IRAQ: THE FIFTY-FIRST STATE ?
FruitsAndNuts
The Fifty-first State?
Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities
of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would
include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting
Iraq's borders-and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we
ready for this long-term relationship?
by James Fallows
.....
Over the past few months I interviewed several dozen people about what
could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged Saddam
Hussein. An assumption behind the question was that sooner or later
the United States would go to war-and would go with at best a fraction
of the support it enjoyed eleven years ago when fighting Iraq during
the Gulf War. Most nations in the region and traditional U.S. allies
would be neutral or hostile unless the Bush Administration could
present new evidence of imminent danger from Iraq.
A further assumption was that even alone, U.S. forces would win this
war. The victory might be slower than in the last war against Iraq,
and it would certainly cost more American lives. But in the end U.S.
tanks, attack airplanes, precision-guided bombs, special-operations
forces, and other assets would crush the Iraqi military. The combat
phase of the war would be over when the United States destroyed Saddam
Hussein's control over Iraq's government, armed forces, and stockpile
of weapons.
What then?
The people I asked were spies, Arabists, oil-company officials,
diplomats, scholars, policy experts, and many active-duty and retired
soldiers. They were from the United States, Europe, and the Middle
East. Some firmly supported a pre-emptive war against Iraq; more were
opposed. As of late summer, before the serious domestic debate had
begun, most of the people I spoke with expected a war to occur.
I began my research sharing the view, prevailing in Washington this
year, that forcing "regime change" on Iraq was our era's grim
historical necessity: starting a war would be bad, but waiting to have
war brought to us would be worse. This view depended to some degree on
trusting that the U.S. government had information not available to the
public about exactly how close Saddam Hussein is to having usable
nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction. It also drew
much of its power from an analogy every member of the public could
understand-to Nazi Germany. In retrospect, the only sin in resisting
Hitler had been waiting too long. Thus would it be in dealing with
Saddam Hussein today. Richard Perle, a Reagan-era Defense Department
official who is one of the most influential members outside government
of what is frequently called the "war party," expressed this thought
in representative form in an August column for the London Daily
Telegraph: "A pre-emptive strike against Hitler at the time of Munich
would have meant an immediate war, as opposed to the one that came
later. Later was much worse."
Nazi and Holocaust analogies have a trumping power in many arguments,
and their effect in Washington was to make doubters seem weak-Neville
Chamberlains, versus the Winston Churchills who were ready to face the
truth. The most experienced military figure in the Bush Cabinet,
Secretary of State Colin Powell, was cast as the main "wet," because
of his obvious discomfort with an effort that few allies would
support. His instincts fit the general sociology of the Iraq debate:
As a rule, the strongest advocates of pre-emptive attack, within the
government and in the press, had neither served in the military nor
lived in Arab societies. Military veterans and Arabists were generally
doves. For example: Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense
and the intellectual leader of the war party inside the government,
was in graduate school through the late 1960s. Richard Armitage, his
skeptical counterpart at the State Department and Powell's ally in
pleading for restraint, is a Naval Academy graduate who served three
tours in Vietnam.
I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about
Iraq rather than clarifying it. Like any other episode in history,
today's situation is both familiar and new. In the ruthlessness of the
adversary it resembles dealing with Adolf Hitler. But Iraq, unlike
Germany, has no industrial base and few military allies nearby. It is
split by regional, religious, and ethnic differences that are much
more complicated than Nazi Germany's simple mobilization of "Aryans"
against Jews. Hitler's Germany constantly expanded, but Iraq has been
bottled up, by international sanctions, for more than ten years. As in
the early Cold War, America faces an international ideology bent on
our destruction and a country trying to develop weapons to use against
us. But then we were dealing with another superpower, capable of
obliterating us. Now there is a huge imbalance between the two sides
in scale and power.
If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about
Iraq, my candidate would be World War I. The reason is not simply the
one the historian David Fromkin advanced in his book A Peace to End
All Peace: that the division of former Ottoman Empire territories
after that war created many of the enduring problems of modern Iraq
and the Middle East as a whole. The Great War is also relevant as a
powerful example of the limits of human imagination: specifically,
imagination about the long-term consequences of war.
The importance of imagination was stressed to me by Merrill McPeak, a
retired Air Force general with misgivings about a pre-emptive attack.
When America entered the Vietnam War, in which McPeak flew combat
missions over the jungle, the public couldn't imagine how badly combat
against a "weak" foe might turn out for the United States. Since that
time, and because of the Vietnam experience, we have generally
overdrawn the risks of combat itself. America's small wars of the past
generation, in Grenada, Haiti, and Panama, have turned out far
better-tactically, at least-than many experts dared to predict. The
larger ones, in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan, have
as well. The "Black Hawk Down" episode in Somalia is the main
exception, and it illustrates a different rule: when fighting not
organized armies but stateless foes, we have underestimated our
vulnerabilities.
There is an even larger realm of imagination, McPeak suggested to me.
It involves the chain of events a war can set off. Wars change history
in ways no one can foresee. The Egyptians who planned to attack Israel
in 1967 could not imagine how profoundly what became the Six Day War
would change the map and politics of the Middle East. After its
lightning victory Israel seized neighboring territory, especially on
the West Bank of the Jordan River, that is still at the heart of
disputes with the Palestinians. Fifty years before, no one who had
accurately foreseen what World War I would bring could have rationally
decided to let combat begin. The war meant the collapse of three
empires, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian; the
cresting of another, the British; the eventual rise of Hitler in
Germany and Mussolini in Italy; and the drawing of strange new borders
from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, which now define
the battlegrounds of the Middle East. Probably not even the United
States would have found the war an attractive bargain, even though the
U.S. rise to dominance began with the wounds Britain suffered in those
years.
In 1990, as the United States prepared to push Iraqi troops out of
Kuwait, McPeak was the Air Force chief of staff. He thought that war
was necessary and advocated heavy bombing in Iraq. Now he opposes an
invasion, largely because of how hard it is to imagine the full
consequences of America's first purely pre-emptive war-and our first
large war since the Spanish-American War in which we would have few or
no allies.
e must use imagination on both sides of the debate: about the risks
of what Saddam Hussein might do if left in place, and also about what
such a war might unleash. Some members of the war party initially
urged a quick in-and-out attack. Their model was the three-part
formula of the "Powell doctrine": First, line up clear support-from
America's political leadership, if not internationally. Then assemble
enough force to leave no doubt about the outcome. Then, before the war
starts, agree on how it will end and when to leave.
