The sorcerer's apprentices

Angelo M. Codevilla
The American Spectator
November 2003

"The sorcerer's apprentices has a long history of bungling it in Iraq"

Today's Iraq, the biblical land of Ur, used to interest Americans only as history and exotica -- the Marsh Arabs at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, north of the fabled location of the Garden of Eden, above that Baghdad and Mesopotamia, the land of Abraham, of Babylon, of Israel's Babylonian captivity, and of the Arabian Nights. There, in the third century BC, Xenophon's 10,000 Athenians fought the anabasis up the Euphrates Valley, through the Kurds, and over to the Black Sea. After the Islamic conquest and the great Mongol invasion, the area was a sleepy part of the Ottoman Empire, until Woodrow Wilson broke that up. Modern Iraq was born of the Versailles settlement of 1919 that brought forth so many other botches.

Iraq was not a good idea in the first place. American and British Wilsonians decided to re-create something like the Babylonian Empire: Sunni Mesopotamian Arabs from the Baghdad area would rule over vastly more numerous southern Sh'ia Arabs, and Arabophobe Kurds. Why the ruled should accept such an arrangement was never made clear. But before a local Mesopotamian ruler could be found, the British made matters worse by "parachuting" in a foreign imperial client. During the War, Britain had fought the Turks in the Middle East largely through Lawrence of Arabia's alliance with the Hashemites -- descendants of the Prophet and traditional rulers of the Hejaz area of southwestern Arabia, including Mecca. But the British had also allied with their rivals, the house of Saud, rulers of the central region of Nejd which, joined to the Wahabi sect, aspired to control the whole peninsula, especially Mecca. In their war for Arabia and Islam, the Saudis promptly showed how impotent were the post-war British to protect their clients. And so it happened that on the floor of the US Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge spoke as follows:

"The following dispatch appeared recently in the newspapers: 'HEDJAZ AGAINST BEDOUINS. The forces of emir Abdullah recently suffered a grave defeat, the Wahabis attacking and capturing Kurma, East of Mecca. Ibn Savond is believed to be working in harmony with the Wahabis. A squadron of the Royal Air Force was ordered recently to go to the assistance of the king.' Under Article 10 [of the Treaty proposed for ratification] if king Hussein appealed to us for aid and protection, we should be obliged to send American soldiers to Arabia...in order to protect his independence against the assaults of the Wahabis."

Lodge scorned Britain's "fair creations" in Arabia by comparing them to "the Mosquito king" that it had set up in Central America. He argued that there is no logical end to such games. The British proved him right. Having failed to protect the Hashemites in Arabia they set them up as alien rulers elsewhere -- Abdullah the lesser in Palestine and Hussein the greater (and his son Faisal) in his consolation prize, Iraq. This added to the regime's unpopularity. If America had helped Britain to defeat the Wahabis, Iraq might have been less frail with a native ruler. But the Americans who most supported the Versailles treaty were least eager to help Britain maintain its empire. Still, no one could have wiped away the problems that required Britain to use 100,000 troops to keep Iraq together in the interwar period.

From the beginning, while what one might call the right wing of American policy makers hoped to see the British Empire continue but was unwilling to help it do so, the left wing pushed for the British Empire to fade way, believing it would leave behind rulers even more open to fruitful relations with America. They imagined reaping the benefits of empire without bearing its burdens. And so the pattern of American policy was set for Iraq as well as for the other cripples that came forth from the wreckage of empires in the twentieth century: some Americans wanted nothing to do with them, others wanted to impose their will, while others yet thought that the locals would adopt democracy and become equal members of the world community. Few American policy makers measured the ends they sought against the means they were willing to commit. All seemed more interested in getting discrete actions approved despite their domestic opponents. If policy is a complex of measures reasonably conceived and brought to term, there has been no policy. Instead, clashing priorities have produced results that none wanted.

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Today's problems in the Persian Gulf began in 1953 with the joint British-American sponsorship of the military coup that overthrew Iran's leftist Prime Minister Mossadegh and placed power in the hands of the young Shah. Some Americans believed that Iran's Shah, plus Iraq's and Jordan's British-sponsored monarchs, would be enough to lead their region to every kind of progress while fighting Communism. Other Americans in the State Department, and even more in the CIA, were less concerned with stability and fighting Communism but even more committed to fostering what they thought was progress in the region. They sought to act as the world's truest revolutionaries. In Egypt, the CIA sponsored a set of young army officers led by Colonel Nasser and allied with the Muslim Brotherhoods that overthrew the compliant but too conservative King Faruk. Americans sponsored Egyptian-type movements throughout the region because they thought that Western-sponsored kings were not nationalistic or socialistic enough. Among the fortunes these Americans advanced were those of the Ba'ath, a national socialist movement founded in Syria in 1943 under Nazi influence.

