AS THE situation in Iraq spins out of control, the disarray in the occupying forces grows more acute. “Certainly these attacks seem to have been the operations of foreign fighters,” said Brigadier-general Mark Hertling, deputy commander of the 1st Armoured Division, after four suicide bombs in one day in Baghdad left dozens dead and hundreds injured. Not at all, said Major-general Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division: “My initial feeling is, this is former regime loyalists doing this with maybe minor co-ordination with a few people that might not be from Iraq originally.”
Even if they can’t even agree on whom they are up against, the US commanders in Iraq remain resolutely confident in public. “They’re going after soft targets,” explained General Odierno, “because they know that they’re not being successful in doing direct attacks against American targets.” He said this after 24 hours that saw a rocket attack on the al-Rashid Hotel that killed a US colonel and almost got Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and four other mortar and bomb attacks that killed four other American soldiers — the worst day ever for US occupation forces in Iraq.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, the commander-in-chief of the ‘war on terror’, US President George W. Bush, made his own unique contribution to the debate, explaining why Iraqis and/or foreign fighters are resisting the US occupation of Iraq in terms that any child could understand: “[They] can’t stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos.” Trouble is, grown-ups find this sort of explanation … well, frankly, childish. Does Mr Bush really believe that people (weird Muslim people) go around thinking to themselves: “I hate freedom. I love terror”?
It’s a mess that’s going from bad to worse — and yet, we are constantly told, it would be even worse if the United States pulled out of Iraq now. All the American and British pundits tell us so, even the relatively sensible ones like John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org: “The problem at the moment is that if they turn the country over to the Iraqi Governing Council … some guy with a moustache is going to come in and shoot them and say he’s in charge.”
The message is clear. Whatever we may have thought about the idea of invading Iraq in the first place, we must now support the US occupation for two or three or five years or however long it takes, because the only alternative is the return of Saddam Hussein or somebody very like him.
But is that really true? Imagine for a moment that George W. Bush and his chief political strategist Karl Rove called in a bunch of independent advisers — not the current policy-makers, who are shackled to the commitments and strategies they advocated in the past, but genuine outsiders — and asked them how to manage policy and perceptions in the 12 months left until next year’s presidential election. It’s a safe bet that they would identify the Iraq quagmire as the biggest obstacle to Bush’s re-election.
If they were worth their salt, they would also take the obvious next step and recommend that he pull US forces out of Iraq now: go to the United Nations, announce that America’s mission in Iraq has been accomplished with the destruction of the Baathist regime, and ask Secretary-general Kofi Annan to take over the task of rebuilding a civil society and a decent government in the country. The UN would also need troops to maintain order in Iraq, of course, but if US troops were rapidly withdrawn, only a tenth of the money currently being spent on them would pay for comparable numbers of blue-helmeted soldiers from other countries — mostly Muslim countries that have no direct border with Iraq, like Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Algeria — to take their places.
Would that stop all the bombs and ambushes? Probably not, but it would eliminate the mistrust of American motives among ordinary Iraqis that currently gives the resistance fighters a friendly and supportive environment to operate it. It would get US troops out of the firing line. And it would not necessarily end with some ‘guy in a moustache’ walking inand taking over.
To argue that this is the only alternative to a continued American occupation reveals a deep contempt for the aspirations and abilities of Iraqis. The Iraqi Governing Council, purged of a few obvious Pentagon carpet-baggers like Ahmed Chalabi, would represent most of the morepowerful groups in Iraqi society. If it were given real power and credibility under a UN administration it might well succeed in bringing the country to a safe, democratic harbour.
So why doesn’t the Bush administration grasp this lifeline? Perhaps because it would require the wholesale replacement of all the powerful people in the administration who advocated the Iraq adventure in the first place, which may be more than Bush can handle. But what can he do instead to ease his path to a second term in November, 2004?
First, he needs another terrorist attack on American soil to drive panicked voters back into his arms. Al Qaeda will certainly provide that if it possibly can, for its leaders understand that Bush is their best recruiting agent. And then he needs another short, victorious war against an alleged ‘terrorist state’ next spring or autumn to distract the voters’ attention from the mess in Iraq. Syria would do just fine.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
