Subscribe...Consider the stunning magnitude of the failure. Iraq has been the top priority for the world's only superpower for the past three years, and a central one for many regional and international powers. The United States, intent on keeping Iraq together, has spent more resources in that country than any state ever has spent on another in the history of the world... In this perspective, one central measure of success of the intervention in Iraq is this: Three years later, have the prospects of regional and global security increased or decreased? The answer should propel a debate that's bigger than Iraq.Challenge Bigger than Iraq
An internal staff report [PDF] by the United States Embassy and the military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces "serious" and one "critical." The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.Graphic/map. According to the report, the only stable part of the country is the Kurdish-controlled north.
...The successful use of military power—as Mao Zedong understood when he called America a “paper tiger”—entails a large element of bluff. Vietnam deflated the image that American power could never be challenged. To some extent, the Gulf War of 1991 restored that image, but the restoration was achieved by the limited aims and quick termination of that war. The Clinton successes in the Balkans came in part because all sides bought this lesson of the Gulf War. (With Serbia, the bluff came close to being called again; the Kosovo bombing campaign took 80 days and Russian diplomacy rescued us in the end.)James K. Galbraith
But now Iraq has once again exposed what military power cannot achieve, short of nuclear weapons. Iran and North Korea have taken notice. Meanwhile, our friends, the Europeans and the Japanese, must be asking themselves: Exactly what sort of security does the American alliance buy, and at what price?
Bush and Cheney have done more than merely bungle a war and damage the Army. They have destroyed the foundation of the post-Cold War world security system, which was the accepted authority of American military power. That reputation is now gone. It cannot be restored simply by retreating from Iraq. This does not mean that every ongoing alliance will now collapse. But they are all more vulnerable than they were before, and once we leave central Iraq, they will be weaker still. As these paper tigers start to blow in the wind, so too will America’s economic security erode.
From this point of view, the fuss over whether we were misled into war—Is the sky blue? Is the grass green?—stands in the way of a deeper debate that should start quite soon and ask this question: Now that Bush and Cheney have screwed up the only successful known model for world security under our leadership, what the devil do we do?
2 For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.civ|il war (siv-el wôr), n. 1 a violent conflict between organized groups within a country
Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).
The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.
This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.
Lebanonization
That, however, rather oversimplifies the contours of the spreading civil war in Iraq. To understand what Iraq will look like, recall the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1990, a brutal struggle that left perhaps 200,000 people dead in a far smaller country. That war dragged on for fifteen years, during which Lebanon's many-sided political culture constantly realigned itself like a reshaken kaleidoscope...
That is precisely what the civil war in Iraq is beginning to look like today. Baghdad, like Beirut, is fast being transformed into a carcass to be fought over (as are cities like Kirkuk and Mosul). The Kurdish north, the Shiite south, and the Sunni triangle are becoming fortified hinterlands for the struggle to control Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk. Iraq has become a Mad Max world in which angry youths wheel around in jeeps and pickups, don ragtag militia uniforms, and set up checkpoints and roadblocks guns drawn. The Shiite forces eye each other suspiciously and enviously, and their rivalries may yet turn to open warfare and violence. The two big Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, despise each other, and in the past have warred each against the other. The Sunnis too are thoroughly divided. Any of these factions might ally with just about any of the others, then break that alliance only to ally for a period with a former enemy and attack the former ally. There are no rules, only guns. Is it possible to imagine the U.S. armed forces in the midst of this chaos? No.
The chaos of the present moment will certainly get worse, new Iraqi government or not. Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times reports that gun sales in Iraq are booming, with proliferating weapons bazaars that sell "machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers." He adds: "Militia ranks are swelling, too, with growing swarms of young, religious, mostly uneducated young men taking to the streets with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders."
The Sunnis, in particular, are fast building private armies to compete with the 20,000-strong Shiite Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army, and other Shiite militias, as well as with the Kurdish pesh merga. The Los Angeles Times [5] reports that Sunnis are "stashing guns in their mosques and knitting themselves into militias of their own." It quotes a young Sunni militant: "One little signal and you'll see us all in the streets." Day after day, scores of Iraqis -- mostly Sunni victims of Shiite gangs -- turn up bound and gagged, with electric drill holes in their bones, and bullets in their brains. They are found in mass graves, in vans stuffed with bodies, in ditches. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing cities and neighborhoods in which they are a minority or feel unsafe, becoming refugees in their own land.
