There is no avoiding it, someday soon there is going to be a reckoning for the neoconservative misadventure into Iraq. It’s hard to predict exactly what will unfold, and there is still time American decisions to effect the outcome, although it’s hard to see how any decisions we make can avert disastrous consequences. Perhaps the best indictator of the degree of peril we are in is the attitude of the war’s architects and greatest cheerleaders. David Rose takes a look at the neo-conservatives in an article for Vanity Fair. Here are some excerpts:
Richard Perle:
“The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity,” Perle says, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic “failed state”—is not yet inevitable, but is becoming more likely. “And then,” he says, “you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”
…Richard Perle is almost as apocalyptic. Without some way to turn impending defeat in Iraq to victory, “there will continue to be turbulence and instability in the region. The Sunni in the Gulf, who are already terrified of the Iranians, will become even more terrified of the Iranians. We will be less able to stop an Iranian nuclear program, or Iran’s support for terrorism. The Saudis will go nuclear. They will not want to sit there with Ahmadinejad having the nuclear weapon.” This is not a cheering prospect: a Sunni-Shia civil war raging in Iraq, while its Sunni and Shia neighbors face each other across the Persian Gulf armed with nukes. As for the great diplomatic hope—that the Iraq Study Group, led by George Bush Sr.’s secretary of state James Baker III, can pull off a deal with Syria and Iran to pacify Iraq—Perle is dismissive: “This is a total illusion. Total illusion. What kind of grand deal? The Iranians are not on our side. They’re going to switch over and adopt our side? What can we offer them?”
James Woolsey:
Now he draws explicit parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, aghast at what he sees as profound American errors that have ignored the lessons learned so painfully 40 years ago. He has not given up hope: “As of mid-October of ’06, the outcome isn’t clear yet.” But if, says Woolsey, as now seems quite possible, the Iraqi adventure ends with American defeat, the consequences will be “awful, awful.… It will convince the jihadis and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types as well as the residual Ba’thists that we are a paper tiger, and they or anybody they want to help can take us on anywhere and anytime they want and be effective, that we don’t have the stomach to stay and fight.”
Eliot Cohen:
“…I’m pretty grim. I think we’re heading for a very dark world, because the long-term consequences of this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just for the region, but globally—for our reputation, for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff.”
…Cohen says his best hope now is not something on the way toward democracy but renewed dictatorship, perhaps led by a former Ba’thist: “I think probably the least bad alternative that we come to sooner or later is a government of national salvation that will be a thinly disguised coup.” However, he adds, “I wouldn’t be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.” And that, he believes, would be “about as bad an outcome as one could imagine.… Our choices now are between bad and awful.”
Frank Gaffney:
“It’s not a perfect parallel here, but I would say it would approximate to losing the Battle of Britain in World War II,” he says. “Our enemies will be emboldened and will re-double their efforts. Our friends will be demoralized and disassociate themselves from us. The delusion is to think that the war is confined to Iraq, and that America can walk away. Failure in Iraq would be a huge strategic defeat.” It may already be too late to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Gaffney says, pointing out that the Manhattan Project managed to build them in less than four years from a far smaller base of knowledge. “I would say that the likelihood of military action against Iran is 100 percent,” he concludes. “I just don’t know when or under what circumstances. My guess is that it will be in circumstances of their choosing and not ours.”
Ken Adelman:
After our lunch, Adelman sends me an e-mail saying that he now understands the Soviet marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who committed suicide in the Kremlin when it became clear that the last-ditch Communist coup of 1991 was going to fail. A note he left behind stated, “Everything I have devoted my life to building is in ruins.” “I do not share that level of desperation,” Adelman writes. “Nevertheless, I feel that the incompetence of the Bush team means that most everything we ever stood for now also lies in ruins.”
David Frum:
Frum admits that the optimistic vision he and Perle set out in their book will not now come to pass. “One of the things that we were talking about in that last chapter was the hope that fairly easily this world governed by law, the world of the North Atlantic, can be extended to include the Arab and Muslim Middle East,” he says. “I think, coming away from Iraq, people are going to say that’s not true, and that the world governed by law will be only a portion of the world. The aftermath of Iraq is that walls are going to go up, and the belief that this is a deep cultural divide is going to deepen.” This is already happening in Europe, he adds, citing the British government’s campaign against the wearing of veils by women and the Pope’s recent critical comments about Islam. As neoconservative optimism withers, Frum fears, the only winner of the debate over Iraq will be Samuel Huntington, whose 1996 book famously forecast a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam.
It’s easy to be dismissive of the paper tiger charges, or hand-wringing about American prestige. Those are the concerns of our imperialists, and they are lamenting our loss of influence primarily because of what it means for U.S. business concerns. Simply put, we don’t need to worry about being put in our place, so to speak, especially if it means that we will make better budgetary decisions and start behaving more like Canada in our foreign policy. What is much harder to dismiss is Perle’s observation that we’ll ‘get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating’.