The in-and-out model has obviously become unrealistic. If Saddam
Hussein could be destroyed by a death ray or captured by a ninja squad
that sneaked into Baghdad and spirited him away, the United States
might plausibly call the job done. It would still have to wonder what
Iraq's next leader might do with the weapons laboratories, but the
immediate problem would be solved.
Absent ninjas, getting Saddam out will mean bringing in men,
machinery, and devastation. If the United States launched a big
tank-borne campaign, as suggested by some of the battle plans leaked
to the press, tens of thousands of soldiers, with their ponderous
logistics trail, would be in the middle of a foreign country when the
fighting ended. If the U.S. military relied on an air campaign against
Baghdad, as other leaked plans have implied, it would inevitably kill
many Iraqi civilians before it killed Saddam. One way or another,
America would leave a large footprint on Iraq, which would take time
to remove.
And logistics wouldn't be the only impediment to quick withdrawal.
Having taken dramatic action, we would no doubt be seen-by the world
and ourselves, by al Jazeera and CNN-as responsible for the
consequences. The United States could have stopped the Khmer Rouge
slaughter in Cambodia in the 1970s, but it was not going to, having
spent the previous decade in a doomed struggle in Vietnam. It could
have prevented some of the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, and
didn't, but at least it did not trigger the slaughter by its own
actions. "It is quite possible that if we went in, took out Saddam
Hussein, and then left quickly, the result would be an extremely
bloody civil war," says William Galston, the director of the Institute
for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, who
was a Marine during the Vietnam War. "That blood would be directly on
our hands." Most people I spoke with, whether in favor of war or not,
recognized that military action is a barbed hook: once it goes in,
there is no quick release.
The tone of the political debate reflects a dawning awareness of this
reality. Early this year, during the strange "phony war" stage of Iraq
discussions, most people in Washington assumed that war was coming,
but there was little open discussion of exactly why it was necessary
and what consequences it would bring. The pro-war group avoided
questions about what would happen after a victory, because to consider
postwar complications was to weaken the case for a pre-emptive strike.
Some war advocates even said, if pressed, that the details of postwar
life didn't matter. With the threat and the tyrant eliminated, the
United States could assume that whatever regime emerged would be less
dangerous than the one it replaced.
As the swirl of leaks, rumors, and official statements made an attack
seem alternately more and less imminent, the increasing chaos in
Afghanistan underscored a growing consensus about the in-and-out
scenario for Iraq: it didn't make sense. The war itself might be
quick, perhaps even quicker than the rout of the Taliban. But the end
of the fighting would hardly mean the end of America's commitment. In
August, as warlords reasserted their power in Afghanistan, General
Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander, said that American troops might need
to stay in Afghanistan for many years.
If anything, America's involvement in Afghanistan should have been
cleaner and more containable than what would happen in Iraq. In
Afghanistan the United States was responding to an attack, rather than
initiating regime change. It had broad international support; it had
the Northern Alliance to do much of the work. Because the Taliban and
al Qaeda finally chose to melt away rather than stand and fight, U.S.
forces took control of the major cities while doing relatively little
unintended damage. And still, getting out will take much longer than
getting in.
Some proponents of war viewed the likelihood of long involvement in
Iraq as a plus. If the United States went in planning to stay, it
could, they contended, really make a difference there. Richard Perle
addressed a major anti-war argument-that Arab states would flare up in
resentment-by attempting to turn it around. "It seems at least as
likely," he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column, "that Saddam's
replacement by a decent Iraqi regime would open the way to a far more
stable and peaceful region. A democratic Iraq would be a powerful
refutation of the patronizing view that Arabs are incapable of
democracy."
Some regional experts made the opposite point: that a strong,
prosperous, confident, stable Iraq was the last thing its neighbors,
who prefer it in its bottled-up condition, wanted to see. Others
pooh-poohed the notion that any Western power, however hard it tried
or long it stayed, could bring about any significant change in Iraq's
political culture.
Regardless of these differences, the day after a war ended, Iraq would
become America's problem, for practical and political reasons. Because
we would have destroyed the political order and done physical damage
in the process, the claims on American resources and attention would
be comparable to those of any U.S. state. Conquered Iraqis would turn
to the U.S. government for emergency relief, civil order, economic
reconstruction, and protection of their borders. They wouldn't be able
to vote in U.S. elections, of course-although they might after they
emigrated. (Every American war has created a refugee-and-immigrant
stream.) But they would be part of us.
During the debate about whether to go to war, each side selectively
used various postwar possibilities to bolster its case. Through the
course of my interviews I found it useful to consider the
possibilities as one comprehensive group. What follows is a triage
list for American occupiers: the biggest problems they would face on
the first day after the war, in the first week, and so on, until,
perhaps decades from now, they could come to grips with the long-term
connections between Iraq and the United States.
The First Day
Last-minute mayhem. The biggest concern on the first day of peace
would arise from what happened in the last few days of war. "I don't
think that physically controlling the important parts of the country
need be as difficult as many people fear," Chris Sanders, an American
who worked for eighteen years in Saudi Arabia and is now a consultant
in London, told me. "But of course it all depends on how one finds
oneself in a victorious position-on what you had to do to win."
What would Saddam Hussein, facing defeat and perhaps death, have
decided late in the war to do with the stockpiled weapons of mass
destruction that were the original justification for our attack? The
various Pentagon battle plans leaked to the media all assume that Iraq
would use chemical weapons against U.S. troops. (Biological weapons
work too slowly, and a nuclear weapon, if Iraq had one, would be more
valuable for mass urban destruction than for battlefield use.) During
the buildup to the Gulf War, American officials publicly warned Iraq
that if it used chemical weapons against U.S. troops, we would respond
with everything at our disposal, presumably including nuclear weapons.
