Iraq: the imperial solution
Melbourne Age December 1 2005
The US has no alternative but to maintain a tight grip on Iraq, writes Scott Burchill.
There is much speculation about the endgame in Iraq. Most of it assumes that the United States and its allies will pull out as soon as "the job is done", a meaningless phrase concocted by PR consultants and designed to help politicians avoid answering the question, "when will the troops come home?"
Twelve months ago this formulation was thought to mean "when the insurgency is defeated", but it now appears to refer to the much less ambitious goal of "creating a well-trained Iraqi army" - much like the one that was demobilised by the "coalition of the willing" after April 2003. With polls heading southwards, congressional elections looming and more than 2000 fatal casualties, President George Bush apparently wants to leave Iraq but hasn't yet found an exit strategy that he can publicly explain or defend.
In comparative terms, this discussion presupposes the inevitable "Vietnamisation" of Iraq. In 1969, the Nixon administration began withdrawing US forces from Vietnam and handing over its weaponry to the army of the Republic of South Vietnam. Within two years these forces and the puppet government that backed them collapsed, sealing a historic communist victory. Will history repeat itself in the Middle East?
The answer is almost certainly no.
First, the Iraqisation of the war - asking Iraqi army recruits to accomplish what highly trained US marines could not achieve - "stretches the imagination", according to General William Odom, former head of the US National Security Agency. Without direct US oversight and support, they are not likely to trouble the insurgency.
However, there is no government or any centralised authority with which either US-led forces or the nascent government in Baghdad's Green Zone could negotiate a ceasefire or power-sharing arrangements. Despite spin emanating from Washington, about 95 per cent of insurgents are native, secular Iraqis and not foreign Islamists. The force that binds them together is the presence of occupying troops from the West. Take them away and it is possible the insurgency would fragment before it could form a coherent government or even challenge the unstable incumbent for political power.
Second, a US withdrawal would hand Iran an extraordinary victory, ensuring it dominates the Gulf region. Assuming their Shiite co-religionists - 60 per cent of the population - dominate political life in Iraq, a new period of co-operation between old adversaries is likely, much to the concern of Iraq's Sunni neighbours Jordan and Saudi Arabia - to say nothing about Israel. Several of the neo-conservatives and radical nationalists in Washington who launched the invasion in March 2003 previously backed Saddam in his war against Tehran during the 1980s. Their hostility to Iranian fundamentalism hasn't abated.
Third, in Vietnam the US could achieve its primary war aims - preventing the spread of the "virus" of independent development - by destroying the country and leaving. The documentary record shows that by the early 1970s Vietnam was no longer the threat of the good example it might once have been in the region. This was hardly surprising.
The US-led invasion of Vietnam that "unleashed the greatest flood of firepower against a nation known to history", was a catastrophic disaster for the civilian population, inflicting unimaginable human suffering and permanent physical and psychic damage on a poor, peasant-based society.
As historian Gabriel Kolko explains, "the United States and its allies exploded 15 million tonnes of munitions during 1964-72, twice the amount used in all of Europe and Asia during World War II. It sprayed defoliants, which cause cancer, birth defects, and other illness, on a fifth of South Vietnam's jungles, over a third of its mangrove forests, as well as on rice crops. About 7 million South Vietnamese, comprising over half the peasants and one-third the entire population, became refugees and were forced into camps and cities, permanently for many, where degradation, vice, and penury brutally assaulted their traditional culture. Almost all of North Vietnam's industry, bridges, and transport systems were destroyed. Assessments of wounded and dead differ greatly, but in a nation of 18 million in 1970, as many as 1.3 million South Vietnamese civilians were wounded, with death for between a fifth and third of this number. More than 2 million North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed - altogether, about 3 million people died."
Daily life in Iraq after March 19, 2003, has begun to resemble the early years of the Vietnam War. According to Kolko, "in the 18 months after the American invasion, according to a team of experts at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, the war caused about 100,000 'excess deaths', 58 times higher than before the war. The real figure may be lower but it could be higher too. Civilian deaths due to combat were at least 25,000 in the two years after the American invasion began, 37 per cent due to American fire, but that figure does not include deaths unreported in the news media. Another study reported that the malnutrition rate among children less than five years has doubled since the invasion, reaching levels that exist in the poorer African countries. The median income fell by almost half from 2003 to 2004, and by 2005 over half of Iraq's population lived below the poverty line."
Cities such as Fallujah have been destroyed, looting and violent crime are endemic, while electricity and clean drinking water supplies and sewerage are unreliable. Unemployment averages 20 per cent across the country and up to 70 per cent in the capital.
However, Iraq is radically different from Vietnam in one crucial respect. Despite parallel crimes in Fallujah and mass civilian deaths throughout the Sunni triangle, Iraq cannot be destroyed, but nor can it be left out of US control. As a source of strategic power and resource wealth, it is too important.
And yet the likely policy choices of a sovereign, minimally democratic Iraqi government would not be favourable to Washington. Closer political ties with Tehran, continuing hostility to Israel, oil contracts for US competitors such as France, Russia and China, and the political emancipation of Shiites across the region are not what the Bush Administration wants.
The only solution for Bush in Iraq is the traditional imperial one, as applied in the region earlier by the British, the French in North Africa, the Russians in Eastern Europe, the US in Central America, and so on: leave a client regime and a brutal army in place, with big muscle only a phone call away when the natives get too restless. This will be called "the democratisation of Iraq" and victory will be declared again, but few locals will be fooled.
Washington isn't building the world's largest embassy in Baghdad and a series of permanent military bases across the country just to abandon its most valuable strategic prize.
Dr Scott Burchill is a senior lecturer in international relations at Deakin University.