Not surprisingly, even as the two strands of American policy fought one another with words and budgets in Washington, their proxies in the Middle East fought one another with knives and guns. After Nasser's American-aided success against Britain, France and Israel, the CIA-supported Ba'ath parties took power in Syria, Iraq, and almost succeeded in doing so in Jordan. Almost immediately, they wrecked the structure that other Americans had built in the region. Nasser had merely received Soviet aid, but Abdul Karim Kassem, immediately after taking power in Baghdad in 1958, aided the Soviet Union by killing the American-sponsored Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which had joined Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan (West and East). CENTO had made Containment a geographic reality by anchoring NATO in the West to the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) in the East. Iraq's withdrawal left a gap that frightened those at State and CIA who cared most about anti-Communism and embarrassed those whose creature Arab national socialism was.

The latter group, however, believed that the problem had just been that the wrong faction of the Ba'ath had come to power. They would fix that. Out of their magic bag they picked six contacts, including a 22-year-old thug named Saddam Hussein, and sent them to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem in October 1959. They botched it. The CIA then set up Saddam in luxurious exile in Cairo, where he continued to be handled both through Egyptian intelligence and directly from the US Embassy.

By 1963, Kassem had made enough enemies within the Ba'ath that the CIA needed only join a native coup against him. The CIA's gunman, Saddam, contributed enough to the coup's success that he became the head of the new ruling faction's secret police. As such, he oversaw the new regime's murder of some 4,000 people, described to gullible Americans as "Communists," but killed in fact for having been too close to Kassem. The CIA congratulated itself on a success that seemed to show the efficacy of its subtle covert action and to justify its dealing with people like Saddam. But their assumption that the likes of Saddam would follow the CIA's agenda and be subordinate to the CIA's authority rather than serve themselves was hallucinogenic smoke. By the late '60s, Saddam had become the power, while Iraq's President Abu Bakr was increasingly a figurehead.

Disappointing Americans who fancied themselves his handlers, Saddam never exhumed CENTO. Instead, Iraq and Syria's Ba'athist regimes became close military and political allies of the Soviet Union. By 1970 they had isolated Iran's Shah, now America's only surrogate. Iraq had become the Shah's chief challenger and was harboring his chief problem, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

American statesmen were of many minds about this. Some thought that Ba'athist Iraq posed less danger to the Shah and to the American order in the Persian Gulf than it presented opportunity to improve relations with progressive Arabs. They voiced Sunni Arab desires for some substantial Arab power to exist in the region to shield fragile Saudi Arabia and the weak Gulf states against Shi'ite Iran. And they argued that supporting Iraq was necessary to quiet Turkish worries about the Kurds. Nevertheless Arabists at State and CIA compromised with those who feared that the rise of pro-Soviet forces in the region would sweep away the Shah, and agreed to a plan of moderate pressure: the CIA would arm Iraq's Kurds, actualize their latent threat to the Baghdad regime, and thus force it to cease bothering Iran. By 1975 this plan to straddle Sunni and Shi'a, the conservative Shah and the progressive Ba'ath, seemed to have worked to perfection. Iraq sent Khomeini off to Paris. In exchange, the Americans left the Kurds to their fate. Saddam gassed and otherwise slaughtered them by the thousands. Henry Kissinger's reaction to this, that foreign policy was not to be confused with humanitarianism, amounted to retail Machiavellianism and wholesale naivete.

By 1978, Saddam's secret services were contributing logistics, cash, and Shi'ite agents to the coalition that destroyed the Shah. Although the Ayatollah Khomeini was indispensable to it, so were Soviet line organizations. Notably, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization provided the bulk of the street fighters. The radio of the Islamic revolution was run by the KGB out of Soviet Baku. Indeed, overthrowing the American order in the Gulf had become so dear to progressives around the world (including State and CIA) that President Carter himself was persuaded to help ease the Shah out of office in the hope that his doing so would ingratiate America with Khomeini and with progressive Arabs. Hopes for this rose in 1979 when Saddam took power directly in Iraq. But his attitude toward America turned harder than ever. Then Iranian revolutionaries took American embassy personnel hostage. Paris's Le Figaro announced "Open Season On Americans!" US policy was a self-inflicted shambles.