Whether or not this was a bluff, Iraq did not use chemical weapons.
But if Saddam were fighting for survival, rather than for control of
Kuwait, his decisions might be different.
The major chemical weapons in Iraqi arsenals are thought to be the
nerve gas sarin, also called "GB," and liquid methylphosphonothioic
acid, or "VX." Both can be absorbed through the lungs, the skin, or
the eyes, and can cause death from amounts as small as one drop. Sarin
disperses quickly, but VX is relatively nonvolatile and can pose a
more lasting danger. U.S. troops would be equipped with protective
suits, but these are cumbersome and retain heat; the need to wear them
has been an argument for delaying an attack until winter.
Another concern is that on his way down Saddam would use chemical
weapons not only tactically, to slow or kill attacking U.S. soldiers,
but also strategically, to lash out beyond his borders. In particular,
he could use them against Israel. Iraq's SCUD and "al-Hussein"
missiles cannot reach Europe or North America. But Israel is in easy
range-as Iraq demonstrated during the Gulf War, when it launched
forty-two SCUDs against Israel. (It also launched more than forty
against the allied troops; all these SCUDs had conventional explosive
warheads, rather than chemical payloads.) During the Gulf War the
Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir complied with urgent U.S.
requests that it leave all retaliation to the Americans, rather than
broadening the war by launching its own attacks. Nothing in Ariel
Sharon's long career suggests that he could be similarly restrained.
A U.S. occupation of Iraq, then, could begin with the rest of the
Middle East at war around it. "What's the worst nightmare at the
start?" a retired officer who fought in the Gulf War asked me
rhetorically. "Saddam Hussein hits Israel, and Sharon hits some Arab
city, maybe in Saudi Arabia. Then you have the all-out religious war
that the Islamic fundamentalists and maybe some Likudniks are itching
for."
This is more a worst-case prediction than a probability, so let's
assume that any regional combat could be contained and that we would
get relatively quickly to the challenges of the following, postwar
days.
The First Week
Refugees and relief. However quick and surgical the battle might seem
to the American public, however much brighter Iraq's long-term
prospects might become, in the short term many Iraqis would be
desperate. Civilians would have been killed, to say nothing of
soldiers. Bodies would need to be buried, wounds dressed, orphans
located and cared for, hospitals staffed.
"You are going to start right out with a humanitarian crisis," says
William Nash, of the Council on Foreign Relations. A retired two-star
Army general, Nash was in charge of post-combat relief operations in
southern Iraq after the Gulf War and later served in Bosnia and
Kosovo. Most examples in this article, from Nash and others, involve
the occupation of Kuwait and parts of Iraq after the Gulf War, rather
than ongoing operations in Afghanistan. The campaign in Afghanistan
may have a rhetorical connection to a future war in Iraq, in that both
are part of the general "war on terror"; but otherwise the
circumstances are very different. Iraq and Afghanistan are unlike in
scale, geography, history, and politics, not to mention in the U.S.
objectives and military plans that relate to them. And enough time has
passed to judge the effects of the Gulf War, which is not true of
Afghanistan.
"In the drive to Baghdad, you are going to do a lot of damage," Nash
told me. "Either you will destroy a great deal of infrastructure by
trying to isolate the battlefield-or they will destroy it, trying to
delay your advance." Postwar commerce and recovery in Iraq will
depend, of course, on roads, the rail system, air fields, and bridges
across the Tigris and the Euphrates-facilities that both sides in the
war will have incentives to blow up. "So you've got to find the
village elders," Nash continued, "and say, 'Let's get things going.
Where are the wells? I can bring you food, but bringing you enough
water is really hard.' Right away you need food, water, and
shelter-these people have to survive. Because you started the war, you
have accepted a moral responsibility for them. And you may well have
totally obliterated the social and political structure that had been
providing these services."
Most of the military and diplomatic figures I interviewed stressed the
same thing. In August, Scott Feil, a retired Army colonel who now
directs a study project for the Association of the United States Army
on postwar reconstruction, said at a Senate hearing, "I think the
international community will hold the United States primarily
responsible for the outcome in the post-conflict reconstruction
effort." Charles William Maynes, a former editor of Foreign Policy
magazine and now the president of the Eurasia Foundation, told me,
"Because of the allegations that we've been killing women and children
over the years with the sanctions, we are going to be all the more
responsible for restoring the infrastructure."
This is not impossible, but it is expensive. Starting in the first
week, whoever is in charge in Iraq would need food, tents, portable
hospitals, water-purification systems, generators, and so on. During
the Clinton Administration, Frederick Barton directed the Office of
Transition Initiatives at USAID, which worked with State and Defense
Department representatives on postwar recovery efforts in countries
such as Haiti, Liberia, and Bosnia. He told me, "These places
typically have no revenue systems, no public funds, no way anybody at
any level of governance can do anything right away. You've got to pump
money into the system." Exactly how much is hard to say. Scott Feil
has estimated that costs for the first year in Iraq would be about $16
billion for post-conflict security forces and $1 billion for
reconstruction-presumably all from the United States, because of the
lack of allies in the war.
Catching Saddam Hussein. While the refugees were being attended to, an
embarrassing leftover problem might persist. From the U.S.
perspective, it wouldn't really matter whether the war left Saddam
dead, captured, or in exile. What would matter is that his whereabouts
were known. The only outcome nearly as bad as leaving him in power
would be having him at large, like Osama bin Laden and much of the al
Qaeda leadership in the months after the September 11 attacks.
"My nightmare scenario," Merrill McPeak, the former Air Force chief of
staff, told me, "is that we jump people in, seize the airport, bring
in the 101st [Airborne Division]-and we can't find Saddam Hussein.
Then we've got Osama and Saddam Hussein out there, both of them
achieving mythical heroic status in the Arab world just by surviving.
It's not a trivial problem to actually grab the guy, and it ain't over
until you've got him in handcuffs."
During the Gulf War, McPeak and his fellow commanders learned that
Saddam was using a fleet of Winnebago-like vehicles to move around
Baghdad. They tried to track the vehicles but never located Saddam
himself. As McPeak concluded from reading psychological profiles of
the Iraqi dictator, he is not only a thug and a murderer but an
extremely clever adversary. "My concern is that he is smarter
individually than our bureaucracy is collectively," he told me.
