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Compounding the Iraq folly in the Middle East

Brahma Chellaney

America is going to find it difficult to maintain its large military presence in the Middle East without attracting increasing terrorist attacks on its forces and without destabilising the regimes it supports.

THE DEEPENING catastrophe in Iraq resulting from America's hubris is likely to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of U.S. leaders. But as underscored by the impending plans for a U.S. troop build-up in Iraq and other measures promising more of what hasn't worked, President George W. Bush still refuses to be humbled by the grim realities on the ground.

If the Bush mission was to establish a stable democracy in Iraq under occupation and inspire neighbouring states to follow the same path, that objective has been discredited with far-reaching consequences that extend beyond the region. The promotion of democracy through aggression, in any case, is a contradiction in terms because democracy, by definition, centres on the exercise of free choice. Also, how can there be democracy without the state enjoying national sovereignty?

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq nears entry into its fifth year, Mr. Bush is not only showing little capacity to learn from experience, but also is searching for an option that doesn't exist — a face-saving exit. In the process, he is seeking to compound his folly through U.S. troop escalation, as if there is still a military way out from Iraq. "Retreat with honour" is a recipe for more years of fighting over ever-more illusive goals. As the new American operational commander in Iraq admitted, even with a U.S. troop build-up, it may take "two or three years" to gain what is a wildly unrealistic expectation — the upper hand in the war.

In fact, in the absence of a face-saver, the options available to the United States are anything but graceful. The stark choice it faces is either to prolong its stay in Iraq and undermine its regional and global interests beyond repair or begin this year to gradually end its occupation by recognising that its large military imprints serve as a rallying point for the insurgency and civil conflict.

A protracted occupation will seriously undercut American interests and make it harder for Washington, after its eventual pullout of forces, to deter a potential domino effect from sweeping the Middle East and toppling U.S.-backed rulers — from Iraq and Jordan to Egypt and the Gulf states.

After the Iraq debacle, America is going to find it difficult to maintain its large military presence in the Middle East without attracting increasing terrorist attacks on its forces and without destabilising the regimes it supports. A larger rethink of its regional military strategy will be forced upon America before long. Given that it can effectively shield its security interests in the Middle East through naval forces operating from bases located outside the region, such as at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, such a revised strategy is feasible.

Mr. Bush's insistence on exiting Iraq only after it is able to "govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself" is a rationalisation for deferring America's day of reckoning to the term of the next administration. The fact is that Iraq cannot govern itself as long as it stays under U.S. occupation and its administration increasingly accepts American diktats.

A U.S. withdrawal will no doubt represent an admission of strategic defeat and carry potentially serious consequences. It will certainly embolden the growing numbers of jihadists in and outside Iraq. More importantly, the effects would extend far beyond the Middle East. But defeat already stares the United States in the face, and it cannot escape from the rout by hiding from the truth. Today it has the choice to either cut its losses from the original blunder or to stay put and multiply the costs of the rout.

Yet the Bush administration, by making U.S. troop escalation the centrepiece of its new war plan in Iraq, hews to a strategy that created the present hopeless muddle. And by preparing to hold Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Government to a series of U.S.-set "benchmarks," Washington does not seem to understand that its surrogates are in an equally hopeless situation. In overhauling his top diplomatic and military team in Iraq, Mr. Bush has signalled that his aim is to buy time politically rather than wind down America's involvement.

In the end, U.S. forces will be compelled to pack up and go home. But like it happened with the 1980s war in Afghanistan, the fallout of the growing violence and disorder in Iraq will affect the security of neighbouring countries more than that of the U.S. The fallout, however, promises to constrict America's strategic space in the region. That, in turn, will increase India's importance to U.S. policy as a strategic anchor. India's strategic value has already been underlined by the fact that the entire expanse from the West Bank to Pakistan has become an arc of volatility and extremism.

Mr. Bush's foreign-policy options have already narrowed considerably because Iraq is in a mess, a resurgent Taliban is stepping up attacks in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden is still at large, North Korea has escaped with a slap on the wrist over its nuclear test, Iran remains defiant over its nuclear programme, and international terrorism is on the rise. All this has happened paradoxically at a time when America supposedly has a monopoly on power unrivalled since the Roman Empire.

