Let's De-Bushify
Dubya’s continued presence in the White House is the biggest obstacle to a resolution of the international and local crises his invasion of Iraq has fomented.
The international community is not interested in handing the Bush administration a victory in Iraq. When the Bush administration plaintively bleats that nobody wants Iraq to fail, it ignores the unspoken coda: everybody wants Bush to fail in Iraq.
It’s not hard to understand why.
Provision of meaningful European aid, NATO participation, and UN cover to shore up our position in Iraq would not be an expression of gratitude and support to the US as the world’s policeman and disinterested dispenser of justice and democracy.
Instead it would be an absurd reward to a U.S. regime that is avowedly unilateralist, committed to serial military adventurism in the name of pre-emption, ridiculously tilted toward Israel’s Likud, cynically duplicitous and contemptuous of its allies, and devoted to a reckless, self-serving U.S. agenda in the Middle East.
Bush is determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq, squeak into office for a second term, and continue his America Uber Alles mischief in the Middle East with his Iraq policy unrepudiated, if not vindicated.
However, nobody outside of the United States harbors any illusions about Bush’s desperate ambitions. The world’s distaste for and distrust of George Bush is terminal.
So if he wants to set up a rogue state and U.S. client in the heart of the Middle East oil patch with 14 U.S. military bases and tens of thousands of U.S. troops, he’ll have to do so on his own dime without the help of the international community.
Too bad, of course, for the Allawi regime.
It could use the legitimacy and assistance that internationalization could bring it — becoming a preferred Euro charity case like Arafat’s Palestinian Administration, instead of a desperate, scorned, and under-supported US client like Karzai’s Afghanistan.
And I have a feeling that most Iraqis, after a brutal dictatorship and inept occupation, would like to see the transitional government try to rise above its corrupt origins and serve at least as a partial vehicle for Iraqi electoral and political aspirations.
Unfortunately, survival as a viable government outside the barricades of the Republican Palace is now out of the hands of the transitional government and the U.S.
The disastrous U.S. occupation and the miscalculations at Fallujah and against al Sadr guarantee that the Iraq political equation includes more than the weak and venal client government that America considers essential to its McDemocracy style of nation building.
Today in Iraq, Allawi shares political power and initiative with paranoid, energized militias blooded in battles with the United States and opportunistic, violently anti-American Islamic radicals.
Civil peace in Iraq is hanging by a thread.
In this dangerous environment, peace and security in the run-up to the crucial January elections depend upon the restraint and good offices of…
…Islamic terrorists.
Unfortunately, the weakness and division of the current Iraq polity offer violent radical Islamic movements an irresistible, once in a lifetime opportunity.
Think of it.
Before we made a hash of Iraq, al Qaeda had devoted decades, millions of dollars, and thousands of lives to the quixotic task of bringing down the rulers of Saudi Arabia — a relatively stable, prosperous, petrostate with political and religious legitimacy and a small number of U.S. troops.
Ironically, a central neo-con justification for the Iraq debacle was the need to de-Americanize vulnerable, equivocal Saudi Arabia and shift our operations to a friendly, under-our-thumb liberated Iraq.
Now Pentagon planners must be looking back longingly at those relatively happy days when American troops were based in the Saudi sandbox, instead of losing dozens of troops a day to death and injury in an angry land teetering between insurrection and anarchy.
For radical Islamic militants, how tempting a target Iraq must be — its economy and society shattered by war, ruled by a derided interim government of fat, moistly desperate émigrés, its domestic security apparatus in tatters, occupied by 135,000 unpopular U.S. troops, and unable to face down an increasingly militant anti-U.S. faction (al Sadr’s) ready to punish and supersede the central government if and when it shows itself incapable of providing domestic security.
Defeat of the Americans and their client regime may be only a few car bombs and months away.
Blowing up Iraqis is — no surprise! - detested by the Iraqis, but the Zaqwaris of Iraq will continue to do so. It’s not a popularity contest. The purpose of the attacks is to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the current regime and allow power and initiative to drift into the hands of indigenous Iraqi forces almost as willing as al Qaeda to regard expulsion of the Americans as a political and moral imperative.
