to right a wrong that we in the west are, to a very large extent, responsible for. Therein lies the seductive power of our leaders’ insistence that we cannot “cut and run”; that we should “stay the course” and remain “as long as we are needed (and not a day longer) ... until the fight is won”.

The fact that a US defeat is being openly discussed opens up political space which can be used in order to advance the proposition that such a defeat could, in the right circumstances, lead to a victory for ordinary Iraqis. The occupiers have long exploited the seductive potency of the promise of a new Iraq. The antiwar movement can do the same, and with far greater effectiveness, since its vision of a route to that goal has the decisive advantages of being realistic, honest and standing some chance of success.