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Saddam's invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980, gave American factions more opportunities to make thing worse. Though those who had championed the Shah hated Khomeini, they continued to see Iran as a bulwark against Soviet and Arab expansion. Among them were Secretary of State Al Haig and NSC staffers Howard Teicher and Oliver North. They did not object to Israel selling Iran parts for its American weapons. With these munitions, Iran turned back Saddam. But when, in 1981, Israel used American-supplied aircraft and intelligence to destroy Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, the pro-Arab progressive elements at State and CIA, led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy, enlisted CIA deputy director Bobby Ray Inman and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to tilt US policy toward Saddam.

To Congress they argued that Israel had recklessly fouled a sophisticated effort, already showing success, to bring Iraq out of the Soviet orbit into the "family of nations" and to make of it America's point of reliance in the oil-rich region for the post-Shah era. To prevent Israel from doing such a terrible thing again, the CIA cut Israel's access to US intelligence and began instead to supply Iraq with satellite photos. To muted congressional guffaws, the State Department took Iraq off the list of states that abet terrorism. In 1982, with the help of George Shultz, Haig's replacement as Secretary of State, this group turned President Reagan to its view. In December 1983, Reagan's special ambassador, Donald Rumsfeld, told Saddam that his defeat would be against US interests. George Bush made calls to smooth the flow of US weapons, credits, and intelligence to Iraq. The US even tried to help Saddam build an oil pipeline along the Israeli border. And so the tide of battle turned again -- not because of any Machiavellian design to exhaust two bad regimes, but because of contradictory US policies.

There were more turns yet to come. By late 1985 the administration's cold warriors convinced Reagan that, from the perspective of what he valued most, the US-Soviet conflict, the real disaster for America would be Iran's defeat by Iraq's Soviet-backed force. With new US help, Iran advanced. At the same time, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane pressed Reagan to trade US arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and for the chance at reestablishing something like the old geopolitical relationship between America and Iran. But as some hostages were released, others were taken -- a supply-side hostage policy. But the tilt toward Iran had not undone the pipeline of weapons flowing from the US to Iraq. And after the 1986 revelation that revenues from arms sales to Iran had financed the Nicaraguan war in violation of law forced the departure of the pro-Iranians (McFarlane, John Poindexter, and North) from the National Security Council, the tilt toward Iraq went further yet. Vice President Bush advised Saddam to bomb with increased vigor.

When Bush became President, he felt that America owed Saddam a debt for ever having bombed Iran. In 1989, Bush ignored Pentagon warnings that Iraq was building nuclear weapons. In October, Secretary of State James Baker met with his Iraqi counterpart Tariq Aziz and specifically excluded specific concerns about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction. Until the eve of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the CIA continued to share intelligence with the dictator and opposed congressional efforts to limit the resources flowing to him. All told, US taxpayers guaranteed $5 billion in never-repaid loans to Saddam. When US ambassador April Glaspie met with Saddam on the eve of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and expressed no US objection to it on the supposition that he would not take "all" of Kuwait, she was faithfully implementing Bush's expressed hope to "bring him into the family of nations." That hope was not backed by means reasonably calculated to effectuate it, chiefly because it is impossible to imagine what might have accomplished such a thing.

Neither were the hopes that the Bush team attached to the Gulf War of 1990-91 so calculated. A half-million American troops, and a battle won so spectacularly that America could do whatever it wished, did not make up for an unrealistic and self-contradictory vision. Bush wanted Saddam defeated, humbled, possibly removed from power. But, following State and CIA, he also wanted Iraq to remain a unified nation under control of the Ba'ath party. The problem was, thoroughly defeating Saddam would also deprive the Ba'ath party of power, and without Ba'ath power (there was no other) the Iraqi state's components -- remember that Iraq is not a nation but an empire made more restive by Saddam's brutalities -- would go their own unpredictable ways. And so, after a military campaign that consisted of killing untold thousands of Iraqis who did not matter while sparing the few who did, the Bush team faced the choice it should have faced before making war: to accept either the uncertain costs of undoing the Iraqi regime, or the certain problems of merely reducing its military force. Since State and CIA had soured only on Saddam without questioning their commitment to the regime, to Iraq itself, or even to the cavalier way in which they related ends and means, and since Bush accepted uncritically their judgment as well as the priorities of Saudis, Turks, Jordanians, et al., he saved Saddam and called it victory.

