Iraq and Afghanistan

We Stumble Forward

The last two days have brought confusing news, and yet there may be daylight ahead. The agreement with the sadrists in Najaf and Kufa does not seem as secure as yesterday, particularly in Kufa. Of course, both sides blame the other for continued violence. But for now no one says the pause is over. On the road between Mahmudiya and Iskanderiya (south of Baghdad) more people are killed, this time Japanese. This Sunni area seems to remain uncontrolled. Clearly as we make agreements elsewhere we should shift more forces here for it is a major artery.

Progress continues on the membership of the "Interim Government" that will replace the present "Governing Council". The latter had felt shut out of the process, but it may now have taken it over. As of today the new premier is to be Iyad Alawi, a secular shi'a who is presently a member of the Governing Council. He is also a leader of one of the two groups that the United States had worked closely together with in its planning the Iraq adventure. (The other group was led by Chalabi, the favorite of another branch of the American government. He is now said to be an opponent of Alawi.) Alawi is a former Baathist who led an attempted revolt against the government in the 1990s. He believes that former Baathists and former generals should have a larger role in the new Iraq. He apparently is a good politician and this choice may work out. It seemed to me the Times did a disservice in emphasizing in several discussions his former closeness to the CIA. After all, anyone who was an enemy of Saddam and wanted change in Iraq in the nineties would have found it difficult not to work with the CIA. This should not condemn him.

Peace in Iraq?

The last couple of days have brought news of an agreement engineered by the Iraqis that will bring at least a tenuous peace between the Americans and sadrists in Najaf and apparently Kufa (in Karbala there was already such a agreement in practice). This does not yet affect the battles between the sadrists and Americans in "Sadr City" area of Baghdad. It represents a considerable backing down by the Americans, similar in some respects to what happened in Falluja with a somewhat different cast. If the agreement holds, the Americans will help bring peace to the embattled holy cities and, one hopes, the recovery of authority in them by more moderate elements. The role of the Iraqis is significant. For all in all, what we are seeing is a progressive Iraqization of authority in the country so that July appears more and more likely to actually mean a transfer of significant power. For their part, the Americans are becoming more comfortable with letting Iraqis take the lead, so they may in fact fade away slowly in the aftermath. However, there are still many hurdles, and the United States and its allies will continue for some time to have thousands of soldiers and civilians exposed to attack throughout the country. In the next few months unless the Iraqis can control the rate of attacks against these persons (leave alone against Iraqis), the Americans will remain tempted to push aside developing national forces in an attempt to crush their tormentors.

Down to Earth

Today's paper reports a coming together of themes and realties that were perhaps inherent in the Iraq situation from the beginning. There is seeming lament that John Kerry and George W. seem to be coming together rather than moving apart as the campaign season heats up. Bush is becoming more internationalist, Kerry remains internationalist with a little more emphasis on sharing the burden with NATO as well as the United Nations. Both are facing limited options because of a sense of responsibility and the pressure of the electorate at home. Both have long records of adapting their views to situations as they develop in spite of superficial appearance of intransigence.

The same mood is reflected in an Op-Ed by the well-known Arab-American Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Fouad Ajami. He has very much wanted the Bush dream to succeed in Iraq in spite of the difficulties, but today he heads his remarks with "Iraq May Survive, but the Dream is Dead". Ajami is despondent that in his latest speeches and actions Bush seems to be ceding Iraq to the United Nations and, after that, to the Iraqis themselves. He ends with these words, "In its modern history, Iraq has not been kind or gentle to its people. Perhaps it was folly to think that it was under any obligation to be kinder to strangers."

Most of us might actually welcome what these two trends reflect. For both indicate that the chances of a functioning political system free of outside control emerging in the near future in Iraq seems rather better than appeared a couple of months ago. The selection of the new interim government appears to be going well, and the results should be acceptable to most of the parties involved (at least that is the American perspective). The result might not be the holding of fully free and fair elections producing a facsimile of a Western European democracy. But this was always an idealistic and over-optimistic expectation. We simply have not put enough resources into the effort nor will the Iraqis give us enough time to make such an outcome probable. Outside of the traditionally democratic areas, democracy has evolved everywhere in fits and starts, with many setbacks. It took most of Latin America well over a century to institutionalize democracy. Most of the rest of the world's democracies have developed directly out of British colonial experience, generations of training that have produced the biggest and many of the smallest of the world's democracies. We did transform the Axis powers into democracies after World War II, but they all already had more democratic tradition than Iraq, our tutelage was much more extended, our assistance more generous.

But if Iraq holds together through the elections, we may end up with a start, a platform on which the Iraqis can build. Remember that observers have long pointed to the Kurdish areas as oases of light in Iraq. These areas are spoken of as though they are democracies. yet they have never been. They are essentially fiefdoms under the control of two old line tribal chieftains. They do allow their people reasonable freedoms, as long is they do not threaten the leadership. In spite of this, their example is one other groups in Iraq might emulate. When it comes to voting, there may be few people who are actually able to vote without looking over their shoulder. One can still hope that the end result is better than it has been in Nigeria where democratic forms have come and gone, and been perverted by leaders at all levels. Yet the democratic forms have persisted in Nigeria, and it has offered its people, Africa, and the international community a level of governance and freedom far better than that offered by Saddam Hussein.

