Iraq the Long View

It is now apparent that George Bush has won his fight to stay in Iraq. Senate Democrats don’t have the votes to force a capitulation and, since Bush isn’t running for reelection, the doomsayers in the press have little influence. It may have been the last major battle of the war, and one of the most significant. As more people begin to realize it I’m seeing a subtle shift in the debate. Presidential candidates are trying to leave themselves enough wiggle room to deal responsibly with Iraq just in case they find themselves in the catbird seat come 2009. It’s no longer so much a question of how quickly we should withdraw as how long we should stay and what a long term presence should look like. I’ve even begun to see estimates of what a Korea style military commitment would cost. The implications are profound. Iran and Syria will both have to consider how they will deal with a strong and stable neighbor and just how many bills they will have to pay for their meddling. The prospect of a prosperous Iraq with firm ties to the US must give them nightmares. It is having a big effect already on the dizzying array of factions jockeying for power inside Iraq. A lot of that has been caused by a life and death struggle to end up on the winning side. As government security forces grow stronger there is a tremendous incentive to jump on the band wagon. I wonder if that isn’t what’s really behind the remarkable turnaround in Anbar province, and the decision by the thuggish Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to call off his militia dogs. Even France has been mending fences in Washington. Europeans are a lot more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than we are and historically France has sought to counter US influence in the region. They wouldn’t want to abandon the field if it looks like Americans are about to prevail after all. It is the global Long War where the effect may be the most significant. Al Qaeda invested heavily in recruiting volunteers to serve as suicide assassins in Iraq, most of them foreigners. As Mohammed Hafez documents in his book Suicide Bombers in Iraq, these people don’t just show up on the scene and ask for directions, they need help. That means al Qaeda had to rely on networks and connections established primarily in Afghanistan before 2001. Those networks have been heavily damaged and without a safe haven they may be difficult to reestablish. Hafez points out that the motives for volunteering are complex and so are the motives of the organizations that employ them but the prospect of success has to be high on the list. If the tactic has failed it loses some luster. More important, most of the victims in Iraq have been Muslims, a very unpopular strategy, so much so that AQI has largely stopped claiming responsibility for them in a bizarre attempt to blame them on a Zionist conspiracy. But of course the idea is to provoke retaliation and create a complete collapse of civil order. The offended community has to know whom to retaliate against. The whole concept may be discredited in the eyes of many Muslims. I don’t know that the Korea model for a six decade plus major military presence applies in Iraq, but if anything our interests in the region are more compelling, and the consequences of an abrupt departure could be devastating. The only serious argument that has been made for leaving is that continued efforts are futile. That argument was never valid and is finally beginning to fall apart. Maybe now we can begin a genuine discussion about what sort of Iraq we can expect might emerge over the next few years, and what sort of relationship we would like to see.