COMMENT: Help for America must have strings attached
Anatol Lieven
Far from ending with the fall of Baghdad, the Iraq war goes on and is likely to continue, at some level, for as long as foreign forces remain there. The death or capture of Saddam Hussein might reduce resistance in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq - but it might not.
Advocates of the US-British invasion often declared that Iraq is not Vietnam and this is self-evident. It is unlikely that anti-American forces in Iraq could ever inflict the losses suffered by the US in Vietnam. However, guerrillas in Iraq do not have to achieve anything like the successes of the Vietcong in order thoroughly to spoil US plans. In Vietnam, the US was defending a ramshackle but existing South Vietnamese state. In Iraq, the US is trying to create a new state on the ruins of Ba'ath and Sunni Arab-ruled Iraq. If it is to do so, the US urgently needs to restore the Iraqi economy.
Iraqi guerrillas can make this impossible. They have only to force allied soldiers to move around in large, heavily armed groups, cut off from the population, to prevent them from acting as a police force. They can trap the occupying forces into situations where they kill large numbers of civilians, infuriating the population. And above all, the guerrillas could kill or intimidate enough Iraqi policemen and officials to make large parts of the country ungovernable and destroy even the appearance of gradual democratisation and reconstruction. These frightening outcomes seem plausible enough in the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq.
As for the Shia majority, steps taken by the US and British authorities have already closed off certain US plans. For example, disarming the Shia population is now considered impossible. Armed Shia groups will preserve their autonomy so that US options for shaping politics among the Shia and choosing which Shia groups to include in government will be limited.
This all adds up to a dangerous mess, worsened by gross failures of planning and intelligence by the US and British governments. This in turn raises the question of whether other countries should help with troops or aid. Now that the US occupation has been sanctioned by the United Nations and Nato, a number of states anxious to improve their relations with Washington are offering some form of military help. Eleven European countries have expressed a willingness to make a military contribution. The US is asking India to send an entire division but in return India is quite rightly demanding a real say over US plans - something on which the British government should have insisted from the start.
This is the heart of the problem. The military contributions under consideration by the Europeans and others are too small either to make a difference on the ground or to exert real influence in Washington.
At best, all they can do is add international legitimacy to the US occupation that is unlikely to carry much weight with the local population. At worst, they will themselves become targets of attack and the resulting domestic political furore will only worsen transatlantic relations.
Substantial forces and aid should, however, be sent only with US guarantees. First, the Bush administration should promise not to establish permanent military bases in Iraq, to rule out turning Iraq into a permanent US client state. This is essential for the development of any kind of stable, consensual state in Iraq; all the evidence suggests that the presence of such bases would be unpopular with most Iraqis.
Second, the US needs to adopt a strategy towards neighbouring Iran that decouples abandonment of Iran's nuclear weapons programme from pressure for regime change. If there is a democratic revolution in Iran, well and good. By linking the two, the US government is destroying any incentive for the present Iranian regime to compromise on nuclear issues.
While the Iranian regime looks weak and endangered by popular anger, so does US authority in Iraq. Not least among the dangers is that an Iranian theocracy in a struggle for existence would do its utmost to arm and encourage Shia revolt in Iraq. This would greatly increase the danger to all foreign troops and workers in Iraq.
If other countries are to help the US in Iraq and expose themselves to such dangers, they have both the right and the duty to demand that the US listen to their advice concerning US strategy not just in Iraq itself but in the region as a whole.
The writer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC