America’s Dilemma in Iraq and the Challenge of Iran
Updated: November 2009
As the Bush administration's days came to an end on January 20, 2009, almost six years after its invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is
worthwhile to take stock of what the Bush White House has accomplished there.
The Agenda
Washington's declared objectives behind the occupation of Iraq were many. Aside from finding and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which were never found, Washington wanted a secular democratic Iraq, linked closely to US
corporations and investors, and friendly to Israel--a model for the Arab world to emulate. There were also not so well declared objectives. These may be inferred from statements made by President G. W. Bush. In
naming Iran as a member of the “Axis of
Evil” in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Mr. Bush made his intentions towards
Iran
clear; regime change. The President's statement let it be known that Iraq's regime change would be incomplete until regime changes in Iran and Syria would
follow.
The Balance Sheet
The Bush White House achieved the opposite to what it had planned. On April 9, 2003, Washington handed control in Mesopotamia to Iraq’s 60% Shiite majority after a thousand years of Arab Sunni control. Washington’s elimination of the Talibans in 2001 and Saddam’s regime in 2003 made Iran a regional powerhouse. On April 9, 2003, the U.S. won the battle against a tattered Iraq. But Iran, without firing a shot won the war for Iraq. Unable to change the regimes in Tehran or Damascus, America became bogged down in Iraq. The
British think tank, Chatham House, concluded in August 2006. “The
greatest problem facing the U.S. is that Iran has superseded it as the
most influential power in Iraq.” To exemplify, Iraq adopted in 2005 a new Islamist constitution
tinged with Iranian wilayat al-faqih (rulership by an unelected Shiite cleric) odor. The head of Iran's powerful ultra-conservative Guardian Council, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told Friday worshipers in Tehran on August 26, 2005: "Fortunately, after years of effort and expectation in Iraq, an Islamic state has come to power and the constitution has been established on the basis of Islamic precepts".
From the Abu Ghraib Prison, the image of
American decency and fair play was shattered. From the devastated
Anbar, Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul, Najaf, Ramadi, Samarra, Tikrit, and
Tal-Afar, with thousands upon thousands of innocent children, women,
and men killed and maimed, in addition to the more than four million
displaced Iraqis, Arab and Muslim enmity to American policies, sadly,
has deepened to a frightening level.
In the process
more than 4,300 American soldiers were killed, 30,000 injured, US$700
billion wasted, possibly three times as much in terms
of economic cost. These figures turned out to be considerably higher
than the prewar forecasts. In early January 2003, a few weeks before the invasion,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put the number at under $50 billion.
"How much of that would be the US’s burden, and how much would be other
countries, is an open question," Rumsfeld said. Not only were the
financial forecasts wildly off, the US Central Command’s war plan
postulated in August 2002 that the United States would have only 5,000
troops left in Iraq by December 2006, a far cry from the 140,000 US
military personnel on the ground in Iraq at the end of December 2008.
In Iraq, “America is living a nightmare with no end in sight” warned
the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, retired general Ricardo Sanchez in October 2007.
The Motives
Why was the Iraq
project undertaken? The simple answer is that the benefits were perceived by the Bush administration to outweigh the cost. Groups with different
agendas pushed for the occupation of
Iraq to serve their narrow parochial self-interests.
Leading the charge were the oil men who wanted
to control Iraq’s 113 billion barrels in proven reserves and then go
after Iran’s 90 billion barrels; the chiefs of the military-industrial
complex who were tantalized by new opportunities to sell expensive arms
systems and gain huge contracts to reconstruct war-ravaged
infrastructure; Israel’s lobbyists who sought to demolish Iraq’s
fighting capabilities and, later, those of Iran and Syria as well; the evangelical Christians who fantasize over speeding up the return of Christ; the
neo-con ideologues who found in the War on Terror a replacement for the
Cold War; and Tehran’s cunning Iraqi moles who were bent on luring the
US not only to hand them the keys to Baghdad but also hand Tehran
control of the predominantly Shiite southern Iraq. Together, these parties administered a sugarcoated bitter pill to the American
people.
Notable among those Iraqis was Ahmad Chalabi. Befriending many of the
men in the highest offices of the Bush administration, Chalabi provided
what later proved to be false information regarding Iraq’s WMDs. In the
Spring of 2004, rumors circulated in Washington that Chalabi had been
duping the Americans all along while spying for Iran. With the approval
and funding from Washington, Chalabi had maintained an office in Iran.
Until his death on August 26, 2009 in Tehran, Abdulaziz Al-Hakeem was the head of SCIRI and the Badr Brigade (his son Ammar inherited the mantle). The Badr Brigade, a militia
financed, trained, and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
fought on the side of Tehran in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). He and
his older brother, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir, fled to Iran in 1980. As
Baghdad fell in April 2003, Abdulaziz was appointed to the
American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir
Al-Hakeem was assassinated in Najaf in August 2003. Iran declared three
days of official mourning following his assassination.
The senior leaders of the Islamic Daawa Party are closely linked to
Tehran as well. Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, spent twenty years in exile in
Iran. He became Iraq’s transitional prime minister in April 2005. Nouri
Al-Maliki succeeded Al-Jaafari in April 2006 as Iraq’s first full-term
prime minister. Al-Maliki, a hard-line activist, spent two decades in
exile in Iran and Syria.
