Thu., September 14, 2006 Elul 21, 5766 | | Israel Time: 21:34 (EST+7)
Good-bye to Iraq
By Shlomo Avineri
"The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End" by
Peter W. Galbraith. Simon & Schuster, 260 pages, $17.99
Peter Galbraith is an oddity in Washington, D.C. In an atmosphere that
prompts countless civil and public servants to adopt a dreary blend of
conformism and opportunism (how else can you get ahead in this world?),
Galbraith is conspicuous for his intellectual powers, integrity and
confidence in his own rightness - a confidence that usually proves
well-justified, but which sometimes enrages even his closest friends. He
probably inherited (not biologically, but via the environment and education)
some of these qualities from his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, who was not
only a brilliant and original economist, but a was also a nonconformist
thinker who put many sacred cows of American capitalist orthodoxy on the
butcher's block.
For years Peter Galbraith conducted research for the Senate's Foreign
Relations Committee, of which he was secretary in the days when that body
was led by Democrats. As part of his job, he was among the first to expose
Saddam Hussein's use of toxic gas against the Kurdish population in northern
Iraq, and he did so in unconventional ways, entering the Kurdish zone
unauthorized and carrying documents and chilling photos back to the West.
Galbraith thus became the Kurds' unofficial spokesman in Washington,
conveying their positions to the American public and to the corridors of
power. When war erupted in the Balkans following the disintegration of
Yugoslavia, he was once again among the first to point an accusing finger at
Serbian policy and to push for active support of the Muslim Bosnians.
Eventually then president Bill Clinton appointed him first U.S. ambassador
to independent Croatia, where Galbraith did much to reduce the influence of
those working for nationalist president Franjo Tudman and to bring about the
triumph of liberal forces in the elections that followed Tudman's death. He
is now a fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in
Washington.
Without hating Bush
Even within the current deluge of American books about the war in Iraq,
Galbraith's stands out as unique: No other book claims in retrospect that
this war was unnecessary, since "clearly" Saddam Hussein had no weapons of
mass destruction. Nor is Galbraith's book nourished by the same fervent
hatred of President George W. Bush that is reflected in most books published
in the United States these days - a hatred that causes the discussion of
issues and strategic questions concerning Iraq to become clearly tainted by
partisan bias.
As a member of the Democratic Party, Galbraith does not have much sympathy
for Bush and his policy. However, instead of offering a retrospective
polemic about the very act of going to war - an act about which Galbraith,
too, has considerable doubts - he focuses in his book on the war's
consequences. Most of the book deals with the astonishing way in which
ignorance, amateurism and neoconservative beliefs - unanchored in reality -
blended with arrogance and a failure to think ahead about what would happen
in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's fall. The combination caused an impressive
military victory to become a political fiasco - about which Bush and his
cronies, especially Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, still seem to be living
in denial.
Galbraith's point of departure is rooted in his experience in the Balkans:
The collapse of a dictatorship does not necessarily and automatically bring
about a peaceful and orderly transition to democracy. I remember meetings
with Galbraith in Zagreb, in which his political analyses pointed to the
need to be patient, to understand the local factors at play, to recognize
the complexity of the data - especially under conditions of war and
nationalist outbursts - and to try to identify those players on the field
who might, sometimes for faulty reasons, promote processes of
democratization. Galbraith applies the same insights to an analysis of the
situation in Iraq.
Essentially, Galbraith believes that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a
significant achievement, but that since it came hand in hand with illusions
about Iraq's rapid democratization, it brought about the opposite result.
That a Sunni uprising would ensue, the country would find itself in a civil
war, Iran would grow stronger, Iraq as a country would disintegrate,
Kurdistan would achieve de facto independence, and the U.S. Army would find
itself mired deeply in mud - all these were not foreseen. It is hard to
imagine another war whose consequences were so antithetical to what had been
planned.
Galbraith calls a spade a spade: Saddam Hussein's rule was a particularly
brutal extension of the Sunni hegemony that the British forced on Iraq after
World War I; the revolt in Iraq has not simply been a struggle against a
"foreign occupation," but an uprising by the Sunni minority that has lost
its hegemony and is now fighting the new Shiite regime, using as its basis
the "Saddam Fedayeen" forces trained before the war, and not foreign
volunteers; and the U.S.-sponsored elections did not bring about
democratization, but rather led to the coalescence of ethnic identities
under the guise of democracy, as most of the Iraqis voted for parties
affiliated with particular ethnic groups.
Nor does Galbraith hesitate to declare that in his estimation, Iraq will
never again have any effective centralized regime. The only silver lining is
that the Kurds will retain their de facto independence: Galbraith cannot
imagine any scenario in which they will consent again to live under Arab
rule, after the West has continually betrayed them - the British after World
War I and the Americans (led by Henry Kissinger) in the 1970s.