"Bureaucracies tend to dumb things down. So in trying to find him, we
have a chess match between a bureaucracy and Saddam Hussein."
The First Month
Police control, manpower, and intelligence. When the lid comes off
after a long period of repression, people may be grateful and elated.
But they may also be furious and vengeful, as the post-liberation
histories of Romania and Kosovo indicate. Phebe Marr, a veteran Iraq
expert who until her retirement taught at the National Defense
University, told a Senate committee in August, "If firm leadership is
not in place in Baghdad the day after Saddam is removed, retribution,
score settling, and bloodletting, especially in urban areas, could
take place." William Nash, who supervised Iraqi prisoners in liberated
parts of Kuwait, told me, "The victim becomes the aggressor. You try
to control it, but you'll just find the bodies in the morning."
Some policing of conquered areas, to minimize warlordism and freelance
justice, is an essential step toward making the postwar era seem like
an occupation rather than simple chaos. Doing it right requires enough
people to do the policing; a reliable way to understand local feuds
and tensions; and a plan for creating and passing power to a local
constabulary. Each can be more complicated than it sounds.
Simply manning a full occupation force would be a challenge. In the
occupation business there are some surprising rules of thumb. Whether
a country is big or small, for instance, the surrender of weapons by
the defeated troops seems to take about 120 days. Similarly,
regardless of a country's size, maintaining order seems to take about
one occupation soldier or police officer for each 500 people-plus one
supervisor for each ten policemen. For Iraq's 23 million people that
would mean an occupation force of about 50,000. Scott Feil told a
Senate committee that he thought the occupation would need 75,000
security soldiers.
In most of its military engagements since Vietnam the United States
has enthusiastically passed many occupation duties to allied or United
Nations forces. Ideally the designated occupiers of Iraq would be
other Arabs-similar rather than alien to most Iraqis in language,
religion, and ethnicity. But persuading other countries to clean up
after a war they had opposed would be quite a trick.
Providing even 25,000 occupiers on a sustained basis would not be easy
for the U.S. military. Over the past decade the military's head count
has gone down, even as its level of foreign commitment and the defense
budget have gone up. All the active-duty forces together total about
1.4 million people. Five years ago it was about 1.5 million. At the
time of the Gulf War the total was over two million. With fewer people
available, the military's "ops tempo" (essentially, the level of
overtime) has risen, dramatically in the past year. Since the
terrorist attacks some 40,000 soldiers who had planned to retire or
leave the service have been obliged to stay, under "stop-loss"
personnel policies. In July the Army awarded a $205 million contract
to ITT Federal Services to provide "rent-a-cop" security guards for
U.S. bases in Bosnia, sparing soldiers the need to stand guard duty.
As of the beginning of September, the number of National Guard and
Reserves soldiers mobilized by federal call-ups was about 80,000,
compared with about 5,600 just before September 11, 2001. For the
country in general the war in Central Asia has been largely a
spectator event-no war bonds, no gasoline taxes, no mandatory public
service. For the volunteer military on both active and reserve duty it
has been quite real.
One way to put more soldiers in Iraq would be to re-deploy them from
overseas bases. Before the attacks about 250,000 soldiers were based
outside U.S. borders, more than half of them in Germany, Japan, and
Korea. The American military now stations more than 118,000 soldiers
in Europe alone.
But in the short term the occupation would need people from the
civil-affairs specialties of the military: people trained in setting
up courts and police systems, restoring infrastructure, and generally
leading a war-recovery effort. Many are found in the Reserves, and
many have already been deployed to missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, or
elsewhere. "These are an odd bunch of people," James Dunnigan, the
editor of Strategypage.com, told me. "They tend to be civilians who
are over-educated-they like working for the government and having
adventures at the same time. They're like the characters in Three
Kings, without finding the gold."
One of the people Dunnigan was referring to specifically is Evan
Brooks. In his normal life Brooks is an attorney at Internal Revenue
Service headquarters. He is also an amateur military historian, and
until his recent retirement was a lieutenant colonel in the Army
Reserves, specializing in civil affairs. "Between 1947 and 1983,"
Brooks told me, "the number of civil-affairs units that were activated
[from the Reserves] could be counted on one hand. Since 1987 there has
not been a single Christmas where the D.C.-area civil-affairs unit has
not had people deployed overseas." Brooks was the military interface
with the Kuwaiti Red Crescent for several months after the Gulf War;
though he is Jewish, he became a popular figure among his Muslim
colleagues, and was the only American who attended Kuwaiti subcabinet
meetings. "My ambition was to be military governor of Basra [the Iraqi
region closest to Kuwait]," he told me, I think whimsically. "I never
quite achieved it."
Wherever the occupying force finds its manpower, it will face the
challenge of understanding politics and rivalries in a country whose
language few Americans speak. The CIA and the Army Special Forces have
been recruiting Arabic speakers and grilling Iraqi exiles for local
intelligence. The Pentagon's leadership includes at least one Arabic
speaker: the director of the joint staff, John Abizaid, a three-star
general. As a combat commander during the Gulf War, Abizaid was able
to speak directly with Iraqis. Most American occupiers will lack this
skill.
Inability to communicate could be disastrous. After the Gulf War,
William Nash told me, he supervised camps containing Iraqi refugees
and captured members of the Republican Guard. "We had a couple of near
riots-mini-riots-in the refugee camps when Saddam's agents were
believed to have infiltrated," Nash said. "We brought a guy in, and a
group of refugees in the camp went berserk. Somebody said, 'He's an
agent!' My guys had to stop them or they were going to tear the man to
shreds. We put a bag over his head and hustled him out of there, just
to save his life. And when that happens, you have no idea what kind of
vendetta you've just fallen in the middle of. You have no idea if it's
a six-camel issue or something much more. I take that experience from
1991 and square it fifty times for a larger country. That would be a
postwar Iraq."
