To fix this mistake, end it as quickly as we began it
Accepting Reality Is No Vice, and Being Oblivious Is No Virtue
| We trim this 2008 article posted at the Independent Institute on March 3. The author has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues and authored The Empire Has No Clothes: US Foreign Policy Exposed. |
by Ivan Eland
The obliviousness of the American people, politicians, and press is especially acute when it comes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The media, always concerned about being branded as “liberal” or “unpatriotic,” portray improvements in Iraq by the US troop surge. This portrayal has been so rosy and so accepted by the American people that the Republicans will attempt to use progress in Iraq against the Democrats in the 2008 election. In Afghanistan, the press coverage has been more accurate concerning the resurgence of the Taliban, but the media and the Democrats seem to think that the United States could still win if more troops are inserted. If the American public is deluded over the surge in Iraq, it is simply ignorant of what is going on in Afghanistan.At the risk of being a “nattering nabob of negativity,” I would argue that the United States is still losing -- and ultimately will be defeated -- in both of these brushfire guerrilla wars. Others are pointing in the same direction. In Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq, William R. Polk, who has experienced insurgencies in the field, concludes from history that in the mid- to long-term -- absent genocide by counterinsurgency forces -- insurgents almost always prevail.
Even after spending $650 billion, more than 4,000 US and allied lives, and tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi lives on these two wars, many US politicians and most of the media and American public still prefer to avoid the stark reality that the United States is likely to lose both of these prolonged wars.
In Iraq, the violence has declined from peak levels, but actually started dropping even before the US troop surge, primarily because severe ethnic cleansing had separated the warring Sunnis and Shi’a into homogenous ghettos, and because the United States had begun to pay off the Sunni guerrillas to police their local areas and fight the excessively bloodthirsty (and therefore incompetent) al Qaeda in Iraq. The militias in Iraq, like all good guerrilla forces, have patience and are merely waiting until the United States leaves. Violence is still high, and no national reconciliation among the mutually suspicious groups has been achieved.
Decades of wars, including the US invasion and occupation, and grinding international economic sanctions have further widened the deep social fissures in what was already one of the most fractious countries in the Middle East. Had the obtuse Bush administration bothered to consult Arabist scholars before launching its ill-fated invasion and occupation, it would have learned that the faction-ridden Iraq, an artificial country dreamed up by the British after World War I, was the least likely of practically any nation in the Middle East to accept a liberal, federated democracy. The level of incomes and social cooperation are too low for a liberal democracy to be sustained. Even if the Iraqi government manages to pass all of the benchmark laws that the Bush administration wants (unlikely, since the president’s council just vetoed a law to hold local elections), the underlying social fragmentation will render such laws mere paper exercises, because no one will honor them. The US troop surge is merely a finger in the dike, temporarily holding back these titanic social forces from clashing in full-blown civil war.
Afghanistan, like Iraq, is naturally a decentralized tribal land. Continued US and allied occupation is merely fueling a resurgence of the Taliban there and radical Islamic elements in Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons. Coercive US and Afghan government anti-drug efforts are further exacerbating the Taliban’s rise, as poppy growers pay the Taliban for protection. Really, President Hamid Karzai’s role is only mayor of Kabul; warlords control the rest of the country. The media, the American public, and even the Democrats think Afghanistan is a “must win” in the “war on terror”. Yet Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, the leaders of al Qaeda, are probably in neighboring Pakistan. To have the best chance to capture or kill these terrorist kingpins, the US government should concentrate its efforts where they are likely to be.
The next president of the United States could actually take advantage of the American people’s apathy toward foreign affairs, cut US losses, and withdraw US forces immediately from both Afghanistan and Iraq -- two quagmires that are creating new radical Islamic terrorists in reaction to the occupation of Muslim lands by non-Muslims.
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Also see: Plan C for Iraq
Habeas That Corpus
The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War |
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