So extracting ourselves from the Iraq quagmire takes more than superficial Iraqization and internationalization.
First, we have to de-Bushify U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and the Middle East so that allies will toss Allawi a lifeline, no longer fearing that stability in Iraq will translate into the regional hegemony of an aggressively unilateralist, confrontational America dominating the world’s oil supplies.
Secondly, and most importantly, we must de-Americanize the politics of Iraq, so that the political forces inside Iraq no longer have to deal with the fatal incubus of the U.S. presence polarizing and dividing the country and providing a target and justification for violent, anti-American Islamic radicalism.
De-Bushification may be within our grasp.
If Kerry is elected president he will probably repudiate the Bush end-run to oblivion in the Middle East with plenty of happy if futile talk about the Israel-Palestine peace process and regional stability. The Arab States and the Europeans, relieved that the United States is trying to regain its role and reputation as honest, ineffectual broker, dispense the military and aid goodies.
That’s the easy part.
The hard part is for Kerry to resist the temptation to continue embracing the Iraq tar baby in the Middle Eastern briar patch in the name of American prestige, interests, and opportunities.
Here’s a modest proposal:
Inside Iraq, instead of trying to force ourselves on an Arab population that detests and distrusts us, we should concentrate our initiatives on the only people who desperately want and need us: the Iraqi Kurds.
Call it Cut and Run Lite.
Openly acknowledging the Kurds as our favored clients will not make them the focus of Iraqi resentment; that’s happened already.
Kurd efforts to skew the evolving constitution and Iraq political life to their benefit through the undisguised influence of the Kurds’ overbearing patron — the United States — have alienated moderate as well as radical Sunnis and Shi’ites. Attempts to include a de-facto Kurd veto lies at the heart of Ayatollah Sistani’s resistance to the draft constitution.
The Kurds and the United States should give up their efforts to obtain overt political, legal, and constitutional protection for the Kurds’ privileged minority status within Iraq. Instead, America should devote its efforts — and power — to ensuring that all parties accept the de facto autonomy of the Kurdish regions.
By the rules of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell autonomy, the Kurds don’t rub Iraqi noses in their independence and, with the help of the U.S. tax payer, turn over some tax revenues to the central government. In return, the regime in Baghdad keeps its hands off the Kurd areas, just like they’ve had to for the last 15 years, and resists the temptation to encourage anti-Kurd feelings among Iraq’s Arabs.
Instead of a catastrophic attempt to impose Kurd priorities on the rest of Iraqi, Iraqi Kurdistan will disengage from Iraq politics, content with its position as a privileged American enclave.
And as the Kurds disengage, so will we, pulling our forces out of southern Iraq. Most troops go home; some set up shop in our nice new Kurdish bases.
Maybe the U.S. presence in a prospering Iraqi Kurdistan may become a stabilizing factor in the Middle East for both Turkey and the Arab states. Imagine that!
And what do we get?
In return for our quarter trillion dollar/1000-life/16000 wounded Iraq escapade, we get our second Israel in the Middle East: another beleaguered non-Arab bastion desperate for U.S. protection, willing to host our troops, and inclined to further our interests.
Inside Arab Iraq, with the American factor removed as a destabilizing force in Iraqi affairs, the émigré hacks of the transitional government can be quietly pensioned off to Geneva without the ruckus of a U.S. and al-Qaeda and/or Zaqwari — orchestrated civil war. Sistani can concentrate his political will and power on neutralizing al Sadr and his lumpen militias without the complicating threat of apocalyptic anti-U.S. Islamic radicalism.
Iraq can achieve its destiny as the Shi’ite dominated, Iran tilting state it yearns to be, tormenting its Sunni minority, playing footsie with Russia and the Europeans, and happily selling its crude to whatever gas guzzling infidel superpower that needs to top off its tank.
That’s the best we can do with the losing hand GWB has dealt us.
The alternative is four more bloody years of Bush wasting American lives, treasure, and influence in a futile attempt to justify his errors and arrogance.
So, for the sake of Iraq — and the world — and our country…
…let’s de-Bushify.
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