Eventually the occupiers would solve the problem by fostering a local
police force, as part of a new Iraqi government. "You have to start
working toward local, civilian-led police," Frederick Barton, the
former USAID official, told me. "Setting up an academy is okay, but
national police forces tend to be sources of future coups and
corruption. I'd rather have a hundred and fifty small forces around
the country and take my chances on thirty of them being corrupt than
have a centralized force and end up with one big, bad operation."
Forming a government. Tyrants make a point of crushing any challenge
to their power. When a tyranny falls, therefore, a new, legitimate
source of authority may take time to emerge. If potential new leaders
are easy to identify, it is usually because of their family name or
record of political struggle. Corazón Aquino illustrates the first
possibility: as the widow of a political rival whom Ferdinand Marcos
had ordered killed, she was the ideal successor to Marcos in the
Philippines (despite her later troubles in office). Charles de Gaulle
in postwar France, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Kim Dae-jung in
South Korea illustrate the second. Should the Burmese military ever
fall, Aung San Suu Kyi will have both qualifications for leadership.
Iraq has no such obvious sources of new leadership. A word about its
political history is useful in explaining the succession problem. From
the 1500s onward the Ottoman Empire, based in Istanbul, controlled the
territory that is now Iraq. When the empire fell, after World War I,
Great Britain assumed supervision of the newly created Kingdom of
Iraq, under a mandate from the League of Nations. The British imported
a member of Syria's Hashemite royal family, who in 1921 became King
Faisal I of Iraq. (The Hashemites, one of whom is still on the throne
in Jordan, claim descent not only from the prophet Muhammad but also
from the Old Testament Abraham.) The Kingdom of Iraq lasted until
1958, when King Faisal II was overthrown and killed in a military
coup. In 1963 the Baath, or "renewal," party took power in another
coup-which the United States initially welcomed, in hopes that the
Baathists would be anticommunist. By the late 1970s Saddam Hussein had
risen to dominance within the party.
The former monarchy is too shallow-rooted to survive reintroduction to
Iraq, and Saddam has had time to eliminate nearly all sources of
internal resistance. The Kurdish chieftains of the northern provinces
are the primary exception. But their main impulse has been separatist:
they seek autonomy from the government in Baghdad and feud with one
another. That leaves Iraqi exile groups-especially the Iraqi National
Congress-as the likeliest suppliers of leaders.
The INC survives on money from the U.S. government. The organization
and its president, a U.S.-trained businessman named Ahmad Chalabi,
have sincere supporters and also detractors within the Washington
policy world. The columnist Jim Hoagland, of The Washington Post, has
called Chalabi a "dedicated advocate of democracy" who has
"sacrifice[d] most of his fortune so he can risk his life to fight
Saddam." The case against Chalabi involves his fortune too: he is a
high-living character, and under him the INC has been dogged by
accusations of financial mismanagement. "The opposition outside Iraq
is almost as divided, weak, and irrelevant as the White Russians in
the 1920s," says Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in Washington.
"What you will need is a man with a black moustache," a retired
British spy who once worked in the region told me. "Out of chaos I am
sure someone will emerge. But it can't be Chalabi, and it probably
won't be a democracy. Democracy is a strange fruit, and, cynically, to
hold it together in the short term you need a strongman."
Several U.S. soldiers told me that the comfortable Powell doctrine,
with its emphasis on swift action and a clear exit strategy, could
make the inevitable difficulty and delay in setting up plausible new
leadership even more frustrating.
When British administrators supervised the former Ottoman lands in the
1920s, they liked to insinuate themselves into the local culture, à la
Lawrence of Arabia. "Typically, a young man would go there in his
twenties, would master the local dialects, would have a local mistress
before he settled down to something more respectable," Victor
O'Reilly, an Irish novelist who specializes in military topics, told
me. "They were to achieve tremendous amounts with minimal resources.
They ran huge chunks of the world this way, and it was psychological.
They were hugely knowledgeable and got deeply involved with the
locals." The original Green Berets tried to use a version of this
approach in Vietnam, and to an extent it is still the ideal for the
Special Forces.
But in the generation since Vietnam the mainstream U.S. military has
gone in the opposite direction: toward a definition of its role in
strictly martial terms. It is commonplace these days in discussions
with officers to hear them describe their mission as "killing people
and blowing things up." The phrase is used deliberately to shock
civilians, and also for its absolute clarity as to what a "military
response" involves. If this point is understood, there can be no
confusion about what the military is supposed to do when a war starts,
no recriminations when it uses all necessary force, and as little risk
as possible that soldiers will die "political" deaths because they've
been constrained for symbolic or diplomatic reasons from fully
defending themselves. All this is in keeping with the more familiar
parts of the Powell doctrine-the insistence on political backing and
overwhelming force. The goal is to protect the U.S. military from
being misused.
The strict segregation of military and political functions may be
awkward in Iraq, however. In the short term the U.S. military would
necessarily be the government of Iraq. In the absence of international
allies or UN support, and the absence of an obvious Iraqi successor
regime, American soldiers would have to make and administer political
decisions on the fly. America's two most successful occupations
embraced the idea that military officials must play political roles.
Emperor Hirohito remained the titular head of state in occupied Japan,
but Douglas MacArthur, a lifelong soldier, was immersed in the
detailed reconstruction of Japan's domestic order. In occupied
Germany, General Lucius D. Clay did something comparable, though less
flamboyantly. Today's Joint Chiefs of Staff would try to veto any
suggestion for a MacArthur-like proconsul. U.S. military leaders in
the Balkans have pushed this role onto the United Nations. Exactly who
could assume it in Iraq is not clear.
In the first month, therefore, the occupiers would face a paradox: the
institution best equipped to exercise power as a local government-the
U.S. military-would be the one most reluctant to do so.
Territorial integrity. This is where the exercise of power might first
be put to a major test.
In ancient times what is now central Iraq was the cradle of
civilization, Mesopotamia ("Mespot" in Fleet Street shorthand during
the British-mandate era). Under the Ottoman Empire today's Iraq was
not one province but three, and the divisions still affect current
politics. The province of Baghdad, in the center of the country, is
the stronghold of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority. Sunnis dominated
administrative positions in the Ottoman days and have controlled the
army and the government ever since, even though they make up only
about 20 percent of the population. The former province of Mosul, in
the mountainous north, is the stronghold of Kurdish tribes, which make
up 15 to 20 percent of the population. Through the years they have
both warred against and sought common cause with other Kurdish tribes
across Iraq's borders in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Mosul also has some
of the country's richest reserves of oil. The former province of
Basra, to the southeast, borders Iran, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf.
