Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

OP-ED: “’The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve’: A response to Messrs. Will, Buckley and Fukuyama,” by Peter Wehner, Wall Street Journal, 4 April 2006, p. A22.

EDITORIAL: “Condi’s Iraq Stumble: The quickest way to lose is by alienating the Shiites,” Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2006, p. A20.

OP-ED: “Two Deadlines and an Exit: Get tough with Iraq’s leadership, and get U.S. troops out of danger,” by John F. Kerry, New York Times, 5 April 2006, p. A23.

First, an exceptionally well-written piece by a special assistant to Bush (Peter Wehner), in which he addresses the “charges” of this trio of conservatives who want to “cut our losses,” so to speak.

First issue is the one that gets me the most: “The war is lost.” Geez, the war was won, and brilliantly waged. What we struggle on is the peace, for a lot of reasons: the Bushies planned horribly, and the Pentagon and military had a long and huge bias against such operations. But most of all, the Powell Doctrine promoted the idea in the national security establishment and among the American people that we just didn’t “do windows,” even if that meant simply returning a few years later and rerunning the intervention (as we did in Haiti) or the war (as we did in Iraq) or simply blowing off the situation altogether (as we did in Somalia and managed to do from the start in Sudan). We finally ditch the Powell Doctrine in Iraq and by accepting the notion that defeating the Vietnam Syndrome isn’t about winning easy wars but about waging far harder and inescapable counter-insurgencies, we finally grow up about what shrinking the Gap and winning this Global War on Terrorism will actually involve.

Saying we “lost the war” in Iraq is simply saying “I want a return to the old days of the Powell Doctrine,” which only got us 9/11 and the rising Occidentalism of the Salafis who think American “staying power” is defined by helicopters fleeing over the horizon with their tail rotors between their legs.

The Powell Doctrine was perfect for the old Neocons, because it was a strategy of limited regret, limited impact, limited success and guaranteed long-term reliance on military arms to do nothing more than maintain a declining status quo.

But the Bushies went beyond those limitations on Iraq, which I thought and still think was completely necessary. Yes, it exposed a lot of bad thinking, bad planning, bad force structure, bad doctrine, bad operations, etc. in the U.S. military, but all those exposures have led to necessary change--and change long-delayed at that.

As for the Iraq situation dragging on, it’s so weird that the conservatives can listen to the insurgency experts talk about needing a good decade to defeat such an effort and yet declare, just three years into the intervention, that all is obviously lost. Where these guys’ sense of history is, I do not know.

Wehner points out that “One might hope our own democratic development--which included the Articles of Confederation and a ‘fiery trial’ that cost more than 600,000 American lives--would remind critics that we must sometimes be patient with others.”

Me? I just like to remind everyone of the UN’s own estimate that we killed about 50,000 Iraqis each year for 12 years with our pointless sanctions between Desert Storm and OIF. Makes for a nice round number, doesn’t it.

Plus, Wehner doesn’t mention this but I think it’s eminently worth mentioning: compare Iraq to our other major effort to deal with a pretend state, Yugoslavia, and the realization grows that: 1) it’ll be a decade before things settle down and 2) when they do, it’s quite likely we’ll have 2 or 3 resulting states at the end.

Why either outcome would be considered a “loss” when no such judgments were rendered for Yugoslavia is beyond me. There we were “successful.” Here, for very similar reasons, we move down similarly hard paths and yet, all is considered “lost.”

Odd, is it not? Especially from the kinds of thinkers who constantly ask us to remember history?

Second charge: “The freedom agenda is dead.”

This one is even more stunning, given all the amazing tumult and change in the Middle East since the invasion. I mean, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union fell into our laps in 1989, and even that gift package has taken more than a decade to unwrap--to include the messy dissolution of Yugoslavia. I can take you back to more than one regional experts’ judgment over the years that the cause of democracy was “dead” or “lost” there too. Of course, the real answer there is that democracy has worked well in some instances, been marginal in others, and suffered serious reversals in still more. But “dead?” Again, when did the U.S. become a full democracy? By many accounts, with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Here Wehner lets ‘em have it a bit:

Why is Mr. Fukuyama so sure people in Iraq and elsewhere don’t long for democracy? Just last year, on three separate occasions, Iraqis braved bombs and bullets to turn out and vote in greate numbers (percentage-wise) than do Americans who merely have to brave long lines. Does Mr. Fukuyama believe Iraqis prefer subjugation to freedom? Does he think they, unlike he, relish life in a gulag, or the lash of the whip, or the midnight knock of the secret police? Who among us wants a jackboot forever stomping on his face? It is a mistake of a large order to argue that democracy is unwanted in Iraq simply because (a) violence exists three years after the country’s liberation--and after more than three decades of almost unimaginable cruelty and terror; and (b) Iraq is not Switzerland.

Beyond that, the critics of the Iraq war have chosen an odd time to criticize the appeal and power of democracy. After all, we are witnessing the swiftest advance of freedom in history. According to Freedom House, “The global picture … suggests that 2005 was one of the most successful years for freedom since Freedom House began measuring world freedom in 1972 … The “Freedom in the World 2006” ratings for the Middle East represent the region’s best performance in the history of the survey.

Mr. Will says it is time to “de-emphasize talk about Iraq’s becoming a democracy that ignites emulative transformation in the Middle East.” Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a democracy activist from Egypt, says different. Mr. Ibrahim, who originally opposed the war to liberate Iraq, said it “has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us.”

Powerful stuff that underlines my continuing claim that the Big Bang strategy is playing out wonderfully. Doesn’t mean we should be approaching 1900 combat deaths in Iraq, though.

And there I am more than willing to listen to realistic proposals for quickening the pace by which U.S. troops are pulled from combat in Iraq. By that I don’t mean we withdraw from Iraq, but that our troops increasingly sit behind the wire, and our Navy and Air Force continue to play the basic, behind-the-scenes role of surrogate naval and air forces to Iraq--a condition likely to last for years and even decades. Once we get our guys out of combat, the combat casualties go down, and then we enter an entirely different strategic environment, one without the same domestic pressures and thus the same domestic vulnerabilities in our ongoing Fourth Generation Warfare struggle with Salafi jihadists in the region.

So rather than dicking around with the question of which Shiite faction gets to claim the PM spot, like the U.S. and the UK recently tried to do, I would rather follow Kerry’s advice of creating external pressure via deadlines, as in, we demonstrate that our patience is not infinite and that we’re smart enough to keep this fight as focused on its essential Sunni-Shiite roots as possible and not let it become a wider front (and thus another propaganda victory for al Qaeda) in years ahead.

By forcing the Sunni-Shiite struggle to the forefront, we force al Qaeda to reveal more openly its anti-Shiite hatreds and that only makes clear to both our public and the region that Shiites tend to be nationalists who see a world of recognizable borders while the radical Sunni Salafis do not.

So distinctions to be made: 1) don’t give up on democracy in Iraq or anywhere else in the Middle East, because it’s quite possible the region will need to go the Gorby route on politics before the Deng possibilities for economic connectivity emerge; but 2) also don’t hold U.S. ground combat troops (note the modifiers there) hostage to that long-term process.

The real goal here is to keep the Big Bang banging. Plenty of compromises and tactical bobs-and-weaves are likely in this historical process, but husbanding our domestic will is not a trivial matter.

I also like the Kerry op-ed simply because he raises the specter of a Dayton-like accords on Iraq, one that I would logically argue should include the Iranians.