An Iraqi Dinar for my Thoughts

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A friend asked me what I think about the current situation in Iraq and whether we should pull out. Here's what I wrote back.

The current assault on the city of Fallujah and fighting in other areas of Iraq are producing some of the most intensive urban combat that American troops have seen since 1993. And fire fights in built up urban areas chews up infantry and spits them out as hamburger. Fighting in urban areas scares infantry soldiers of today as much as trench warfare terrified the teen troopers of a hundred years ago. It is the arena where all sides are relatively equal, the advantages of technology are blunted, and both sides will suffer disproportionately. It's great if you're the underdog defender with very little equipment, but awful if you're attacking and trying to keep losses down.

So as the days pass, Fallujah reminds me more and more of the battle memoirs from men who fought to recapture Hue in South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in 1968. This battle went down in U.S. Marine Corps history as one of the toughest battles they ever fought and they had to do it to take back a formerly friendly city after it was taken over by local cadres of viet cong insurgents. Final result? A lot of dead people, a city in rubble, and delaying the installment of a Communist mayor for seven years. After 25 days of fighting, 210 American and over 11,000 Vietnamese lives bought a reprieve of seven years.

"Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe."
--John Milton (1608-1674)

To date since the war began, over 640 American soldiers have died in Iraq plus at least 100 more in Afghanistan. And don't forget about the coalition nations (UK, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Poland, El Salvador, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine) which have accumulated over 90 dead soldiers. That is over 800 dead soldiers not including around 4,000 wounded. Then add over 150 UN, international aid personnel, and foreign contractors (many of whom are armed security consultants (aka mercenaries). So over 1,000 non-Iraqis have been killed and over 4,000 wounded. And that's leaving out all of the Iraqi dead and wounded who number in the tens of thousands. This is shaping up to be a bloody little war of occupation, and there's no end in sight. Sigh...

To compare and contrast, more U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat overseas in the past year than in the past twenty years. This includes the conflicts in Lebanon (1982-1984), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Persian Gulf (1991), Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994-1996), and Yugoslavia (1999). All of these conflicts combined killed 473 U.S. troops.

So what should the U.S. policy makers do now? Continue as normal and persevere, or withdraw?

I don't think that the U.S. can pull out cleanly now. It's like being asked when you stopped beating your wife. Any answer makes you look bad. The only way out was to not beat your wife in the first place.

Going into Iraq was not necessarily a bad thing. Nobody really likes strong arm dictators who destabilize nearby countries, cause two regional wars, and run police states. But if you plan to take down a foreign ruler by invading them with an army, the most critical part of the plan is not how many fighter planes and tanks you'll use. It's not even how you're going to defeat the enemy. It's knowing when to leave. The days are long gone when you could build a proxy army and install a puppet ruler on a throne to run things for you after you leave. Especially when every family in the nation you overrun seems to own and cherish their very own russian assault rifle. Life in the Third World is pretty dog-eat-dog; and lawyers don’t set precedents nearly as well as armed men showing up in the middle of the night to turn you into the deceased.

I think that General Shinsheki, the Chief of Staff at the time, was right when he objected to starting the invasion with so few troops and not having a clearly defined exit strategy. The only way to have a realistic exit strategy was to do so at the request of the existing government (not from Saddam Hussein but from an organized internal resistance) AND to wait until there was a groundswell of truly international support (with significant troop contributions from other nations). But Bush insulted too many former allies who backed the Gulf War who once joined together to drive Saddam's army out of Kuwait at the request of the Kuwaiti government in exile. Waging war to defend an ally is honorable and clearly makes you the "good guy". More importantly, it provides a clear timeline of when to leave and allows you to pull out without leaving a power vacuum. Invading a hostile nation with minimal international support just sets you up as the bad guy. And then you're stuck on the wrong side of the moral equation in the eyes of the local populace. Even if the majority of Iraqis lived in fear of Saddam's regime, nobody likes to see foreign soldiers on your streets shooting people who look like you.

The current situation has parallels with Vietnam (local insurgents blending with the population), the Balkans (threat of ethnic warfare imminent), Somalia (hunting down individual leaders amidst an armed and angry urban population), and Chechnya (increasing casualties for no real long-term gain). But it also has strong overtones of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We just created another Intifada with a major difference. Palestinians can't gather in a shouting crowd with assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades. Israeli security will kill them dead if they brandish weapons in public. But our soldiers have to put up with it because they are surrounded by a sea of people and are not planning to stick around.

Dubya's impetuous wishes to exact revenge on a nation for trying to shoot his daddy have produced a no-win situation. How have we and the world benefited from invading and occupying Iraq? So, we took down a dictator who killed thousands of his own people. It's not our job to be the world's star chamber. If we have to police the world, let's do it as part of a police department, not as a solo vigilante. We waited decades and supplied him with billions of dollars in weapons while he fought his neighbor to a bloody standstill, bombarded his own villages with nerve gas, and had thousands of people shot and tortured. When he invaded Kuwait, we let him stay in power but destroyed his military and bombed his country back into the stone age. And still, there wasn't a good reason to topple him from his throne and invade. Why? Nobody with half a brain would be willing to deal with the international censure sure to result from invading another country. And nobody has the resources to rebuild the country fast enough to satisfy an already resentful population comprised of three major groups that hate each other's guts. Nobody can do it, not even the U.S.

