At the end of September, the New York Times reported that "A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks." According to the most recent classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), "The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat." Moreover, "The Iraq conflict has become the ’cause célèbre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." Congressional Democrats seized on the NIE [.pdf] to counter President Bush’s argument that the Iraq war has made America safer.
Of course, the president cites other judgments in the NIE – "perceived jihadist success there [Iraq] would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere" and "should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight" – to make his case that "withdrawing from Iraq before the enemy is defeated would embolden the terrorists." According to President Bush, we will "fight and defeat the terrorists there, so we do not have to face them here at home." So the Bush administration continues to insist that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism and that we must stay the course.
Apparently, that’s exactly what al-Qaeda wants. According to a letter thought to be written by a senior al-Qaeda leader, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, "The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness … indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest." Thus, it seems the Bush administration and al-Qaeda have developed a co-dependent relationship.
The only way to break the co-dependency is for the United States to exit Iraq.
Of course, President Bush has an exit strategy: "as Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down." But the notion of the Iraqis being able to stand on their own anytime soon amounts to wishful thinking. According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the total number of Iraqi security forces is over 300,000 personnel. Yet U.S. forces have not been able to stand down. In fact, the U.S. force size has increased from 126,900 troops in June to 130,000 in July to 138,000 in August to 145,000 in September. And despite hints at the beginning of this year that U.S. forces would fall below 100,000 troops by the end of the year, the current force level "will probably have to be sustained through the spring" according to Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command.
The other criterion invoked for exiting Iraq (even by many who opposed the war, largely liberal internationalists but also some libertarians) is the Pottery Barn maxim of "you broke it, you bought it" – meaning that the United States cannot leave Iraq a broken country. But such logic is based on the illusion that Iraq can be fixed by the United States and the result will be accepted by the Iraqis. Yet the lesson of nation-building in the Balkans – forcing diverse ethnic and religious groups with long-standing animosity toward each other to live together – is that whatever fix is fashioned together by the United States will only hold as long as there is a foreign military presence to enforce the outcome, and will likely fracture after those troops leave, which they eventually must do if Iraq is to be considered a sovereign nation. So partitioning Iraq (as advocated by my good friend and colleague, Ivan Eland, as well as Sen. Joe Biden) may be a good plan on paper and the best possible solution given the
circumstances, but we would have to be willing to live with a failed partition. Otherwise, it is a prescription for endless re-occupation to enforce the partition.
At a congressional fundraiser in Stockton, Calif., last week, the president said, "We will stay in Iraq, we will fight in Iraq, and we will win in Iraq." Even if one is willing to believe President Bush’s promise of complete victory, history tells us that substantially more boots on the ground are needed to have a fighting chance of achieving it. The British – often acknowledged as the most experienced practitioners of counterinsurgency operations and demonstrably more successful than the U.S. military – required a force ratio of 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants deployed for more than a decade in Malaysia and more than 25 years in Northern Ireland to achieve success. With a population of nearly 25 million people, to meet the same standard in Iraq would require a force of 500,000 troops (more than 118,000 in Baghdad alone) – which is more than three times the current Iraq deployment of 144,000 soldiers and equal to the size of the entire active-duty U.S. Army, already strained to near breaking by the Iraq occupation – for perhaps a decade or longer.
Even if more troops could be put in Iraq, doing so would be counterproductive. A larger force would confirm that the United States is an occupying military power and increase the call for jihad in Iraq and around the world. And it would likely result in more Iraqis joining the ranks of the insurgency to throw off the yoke of the foreign occupier. According to a September poll [.pdf] conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), "Seven in ten Iraqis want US-led forces to commit to withdraw within a year. An overwhelming majority believes that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing." This result is consistent with previous polls. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll [.pdf] in April 2004 showed that 71 percent of Iraqis viewed U.S. forces "mostly as occupiers" and 57 percent wanted U.S. forces to "leave immediately." A poll conducted for the Coalition Provisional Authority before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal came to light showed that 82 percent of Iraqis disapproved of the U.S. military presence. And just before the Jan. 31, 2005, elections in Iraq, a Zogby international poll of Iraqis for Abu Dhabi television found that 82 percent of Sunni Arabs and 69 percent of Shi’ites wanted U.S. forces to withdraw immediately or after a new elected government was in place.
Moreover, any victory would be Pyrrhic given the costs and consequences. At best, it would only be a tactical victory at the expense of losing strategic position in the war on terrorism (much like Israel’s military incursion into Lebanon was at most a tactical victory for the Israelis but a strategic victory for Hezbollah, as evidenced by another PIPA poll showing 87 percent of Lebanese support Hezbollah). What the Bush administration refuses to understand is that the U.S. military occupation in Iraq is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Therefore, the strategic imperative is to exit Iraq rather than stay. Although it is counterintuitive, exiting Iraq may be a prerequisite for victory.
