The Vision Thing: U.S. War Aims in Iraq

The Vision Thing: U.S. War Aims in Iraq Rael Jean Isaac President Bush has identified our aim in Iraq as more than regime change: the U.S. seeks to transform Iraq into a liberal democracy respecting freedom of religion and individual rights that will in turn serve as an example to a region where despotisms are the norm. In a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation, the president went further, indicating that he had the entire region more directly in his sights. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accomodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe...Whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead...as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export." The speech was widely praised by neoconservative friends of Israel. Daniel Pipes called the speech not only "the most jaw-dropping repudiation of an established bipartisan policy ever made by a U.S. president" but "audacious in ambition, grounded in history, and programmatically specific."

Offering a vision for a new Middle East -- "a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East," in the President's words -- is inspiring: Americans are being asked to sacrifice lives and treasure and will be more ready to do so for a lofty goal. In World War I, the notion of a war to end wars was similarly satisfying and Bush has been compared to Wilson in laying down principles to reshape the world. But before we hastily applaud Bush's Wilsonianism, we might do well to remember what happened within twenty years of the Versailles Treaty.

There is already evidence of a disquieting divorce from reality in the Bush administration's Middle East policy. Let us look again at Pipes's article quoted above. In it, Pipes also praises the president's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict: "I called Bush's overhaul of the U.S. approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict in June perhaps 'the most surprising and daring step of his presidency'. He changed presumptions by presenting a Palestinian state as the solution, imposing this vision on the parties, tying results to a specific timetable, and replacing leaders of whom he disapproved." But what has happened since that June speech? Arafat, the leader Bush was going to replace, has consolidated his power.

Nor would it have changed matters if Arafat had in fact been replaced or sidelined. This is because the premise underlying the policy is false. A Palestinian state is not the "solution," however obviously it may seem to be so in the never-never land of academic conflict resolution. The goal of the Arabs is to destroy Israel, not live with it, and Palestinian Arab leaders are frank about this, even though it would seem to serve their purpose to conceal it. To pursue the goal of a Palestinian state is thus to pursue the goal of Israel's destruction, by in effect implementing the first stage in the PLO's "phased plan" for Israel's destruction.

Even in terms of his own stated goals, Bush has failed to have any impact, for Arafat has successfully defied him. And what has been the administration's reaction? It has not been to denounce the Palestinian Authority, but to put yet more pressure on Israel. It is surely significant that both Colin Powell, representing the State Department, and Paul Wolfowitz, representing the supposedly more supportive-of-Israel Department of Defense, publicly praised so-called "peace plans" undermining the state. Powell in effect endorsed the so-called "Geneva Understandings," entered into on behalf of Israel by Yossi Beilin, who is not even a member of the Knesset. Steven Plaut described them in the November Outpost: "[Yossi] Beilin's latest gambit is to 'negotiate' publicly on behalf of himself with the PLO and to crayon yet another grand document for total settlement of all outstanding Arab-Israeli issues through surrender to the PLO. (The only concession by the Arab side was some modification of the right to return and the Palestinian Authority promptly repudiated even that.) Beilin does not represent Israel, does not represent the opposition Labor Party and does not even represent [the far-left] Meretz, whose leaders are embarassed by the new 'peace initiative.'"

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Prime Minister Sharon called Beilin's activities subversive of the state. As James Tisch, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has properly said, it is like "Ramsey Clark negotiating with Al Qaeda and coming up with an agreement or Jane Fonda on her own, negotiating an agreement with the North Vietnamese."

Wolfowitz, who had enjoyed the reputation of being a strong friend of Israel, endorsed a similar scheme, this one a "petition" circulated by a former head of Israel's secret service, which called for Israel to withdraw to the 1949 borders. In a lecture at Georgetown University, Wolfowitz said the petition's principles "look very much like" the administration's Road Map. It is difficult indeed to see anything "daring" or "surprising" or even original in all this: it suggests the President clings to the old State Department formula of forcing Israel back into what even the dovish Abba Eban called "the Auschwitz borders." It's the same old poisonous liquid packaged in a shiny new bottle, labeled "A vision of a new Middle East."

And what about Iraq? The real issue is not theSaddam loyalists and outside jihadists who are producing daily casualties. If U.S. forces show sufficient determination, they will be eliminated. Indeed, a U.S. officer in Iraq is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that the army's policy now is to kill or capture anyone who shoots at a coalition force member and destroy the property of anyone who harbors attackers. (This is precisely the Israeli policy the U.S. government has so often denounced.) The underlying problem, not susceptible to American power, is that Iraq, with its serious ethnic and religious divisions, as well as its dedicated Islamist component, is unpromising material for liberal democracy. The London Daily Telegraph (October 29) reports the uncomfortable conclusions of Dr. Noah Feldman, senior constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Feldman is a young American expert in Islamic law who works closely with administrator Paul Bremer. Says Feldman: "The end constitutional product is very likely to make many people in the U.S. government unhappy. Any democratically elected Iraqi government is unlikely to be secular and unlikely to be pro-Israel. And frankly, moderately unlikely to be pro-American." When he tells people that Islam and Islamic law are going to be in the constitution, says Feldman, people are very concerned. But, he continued "frankly nothing in Iraq is going to look the way people imagined."

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Removing Saddam was a necessary but not sufficient step in changing the psychology of the Arab-Muslim world.

