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Much ink has been spilled and outrage revved up in
arguing that the Bush administration has shamefully ignored the Iraq Study
Group report released in December. But in a speech on Jan. 10 announcing a
new strategy for Iraq, President George W. Bush took a major ISG
recommendation to heart: the United States intends to set benchmarks for
the Iraq leadership to implement, otherwise . . . Otherwise what? Like the ISG authors, Bush didn’t make the
sharper side of that equation clear. He did warn that the Iraqi government
“would lose the support of the American people,” but on those
grounds you would have to assume the U.S. entered Iraq as a favor to the
Iraqis. Even the most idealistic war supporter would not make that
argument. So, what leverage does the U.S. have over the Iraqis when the
Iraqis are so essential to the success of the administration’s plans,
and its broader regional calculations? You do wonder.
The absence of an answer points to a recurring flaw
of U.S. policy in Iraq: American plans are chiefly designed to influence
the mood on the home front, with relatively little allusion to Iraqi
priorities — even if it has become a habit to underline that
it’s up to the Iraqis to “want victory.” As far as
Americans are concerned, Bush’s main hurdle in Iraq is assuaging
Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats, but very few people have a sense
of what the aims of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are or how they
might end up undermining the president’s “surge
option.”
In fact, this shortcoming was already obvious before
the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then, very few people in Washington cared to
examine Iraqi society and ask how it might react to the arrival of foreign
soldiers. Even administration critics tended to discuss the war in
parochial terms. Iraq was, and still is, largely about America.
Only recently have the mainstream focused any real
attention to the number of Iraqi civilian deaths in 2006 (more than 34,000,
says the United Nations). These reports were a grimly appropriate
counterpoint to the recent crossing of the 3,000 threshold in terms of
American soldiers’ lives lost in the Iraqi conflict. It was also a
sign of how much Iraq’s future will be decided by Iraqis themselves,
whatever the politicking back home in the U.S. The reason is that far too
many of those deaths were caused by individuals or groups wholly
unconcerned by what goes on inside the Beltway. The essence of the surge plan is for the U.S. to
remove armed militias from Baghdad quarters, after which Iraqi forces would
take control of the areas. Among the problems with the plan, two in
particular will be defined by specifically Iraqi factors. First, Maliki
will have to sign off on any decision to crush the Mehdi Army of Muqtada
al-Sadr, the American’s main quarry, which has been among the worst
perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. The problem is that the prime
minister, who is also the No. 2 man in the Daawa Party, came to power
thanks to Sadr. Will he agree to alienate his main backer in favor of the
wobbly Americans? Nothing is less certain. A second potential problem is the apparently
significant reliance on Kurdish troops to help make the surge work.
According to Iraqi sources cited by the Washington
Post, two Kurdish army brigades will be
brought into Baghdad, as will a Shiite brigade from the south, to support
U.S. efforts. There is little enthusiasm among Kurds to waste their forces
in Baghdad when the main Kurdish political objective is to break free from
the rest of Iraq. What is an effort to reduce Sunni-Shiite sectarian
tension could end up partly turning against the Kurds. There are other factors as well that might spoil the
administration’s strategy, whether the likely military
ineffectiveness of more than 20,000 new American soldiers or the absence of
a political project to accompany U.S. endeavors. The fact that Bush has
revamped the American political and military hierarchy in Iraq may be more
a sign of weakness than strength. It does imply that new ideas will be
floated, but it also means that those who have spent months or years in the
field didn’t get very far. Whenever Vietnam is brought up, someone is heard to
sigh, “The war was lost at home.” Many wars are lost at home.
But while it is fair to argue that the U.S. will find it much more
difficult to withdraw from Iraq than Americans imagine, it is
self-defeating to ignore or underplay the details of a society in which
American forces are fighting. Both Bush and his harshest critics need to
make Americans better aware of Iraqi dynamics and the regional and
international implications of any American decision. Iraq is not just about
America, nor is it even mostly so. It’s time that straightforward
truth becomes more widespread.
Michael Young is the opinion page editor of
The Daily Star in Beirut
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2007.