In a leaked memo, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once asked, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" What he failed to ask (and what we continue to fail to ask and are unwilling to admit) is how U.S. actions – including the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq – are contributing to increasing the terrorist threat. To be sure, President Bush is right when he says "Iraq is not the reason the terrorists are at war against us." But Iraq is a reason for more Muslims to become terrorists. Consider that according to the PIPA poll conducted last month, 61 percent of Iraqis approved of attacks on U.S. forces – compared to 20 percent in September 2003 and 40 percent in April 2004.
Another judgment of the NIE was: "The jihadists’ greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution – an ultraconservative interpretation of sharia-based governance spanning the Muslim world – is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims." In other words, what we call the war on terrorism is, first and foremost, a struggle inside the Islamic world. As such, it must ultimately be waged and won by Muslims themselves.
And it is important to understand that even through President Bush asserts that "the terrorists are at war against us because they hate everything America stands for," the reality is that, as Michael Scott Doran wrote in Foreign Affairs at the beginning of 2002, "War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument to help his brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers." And the reason America has become a target for al-Qaeda is because we have inserted ourselves in somebody else’s civil war.
The implication is that if Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, then the United States must be willing to let the Iraqis wage the war against al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is worth noting that the same poll that showed 61 percent of Iraqis approving of attacks on U.S. forces also found that 94 percent had an unfavorable view of al-Qaeda (82 percent had a very unfavorable view). So unlike the Taliban regime in Afghanistan who welcomed bin Laden and al-Qaeda, it is clear that a new Iraqi government (especially one dominated by the Shia majority in Iraq) would not. As such, removing the U.S. military would go a long way towards shifting Iraqi popular opinion being from anti-occupation to anti-foreign fighters and terrorists – taking a lot of the wind out of the sails of the insurgency. Such a phenomenon is not unprecedented in the Muslim world. For example, many Muslim Bosnians welcomed foreign fighters in their struggle against the Serbs, but that did not necessarily mean that they were embracing the mujahedeen’s version of Islam. According to Dutch journalist Emerson Vermaat, "these foreign fanatics were also hated by the local Bosnian population; most of whom preferred a more secular lifestyle, did not like growing beards, and would eat pork and drink alcohol." That does not mean that Iraqis would embrace secularism (although under Saddam Hussein’s rule, Iraq was one of the most secular Muslim countries in the world), but that they would strongly resist al-Qaeda’s brand of radical Islam and jihad (particularly since al-Qaeda is a Sunni-based organization and Iraq is predominantly Shi’ite).
Finally, we must be willing to accept the possibility that the outcome might not be the democracy sought by the Bush administration or even a government that is friendly to the United States. But as long as the new Iraqi government does not support or harbor al-Qaeda terrorists, then our strategic interests will be served.
SIDEBAR: OCTOBER SURPRISE
In late September, NewsMax.com reported that Karl Rove was "promising Republican insiders an ‘October surprise’ to help win the November congressional elections." So far, however, all the surprises have been unwelcome ones for the Bush administration. The controversial NIE that concluded that the Iraq war was making the terrorist threat worse was the first surprise. Then Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III was released. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration were largely positive, but in State of Denial he outlines how the White House has deceived the public about Iraq – including intelligence assessments that contradict President Bush’s rosy proclamations of the situation in Iraq and how attacks against U.S. and coalition forces have increased to over 3,500 a month. On the same weekend that Woodward’s book was released, it was also reported that a biography of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung, would be hitting bookstores in October, and that Powell confirms what everyone in Washington suspected: he was fired. Then the Foley scandal unfolded. Not only did the self-proclaimed party of "family values" have to deal with one of their own being a closet homosexual (according to Newsweek, "A gay man, he [Foley] might bring a boyfriend to private parties, friends say, but when he appeared on the official cocktail circuit, he went alone or with a woman") soliciting underage congressional pages, but also that the Republican leadership in Congress may have known about and covered up Foley’s unacceptable behavior – resulting in the even the traditionally conservative Washington Times calling for House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s resignation. But the biggest October surprise so far is North Korea’s underground test of a nuclear weapon on Monday.
Until now, most everyone thought an October surprise would come in the form of some sort of military action against Iran to halt its nuclear program. While such action cannot be completely ruled out (remember that a Bush aide derided the so-called reality-based community: "That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality"), it seems unlikely that the administration would be able to pull off an unprovoked attack against Iran before the November midterm elections. Yet North Korea’s nuclear test has created an even greater impetus for the Bush administration to take such action – if not in October, then sometime during the remainder of its tenure.