Victory gives the winner his preferred version of peace, turns the page, and lets him go on to other matters. But Saddam did not treat America as if it had won. The Gulf War had made Iraq a continuing test of America's competence in the world and Saddam did not make that test easy for America's leaders. To neighboring states and peoples he presented the fact that he had fought and survived a mighty onslaught as proof of his potency, and of his leadership in a common cause: opposition to America -- foreign, envied, apparently mighty, but ultimately impotent. American elites in the 1990s for once were united -- in missing the magnitude of Saddam Hussein's political achievement. Thanks to their forbearance, this ex-CIA agent, this atheist, this bloody persecutor of Muslims, this tyrant, glutton of the finest Western food, drink, and whores that billions can buy, managed to convince millions of poor, hungry, powerless, devout people that he represented their fondest hopes, that America stood between them and those hopes, that America was beatable, and that they should make war against America.

This politics, not any military power, was Saddam's weapon of mass destruction -- all the more effective because America exposed itself by pursuing contradictory wills of the wisp. And that, with means disproportionate to ends. Indispensable to Saddam's success was the US government's ignorance of his mind due in part to the CIA's habit of relying on sources controlled by Iraqi intelligence. A decade after the Gulf War, never mind after the 2003 war, we still speculate but do not know what he thought he was doing.

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Two Bushes and one Clinton spent the decade after the Gulf War trying to bring Israelis and Arabs together, protect Saudi Arabia, and sanction Iraq economically lest it produce certain weapons. Saddam turned all these efforts to his credit and America's detriment, while at the same time fostering acts of terror. In Palestine, his money, propaganda, and henchmen made sure that no local Arab could afford to be less demanding of Israel or less damning of America than he. Quickly, he made the Saudis realize that relying on Americans for protection against other Arabs was a deadly self-indictment. At this writing we do not know how thoroughly Iraqi secret services backed up Iraqi foreign policy of fostering Islamic resentment amongst Saudis. But appeasing Saddam -- trying to prove in countless ways how truly Arab, meaning by now anti-American, the royal family really was -- became a political necessity that overshadowed Saudi relations with America.

Saddam used economic sanctions to strengthen his grip on his people, by shifting privations to peoples who opposed him while giving his supporters even greater relative advantages. The US government could not deny Saddam's charge that starvation and disease from sanctions were killing innocents. Nor could it tell itself that the sanctions were doing more than raising the price of Saddam's pursuit of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Textbooks teach that because economic resources are fungible, those who are subject to sanctions (other than total blockades on small countries) are forced only to pay higher prices for whatever they want. But neither Bushes nor Clintons were much on reading. Secretary of State Colin Powell even proposed "smart sanctions" -- as conceivable as sharp balloons. By the late '90s, Saddam was more important than he had been before the Gulf War.

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Hundreds of years from now, textbooks will still cite US Iraq policy to define divorce between ends and means. All means of coercion -- diplomacy, economic pressure, subversion, and military action itself -- are effective to the extent that the plan of which they are part exerts force upon the target greater than the sacrifices demanded of it. In the decade after the Gulf War, Bushes and Clintons had hopes about Iraq, and discrete actions. But no coherent, success-oriented plan. How could they have one? On one hand they wanted the Ba'athist regime to remain. On the other, they wanted Iraq to change the role it was playing -- successfully -- in world politics. And their means were half-measures advertised as such.

US diplomacy, consisting of demands that Iraq grant more access to U.N. weapons inspectors, resembled a Kabuki show. Iraqis would delay and complicate. Americans said darkly that all means of enforcement were under consideration. But the end of the Gulf War had made plain to Saddam the internal contradictions of American policy and the limits they imposed. And so the inspection ritual would limp forward, with economic sanctions as the only American hammer. As more time passed, however, these became more trouble for America than for Saddam. The subversion consisted on the one hand of helping disaffected Kurds, but not enough to give them a chance to establish independence. Never mind of threatening the regime. When, in 1996, Saddam's army invaded the Kurdish enclave, America advertised its impotence by sending five cruise missiles against air defense sites hundreds of miles away. On the other hand, subversion consisted of placing hopes and money on the CIA's favorite Ba'athist henchmen, who were really working for Saddam. There was an independent set of Iraqi opponents of the regime, the Iraqi National Congress, supported by the US Congress. But State and CIA conducted covert actions against it.