Its population is mainly Shiite Muslims, who make up the majority in
the country as a whole but have little political power.
The result of this patchwork is a country like Indonesia or Soviet-era
Yugoslavia. Geographic, ethnic, and religious forces tend to pull it
apart; only an offsetting pull from a strong central government keeps
it in one piece. Most people think that under the stress of regime
change Iraq would be more like Indonesia after Suharto than like
Yugoslavia after Tito-troubled but intact. But the strains will be
real.
"In my view it is very unlikely-indeed, inconceivable-that Iraq will
break up into three relatively cohesive components," Phebe Marr, the
Iraq expert, told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. But a
weakened center could mean all sorts of problems, she said, even if
the country were officially whole. The Kurds could seize the northern
oil fields, for example. The Turkish government has long made clear
that if Iraq cannot control its Kurdish population, Turkey-concerned
about separatist movements in its own Kurdish provinces-will step in
to do the job. "Turkey could intervene in the north, as it has done
before," Marr said. "Iran, through its proxies, could follow suit.
There could even be a reverse flow of refugees as many Iraqi Shia
exiles in Iran return home, possibly in the thousands, destabilizing
areas in the south."
The centrifugal forces acting on postwar Iraq, even if they did not
actually break up the country, would present a situation different
from those surrounding past U.S. occupations. America's longest
experience as an occupier was in the Philippines, which the United
States controlled formally or informally for most of a century. Many
ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences separated the people of
the Philippine archipelago, but because the islands have no land
frontier with another country, domestic tensions could be managed with
few international complications. And in dealing with Japan and Germany
after World War II, the United States wanted, if anything, to dilute
each country's sense of distinct national identity. There was also no
doubt about the boundaries of those occupied countries.
Postwar Iraq, in contrast, would have less-than-certain boundaries,
internal tensions with international implications, and highly nervous
neighbors. Six countries share borders with Iraq. Clockwise from the
Persian Gulf, they are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey,
and Iran. None of them has wanted Saddam to expand Iraq's territory.
But they would be oddly threatened by a post-Saddam breakup or
implosion. The Turks, as noted, have a particular interest in
preventing any country's Kurdish minority from rebelling or forming a
separatist state. The monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Jordan fear that
riots and chaos in Iraq could provoke similar upheaval among their own
peoples.
"In states like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, even Saudi
Arabia," says Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor of Peace and
Development at the University of Maryland, "there is the fear that the
complete demise of Iraq would in the long run play into the hands of
Iran, which they see as even more of a threat." Iran is four times as
large as Iraq, and has nearly three times as many people. Although it
is Islamic, its population and heritage are Persian, not Arab; to the
Arab states, Iran is "them," not "us."
As Arab regimes in the region assess the possible outcomes of a war,
Telhami says, "they see instability, at a minimum, for a long period
of time, and in the worst case the disintegration of the Iraqi state."
These fears matter to the United States, because of oil. Chaos in the
Persian Gulf would disrupt world oil markets and therefore the world
economy. Significant expansion of Iran's influence, too, would work
against the Western goal of balancing regional power among Saudi
Arabia, Iran, and postwar Iraq. So as the dust of war cleared, keeping
Iraq together would suddenly be America's problem. If the Kurds
rebelled in the north, if the Shiite government in Iran tried to
"reclaim" the southern districts of Iraq in which fellow Shiites live,
the occupation powers would have to respond-even by sending in U.S.
troops for follow-up battles.
The First Year
"De-Nazification" and "loya-jirgazation." As the months pass, an
occupation force should, according to former occupiers, spend less
time reacting to crises and more time undertaking long-term projects
such as improving schools, hospitals, and housing. Iraq's occupiers
would meanwhile also have to launch their version of
"de-Nazification": identifying and punishing those who were personally
responsible for the old regime's brutality, without launching a Khmer
Rouge-style purge of everyone associated with the former government.
Depending on what happened to Saddam and his closest associates,
war-crime trials might begin. Even if the United States had carried
out the original invasion on its own, the occupiers would seek
international support for these postwar measures.
In the early months the occupiers would also begin an Iraqi version of
"loya-jirgazation"-that is, supporting a "grand council" or convention
like the one at which the Afghans selected the leadership for their
transitional government. Here the occupation would face a fundamental
decision about its goals within Iraq.
One option was described to me by an American diplomat as the "decent
interval" strategy. The United States would help to set up the
framework for a new governing system and then transfer authority to it
as soon as possible-whether or not the new regime was truly ready to
exercise control. This is more or less the approach the United States
and its allies have taken in Afghanistan: once the loya jirga had set
up an interim government and Hamid Karzai was in place as President,
the United States was happy to act as if this were a true government.
The situation in Afghanistan shows the contradictions in this
strategy. It works only if the United States decides it doesn't care
about the Potemkin government's lapses and limitations-for instance,
an inability to suppress warlords and ethnic-regional feuds. In
Afghanistan the United States still does care, so there is growing
tension between the pretense of Afghan sovereignty and the reality of
U.S. influence. However complicated the situation in Afghanistan is
proving to be, things are, again, likely to be worse in Iraq. The
reasons are familiar: a large local army, the Northern Alliance, had
played a major role in the fight against the Taliban; a natural
leader, Karzai, was available; the invasion itself had been a
quasi-international rather than a U.S.-only affair.
The other main option would be something closer to U.S. policy in
occupied Japan: a slow, thorough effort to change fundamental social
and cultural values, in preparation for a sustainable democracy.
Japan's version of democracy departs from the standard Western model
in various ways, but a system even half as open and liberal as Japan's
would be a huge step for Iraq. The transformation of Japan was slow.