It is precisely this phenomenon that marks the formal start of civil war in Iraq, and it can be traced back to the late summer of 2005, when a steady stream of Sunni murder victims began to turn up in hospital morgues around the country. Since last fall, according to reports from human rights observers, hundreds of dead Sunnis have been piling up in mortuaries each month. In the past month, according to various Iraqi officials, more than 1,700 Sunnis have been kidnapped, tortured, and executed, and fifty or so new bodies are turning up on a typical day. Since last fall, the number of those killed by Shiite death squads has surpassed those killed by the Baathist-led resistance and by the terrorists linked to Al Qaeda's suicide bombers -- as good a marker as any with which to pinpoint the moment when Iraq passed from one stage of political existences to another: Iraq has now gone from a country with a shaky, U.S.-backed regime fighting a resistance movement to a country in which sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing predominates.
The researchers compared the mortality rate among civilians in Iraq during the 14.6 months prior to the March 2003 invasion with the 17.8 month period following the invasion. The sample group reported 46 deaths prior to the March 2003 and 142 deaths following the invasion. The results were calculated twice, both with and without information from the city of Falluja. The researchers felt the excessive violence from combat in Falluja could skew the overall mortality rates. Excluding information from Falluja, they estimate that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. Eighty-four percent of the violent deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery.Iraqi Civilian Deaths Increase Dramatically After Invasion
Sunni terrorists and death squads have been killing Shiite civilians since 2003, while the Shiites have been retaliating on an ever increasing scale, including using Iraqi police as death squads. In the last six weeks alone, roughly 3,000 deaths have been attributed to sectarian violence, according to American press outlets. Figures reported by Arabic-language media are even higher.Divided and Conquered, Iraq Descends Into Civil War
According to the Iraqi government, more than 40,000 Iraqis have become refugees in the last month. As if the number were not enough cause for concern, consider that this estimate is almost certainly low, since it implies a ratio of deaths to refugees of about 1 to 10. Typical ratios in ethnic cleansing campaigns — except in genocides, which is not what is happening in Iraq — are closer to one to 100.
The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and it will still remain a name on the map. American power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A ‘national unity government’ may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. ‘The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,’ one minister said. The army and police are already split along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will break up with or without an all-out civil war.The end of Iraq
Most probably war is coming, but it will not be fought in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be a battle for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs. ‘The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the fighting,’ a Kurdish leader told me. ‘The soldiers obey whatever orders they receive from their own communities.’ The parts of the country with a homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurdish, may well stay quiet. But in greater Baghdad, sectarian cleansing is already taking place. The place bears an ever closer resemblance to Beirut thirty years ago. The Shia Arabs have the advantage because they are the majority in the capital, but the Sunni should be able to cling on to their strongholds in the west and south of the city. The new balance of power in Iraq may be decided not by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting street by street.
Spiegel: Professor Stiglitz, at the beginning of the Iraq war, the United States administration was hoping to almost break even in terms of the costs ...Interview with Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz
Stiglitz: ... they truly believed the Iraqi people could use their oil revenues to pay for reconstruction.
Spiegel: And now you are estimating the cost of war at levels between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. How do you explain this difference?
Stiglitz: First, the war was much more difficult than President Bush and his government expected. They thought they were going to walk in, everybody would say thank you, and they would set up a democratic government and leave. Now that this war is lasting so much longer, they constantly have to adapt their budget. It rose from $50 billion to $250 billion. Today, the Congressional Budget Office talks about $500 billion or more for this adventure.
Spiegel: That's still by far lower than your own calculations.
Stiglitz: The reported numbers do not even include the full budgetary costs to the government. And the budgetary costs are but a fraction of the costs to the economy as a whole. And compare this to Gulf War number one, where America almost made a profit!
...Spiegel: In the US, the financial costs of war are seldom discussed. It used to be considered a sacrifice to achieve common goals. Why is it different today?
Stiglitz: This is not like a world war where you're attacked. We were attacked in Pearl Harbor, we had to respond. This time, we had a choice, we had to decide how and who we are going to attack ...
Spiegel: ... and if you can afford it.
Stiglitz: Well, we can afford it, that's not the issue. The issue is: $1 trillion or $2 trillion is a lot of money. If our objective is to have stability in the Middle East, secure oil, or extend democracy, you can do a lot of democracy buying for this sum. To put it in context: The whole world spends $50 billion a year on foreign aid. So what we're talking about is multiplying the foreign aid budget 20-fold. Wouldn't you say this could do more for peace and stability and security?
