| |
COMMENTARY
The consequences of
invasion
Asia Times Online
Even given that there may have been considerable
justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power in
Iraq because he was a notorious despot and a vicious
murderer, it is probably time to step back and attempt
to take a clear look at the strategic implications of
what America has got itself into with its invasion of
Iraq.
Pro and anti-Bush partisans in the United
States are making it increasingly hard to break through
the static. But it is imperative that before it is too
late, American policymakers, both in the administration
and the Congress, put aside their partisan squabbling to
examine the possibility that the US is trapped as it was
trapped in Vietnam 30 years ago, or as the Russians are
today in Chechnya.
If the US and its only
effective ally, the United Kingdom, are indeed trapped,
the strategic implications are even worse than they were
in Indochina. Vietnam was surrounded by stable client
states that were going to survive in America's orbit
whether Vietnam fell or not. That is not true in the
Middle East.
It doesn't matter at this point
whether 16 words in the president's State of the Union
speech in January referring to Iraqi attempts to procure
uranium from Niger were false or not. It doesn't matter
if the premises enunciated by the president and his
handlers for getting into Iraq were right or wrong, or
if the public was deceived. The cold fact is that
150,000 troops are there now. Even if Bush's war turns
to folly and the voters defenestrate him a year and a
half hence along with his handlers, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, the next
administration, Democrat or Republican, is going to have
to decide what to do. There are no options, easy or
otherwise.
The geopolitical reality and the
unpalatable fact is that the Bush administration has put
the US into a desperate position where it cannot get out
of Iraq without a victory, no matter how bloody or how
long it takes. It has to find Saddam and his sons and
either kill them or capture them. It cannot, as Senator
Richard Russell of Georgia advocated during Vietnam,
declare victory and get out. Departure, from the
standpoint of global stability, is unthinkable. The
American people would have to pay for that in blood and
treasure.
That is because unlike Vietnam, Iraq
is at the heart of the most volatile region in the world
today. Israel, an American client state, is completely
surrounded by countries that would destroy it if given
the opportunity - and a precipitous American departure
from Iraq would do nothing but encourage Israel's
enemies. Worse, without the military and economic might
of the US to prop them up, the Middle East is rife with
unstable governments likely to fall with the
enthusiastic assistance of al-Qaeda and its Messianic
leader, Osama bin Laden.
Whether we like it or
not, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia possess 45 percent of
the world's oil reserves. Iraq and Iran control probably
another 20 percent. For Japan, the US and the eurozone,
access to those petroleum reserves is vital. Without it,
their economies would come to a stop. This was clearly a
war begun for ideology and not for oil. But an American
departure from the Middle East would make it all about
oil. The protesters who say it is all about oil today
would find to their tears that they are depressingly
right.
In a country where every convoy is prey
to a grenade rolled under a truck, a land mine, a mortar
round, a B40 rocket or a sniper's bullet, and every
guard post is vulnerable, it appears that casualties
cannot be minimized. They will probably increase,
especially if nervous, angry GIs begin to retaliate
against the population at large, as they did too often
in Vietnam, with tragic consequences.
The trap
that closed in Vietnam led to a 25-year period during
which America's military was essentially traumatized
about going to war. The Vietnam debacle led to the
imminently sensible Powell Doctrine, named for Colin
Powell, the US Secretary of State. Under this, war is
only to be undertaken as a last resort, only when there
is a clear risk to America's national security, and to
be delivered with overwhelming force. Finally, and most
important, a clear exit strategy is essential.
Powell began to formulate his doctrine as a
platoon commander in Vietnam, and he refined it all the
way up the ranks until he became the chairman of the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff. He applied it in the 1991 Gulf
War, and again in Kosovo, where he was extremely
reluctant to involve the US. But tragically he appears
to have either repudiated the doctrine or he was
overruled by Cheney and Rumsfeld, who clearly did not
think they needed an exit strategy from Iraq, despite
the cautious advice of their generals.
They were
wrong.
If the US military were to pull out at
this point, leaving Saddam alive, he would probably be
back in power in Iraq in a matter of weeks and the
jubilant citizens of Iraq who welcomed the fall of his
statue would be slaughtered. The survival of an unknown
number of America's other client states - Bahrain, Oman,
Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan - could no
longer be guaranteed. They would be under threat not
only from Iraq but the jihadis led by bin Laden. Israel
would have to be heavily fortified or evacuated to North
Dakota.
Contrary to belief in much of the world
today, the US did not cut and run in Vietnam. The US
lost 57,000 dead from combat and noncombat causes in
Vietnam, with another 153,303 wounded. From the time the
first regular troops arrived aboard the jeep carrier
USNS Core in 1961, US troops fought there for 11 years.
In the end, they did it without the backing of
the American public, which long since had soured on a
war seemingly without a long-range or even immediate
strategic goal and without the prospect of victory in
sight. The American military ultimately was corrupted
and demoralized by the war, which led to the most
traumatized generation since America's Civil War.
The parallels between Vietnam are real enough.
But the parallels between Iraq and the Russian
experience in Chechnya are even more disturbing, where
destruction has been so total that the state, the
economy and even Chechnya's population are virtually
moribund, exhausted, corrupted and bathed in blood. Both
the Chechen rebels, propped up by international jihadis,
and the Russians themselves are locked in a death grip
that apparently cannot be broken. If the war on the
ground in Iraq starts to look like this, the Americans
are in for serious trouble.
It remains a
question when and if the American public will again get
fed up with the casualties among its fighting men and
women. For seven and a half years, during its most
intense involvement in Vietnam, the Americans averaged
528 combat troops killed per month. That is about 17 per
day.
So the policy question that Democrats,
Republicans, anti-war and pro-war activists and ordinary
voters have to ask is this: Before this becomes a
quagmire, what is the US going to do? Because
abandonment is unthinkable from a Western geopolitical
standpoint, it is probably best for the Bush
administration to swallow its considerable pride and ask
for help from as wide a spectrum as possible of the
United Nations, which has considerable experience in
nation building and peacekeeping, however ineptly it
does it. That will be a hard thing for Rumsfeld, Cheney
and Paul Wolfowitz to do.
Already President
George W Bush's popularity is falling. After just three
months, 40 percent of the American people think there
was not sufficient justification to go to war. What will
happen if, as the American military says, it takes four
to six years to pacify the country?
Today, the
coalition forces are averaging roughly one GI killed per
day. Sixteen to go.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
