Commentary No. 125, Nov. 15, 2003
"What is Realism in Iraq?"
As the U.S. gets into more and more difficulty in Iraq, the U.S. hawks are getting more and more shrill in their attacks on the doubters. They are accusing the doubters of being out of touch with what is going on. And this, they say, is what is causing the U.S. difficulty. So in the end it is not the Iraqis but the messengers of skepticism who are said to be causing the harm to U.S. interests. I myself was attacked for being an example of "dizzying unreality" in an article by Victor Davis Hanson in the October 13, 2003 issue of the National Review, America's premier conservative journal of opinion. Here is the evidence Hanson offers:
Immanuel Wallerstein warned of the possibility of "a long and exhausting war," dismissing the scenario of a quick triumph - "Swift and easy victory, obviously the hope of the U.S. administration, is the least likely [outcome]. I give it one chance in twenty" - before concluding that "losing, incredible as it seems (but then it seemed so in Vietnam too), is a plausible outcome."
Hanson's quotes, taken from an article I wrote in Foreign Policy in its July/August 2002 issue, don't seem to me, today, anything I should blush about. It is true that I, along with most people, expected Saddam Hussein to hunker down in the big cities and fight a house-by-house war. But, it seems, he was cleverer than we were. He decided instead on a guerrilla war. Scott Ritter, an American ex-marine who was part of the U.N. inspection teams of the mid-1990s, says he came across at that time an outline of an official program for a guerrilla war in case of invasion, a document that he turned over to U.S. authorities. And in the Nov. 13, 2003 issue of the Washington Post, the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack, Jr., who is responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni triangle, is quoted in essential agreement with this assessment:
I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall. That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency.
So, let us review where we are. The U.S. clearly has not won a swift and easy victory. The U.S. is into a long drawn-out war. In that article I wrote last year, I said I thought the U.S. had two chances out of three of winning a long-drawn out, bloody war and only one in three of a real defeat. But a widely-leaked recent supposedly top secret CIA report says that the U.S. might actually be losing the situation in Iraq. I may thus have overestimated the chances of the U.S. to win. In any case, the only dizzying unreality is to believe that the U.S. is doing well in the Iraq fiasco.
We now know, because no one less than Richard Perle, the preeminent neo-con, tells us, that Saddam Hussein offered just before the U.S. invasion, via a backdoor messenger, to make a deal that would have left him in power but allowed direct U.S. inspection for weapons of mass destruction. The offer was not pursued by the U.S. The commentary by The New York Times in its editorial on Nov. 7, 2003 on this revelation was:
Administration supporters were fond of saying at the time that there were things Bush officials knew but could not share with the public. Little did we imagine that among those things was an offer that might have provided a way to avoid the war.
Meanwhile, within the United States, all the polls show that the U.S. public is slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that the whole Iraq adventure was a mistake. One of the most senior U.S. senators, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, with 30 years of service, made a not widely reported speech on Nov. 3 on the floor of the Senate explaining his misgivings about Iraq. Hollings started by saying "I come to acknowledge my 'Cambodian moment' in the Iraq war." He is referring to an earlier war, when Senator Mansfield of Montana, the then Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, said at the time of the invasion of Cambodia that he could not take the whole Vietnam war any longer. Hollings said he did not want to wait as long as Mansfield did on Vietnam.
What is important about this speech is that Hollings is from the South and has been historically a quite conservative Democrat. And countering the Bush regime's hype, he says that to say this isn't Vietnam all over again is nonsense. The rumbling in middle America that Hollings represents is very real and is spreading very fast.
So could the United States really lose the war in Iraq? Well, the U.S. really did lose the war in Vietnam. Of course, I suppose it depends on how you would define winning the war. Do we mean a situation in which U.S. troops remain in Iraq but no one shoots at them? The real prospect before us is instead the gathering of U.S. troops in Iraq behind concrete walls where it's more difficult to shoot at them. Does it mean the election of a "democratic" government? A free election today, or tomorrow, would most likely lead to a Shiite majority, and not a government in the hands of those favored exiles the U.S. has been sponsoring. In either case, it is doubtful that those elected would have John Locke or Thomas Jefferson as their heroes, or have a less hostile view towards Israel than Saddam Hussein, or be less likely to pursue nuclear proliferation as soon as they could. After all, Iraq has national interests too, and they don't accord very well with the national interests of the United States.
The U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, seemed to think he could handle this by remaining proconsul in Iraq for a long time and slowly building an acceptable puppet regime. But the daily deaths make even the hawks in Washington doubt that they have the leisure to be so disingenuous. The horizon is grim for the United States in Iraq, in the Middle East, and indeed in the world.
This puts the Bush administration in a bind. In Washington, they are now beginning to mumble about an exit strategy. Some think this may win more votes for Bush in 2004 than persisting in the current strategy. But it may also lose votes among disillusioned partisans. So it's a lose-lose situation for Bush. And the only dizzying unreality would be not to recognize this.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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