It required detailed interference in the day-to-day workings of
Japanese life. U.S. occupation officials supervised what was taught in
Japanese classrooms. Douglas MacArthur's assistants not only rewrote
the labor laws but wrote the constitution itself. They broke up big
estates and reallocated the land. Carrying out this transformation
required an effort comparable to the New Deal. American lawyers,
economists, engineers, and administrators by the thousands spent years
developing and executing reform plans. Transformation did not happen
by fiat. It won't in Iraq either.
John Dower, a professor of history at MIT, is a leading historian of
the U.S. occupation of Japan; his book Embracing Defeat won the
Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2000. Dower points out that in Japan
occupation officials had a huge advantage they presumably would not
have in Iraq: no one questioned their legitimacy. The victorious
Americans had not only the power to impose their will on Japan but
also, in the world's eyes, the undoubted right to remake a militarist
society. "Every country in Asia wanted this to be done," Dower says.
"Every country in the world." The same was true in postwar Germany.
The absence of international support today is one of many reasons
Dower vehemently opposes a pre-emptive attack.
Oil and money. Iraq could be the Saudi Arabia of the future. Partly
because its output has been constrained by ten years' worth of
sanctions, and mainly because it has never embraced the international
oil industry as Saudi Arabia has, it is thought to have some of the
largest untapped reserves in the world. Saudi Arabia now exports much
more oil than Iraq-some seven million barrels a day versus about two
million. But Iraq's output could rapidly increase.
The supply-demand balance in the world's energy markets is expected to
shift over the next five years. Import demand continues to rise-even
more quickly in China and India than in the United States. Production
in most of the world is flat or declining-in OPEC producing countries,
by OPEC fiat. The role of Persian Gulf suppliers will only become more
important; having two large suppliers in the Gulf rather than just one
will be a plus for consumers. So in the Arab world the U.S. crusade
against Saddam looks to be motivated less by fears of terrorism and
weapons of mass destruction than by the wish to defend Israel and the
desire for oil.
Ideally, Iraq's re-entry into the world oil market would be smooth.
Production would be ramped up quickly enough to generate money to
rebuild the Iraqi economy and infrastructure, but gradually enough to
keep Saudi Arabia from feeling threatened and retaliating in ways that
could upset the market. International oil companies, rather than an
occupation authority, would do most of the work here. What would the
occupiers need to think about? First, the threat of sabotage, which
would become greater to the extent that Iraq's oil industry was seen
in the Arab world more as a convenience for Western consumers than as
a source of wealth for Iraq. Since many of the wells are in the
Kurdish regions, Kurdish rebellion or dissatisfaction could put them
at risk. Oil pipelines, seemingly so exposed, are in fact not the
likeliest target. "Pipes are always breaking, so we know how to fix
them quickly," says Peter Schwartz, of the Global Business Network,
who worked for years as an adviser to Shell Oil. At greatest risk are
the terminals at seaports, where oil is loaded into tankers, and the
wells themselves. At the end of the Gulf War, Iraqi troops set fire to
90 percent of Kuwait's wells, which burned for months. Wellheads and
terminals are the sites that oil companies protect most carefully.
Another challenge to recovery prospects in general would be Iraq's
amazingly heavy burden of debt. Iraq was directed by the United
Nations to pay reparations for the damage it inflicted on Kuwait
during the Gulf War. That and other debts have compounded to amounts
the country cannot hope to repay. Estimates vary, but the range-$200
billion to $400 billion-illustrates the problem.
"Leaving Iraq saddled with a massive debt and wartime-reparations bill
because of Saddam is an act of moral and ethical cowardice," says
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a military expert who is no one's idea of a bleeding heart.
"We must show the Arab and Islamic worlds that we will not profiteer
in any way from our victory. We must persuade the world to forgive
past debts and reparations." Cordesman and others argue that as part
of regime change the United States would have to take responsibility
for solving this problem. Otherwise Iraq would be left in the position
of Weimar Germany after the Treaty of Versailles: crushed by unpayable
reparations.
This would be only part of the financial reality of regime change. The
overall cost of U.S. military operations during the Gulf War came to
some $61 billion. Because of the contributions it received from Japan,
Saudi Arabia, and other countries in its alliance, the United States
wound up in the convenient yet embarrassing position of having most of
that cost reimbursed. An assault on Iraq would be at least as
expensive and would all be on our tab. Add to that the price of
recovery aid. It is hard to know even how to estimate the total cost.
Legitimacy and unilateralism. An important premise for the American
war party is that squawks and hand-wringing from Arab governments
cannot be taken seriously. The Saudis may say they oppose an attack;
the Jordanians may publicly warn against it; but in fact most
governments in the region would actually be glad to have the Saddam
wild card removed. And if some countries didn't welcome the outcome,
all would adjust to the reality of superior U.S. force once the
invasion was a fait accompli. As for the Europeans, they are thought
to have a poor record in threat assessment. Unlike the United States,
Europe has not really been responsible since World War II for
life-and-death judgments about military problems, and Europeans tend
to whine and complain. American war advocates say that Europe's
reluctance to confront Saddam is like its reluctance to recognize the
Soviet threat a generation ago. Europeans thought Ronald Reagan was a
brute for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire." According to this
view, they are just as wrong-headed to consider George W. Bush a
simpleton for talking today about an "axis of evil."
Still, support from the rest of the world can be surprisingly
comforting. Most Americans were moved by the outpouring of solidarity
on September 11-the flowers in front of embassies, the astonishing
headline in Le Monde: "NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS." By the same
token, foreigners' hatred can be surprisingly demoralizing. Think of
the news clips of exaltation in Palestinian camps after the attacks,
or the tape of Osama bin Laden chortling about how many people he had
killed. The United States rarely turned to the United Nations from the
late 1960s through the mid-1980s, because the UN was so often a forum
for anti-American rants. Resentment against America in the Arab world
has led to a partial boycott of U.S. exports, which so far has not
mattered much. It has also fueled the recruitment of suicide
terrorists, which has mattered a great deal.
The presence or absence of allies would have both immediate and
long-term consequences for the occupation. No matter how welcome as
liberators they may be at first, foreign soldiers eventually wear out
their welcome. It would be far easier if this inescapably irritating
presence were varied in nationality, under a UN flag, rather than all
American. All the better if the force were Islamic and
Arabic-speaking.
