|
Trapped in Iraq
The US and its allies are trapped in Iraq with little hope of a
dignified way out
By Hugh White
03/14/06 "Sydney
Morning Herald" -- -- WHEN he sent our forces to
help invade Iraq, John Howard was sure they would not be there long:
months, not years, he said. Last week his new Defence Minister,
Brendan Nelson, was visiting the troops still in Iraq three years
after the invasion. And he made it clear he expected them to stay a
lot longer.
I'm sure Nelson is right. So how and why was Howard so wrong?
The conventional view is that a brilliantly successful invasion was
followed by a hopelessly ill-planned and mismanaged occupation.
The US-led forces didn't stop the looting after Saddam Hussein fell,
they didn't restore power and water, they didn't crack down early
and hard on the insurgency, they didn't have enough troops in the
country. If only these errors had been avoided, Iraq would now be
well on the way to stability and democracy, and our troops would be
safely on their way home, the argument goes. I don't buy it.
The failure in Iraq is not a failure of execution; it's a failure of
conception. The occupation and political reconstruction of Iraq was
not a good idea badly implemented. It was a bad idea that no amount
of administrative skill, political savvy, cultural sensitivity or
military firepower could have made work.
You can see why political leaders might prefer to see the problems
in Iraq as failures of execution. That shifts the blame from those
who thought of the idea to those who had to carry it out. But if we
are to learn by our mistakes it is important to understand what
those mistakes were, and who made them.
We need to face squarely the mistakes of our leaders. We can all be
glad that Saddam no longer rules Iraq. But we all know that none of
the leaders who conceived and drove the invasion would have done so
had they been able to foresee how things stand in Iraq today. Howard
was more careful than the others, but he lent his weight - and
Australia's - to their arguments.
These leaders misunderstood the costs and risks they were running in
setting out to reshape Iraq. And that is what they were about. One
thing the flood of instant history has made clear is that, while
Howard, George Bush and Tony Blair undoubtedly believed Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction, that was not why the invasion went
ahead.
It went ahead to destroy the Baath regime and replace it with
something more congenial, something more aligned with our interests
and, they stressed, our values.
The conception at the heart of this enterprise was that if a fully
functioning liberal democratic Iraq did not spring spontaneously
from the ashes of Saddam's dictatorship, it could be speedily and
efficiently conjured by the application of US power. Especially
military power; the whole project was, after all, a Pentagon
initiative.
This misconception was powered by a misunderstanding of the nature
and limits of armed force. Armies are very good at fighting other
armies, but they are of very limited use for anything else. The
contrary view is the beguiling illusion that military force can be
used to achieve political goals and promote values, rather than
secure purely military objectives.
It is an idea that not even the Vietnam War could quite kill off.
The invasion of Iraq three years ago was a product of its
resurgence. The situation in Iraq today is yet another demonstration
of its fallacy. A force of 180,000 troops - and the expenditure of
billions of dollars a month - gives the coalition very little
influence over what happens in Iraq today, or over the shape of its
future.
There is still a faint chance that Iraq's ill-matched factions will
find a way to work together in some semblance of national
government. But whether they do or not is out of our hands.
We had the power to destroy Saddam's regime, but not to build a new
one. Only the Iraqis can do that. Only they can make the
compromises, build the trust, contain their fears and curb their
rage enough to generate the sense of shared interests necessary to
make Iraq work as a democratic political entity. All we can do is
watch.
From the coalition's point of view - and especially Washington's -
to leave now would be a disastrous political and strategic defeat,
with unpredictable consequences.
It might come to that anyway, but in the meantime our leaders just
hang on and hope that even if we have failed, the Iraqis will
somehow make something work. It's a forlorn hope, but better than
certain humiliation.
And for Australia? We are there, above all, to support our ally. As
an exercise in alliance management, that is probably justified.
But the fact that we find ourselves in this predicament, compelled
to sustain a largely futile symbolic presence in a land in which we
can achieve so little, is a testament to the failure of Howard's
initial conception.
We need to remember this the next time someone tries to argue that
we should send our new "hardened and networked army" to promote
Australia's values far away.
Hugh White is a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute and professor
of strategic studies at the Australian National University.
Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald.
Click below to read or post comment's on this article
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
