US 'war on terror' is unwinnable
October 05, 2004 Edition 1
Allister Sparks
Sooner rather than later the United States will have to start thinking about withdrawing from Iraq. It won't happen before the election of course.
As last week's debate of the candidates showed, John Kerry is terrified of being labelled a potential quitter. So from his toy-soldier salute when he stepped on stage at the Democratic convention in July to his declaration in the debate that "I will hunt down the terrorists and I will kill them," he has tried to match Rambo step for gung-ho step. Only he says he will fight smarter.
As for Bush, he is committed to projecting an image of himself as the poor man's Churchill, resolute if not literate. "We must not waver. We must persevere. We will prevail."
But the situation in Iraq is becoming untenable. A National Intelligence Estimate presented to the White House in July, summarising the views of all the major US intelligence services, presented a grim picture of the future of Iraq. Its best-case scenario was "a vulnerable and tenuous stability". Its worst, civil war.
America's dilemma is that the longer it stays in Iraq as an occupying power, the more it undermines the Iraqi regime it wants to support. And the more it alienates the entire Islamic world, playing into the hands of al-Qaeda and other extremist organisations.
The so-called "war on terror" has become not only unwinnable but counter-productive, greatly exacerbating the threat of global terrorism.
On the other hand the US fears that if it leaves Iraq prematurely it risks leaving behind a weak government unable to cope with the chaos that is the breeding ground of terrorism.
It's a catch 22 of America's own making, for this was an ill-conceived war in the first place. But having created the mess, the US must now find a way out.
What is clear is that the present strategy is making the situation worse. That strategy is to try to crush the insurgency so that a process, beginning with elections in January, of democratising the country and handing over power to an elected Iraqi government by the beginning of 2006 can take place.
The problem is the Americans are seen as an occupying power intent on imposing a political system of their own design on the country. Not surprisingly, the locals see this as prescriptive imperialism.
A recent US government poll showed that 90% of Arab Iraqis see the Americans as an occupying power, only 2% as liberators. Occupying powers are always hated and their continued presence invariably leads to armed resistance.
Several factors have intensified the hatred. American efforts at pacifying the country have been crude. Reluctant to suffer more military casualties in the face of the upcoming election, the US has used battle tanks, bombers and helicopter gunships to "take out" supposed "terrorists" in slums like Falluja and Sadr City, killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process.
Some estimates put the Iraqi casualty rate as high as 37 000.
American forces have also adopted a strategy called "cordon and capture" which involves sweeping through a designated area and arresting hundreds of people who are then interrogated for information about the "terrorists".
Sounds like an apartheid-era police raid, doesn't it? Worst of all has been the treatment of the thousands of people arbitrarily arrested in these raids.
They have been held for months without trial and many have been subjected to horrendous interrogation methods, deliberately designed to be specially humiliating to Muslims.
Osama bin Laden himself could not have designed a more potent recruitment poster for his organisation than those appalling pictures of female soldiers sexually abusing naked Muslim men.
But if staying in Iraq is counter-productive, how can America get out? Ideally it would like to hand over control of the country to a retrained Iraqi army and police force.
But the newly recruited forces are neither capable nor loyal. They have been recruited from the ranks of the desperate unemployed, and when it comes to combat many either melt away or join the insurgents. It is unlikely they will be able to stabilise the country in time for credible elections in January.
The problem starts at the top. To have credible elections there must first be credible leaders with the moral authority to impose the necessary peace.
The American appointee, Iyad Allawi, does not fit that bill. He is one of Iraq's least popular politicians, whose appointment as interim prime minister was opposed by 61% of the population. He is seen as an American puppet.
Who to turn to, then? Two men have shown themselves as having the kind of popular authority needed. First is the 80-year-old Grand Ayatolla Ali al-Sistani, who returned from heart surgery in London recently and promptly negotiated a ceasefire in the city of Najaf where US troops were deadlocked in battle with the rebel forces of the angry young Shi'ite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Mahdi Army.
The other is Al-Sadr himself, who showed up with 61% popular support in the poll in which Allawi did so badly.
The US doesn't like these men because both are clerics who want Iraq to be a Shi'ite Muslim state. But they do have the moral authority to end the fighting and in this situation US beggars, however evangelical in their democratic zeal, cannot be choosers.
A leading American specialist on Iraq, Peter Galbraith, has suggested what seems to me a practical way out of the Iraqi quagmire - one that has reportedly caught the attention of Kerry.
Galbraith proposes that the US settle for a loose federation in Iraq in which each of three distinct units - Kurds in the north, Shi'ite Muslims in the south and the so-called Sunni Triangle in the centre around Baghdad - could have the political system its people choose.
Kurdistan, whose leaders want a Western-style democracy, is already a virtually independent state in which the central government has no presence. Iraq's three predominantly Shi'ite southern administrative districts want to form their own Shi'ite majority region and have asked for the same degree of autonomy as Kurdistan has.
That leaves the Sunni Triangle. Galbraith suggests that a Shi'ite-Kurdish coalition at the centre of a federated Iraq would represent 80% of Iraq's people, and would be powerful enough to concentrate on containing the Sunni insurgency and bringing law and order to the capital.
It seems to me that what the Americans should consider is to call in Sistani and Al-Sadr, cut a deal with them to establish a federated Iraq, give them aid to train up new security forces - and then go.
