In his weekly radio address over the weekend, President Bush said, "Our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging: Our goal is victory. What is changing are the tactics we use to achieve that goal." This statement begs two questions. The first is: What is victory? And secondly: Given the current situation in Iraq – one of the bloodiest months, with (as this is written) 87 American soldiers and at least 961 Iraqis killed, plus a 43-percent increase in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces despite Operation Together Forward’s four-month effort to reduce the violence and increase security – how will simply making changes at the margins with tactics achieve victory?
The administration originally (and incorrectly – and some would say disingenuously) portrayed the threat posed by Iraq as Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. Presumably, then, victory could have been defined as deposing Saddam and ridding Iraq of WMD. The Iraqi regime was toppled in March 2003 after three weeks of military operations, and President Bush declared "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" while standing in front of a "mission accomplished" banner aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. Finally, in October 2004 the Iraq Survey Group reported that there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq. According to the report, Iraq’s WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and its nuclear program ended after the 1991 Gulf War. At best, Saddam Hussein wanted to preserve "the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted." So by the original standards set forth by the administration, victory could have been declared nearly two years ago.
The Bush administration could have also declared victory when the most wanted man in Iraq – Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and believed to be responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Iraq, as well as the execution of American Nicholas Berg – was killed in June of this year. However, the goal posts have constantly moved – even before the invasion of Iraq. At the eleventh hour – in late February 2003, just a few weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched – President Bush told a crowd from the American Enterprise Institute that U.S. goals in Iraq went far beyond simply deposing the regime and disarming the country. The president talked about "bringing stability and unity to a free Iraq" and how "a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region." In what amounted to a democracy domino theory, Bush argued that "a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region."
It is telling that on the same day that President Bush delivered his speech to AEI, the State Department released a report entitled "Iraq, the Middle East, and Change: No Dominoes," which warned that "Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve." According to the report’s author, Wayne White, "even a successful effort in Iraq, both militarily and politically, would … fail to trigger a tsunami of democracy in the region," and "even if democracy had taken hold in various Middle East states, the result would have been governments more anti-American, anti-Israeli, and militantly Islamic."
The problem, however, with installing democracy as a condition for victory is that the Iraqis themselves have not cooperated. They have taken on the trappings of democracy – an elected government that has representation from all elements of Iraq’s ethnic groups – but the reality is that Iraq is a very divided country. Thus, the escalating sectarian violence should come as no great surprise – after all, the majority Shi’ite population was suppressed (often brutally) by the Sunnis under Saddam’s rule, so at least some segment of the Shi’ites have motivation to return the favor. But the violence in Iraq is not just sectarian. The insurgency is also fueled by widespread resentment of occupation by a foreign military. And Iraq has become a convenient place and opportunity for jihadists to hone their craft.
If the goal, as President Bush claims, is "a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself," the security situation must be brought to heel. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Iraqis are "going to have to provide security for it and they’re going to have to do it sooner rather than later" (one can almost hear the testiness and impatience Rumsfeld is famous for leaping from the words on the page). Although U.S. officials are now claiming that the Iraqis may be able to control security in the next 12-18 months but with "some level" of American support (and the timing of such claims with the looming midterm U.S. elections means they should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism), the prospects for the Iraqis to be able to take nearly full responsibility for the security of their own country any time soon are dim. Despite the fact that over 300,000 Iraqis are in the ranks of the security forces, they are clearly not capable of imposing security – indeed, they are barely capable of defending themselves as evidenced by recent events in Amara when radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militiamen stormed the city and attacked police stations. It is also highly likely that Iraq’s security forces are compromised – infiltrated by militia, insurgent sympathizers, and perhaps even jihadists. And, as Ivan Eland has pointed out, U.S. assistance to Iraqi security forces is probably resulting in the training of more militia loyalists who will perpetrate even more violence.
So if the Iraqis are incapable, the only real hope of imposing security is left to the U.S. military. Yet this much is clear: the current force of 145,000 troops is not enough (and Gen. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is on record that he will not hesitate to ask for more troops if he thinks they are necessary). The harsh reality is that to even have a fighting chance of ending the violence, a much larger ground force is required – on the order of several hundred thousand troops, as former Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki once remarked (he was subsequently rebuked by then-deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz for being "wildly off the mark"). While President Bush talks about changing tactics in Iraq, the truth is that he only has two options, and it’s time to fish or cut bait.
The first is the fish option, which is to increase the force size in Iraq and truly become an occupying power, which is the correct military tactical operational response to the situation on the ground. And the reality of occupation demands a willingness to use indiscriminate and harsh, even brutal, tactics to suppress all violence and opposition in order to impose security and order – much as the British did to crush the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. Of course, taking such actions would just swell the ranks of the insurgency, resulting in even more violence directed at American troops. And more and more Muslims around the world would come to hate America, giving them a powerful reason to become terrorists. With over a billion Muslims in the world, tactical success in Iraq would yield a larger strategic defeat.
The second option is for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq and refocus its efforts on the real enemy, which is not a democracy deficit in Iraq or the Middle East, but al-Qaeda and the radical Islamic terrorist threat. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are hiding out in Pakistan. None of the post-9/11 terrorist attacks in Indonesia, Turkey, Spain, or the United Kingdom are attributed to an al-Qaeda threat emanating from Iraq. President Bush says, "We will defeat the terrorists everywhere they make a stand," but al-Qaeda is more taking advantage of an opportunity in Iraq rather than making a stand. If anything, it is the United States making an unnecessary stand, much like Custer did at Little Big Horn. All the more reason to cut bait.
