Former Lieutenant General William Odom, who served head of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, had a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post detailing the reasons that victory in Iraq is simply not possible.
The fundamental problem, Odom argues, is that the assumptions that underlied the decision to go to war were fundamentally flawed. Specifically, we were told that the goal would be the creation of a post-Saddam Iraq that was democratic and pro-American. As Odom points out, that goal ignored two important points:
First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly “constitutional” — meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.
So much for the stable democracy thing, what about the pro-American part ?
Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis’ rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning. Today the Iraqi government survives only because its senior members and their families live within the heavily guarded Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and military command.
Without American military protection, it is highly unlikely that the present Iraqi government would survive.
Odom goes on to demolish the arguments advanced by the Bush Administration and it’s supporters in favor of continuing the present strategy. For example, there’s the Iran argument:
2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran’s influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president’s initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power — groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.
Which is precisely what is happening. This morning’s Post, for example, reports on the unsuprising fact that Iran is arming Shia militias in Iraq — something which I’m sure some war supporters will argue is causus belli for attacking Iran.
Then, there’s the al Qaeda argument:
3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq’s doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.
Odom argues that, instead of continuing with the failed policies of the past, the United States needs to rethink it’s approach to the Middle East. Stability, rather than a crusade for democracy, should be the goal. Would it work ? Who knows, but it has to be better than continuing a war that has no end in sight.