The one-year sum is larger than the entire cost of the Marshall Plan, which lasted four years and cost American taxpayers a total of $11.8 billion in 1950 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, the Marshall Plan would have a total cost of $86 billion today, with this difference: The plan helped 16 nations and 270 million people in Europe rebuild after World War II, compared with the Bush Plan in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will mostly pay for military occupation, with trickle down benefits going to 24 million Iraqis and 28 million Afghans.The conflict in Iraq has cost us approximately 272 Billion as of today (note: I'm not endorsing the source, but the figure seems consistant with what I've seen reported in the major news media).
'Despite the violence, U.S. officials have discounted talk of civil war. However, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday that an 'undeclared civil war' had already been raging for more than a year. 'Is there a civil war? Yes, there is an undeclared civil war that has been there for a year or more,' Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal told The Associated Press. 'All these bodies that are discovered in Baghdad, the slaughter of pilgrims heading to holy sites, the explosions, the destruction, the attacks against the mosques are all part of this.' Kamal said the country would still be spared from all-out sectarian war ``if a strong government is formed, if the security forces are given wide powers and if they are able to defeat the terrorists.'Official: Iraq in 'Undeclared Civil War'
The tragedy of civil war lies not only in what it means for Iraq's people but also in what the consequences would be for international security. The danger of drawing other states in, the spillover potential involving neighboring countries, the erosion of the balance of power in the region in favor of Iran and the creation of a hospitable environment for international terrorism. In the end, it is mostly these international consequences that propel international interventions that justify intrusion into the sovereignty of states.Three years later, have the prospects of regional and global security increased or decreased?
But despite the prevalence of troubled and troubling governments, states remain the most effective entities for enforcing security. Confronting them is sometimes necessary, but dismantling them is altogether different. In the security arena, both locally and across borders, states remain the best enforcers of order. Many states need to be improved or enhanced; others challenged, sometimes fought. But dismantling states remains one of the greatest dangers in our international system.
As we consider options toward other states not to U.S. liking, such as Iran, the removal of some governments may seem desirable from many vantage points, but not any cost.
The next user of weapons of mass destruction is more likely to be a terror group, such as al-Qaida, than any state. In its history, the United States has deterred the most ruthless and powerful states, including the Soviet Union. Groups such as al-Qaida are constrained only by the limits of their capability. Where there is absence of central authority, they expand. Al-Qaida didn't exist in Iraq before the war but now thrives there despite the presence of the most powerful military in the world.
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.No wonder they didn't kill him when they had the chance. He's so much more useful this way.
...
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
It was a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, three years ago. I was interviewing the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, in the ballroom of a big hotel in Cairo. Shrewd, amusing, bulky in his superb white robes, he described to me all the disasters he was certain would follow the invasion. The US and British troops would be bogged down in Iraq for years. There would be civil war between Sunnis and Shias. The real beneficiary would be the government in Iran. "And what do the Americans say when you tell them this," I asked? "They don't even listen," he said. Over the last three years, from a ringside seat here in Baghdad, I have watched his predictions come true, stage by stage.How predictions for Iraq came true
Steps toward democracy in the Arab world, a crucial American goalthat just months ago was cause for optimism — with elections held in Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian areas — are slowing, blocked by legal maneuvers and official changes of heart throughout the Middle East. Analysts and officials say the political rise of Islamists, the chaos in Iraq, the newfound Shiite power in Iraq with its implication for growing Iranian influence, and the sense among some rulers that they can wait out the end of the Bush administration have put the brakes on democratization. "It feels like everything is going back to the bad old days, as if we never went through any changes at all," said Sulaiman al-Hattlan, editor in chief of Forbes Arabia and a prominent Saudi columnist and advocate. "Everyone is convinced now that there was no serious or genuine belief in change from the governments. It was just a reaction to pressure by the international media and the U.S."Democracy in the Arab World, a U.S. Goal, Falters
User ParisParamus is a troll, but can not be deleted.
Abort, Retry, Ignore?Increased. Significantly. From Libya, to Egypt, to Lebanon, to Syria to Iraq.
Steps toward democracy in the Arab world, a crucial American goal that just months ago was cause for optimism--with elections held in Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian areas--are slowing, blocked by legal maneuvers and official changes of heart throughout the Middle East.
Analysts and officials say the political rise of Islamists, the chaos in Iraq, the newfound Shiite power in Iraq with its implication for growing Iranian influence, and the sense among some rulers that they can wait out the end of the Bush administration have put the brakes on democratization.
...
"Iraq has allowed people to say, 'Forget the American style of reform,' " said Taher al-Adwan, editor in chief of the Amman-based newspaper Al-Arab Al-Yawm. "The Americans are not able to present anything to the reformers to encourage them."
« Older Thinking in C.... | Dromedaries,... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by quonsar at 11:41 AM on April 9, 2006