Completing A Scaled-Down Mission?

Without wanting to seem pollyannish, it would appear as though we may be doing somewhat better in Iraq, better enough to make possible an eventual "withdrawal with honor", assuming Iraq holds together enough during the transition period that our departure does not look like we are being chased out. There are still violent incidents every day. But the momentum of anti-American attacks appears to have been lost since April. (Let not tomorrow prove me wrong!)

Two other indications look good. First, we seem to have withdrawn successfully from Karbala without destroying the important shrines. We are now using Iraqis to do at least part of the security, and shops are reopening. We also seem to have been able to go a long way toward retaking Kufa, the main base of the Sadrists outside of the Sadr City area of Baghdad. In both cases we have been able to inflict very one-sided casualties on the Sadrists, and they may be discouraged. This backs up the general rule that guerrillas make a mistake when they engage in pitched battles with an occupying power. Pitched battles partly worked for a different sort of guerrilla in Falluja. But it appears as though the people in Karbala were really glad to see their guerrillas go, and this may have made the difference.

Second, NYT reporters and others sense that the general feeling of Iraqis today is one of sullen acceptance of the American presence. They want the Americans to go, but they fear chaos in the aftermath. The result may be a growing unwillingness to push harder on the Americans. It is significant that the main complaint against the Americans in most of the country seems to be that the Americans have failed to guarantee security and have failed in their promises of development. Deep down the average Iraqi realizes that neither of these problems is likely to get better if the Americans leave now.

An eerie aspect of the situation is that while the Americans beat themselves up over the their egregious torture of detainees this does not seem to have had a great effect in Iraq itself. Partly this is because the Iraqis who really hate us expected no better of us, so are not disappointed. Those, on the other hand, who see the Americans as the only reed to cling to do not wish to damage their crutch further. Perhaps my impression results from misreporting, perhaps there is a new upwelling of hatred over the torture that will lead to a new cascade of attacks. Certainly our actions have had a negative effect is in the Arab Middle East and Europe, but we hear little of it in Iraq itself.

Extra-Terrestrials

Friedman's Op-Ed today proposes that we should turn over the control of security in Iraq to the Iraqis for a rather strange reason. He seems convinced that most of the suicide bombers in the country are fanatical Muslims from outside Iraq. Their depredations can then only be controlled by Iraqis who can tell from their accents and other subtle differences that they are outsiders, a task Americans cannot perform. He seems to have no special source of information, and he seems blissfully unaware of the fact that many suicide bombers, for example those in Sri Lanka, have no religious motivation at all. There is actually no reason to believe that Iraqi nationalism in some groups, groups taught an extreme form of Iraqi nationalism for many years, could not be recruited to take part in these attacks against Americans and anyone else who seems to accept the American presence. Of course, religion is important to many Iraqis. But I do not believe that we should accept the easy proposition that what we are fighting in Iraq and everywhere in this "war against terrorism" is a wave of Islamic terrorism. Most guerrilla activity, most terrorism is local and has local roots, a fact we should remember in spite of the preachings of al-Qaida.

Sontag's Take on the Abuse


Today's New York Times Magazine brings us Susan Sontag's take on the Iraq abuse scandal. Her emphasis is on the pictures which she correctly states are responsible for the Administration's response. Without the pictures there would have been little outcry and the Red Cross and human rights groups would have continued crying in the wilderness. Her article makes two important points (not original but well made). (1) The most embarrassing thing for Americans is the obvious pleasure the American participants in the pictures had in their activities. They reveled in what was occurring and in their part in it. Obviously they thought what they were doing was not wrong. She also points out that the photographing was essentially pornography. It was the sexual aspect that interested the picture takers. In the collection of pictures that have been analyzed, there are a few of other forms of torture. Although such actions were probably much more common than sexual humiliation, such actions were not considered interesting enough to record. Incidentally, scattered among the pictures are pictures of Americans having sex with one another as well. She relates the behavior of the young Americans and their delight in taking the pictures to the diet of video games and pornography that has become a part of their life back in the states. (2) She points out that if one looks at all the pictures in the collection, and she has evidently seen much more than most of us, and if one looks at uncut versions of the pictures, he will note that there are many more people involved than in the publicized pictures. In the full version of the pyramid of naked prisoners, for example, there are many people standing around, walking by, some apparently not paying much attention. This suggests two facts to her. First, the actions were widespread and well-known (one report is even of the pyramid picture being used as a screen saver). There were many people higher up who knew what was going on.

Sontag's purpose appears to be not in this criticism itself. It is rather in showing that this was the inevitable result of the kind of war we were waging. This is certainly not so. American troops have been in many wars without this kind of humiliation of prisoners. Soldiers also hate Germans and Japanese in World War II, sometimes for unspeakable crimes. Yet the treatment of prisoners in camps did not break down to this extent. The British colonialists fought explicit colonial wars without this result. No, the mistakes of the war policy, the way it was fought, the poor training of the troops, the random killings of GIs by Iraqis, these all contributed to frustration and played a part. But Abu Ghraib and the other mistreatments in this war and in Afghanistan should be considered and condemned in their own right, not as part of a general condemnation of the war.