One of many examples of US military action should suffice as the clearest proof of fecklessness. In 1993, after discovering an Iraqi plot to kill former President Bush, Clinton sent some 23 cruise missiles to destroy the headquarters of Iraq's intelligence service -- at night, killing mostly cleaning women. Clinton intended "to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism, to deter further violence against our people ... our intent was to target Iraq's capacity to support violence against the United States and other nations and to deter Saddam Hussein from supporting such outlawed behavior in the future."

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration endorsed the CIA's judgment that terrorism came not from states like Iraq, but from "loose networks" of renegade individuals. The chasm between words and reality sent a real message: America would not threaten Saddam's core interests. He was free to spread hate and contempt of America to the world.

Laurie Mylroie describes Iraq's role in anti-American terrorism. Such descriptions are necessarily incomplete and suggestive because terrorism, like all forms of indirect warfare, depends for its success on hiding the state's role as much as possible. While there is room to dispute Iraq's responsibility for any given act of international terror, no one denies that dealing death was Saddam Hussein's indispensable tool in international as in domestic relations, nor that Iraqi intelligence ran camps for training foreign Arab terrorists, nor that Saddam publicly supported the PLO and other longtime allies in the anti-Western cause. The point here is that surely the most effective aid that he received in concealing his hand in this business came from disputes amongst Americans about what ought to be done about Iraq.

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September 11 inflamed those disputes to the point of allowing the dispute itself to overshadow America's interest, never mind that of the Iraqi people. Instinctively, George W. Bush is said to have believed that Saddam "probably was behind [the attacks] in the end." Due to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the Department of Defense long held that, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman later wrote, "98 percent of terrorism is what governments make happen or let happen." Hence, the war on terror should aim at changing hostile regimes. Ba'athist Iraq headed the list. State and CIA differed. CIA director Tenet argued that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was responsible -- no one else -- and agreed with Secretary of State Powell that only targets in Afghanistan should be hit in retaliation. Both State and CIA argued against trying to topple Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Bush agreed with them. And when two weeks of bombing mud huts in October 2001 showed that the only way of hurting al-Qaeda was to create an Afghan regime hostile to it, State and CIA convinced Bush to try defeating the Taliban without producing a victory for their internal enemies, the Northern Alliance. Only after another week of derisory bombing showed the absurdity of this did Bush override State/CIA and order support of the Alliance. Much more strongly did these agencies oppose any sort of action against the Iraqi regime. Such action would alienate everyone they cared about: the Europeans, the United Nations, the Arab world, the New York Times, and of course America's Best And Brightest.

Bush somehow decided to take the Pentagon's advice and do "regime change" in Iraq, but he did not thereby break with the premises of his earlier decisions, or with their proponents. Nothing that happened on September 11 had changed the Bush team's primary objective in the Middle East -- maintaining the status quo -- or its evaluation of what the status quo required, namely, the good graces of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, That meant not touching Iraq, for that would suggest that Bush was somehow dissatisfied with their regimes as well. Yet, having decided to act against Iraq, he did not explain to himself or to others what he meant to do. Indeed, Secretary of State Powell convinced him that the clever way to obtain popular support for regime change was to pretend that the objective was something else: disarming Iraq of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Contradictory premises mixed with the tangled web of dissimulation to produce a mess.

That Saddam Hussein possessed or was trying to possess such weapons was conventional wisdom. That is why the emphasis seemed clever. For example, Senator John Kerry, palimpsest of the Democratic Left, was saying, as late as January 2003: "Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation al Qaeda And now he is miscalculating America's response to continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..." By the same token, President Clinton had often talked about using force to disarm Saddam, e.g., in February 1998: "One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."

Bush thought that merely matching the expressed views of the factions whose support he was seeking, acknowledging their authority, and stating that his decision depended on their support would deliver that support. With it, he could make war and get "regime change." This proved too clever by half because those factions were playing Iraq to look good to their constituencies even more than he was to look good for his. So, whereas in the summer of 2002 polls had been running heavily in favor of overthrowing Saddam, by January 2003 opposition to attacking Iraq, and to President Bush, had risen sharply. Common sense would not have expected otherwise. To ask support of anyone, never mind of opponents, for a course of action on which one claims not to have decided oneself, giving the impression that one's decision is contingent on such support, is to beg for opposition.

