Iraqi Roulette
"Never reinforce failure."
An adage that is as old as its parentage is uncertain, it nevertheless leaps insensibly into the mind when considering the President's recently announced New Way Forward. It is, of course, unlikely that an additional 17 percent more troops will turn out to be the critical mass required for the pacification of the Sunni and Shiite combatants, much less the peaceful democratization of a collection of ancient peoples who have never known, or even shown any signs of wanting, democratic rule.
And for a situation that, we were repeatedly assured, bears absolutely no similarity to Vietnam, there are what certainly appear to be Vietnamic vibes resonating throughout Washington, as what had been whispers of a Bush-approved military coup that would remove elected Prime Minister Maliki from power are now being openly discussed in National Review, in ominous echo of the Kennedy-approved assassination of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem.
This "new" plan appears to be right out of a rather old playbook, and involves an ugly combination of betrayal, hypocrisy, additional cannon fodder and micromanagement of the military operations from Washington. While President Bush is unlikely to be issuing orders to lieutenants in the field as President Nixon so famously did, it's clear that even if American troops are going to be given more tactical freedom with which to operate, the generals will still be on a tight strategic leash from the White House.
Not only is this no way to win a war, history suggests that it is a dependable way to lose one.
The truth is that Iraq is not winnable, at least not by the terms in which the president has defined winning, and moreover, it never was. America is still attempting to fight fourth-generation warfare with troops, officers and strategies beholden to second- and third-generation military concepts. It is looking for a knockout punch, that one climactic battle, that will never come.
One cannot defeat a pool of water with a stone, and one cannot defeat an insurgent campaign with conventional military operations. If, to paraphrase Mao, the people are the sea through which the insurgents swim, one will need to drain the sea in order to be sure that the insurgency has been defeated, otherwise, one has likely achieved nothing more than to delay the inevitable.
The backlash from the failure in Iraq is only beginning. American enthusiasm for the neocons' World Democratic Revolution has never been at a lower ebb, and not even dire predictions about the inevitability of an Iranian attack on Israel is enough to revive it. One wonders how many Americans who supported the war would have supported it had they known that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are expected to immigrate to the United States, (and if Thomas Friedman's advice is followed, given U.S. citizenship), as a direct result of the invasion and occupation.
Considering the extreme displeasure the citizenry is already expressing over the administration's immigration policies, the revelation of an Iraqi immigration program may well have the Republican grass roots clamoring for an impeachment of President Bush.
Like Mao's Great Leap, the New Way Forward is almost certain to end up in another direction altogether. About the only positive thing one can say about it is that it is highly unlikely that the New Way will cost as many lives as the Great Leap Forward did, although given its low probability of sparking nuclear conflict in the Middle East, one can't entirely discount the possibility.
The Sunni-Shiite conflict is far from the only conflict in what used to be known as Iraq. The Kurds are biding their time and busily preparing for their bid for independence, one possible effect of which would be to cause Iran and Turkey to ally against the United States. The situation is a puzzle, not a nail, and unfortunately, a hammer is simply not an effective instrument for puzzle-solving.
In his recent admission that his actions have increased instability in Iraq, President Bush missed an opportunity to confess the bankruptcy of the World Democratic Revolution strategy, announce the immediate withdrawal of American troops and declare that his focus would be on defending America, not Iraqi democracy. Instead, he has foolishly decided to squander his last remnants of credibility on one more spin of the Iraqi roulette wheel.