How do we lose? Our people die. We create thousands of people who have died at the hands of American soldiers. These people will NEVER forget and will hate the U.S. until the day they die. And pass on that hatred to their children. No oil is being produced or exported from Iraq which helps drive gas prices up; and destabilizes the international economy. The war provides a seed around which global anti-American sentiment crystallizes. This is not a war to stop terrorism. There were never strong or proven links between Saddam Hussein and (A) Al Queda, (B) recent international terrorism, and (C) weapons of mass destruction. If anything, the war creates a widening population of dirt poor, angry, and fundamentalist people who hate the United States. By fostering the conditions and population from which terrorists are recruited -- people with lots of hate and nothing left to lose -- we create a potential terrorist for every man, woman, or child that dies in the fighting. What makes hate grow? Blood, blood, blood.

"We are at a great disadvantage when we make war on people who have nothing to lose."
-- Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540)

So, yes. Bring our troops home. So there's a pool of people in Iraq who hate our guts. No big surprise. We've been bombing that country for over ten years now. There's just no way in hell that we're going to be able to create a government that likes us after everything that we've done. Is that the mission? Are they supposed to like us now? Never going to happen. At the best, some groups like the Kurds will seek to use the U.S. as a shield to protect their newfound territory, independence, and power. The emphasis is on the verb, use.

Proponents of the war urge the country to "stay the course" and not give up. What is the course? What are we trying to do? And when do we go home? Those points are not very clear.

So let's face the fact and define a clear and reasonable objective. What are we fighting for?

At first, we were fighting to defend ourselves against the dark and nebulous forces of international terrorism. Then we were fighting to remove weapons of mass destruction from a crazed despot. Then we were fighting to free an oppressed people. Well, Al Queda seems to have closer ties to Saudia Arabia than Iraq, nobody's found a trace of any kind of WMD, and the Iraqi people are free now. Free to start a civil war maybe, but they are free.

Are we fighting to protect the Iraqi people from themselves? We will not be able to install a puppet government that loves the U.S. over the heads of a suspicious population which is so fragmented and divided that the only thing that is postponing an all-out civil war is that American and foreign soldiers are easier and more favored targets. Let's get some Muslim soldiers from North Africa to replace our troops and hold the reins while we back out of there with as much remaining face as possible. And then let the country explode into civil war. It's going to happen, regardless. I'd rather it happen and face the international criticism and public loss of confidence. We're facing that criticism anyway right now, but have the added sorrow of having air force planes fly back into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, loaded with the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers.

If the casualties were taken in the course of creating and defending democracy in Iraq, it might be worth it. But I don't think that's what is happening. The democratic process in Iraq is a farce when Paul Bremer makes all the decisions and the local parliament members are targeted for assassination by their own people. And when small children are volunteering their services to target our soldiers for ambushes. Those kids aren't being threatened. They're doing it to be local heroes. To help keep Uncle Hamid alive. To get back at the Americans for killing mommy with a bomb ten years ago...

When the enemy also includes women and children, you're not fighting an army anymore. You're fighting the country. And if there's one thing that history shows, it is that soldiers can defeat other soldiers but cannot occupy a hostile country. And if you try to keep your soldiers where they are not wanted by the local population, it will divide your own society and topple governments when the casualties mount and the body bags start coming home...

"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country"
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

That's what happened to King George of England and how we gained our own independence in the 1770s. America is not the only country where people take pride in their history, culture, and religion. And killing people who don't want you there in the first place is not how you spread democracy. Democracy is about the what the people want. And what the people of Iraq want is to be left alone to rebuild their shattered country. They want what you and I want -- to be able to live their lives without fear and to have their children be happy, safe, and productive. There may be shortages of clean water and electricity in Iraq right now, but life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seem to be rarer commodities. You cannot force somebody to agree with you and to like you. You can force only force submission.

And modern Islam is not exactly a religion that bends. Especially when non-believers are automatically cast into the "House of War"… For 400 years during the Golden Age of Islam (8th to 13th centuries AD), Islam was known as a great force for unifying people and creating economic prosperity, scientific advancements, and great art.

But contemporary Islam is a far cry from those enlightened days when trade and tolerance produced great things. Rather, modern Islam encourages isolationism within a social framework that breeds tolerance of poverty, factional warfare, and represses the economic and educational potential of fully half of it's practitioners (the women) --- not exactly a great vehicle for driving an economic recovery much less an actual economy.

"A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

The will of god, my ass. Stop that fatalistic bull poop, stop arguing with your neighbors, and start doing something about your problems. I may digress, but I don't think it is an understatement to say that very few of the American soldiers, contractors, or administrators in Iraq have any clear idea of how to "build" democracy in an ancient and divided society that sits on the ruins of cities that are soaked in the blood of countless wars and conquerors. A land where your tribe and city of origin are more important than who you cast a ballot for --- or should I say, are the same darn thing.

American-style democracy has no chance of planting real seeds in Iraq. And more importantly, if there were a country-wide referendum, the only thing that most people would agree on would be for the Americans to get the hell out while giving them as much money as possible to rebuild.

Democracy relies on institutions and generations of faith in those institutions. More importantly, it requires a willingness to take that leap of faith. You can't build it overnight out of a Halliburton pre-fab kit. Even McDonald's can't do it. There seems to be this popular myth that countries that fight the U.S. eventually become staunch allies. Look at Germany and Japan since WWII. And even Vietnam is trading with us again. But bombing a nation back into the stone age doesn't exactly make many local friends. It took years of trade and diplomacy between relative equals to ease the scarring produced by years of our young men killing and being killed by their young men. And most importantly, this process begins when the killing stops.

So I say get out as soon as gracefully as possible. And let Iraq determine its own destiny, just as we at home are trying to figure out ours. Call me crazy, but trying to spread democracy abroad at the price of losing freedoms at home doesn't make any sense to me.

"Everything belongs to the fatherland when the fatherland is in danger."
-- Georges Jacques Danton (1759-1794)

 

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