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Neither is the "federal" plan dividing the country into 18 or so provinces, which the U.S. favors, likely to fly. The Kurds are determined to have an autonomous Kurdish region and will not support any constitutional plan that splits up their territory. There have been widespread media reports of U.S. disappointment with the Iraqi Governing Council, which made little progress in coming up with a plan for drafting a constitution, which the U.S. initially hoped to have in place before turning over authority to Iraqis. There were complaints that the Council met too little, traveled too much and, as Sen. Richard Lugar complained, "aren't doing their job." But the underlying problem is the disparate goals of the groups the Council represents, a problem evident from the beginning when members were unable to select a chairman and had to resort to rotating the chairman every few months. Shi'ites, Sunnites, and Kurds, to take only the three largest groupings, have very different views of what both elections and a constitution should be like and of what their respective roles should be in a new Iraq.

In setting unachievable goals -- a "solution" to the Israel-Arab conflict, a liberal democratic Iraq, a democratic Middle Eastthe U.S. risks, indeed virtually assures, failure. Yet in setting different goals, the U.S., without major changes in what it actually does on the ground, could achieve success in what is, after all, its chief strategic purpose -- containing and defanging radical Islam. In an essay entitled "War in the Absence of Strategic Clarity" (Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2003), Mark Helprin reframes the task of the West in the Middle East. Writes Helprin:

"The object long expressed by bin Laden and others is to flip positions in the thousand-year war [of Islam against the West]. To do this, the Arabs must rekindle what the tenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun called 'asabiya, an ineffable combination of group solidarity, momentum, esprit de corps and the elation of victory feeding upon victory. This, rather than any of its subsidiary political goals, is the objective of the enemy in the war in which we find ourselves at present. Despite many flickers all around the world, it is a fire far from coming alight, but as long as the West apprehends each flare as a separate case the enemy will be encouraged to drive them toward a point of ignition, and the war will never end. The proper strategic objective for the West, therefore, is the suppression of this fire of 'asabiya in the Arab heartland and citadels of militancy -- a task of division, temporary domination, and, above all, demoralization."

Helprin says our goal must be to shift Arab-Islamic society into its other pole: fatalism and resignation. The object is not to defeat the Arabs but to dissuade them from making war on us, to convince them (as they were convinced throughout the 19th century) that taking on the West is hopeless, that they can therefore retire from the field with honor. Helprin believes the U.S. has missed the chance to do this repeatedly: in the first Gulf War when the West's overwhelming forces were abruptly and prematurely withdrawn and, he argues, in this war, when U.S. leaders "did not understand the essence of their task, which was not merely to win in Iraq but to stun the Arab World." The proper objective, says Helprin, "should have not been merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing."

That chance has passed. But if Helprin is right -- and this writer believes he is -- in arguing that our strategic goal must be to slake the fires of 'asabiya, the surge of militancy inspired by hope and portents of victory, then both our stated goals and our policies need to shift. We do not need to make Iraq a beacon of democracy nor do we even need to insist it remain a unitary state. (It might cause less trouble in the long run to its neighbors and its own people if it were divided into more homogeneous states.) This does not mean removing Saddam Hussein was a vain exercise. On the contrary, in removing him the U.S. took a crucial step in achieving our strategic goal. That Saddam was not an Islamic fundamentalist is beside the point. Saddam was a central symbol in the Islamic world of defiance of the West, and it was for this reason the Arab "street" passionately identified with him despite his brutality toward fellow Arabs. And precisely because Saddam's symbolic power came from throwing down the gauntlet to the West, that same Arab street quickly lost interest when his regime collapsed. Removing Saddam was a necessary but not sufficient step in changing the psychology of the Arab-Muslim world. Changing the regime in Iran would be another powerful and salutary shock to the region, dramatically undermining the view that Islamic fundamentalism is the wave of the political future. Iranians have had more than twenty years of rule by the ayatollahs and most are eager for an end of it. That Iran is clearly on the verge of becoming a nuclear power lends urgency to the need to give massive support to the popular forces opposed to the regime, not pursue meaningless negotiations that can only strengthen the status quo.

But none of this will avail if the Arab world scents success in its jihad against Israel. There is no possibility it will retire into passivity if the hugely energizing hope of driving Israel into the sea can be kept alive with Western connivance. And that is why U.S. policy of seeking to satisfy the Arabs through ever more radical Israeli concessions undercuts U.S. strategic interests, stoking the fires of 'asabiya, when it must be our purpose to smother them. Yes, Israel offers a tempting target for pressure, since the worldwide causeless hatred it increasingly experiences (exacerbated by its own display of weakness) has had the effect of curving, not stiffening, its spine.

If the U.S. is serious about curbing Islamic militance, it should be seeking to shore up, not break, the crumbling government of Israel. Oslo (like the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan) was a turning point in inspiring Arab-Muslim militance. It will surely go down as one of the most stupid actions ever committed by a democratic government. Its premises were false and it has failed. The U.S. should be encouraging Israel to evict not only Arafat but the entire Palestinian Authority as well as the alphabet soup of terror groups. This too would send a message of "shock and awe" through the Arab world -- the Palestinian Arabs will not achieve their state, but at most will have to find some measure of autonomy under Israeli control.

The administration is unlikely to accept such a politically incorrect view of the Arab-Muslim world. It is far more tempting to listen to utopian siren songs. And so Helprin is probably right in his forecast for the future: "The sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been."

What is hurting us most in Iraq, is our limited ability because we do not have sufficient air support --- it affects all kinds of planning and implementation of plans.

It's really, really, really, really hurting us.

We need aircraft (C-17's) and helicopters, and lots of them.

We're trading off people on the ground for manuever warfare. The theory has been that we can cut costs ($$), but the aerial requirements for manuever warfare have been, and continue to be, grossly underestimated.

Whatever we do as a strategy, we need aerial maneuverability and backup (in depth) for that.

We do not have it; in fact, we barely have it.

Not to mention that we really do need about two times more the number of people on the ground in theatre.

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