The face of the occupying force will matter not just in Iraq's cities
but also on its borders. Whoever controls Iraq will need to station
forces along its most vulnerable frontier-the long flank with Iran,
where at least half a million soldiers died during the 1980-1988
Iran-Iraq war. The Iranians will notice any U.S. presence on the
border. "As the occupying power, we will be responsible for the
territorial integrity of the Iraqi state," says Charles William
Maynes, of the Eurasia Foundation. "That means we will have to move
our troops to the border with Iran. At that point Iran becomes our
permanent enemy."
The longer-term consequences would flow from having undertaken a war
that every country in the region except Israel officially opposed.
Chris Sanders, the consultant who used to work in Saudi Arabia, says
that unless the United States can drum up some Arab allies, an attack
on Iraq "will accomplish what otherwise would have been impossible-a
bloc of regional opposition that transcends the very real differences
of interests and opinions that had kept a unified Arab bloc from
arising." Sanders adds dryly, "If I were an American strategic
thinker, I would imagine that not to be in my interest."
The Long Run
So far we've considered the downside-which, to be fair, is most of
what I heard in my interviews. But there was also a distinctly
positive theme, and it came from some of the most dedicated members of
the war party. Their claim, again, was that forcing regime change
would not just have a negative virtue-that of removing a threat. It
would also create the possibility of bringing to Iraq, and eventually
the whole Arab world, something it has never known before: stable
democracy in an open-market system.
"This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the
Arab world," James Woolsey, a former CIA director who is one of the
most visible advocates of war, told me. "Just as what we did in
Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have
got a golden chance." In this view, the fall of the Soviet empire
really did mark what Francis Fukuyama called "the end of history": the
democratic-capitalist model showed its superiority over other social
systems. The model has many local variations; it brings adjustment
problems; and it encounters resistance, such as the anti-globalization
protests of the late 1990s. But it spreads-through the old Soviet
territory, through Latin America and Asia, nearly everywhere except
through tragic Africa and the Islamic-Arab lands of the Middle East.
To think that Arab states don't want a democratic future is
dehumanizing. To think they're incapable of it is worse. What is
required is a first Arab democracy, and Iraq can be the place.
"If you only look forward, you can see how hard it would be to do,"
Woolsey said. "Everybody can say, 'Oh, sure, you're going to
democratize the Middle East.'" Indeed, that was the reaction of most
of the diplomats, spies, and soldiers I spoke with-"the ruminations of
insane people," one British official said.
Woolsey continued with his point: "But if you look at what we and our
allies have done with the three world wars of the twentieth
century-two hot, one cold-and what we've done in the interstices,
we've already achieved this for two thirds of the world. Eighty-five
years ago, when we went into World War I, there were eight or ten
democracies at the time. Now it's around a hundred and twenty-some
free, some partly free. An order of magnitude! The compromises we made
along the way, whether allying with Stalin or Franco or Pinochet, we
have gotten around to fixing, and their successor regimes are
democracies.
"Around half of the states of sub-Saharan Africa are democratic. Half
of the twenty-plus non-Arab Muslim states. We have all of Europe
except Belarus and occasionally parts of the Balkans. If you look back
at what has happened in less than a century, then getting the Arab
world plus Iran moving in the same direction looks a lot less awesome.
It's not Americanizing the world. It's Athenizing it. And it is
doable."
Richard Perle, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others have
presented similar prospects. Thomas McInerney, a retired three-star
general, said at the Senate hearings this past summer, "Our
longer-term objectives will be to bring a democratic government to
Iraq ... that will influence the region significantly." At a Pentagon
briefing a few days later Rumsfeld asked rhetorically, "Wouldn't it be
a wonderful thing if Iraq were similar to Afghanistan-if a bad regime
was thrown out, people were liberated, food could come in, borders
could be opened, repression could stop, prisons could be opened? I
mean, it would be fabulous."
The transforming vision is not, to put it mildly, the consensus among
those with long experience in the Middle East. "It is so divorced from
any historical context, just so far out of court, that it is
laughable," Chris Sanders told me. "There isn't a society in Iraq to
turn into a democracy. That doesn't mean you can't set up institutions
and put stooges in them. But it would make about as much sense as the
South Vietnamese experiment did." Others made similar points.
Woolsey and his allies might be criticized for lacking a tragic
imagination about where war might lead, but at least they recognize
that it will lead somewhere. If they are more optimistic in their
conclusions than most of the other people I spoke with, they do see
that America's involvement in Iraq would be intimate and would be
long.
It has become a cliché in popular writing about the natural world that
small disturbances to complex systems can have unpredictably large
effects. The world of nations is perhaps not quite as intricate as the
natural world, but it certainly holds the potential for great
surprise. Merely itemizing the foreseeable effects of a war with Iraq
suggests reverberations that would be felt for decades. If we can
judge from past wars, the effects we can't imagine when the fighting
begins will prove to be the ones that matter most.
The URL for this page is
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/11/fallows.htm.
Nap
"FruitsAndNuts" <fruitsan...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:60a7fde9.0209...@posting.google.com...
> The Atlantic Monthly | November 2002
>
>
> The Fifty-first State?
>
> Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities
> of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would
> include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting
> Iraq's borders-and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we
> ready for this long-term relationship?
>
Or, we could bomb the shit out of their wmd, kill Saddam,
and send them aid if they install a regime that is less hostile
to human life. That'd work.
Joseph Hertzlinger
Mosul, Bagdad, and Basra will be at least three states.
e patashnikov
TheTwinkieGourmet
wayward province. They like to think they are independant but we all know
the real situation.
"e patashnikov" <epatas...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:92ab9f32.02092...@posting.google.com...
That Guy
"Nap" <now...@anon.com> wrote in message
news:9IQj9.191633$Jo.69375@rwcrnsc53...
It would be a lot smarter than trying to occupy the country, we'd get
slaughtered. Can't fight guerillas unless you kill everyone.
Nap
"That Guy" <webg...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:IpEn9.51773$WI5.6...@twister.kc.rr.com...
Sadly, yes. And killing everyone gets people pissed off.