More important, once President Bush had given the American people the impression that America needed the United Nations' blessing to go to war, many Americans took him at his word and disapproved of war without those blessings. Besides, his enemies charged, when Bush said "disarmament" of Iraq he really meant "regime change." What he really meant was a matter of dispute to which he contributed. On October 21, 2002, he endorsed Colin Powell's proposal that if Saddam truly disarmed, that would constitute regime change and the regime could stay in power. But by March 2003, Saddam's departure was the point. And, late in the game, he defined the operation with the title "Iraqi freedom." This was less cynicism than a reflection of the shifting balance of power within the administration.

What would the actual purpose of US military operations be? The answer, crucial for planning, was manifold and contradictory. An operation meant strictly to "disarm" would be an armed scavenger hunt -- highly dangerous unless preceded by destruction of enemy armed forces. Destruction of enemy forces that left the regime intact made even less sense. So any operation would have to destroy the armed forces and the regime. But what would replace it? Here Washington's factions showed their differences, and plans for operations reflected them long before the first bombs fell on March 20, 2003.

One group in the Pentagon wanted to arm Iraqi exiles and Kurds, recognize them as a provisional government, and run a military operation to put them in power. Essentially, America would empower the enemies of America's enemies and step back as they dealt summarily with the Ba'athist regime's vast infrastructure. This would have required few US troops during the battle and, by definition, no American would take a hand in the inevitable settling of scores. At the other end of the spectrum, State and CIA having long argued that the weapons, not the regime, were the problem, were less concerned with eliminating America's enemies. Because they wanted to change Ba'athist Iraq as little as possible, they wanted no antiregime locals in the fight at all. Afterward, they wanted to pick and choose among Saddam's entourage while making sure to suppress any separatist tendencies among southern Shi'ites and northern Kurds. This required an extensive, long-term US occupation force.

President Bush, typically, chose both and added idealism. Iraq, he decided, would be governed by Iraqis, but not yet. True democracy would require elections not prejudiced by the power of Iraqi political personages chosen by the Pentagon. So American military forces would run Iraq for a long time with the help of Iraqi "technocrats" chosen by, well, by fights between State, CIA, and Pentagon, and during this time set up absolutely free and impartial elections. Despite freedom and impartiality, the occupation and elections would have to guarantee the territorial integrity of the country, prohibit religious fundamentalism, establish the rights of women, etc. How, no one could explain.

Saddam knew all this as well as the rest of the world. We do not know what he thought about it. But we now know what he did. Americans puzzled in January when Saddam emptied his jails of common criminals. Political prisoners were long dead. No one guessed that Saddam put the criminals on the street as part of a plan for after the war -- to augment regime loyalists in killing Americans and their collaborators. A few Americans puzzled at why Saddam did not take the opportunity to invite the US forces or anyone else to come -- peacefully -- and take whatever they thought were forbidden weapons. In Washington, even fewer paid much attention to the widely reported fact that the regime was apparently moving lock, stock, and barrel out of the palaces and ministries that Washington had publicly designated as targets of its "Shock and Awe" campaign. No one knew, of course, that Saddam had gathered over $1 billion for his post-war operations in Iraq. All sides in Washington also missed Saddam's decision to take his regime underground, expose the army and non-essential cadres to destruction, and to wage his fight after what America considered the war.

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As "shock and awe" was getting under way on March 21, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the Iraqi regime was "starting to lose control" because "their ability to see what is happening on the battlefield, to communicate with their forces, and to control their country is slipping away." But the regime had not tried to see, communicate, or control. It was long gone. Gradually, US planners realized that they would have to convince Iraqis that the regime had quit. Saddam would endeavor to convince them of the opposite. The real fight was just beginning. The shooting would be in Baghdad. But the issue would be decided in Washington -- just like Vietnam.

By April 9, the Bush team's decision not simply to crush the enemy, but to export good government, coupled with its failure to decide who would govern, began to haunt the operation. The US armed forces were ordered to arrest anyone who tried governing. Anarchy, anyone? Running Iraq would require favoring some local claimants to power over others chosen by Washington. But the State Department and the CIA favored some Iraqis and the Defense Department others. The Bush team counted on rival Iraqis and Americans to sort things out. It also counted on no resistance from the remnants of the regime. Nonsense.