Appalling ignorance
Over and over Galbraith provides examples that demonstrate the appalling
ignorance of the U.S. leadership: during the preparations for the war -
which lasted over a year and consisted mainly of White House meetings
involving the president and Pentagon officials - the question of how Iraq
was to be run after the war was never once discussed in the president's
earshot. While testifying before the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee in
February, 2003, then U.S. undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith assured
his listeners that everything had been taken into account - but completely
ruled out the possibility that the country and its regime would
disintegrate. He estimated that the Iraqi military and bureaucracy would
continue to function after Saddam Hussein was removed from power and would
follow the orders of the U.S. military administration.
All this and more: The administration established by the U.S. Department of
Defense to run Iraq after the war focused solely on humanitarian aid; no one
expected an uprising, a Sunni guerrilla war or the collapse of the governing
apparatus; and the precedents of Germany and Japan after World War II were
discussed, but not the specific conditions of Iraq. As a result, the
Americans were completely unprepared for the looting and riots that took
place after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They were forced to replace the
first postwar administrator, Lieutenant General Jay Garner, with L. Paul
Bremer, who assumed all of the powers of government, dismantled the Baath
party, the military and the security services and thus, Galbraith claims,
dismantled Iraq itself as a state without intending to do so. By the way,
when Bremer first visited the offices of Massoud Barzani in the northern
part of the county, he saw a portrait on the wall of his father, the
legendary Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani. "Who's that?" Bremer asked,
and when he heard the answer admitted that he had never heard his name
before.
At the same time, Galbraith tells hair-raising stories about "advisors" sent
to help in Iraq's rehabilitation, who were given positions in the various
government ministries - advisors who in many cases were young (often
20-something) activists of the Republican Party. Some of them gave dazed
speeches about how privatization and a market economy would push Iraq ahead
and solve all of its problems. As a result, the American planners who later
focused their attentions on "rebuilding the Iraqi military" did not
understand that they were not, in fact, creating an army, but rather Shiite
military units intended to safeguard the new Shiite hegemony. In contrast to
Bush and Cheney's rhetoric about the "Iraqi people," Galbraith claims simply
that there is no such thing: There are Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, each with
their own agendas. The Iraqi state was only a framework held together by the
oppressive force of the Sunni minority.
The symbolic date within this process is, for Galbraith, February 22, 2006,
when Sunnis blew up the Askariya shrine in Samarra. The shrine was among the
holiest of Shiite sites: The 12th Imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi ("the savior"),
disappeared there and is expected to reappear there before Judgment Day. The
bombing was a defiant, clear-cut assault on the Shiite vision of salvation,
and its goal could not have been clearer: to denigrate and humiliate Shiite
believers and to frighten them into thinking that the Imam would never
return.
The West often does not quite understand just how deep the rift is between
Sunnis and Shiites, or what it means that Iraq's Sunni hegemony has been
abolished. Aware of local traditions and concrete contexts, Galbraith knows
that what is at stake are not theological disputes, but profound problems of
identity, history and communal consciousness. Unlike many Americans, who
think the differences between Sunnis and Shiites resemble those between
Baptists and Methodists, Galbraith understands that the situation is more
analogous to the chasm between Catholics and Protestants in Europe - but
during the 17th century.
Weak part
Galbraith, then, sees the Kurd independence as a fait accompli, and he
suggests that even Turkey is beginning to adapt to this new reality. He
devotes a special chapter to the Kurds, their suffering and the ways in
which they are constructing their rule in the north.
The book's weakest part is the last chapter, in which Galbraith tries
against all odds to propose a U.S. strategy for gradual withdrawal from
Iraq. An American book cannot be expected to avoid confronting this
question, which troubles not only President Bush, but the no-less baffled
Democrats as well. On the one hand, Galbraith argues that the Iraqi state
has ceased to exist, like a Humpty Dumpty that cannot be put back together
again. He's also willing to say, contrary to prevailing wisdom, that Iraq's
dismantling will not in itself cause instability, claiming instead that for
the 80 years of its existence as a state, Iraq was actually a source of
regional instability and a framework for internal oppression.
All this is true, but what Galbraith suggests - a proposal that seems
perfunctory at best - is that the U.S. accept Iraq's loose constitution,
which supposedly sustains some kind of federative framework, consider it an
accomplishment and gradually withdraw its forces. This does not even sound
good, because Galbraith simultaneously cites Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
as examples of multinational frameworks that ended up disintegrating
completely. Nor does he have a strategic answer for the question of how the
U.S. can get out of the Iraqi quagmire without further weakening America's
standing in the region or strengthening that of Iran.
In all likelihood, Iraq will be a central topic on the agenda for the 2008
presidential elections in the U.S. Galbraith's book will perhaps be able to
explain what has happened and what continues to happen; it cannot, however,
explain how America can extricate itself from a situation that began with a
sound policy (the removal of Saddam Hussein) and ended in shortsightedness.
Then again, that's what happens in many wars.
Prof. Shlomo Avineri has served as a member of international committees
tracking the processes of democratization in Eastern Europe in the last
decade.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/762927.html
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