Consensus fractured

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has helped fracture the post-September 11, 2001, global consensus to fight terror. More importantly, it has weakened America politically and militarily, distracting it from single-mindedly pursuing its larger strategic goals. It has been virtually forgotten that 9/11 happened not because of Iraq but because of the terrorist nurseries in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt, many of which still remain in business in the northern Pakistani regions. In fact, by speciously linking Iraq with Al-Qaeda to justify its invasion, the U.S. created a self-fulfilling prophesy that has now come to haunt it.

If anything, the Iraq occupation has starkly brought out the contradictions in Mr. Bush's approach. Take, for instance, his accent on promoting democracy in Iraq while shoring up dictatorships in Iraq's neighbourhood — from Egypt to Pakistan. Or the way he invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that were not there, but then pursued an exceptionally lenient treatment of Pakistan despite the discovery of a major nuclear black market ring run by Pakistani scientists and intelligence and military officials. The country that exported nuclear secrets to three states — Iran, Libya, and North Korea — has been allowed to escape international scrutiny and censure while importer Iran is sought to be put in the doghouse.

Unable to vindicate himself on his allegations about Saddam Hussein regime's WMD holdings and links with Al-Qaeda, Mr. Bush sought to prove himself right on his third pretext for invading Iraq — "liberating" its people from a brutal dictator. This he did by getting the captured despot convicted and executed. But there again he blundered.

Had Saddam Hussein not been privy to embarrassing secrets, he would have faced trial at The Hague — like Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic — instead of before a kangaroo court in Iraq. General Manuel Noriega, captured in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, also was not delivered at The Hague, lest he spill the beans about his past cosy ties with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Today, owing to his legal lynching, Saddam Hussein seems more powerful in his grave than he was in power. It is ironical that a dictator who seized power with CIA's blessings in 1979 and who invaded Iran in 1980 with tacit U.S. support should have become in death an emblem of the struggle against brute American power. But then, didn't the CIA unsuspectingly endorse Osama bin Laden during the 1980s?

It was at a White House ceremony attended by some turbaned and bearded "holy warriors" from Afghanistan in the mid-1980s that President Ronald Reagan proclaimed mujahideen like Osama bin Laden as the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers" of the U.S. One such "moral equivalent", Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed Taliban chief, gave vent to his destructive genius in 2001 by demolishing Afghanistan's most famous antiquities, including two towering, 1,500-year-old Buddhas carved into a sandstone cliff at Bamiyan.

It is Mr. Bush's fusing of the war of necessity against terrorism that began after 9/11 with his war of choice in Iraq that has created adverse and unmanageable consequences for U.S. policy. There was no direct threat from a Saddam Hussein-ruled Iraq, only a desire on Mr. Bush's part to try out neoconservative theories of political engineering. But think of a diametrically opposite scenario to the present one — a situation in which the U.S. had succeeded politically and militarily in Iraq. What kind of an overweening America under Mr. Bush would the world have seen today?

To the critics, the fact that the American colossus has stumbled in Iraq — and stumbled badly — has come as a welcome respite from the further exercise of untrammelled U.S. power by Mr. Bush. In this view, by landing America in a costly, intractable quagmire, Mr. Bush has rendered yeoman service to clip the capacity of the unipolar beast. Even the staunchest supporters of Mr. Bush will have to concede that his blunders have done much to contain U.S. power and influence in the world. Yet, even under siege, Mr. Bush has opened a battlefront in the newly oil-rich Horn of Africa, launching U.S. air strikes in Somalia after prodding Ethiopia to send its forces across the border to battle Islamists. He has still to grasp a simple truth — aggression begets more militancy.

When history is written, what will stand out is Mr. Bush's role in turning a stable, secular Iraq into a failed state, whose ruins provided the base for a bloody surge of Islamist militancy in the world.

(The writer is Professor of Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

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