We need to look at Iraq with clear eyes, which is something that our politicians are not currently doing. So, let me go through some things here.
1. Iraq is currently in a battle of militias. When the U.S. pulls out, control of the country (rather than revenge killing) will become the primary function of these militias. The government institutions (army and police) will be taken over by one militia or another, or merely dissolve with their equipment dispersed to different warring factions.
2. By sheer force of numbers, the Shi’ite militias will be able to dominate in Baghdad and all of the south. It is unlikely that Sunnis will be able to survive in the capital at all. This will force Sunnis to the north and west, where there will be no jobs, insufficient housing…a basic refugee crisis.
3. Even this level of sectarian cleansing may not satisfy the Shi’ites, or allow them to restore stability. It is not unlikely that the Shi’ites will take the fight into Anbar province. This will not occur overnight, but more likely will develop as Baghdad is secured and the militias are organized and equipped with transport and heavy weapons.
4. At some point in this process, the Sunni world is going to intervene. The Saudis, being Arabs, are going to feel more honor bound to intervene than the Turks, but the Turks have a breaking point too. At this point, our two most important regional allies will begin fighting the Iraqi government (if one still formally exists). We’ll be faced with the choice of supporting the Iran-backed Shi’a that we helped bring to power, or supporting our NATO partners Turkey and our best friends forever, the Saudis.
5. Tossed into this witch’s cauldron are the Kurds. Insofar as possible they are going to try to stay out of the intra-Arab struggle, but Kurds are Muslims too (mostly Sunni) who hate Arabs (especially Saddam’s Sunni Ba’athists), and want to hold the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. If Turkey intervenes in Iraq it will spell strife between the Turkmen and the Kurds, and there is no telling how that will shake out.
6. All of this risks a more general war between Iran and the Gulf States, Iran and Turkey. And this will be joined by civil wars raging in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine (at a minimum).
7. Instability at this level has the potential to disrupt energy supplies, or completely shut them off (if, for example, the Straits of Hormuz are closed, or the Persian Gulf is a war zone). As Lee Hamilton said recently, “If we can’t get oil out of the gulf, it isn’t a problem for us in six months, it is a problem for us tomorrow.” This isn’t about high gas prices, it’s about the functioning of modern society. It’s about huge economic dislocations, job losses, another Great Depression, but without functioning mass transit or heat.
All of these considerations are running through the heads of people like incoming House Intelligence Chairman, Silvestre Reyes, when he says we can’t ‘leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan” was before the 2001 invasion by the United States.’
In all of this, the threat of terrorism is but the least of our concerns. The U.S. troops must remain in Iraq, goes the argument, because the risks of regional war and energy disruption as so potentially catastrophic that we can’t risk going down that road. But there are two problems with this reasoning.
First, U.S. policy makers must bow to the American electorate and the economic and military reality. Only a permanent U.S. presence can permanently forestall the risks laid out above, and that is not a viable option because of the politics, because of the costs, and because of the stress it puts on our armed forces.
Second, buying time and hoping for the best might make sense if we had new leadership, new credibility, and some restored goodwill. But nothing in six years has indicated that Bush and Cheney should be entrusted with two more years of ‘stay-the-course’. Simply put, we are unlikely to gain anything but a delay in the day of reckoning. We will lose more lives, spend/waste hundreds of billions more dollars, and further erode our alliances and the divisions within our country by staying in Iraq.
It is for this reason that we should be honest with ourselves and act like adults. We have two choices that make any sense.
1) We pull out and try to assist the international community in preventing a total disaster in the region.
2) We kick Bush and Cheney out of office and add a few hundred thousand more troops, mobilizing the whole country and all our resources to the job of stabilizing Iraq.
Which path is the better one? We may never know, because it looks like we will not choose either one, and instead will continue sliding towards Gomorrah.
Hmmmm, more troops needed. As things are I don’t see how the Dems can argue for something different on it right now without it’s failure. Better pack my husbands bags. Everything is so fucked!
yup. Also available in orange.
would build a bridge across the divide that this war has created in America and I screamed Fuck You at the TV. My husband said, “Wow babe, calm down.” Can’t be calm though. This report is NOTHING special, NOTHING spectacular, and is a lot of stay the course WITH SOME SORT OF DEADLINES. I have blood on the line here so I will have no bridges built that are falling down……no paper tigers allowed……FUCK YOU BAKER! “The country get behind this on a consensus basis”, is what Sandra Day O’Connor just said. FUCK YOU Sandra!!!!! The only way left for the country to get behind this together is to send their sons and daughters to die for this……THAT IS ALL THAT IS LEFT, THAT’S IT! So FUCK YOU SANDRA. Simpson just called me a seether. Fuck you Simpson. Did you send some blood into this bullshit that came home needing medication? I have a right to seethe, I have a giant reason to seethe and I will stop seething when you fuckers stop the insanity! FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKER AND IT IS CORNEY AND NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED AS FAR AS SITTING THERE LIKE WE ARE NOW. YOU DIDN’T HAND DELIVER ANY MESSAGE FROM GOD HERE TODAY YOU FUCK! Simpson, if this is your answer get your fucking uniform on and back it the fuck up! Get one for Sandra too while you are at it!