By mid-May, embarrassment at apparent chaos led Bush to order US forces into action to restore order. But whose order? In June, US forces, at who knows whose direction, raided the offices of the Pentagon-allied Iraqi National Congress. "Well, they won't be pro-American anymore, I guess," mused one of the soldiers who carried out the dumb order. Meanwhile, remnants of the regime, along with religiously motivated fighters from throughout the Arab world (so much for the State/CIA canard that secular and religious terrorists do not cooperate) began a campaign of ambushes that has killed some 12 American soldiers per week, as well as Iraqi officials who cooperate with Americans. Iraqis learned that whereas no one would kill them for being anti-American, some would kill them for not being anti-American. And the Americans learned that they did not know who the killers were.

By fall 2003, US military operations had come down to garrison duty plus something like the search and destroy tactics of Vietnam, against mostly insignificant persons. That meant soldiers barging around the country, reasonably afraid for their lives, treating mostly innocent people as if they were enemies because they do not know who was who. Captured regime bigwigs have given no useful intelligence, betting that no harm will come to them from siding with Saddam, and much harm would come from siding against him. That calculus is all the more indicative of bad things for America because it is so reasonable. Americans eager to anticipate attacks could only rely on low-level informants. Quite simply, Americans were strangers, short timers, not fearsome, and not about to become anything else, who did not know the difference between Ahmed and Abdul, and were not about to find out -- except the hard way.

The fighting was limited to a small part of Iraq -- the area inhabited by the Sunni Mesopotamians who have ruled Iraq since 1919. Southern Shi'ites and northern Kurds, grateful to America for liberating them from Saddam and the Mesopotamians, not only do not fight Americans, but fear being placed once again under Sunni Arabs. Left to their own devices, they would either make some sort of separation from them or a war of reprisal and intimidation against them. Probably both. But the Americans prevent them from doing either. US policy prefers to have Americans shot at.

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By fall 2003, the Americans were scrambling to put an Iraqi face on the occupation. Hard bargaining between State and Defense produced a 25-member provisional governing council with some authority except over what really counts: the capacity to make war against the forces that, among other things, killed one member of that council and wounded another. The war they would make would be more like that which the Lebanese militias made against the PLO in 1982 -- the kind of war that settles matters in the region. The kind of massacre war that Americans do not and should not make.

The only meaningful choice that Americans can make in Iraq at the end of 2003 is whether or not to step aside and let the enemies of the Mesopotamians have at their former rulers. Absent that, serving on an American-sponsored governing authority may amount to signing one's own death warrant, as such service turned out to be in Vietnam. Friendly Iraqis were facing the same deadly choice as had the Vietnamese: succumb to the enemies that the Americans won't let you fight as you would like, or be thrown to the wolves by Americans who regard you insufficiently faithful to their domestically driven agenda. The other alternative is for such friendly Iraqis to survive by becoming unfriendly.

Meanwhile, back in America, President Bush's inability to succeed in Iraq lowered his chances of re-election. The President had told Bob Woodward:

"I'm the commander, see, I don't need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

But in fact he did explain why he made war on Iraq primarily in terms of Weapons of Mass Destruction. That mistake was sure to become an embarrassment. Of course Iraq had chemical and biological weapons! Some US Special Forces who had found their hiding places in 2002 had become contaminated and quite sick. But since these substances are almost as easily unmade as they are made, and since the pieces for making them do not have to be kept together, turning their discovery into the test of legitimacy of US policy always amounted to leading with America's political chin. Saddam did in fact get rid of them. None of Bush's resident geniuses ever understood what little role they ever played in his quiver. Later, Bush explained the war in terms of the numerical measures of good government that he was bringing to Iraq. But as in Vietnam, this won't do. Mostly, failure to kill those who kill Americans requires not explanation, but termination.

Failure to focus on killing America's enemies, as well as on the desire of most Iraqis to be rid of the kind of American expertise that foisted Saddam on them in the first place, is precisely the result of the dysfunctional interplay of overblown personalities and domestic agendas that passes for foreign policy in today's Washington.

 

[Posted 2004/11/28]

 

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"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

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"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

› AOTW Archive



From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



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