The Eventual Outcome
Six years after the
occupation, Washington finds itself in an untenable position. Staying
means facing several possible fronts: a nationalist war of liberation, a
Shiite-Sunni sectarian confrontation, and a Shiite-Shiite turf war (for more
on this see: A Verdict on the Surge). The cost of
staying is high, especially when it is to protect anti-American
ayatollahs and Iraqi politicians linked to Tehran (for more on this see: The March of Shiism).
As the cost of the
war mounts, Washington will sooner or later withdraw its forces from Iraq. Indeed, the Obama administration announced plans to withdraw the majority of American forces by the end of 2010. When this
happens, Iraq will be left plagued by sectarian and ethnic divisions. The occupation of Iraq will leave behind
a Middle East rife with Shiite-Sunni conflicts, spilling rivers of
blood in the decades to come and breeding hardened terrorists, until and unless Iraq’s Sunnis
and the Sunni majorities in the neighboring countries manage to either
halt the march of Shiism or accept Iran’s hegemony.
The paradox between the fantasy and the reality is astounding. How did such a situation develop?
The Causes Behind the Failure
It was the lack of
knowledge by the Bush administration’s war managers about Arab history,
Islam, Sunnism, and Shiism. It was their ignorance of Arab social and cultural subtleties and the
makeup and dynamics of Iraq's religio-ethnic structures, let alone those of other Arab countries.
Many of the Bush administration’s “experts” had never visited Iraq or any
Arab country before the occupation, let alone studied Arabic, or read
the Quran, or deliberated its message from an Arab or Muslim
perspective. Most of these “experts” do not speak Arabic. They had
little or no contact with Arabs, Arabic food, Arabic music, or the Arab
way of life, save for a life-long indoctrination from anti-Arab and
anti-Islam rhetoric in Hollywood movies or hostile and prejudiced
Madison Avenue prototypes of Arabs and Muslims as dirty, nasty,
violent, and nefarious beings. It was the arrogance of
power, the feeling of self-righteousness, the belief that God is on "our" side, and that the gun can settle all conflicts that led to the endless waves of shock-and-awe bombardment of Baghdad. The natural outcome of such a
mindset is escalating violence, especially when martyrdom-seeking
jihadists are at the receiving end.
This ignorance was also behind the wishful thinking, or the mistaken belief that the Arab masses everywhere would want to copy the American "democratic" model in Iraq. These experts failed to foresee that the masses would regard the American occupation as an anti-Islam colonial adventure. These “experts” could have never imagined that the Quran may be transformed into a weapon against occupation. Iraqis in their millions did not turn out to welcome America’s soldiers with roses, as Washington’s Iraqi “friends” had promised. Most seriously, however, is the feeling of enmity that this war has engendered in the collective memory of generations of Arabs and Muslims to come.
This ignorance was also behind the wishful thinking, or the mistaken belief that the Arab masses everywhere would want to copy the American "democratic" model in Iraq. These experts failed to foresee that the masses would regard the American occupation as an anti-Islam colonial adventure. These “experts” could have never imagined that the Quran may be transformed into a weapon against occupation. Iraqis in their millions did not turn out to welcome America’s soldiers with roses, as Washington’s Iraqi “friends” had promised. Most seriously, however, is the feeling of enmity that this war has engendered in the collective memory of generations of Arabs and Muslims to come.
In their book, A World Transformed, former president
George Bush (Sr.) and Brent Scowcroft wrote on why the first Bush
administration decided against occupying Iraq in 1991: “Had we gone the
invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an
occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a
dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.”
In
March 1991, when he was defense secretary, Dick Cheney toed his
superiors’ line. He said on ABC-TV, in answer to a question as to why
US forces did not go to Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein from power:
“I
think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war
inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what
would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government? Would
it be a Sunni government, a Shi’ite government, a Kurdish government?
Would it be secular, along the lines of the Baath party? Would it be
fundamentalist Islamic. I do not think the United States wants to have
US military forces accept casualties and accept responsibility of
trying to govern Iraq. It makes no sense at all.”
To pretend that the failures are only tactical in an otherwise sound strategy is to put on a brave face with a brazen political spin. To blame the failures on Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian divisions or on the meddling of neighbors is to run away from responsibility. Was it not the American occupation that released these demons in the first place? History will remember Iraq as Mr. George W. Bush’s gift to Iran, a strategic blunder of gigantic proportions. The followers of Shiism will forever be grateful. The Arab Sunni masses will never forget or forgive.
As for those former officials of the Bush administration who
were relentless in their eagerness for the war and who later found it
convenient to blame the failures on the Bush administration’s
mismanagement, such finger pointing is morally deficient. Two leading
neo-cons, Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, attacked the Bush team in Vanity Fair Magazine. Both had been senior defense
department officials and members of a Pentagon advisory board. Both had
argued vociferously for war in Iraq. Richard Perle declared that had he
known how it would turn out, he would have been against it. “I think
now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies.’”
Kenneth Adelman said, “They turned out to be among the most incompetent
teams in the post-war era . . . Not only did each of them,
individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly,
dysfunctional.” Donald Rumsfeld “fooled me,” Adelman added.
In a speech in October 2007 the former commander of coalition
forces in Iraq, retired general Ricardo Sanchez labeled his political
leaders as “incompetent” and “corrupted” and declared that they would
have faced courts martial for dereliction of duty had they been in the
military.