And considering that bushco is going to be asking Congress for another fucking 130 fucken Billion dollars in special funds for Iraq that would pretty much mean that any draw down/compromise is all bullshit..it’s stay the fucking course I guess until everyone comes home in body bags or PTS and Iraq has been completely destroyed.
What are the odds that the dems will vote against this..haha other than a few like Kucinich.
This part jumps out at me:
Might as well just call it like it is: we should left Iraq alone. Saddam was a stabilizing force there.
How ironic that by going in to try to secure their oil because we couldn’t have a crazy dictator sitting on it and denying our access to it, we’ve created exactly the situation we wanted to avoid.
There are so many other major crises in the world right now that it would be difficult to justify the level of resources needed by the international community to stabilize Iraq. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Darfur, all are currently in need, as well as other locales.
Really, would things be much worse if we weren’t there to provide our exceptional guidance? But of course there is our great national prestige to protect. And the great Bush legacy.
It’s telling how many of these neocon asses moan about the loss of our “prestige”, “reputation”, and so forth. We will end up with the reputation we deserve: a nation that allowed stupid and insane ideologs like the ones quoted above to entice us into an exercise of psychotic hubris. We’ve heard for so long about how the world can’t do without US “leadership”. Well, we’re about to find out how much truth there is to that because we have no credibility left.
As George McGovern and William Polk propose in their studiously ignored anaysis, the only way out is to get out and make generous, painful reparations.
Beyond that, we need to grow up and admit we were terribly wrong from the beginning — not just on the facts but on the intention and on what our rights are in the world. I think the least destructive outcome to our Iraq disaster would have to begin with the resignation of Bush and Cheney and the open admission before the world that we made a terrible mistake — and Democrats would have to forswear electoral calculations and find a compromise that would allow that to happen. The Iraq exit would continue with massive funding for truly international reconstruction and peacekeeping to whatever extent conditions allow for that to happen.
Americans are notoriously incapable of putting ourselves in the shoes of others. If we could, we’d see that Iran, N Korea and the rest of the world are entirely rational in distrusting us, our intentions, our sanity, and our credibility. Our best hope of mitigating the distrust and hostility we’ve earned is to show that we’re capable of recognizing that we violated our own best principles and are prepared to mitigate the damage we caused as best we can. I think much of the disillusioned around the world are hoping for such an opening to begin to respect us again. Those hopes will be dashed by anything less than full admission of guilt and error. The time has come that either we think about the welfare of the whole planet and not just our own interests, or we continue down the road to international irrelevance and domestic failure. The neocons and their flak corps are right about one thing: we are indeed at a historic crossroads.
Quoth Woolsey: “It will convince the jihadis and al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types as well as the residual Ba’thists that we are a paper tiger, and they or anybody they want to help can take us on anywhere and anytime they want and be effective, that we don’t have the stomach to stay and fight.”
It’s appalling that after all these years, the neocons still don’t get Vietnam — and the “paper tiger” language clearly shows that’s what’s on Woolsey’s mind.
I sincerely doubt, if you asked, that many of the surviving NVA commanders would say that the Americans would have won if only they’d stuck it out another five or ten years. When they leased offices in Paris for peace negotiations, the North Vietnamese purchased twenty-year leases.
The lesson of Vietnam is that you don’t stick your nose into other people’s civil wars. The additional subtlety in Iraq is that Saddam was mostly keeping a lid on that war, though the Kurdish and Shia insurgencies that had been simmering for the previous quarter century were there for anyone with eyes to see. And after watching any number of post-Soviet satellites collapse from infighting once the Soviet boot was removed, it wasn’t that subtle of a lesson.
The problem with the neocons is that they actually believe the myth of American invincibility. They believe we never lost a war except for Vietnam (somehow forgetting 1812, among others), and that no victory is pyrrhic (the Philippines, Korea). They believe we won WW2 single-handedly, as if that war was winnable in the first place without the Soviet juggernaut rolling over Nazi Germany from the east.
It’s all bullshit. We’re not invincible. We can lose wars like everyone else, and we’re losing one now. We can’t go it alone more than any other great power. For chrissakes, we’d have lost our own revolution if the “cowardly” French hadn’t bailed us out, and our own civil war could have turned out very differently if those same French hadn’t gotten bogged down in Mexico on their way to the aid of the Confederacy. We’re not special, we’re not exceptional, and if idiots who don’t grasp that fundamental fact remain in power much longer, we will end up on the trash heap of history with all the other victims of hubris whose names are barely remembered today.
John Donne was wrong. Some men are islands. Just not the smart ones.