Round and round we go and
Where it stops no one knows
In five parts: 1. The Fallacy of the Surge
2. Circular Logic in the Oval Office
3. Fear not, we’ve still Fear to Fear
4. The lack of Command of our Commander
5. An Exit Strategy from Iraq
1 The Fallacy of the Surge
The most disgraceful aspect of the war in Iraq is that we are four years in and still have no clear understanding and credible strategy which can possibly be successful to get us out. Amidst the endless web of shifting tactics, nice phrases, untruths and empty slogans there is no plan the administration has ever put forward which is not totally dependent on another government - which has proven itself neither very effective nor very compliant to US interests - to achieve something which it has never shown itself in any way capable of achieving.
The premise of the troop “surge” begun at the start of the year was in error. It was implicitly based on a theory that the Iraqi government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had not been able to make tough decisions concerning the future structure of the government of Iraq because when looking out their windows from the Green Zone in Baghdad they could see cars bombs exploding. The first question that occurs to you is, if they can’t make hard choices when their lives are daily being threatened and their country is going up in flames around them when will they ever find the gumption to make them?
The answer the Bush administration arrived at is that they will make tough decisions only after they are given greater security. In other words we will send more American troops to essentially man the new police force in Baghdad in order to make them feel more safe. Cynics may suggest this is really rewarding them for their inactivity. They will say that greater security will more likely harden them in their prejudices rather than force them to abandon them. Because the less they do the more we help them and the more we help them the less they do.
In any case, predictably, even as they have grown marginally more secure, and as even more American lives have been lost in the process, the ability and desire and need of the government of Iraq to make these hard decision seems to have further withered rather than strengthened. The Iraqi government is spending the next month on vacation and have not bothered to invite our troops to accompany them. Meanwhile, none of the key political benchmarks which were to be the strategic corollary to measure the success of the small tactical military build up connected with the surge have been met and are not likely to be.
The surge is directed at suppressing only ten percent of the most extreme instances of militia and terrorist aggression. It does nothing to address the political disagreement which is ninety percent of the cause of the extremism we are trying to suppress.
In other words the surge, instituted and maintained at such incredible cost to our country can, at best, have only a marginal and temporary effect on events. It is designed to change the atmospherics of the situation on the ground in Iraq rather than transform its underlying political landscape. Yet this has now become the new path to “victory” in Iraq. The surge is not strategic policy but a mere tactical disguise designed to provide cover and buy time for the administration’s lack of strategic purpose and their unwillingness to institute an exit strategy for our troops from Iraq.
In fact, despite a few successes around the edges - and we have always had some successes around the edges in Iraq - Iraq is no better run or closer to consensus today than it was before the surge. That’s the only bottom line that matters. All the rest is administration public relations. Despite a few tactical military victories, strategically and politically the place is still a mess. Increasingly, it looks as if the people who make the decisions in Iraq are moving beyond any desire to have an American component to their future. Seemingly the only thing that most fractious Iraqis can find to agree on as they descend further into civil war is their hate for America.
Of course, this exposes the administration’s traditional inability to grasp any of the larger issues at work in Iraq today. Because even at best, even if the surge could bring the worst of this multi-faceted insurgency temporarily to heel, it is not logical to believe that the government of Iraq would suddenly put aside all their real differences to equitably settle all of the problems of the country to everyone’s satisfaction.
There are three fallacious assumptions connected with the surge, these are:
First, the entire key to the surge, that there could be an American military solution to an Iraqi political problem, was erroneous. For years we have known this was not possible yet the administration and many supporters and many in the military continue to confuse these assumptions. To suggest the premise of the surge correct one would also have to assume that if you could bring down the crime rate in Washington D.C. Congress would immediately pass a health care bill and balance its budget. The one thing has nothing to do with the other. Neither does a successful change of American military tactics have anything in the least to do with the ability or resolve of Iraqi politicians to make tough and correct decisions about their nation’s future.
Second, another assumption the administration is making is that democracy in Iraq has been somehow successfully launched. One election however well participated in does not mean you have a working democracy. Though regular elections are a symptom of a functioning democracy, it does not follow that where you have an election, of necessity you have a working democracy. Obviously the civil war trumps the democracy. Democracy is not working. It has not taken hold. If the current pattern holds it never will. Democracy is Iraq is failing and unless the dynamic is completely transformed either disunion, civil war, dictatorship, theocracy or all of the above, will result.
The third assumption is that we can trust our leadership to make proper decisions about the war in Iraq. On the contrary, as a general rule those who were exaggerating the threat that Saddam represented at the same time they were exaggerating how easy the war to remove him would be, are now the same ones exaggerating how bad things are going to be if we leave. This should tell you something, they are serial exaggeraters. These people should not be trusted or believed. For if you haven’t been paying attention, people who desired this war will always find reasons to continue it, no matter how flimsy, vague or self-destructive those reasons are.
They will grasp at straws to make us as afraid of their own shadows as they are. Their errors have permanently discredited them. They envision permanent commitment to Iraq. They do not mean well, as evidenced by the fact that each prediction and claim they have made up till now has proven to be so wildly untrue as to be worthy of destroying their credibility by itself and yet they continue to make them. And these are all wrong too. By now they have allowed their egos and politics to so thoroughly merge with their stupidity and irresponsibility that they no longer know or much care what the truth is. This renders everything they say less than useless. Yet they still blather on despite the fact that they rightly deserve to be discredited, ignored and eventually blamed for the fiasco their fear and ignorance and engendered.
2 Circular Logic from the Oval Office
The administration’s case to continue the war is really just an ongoing case of circular logic. We engaged in preemptive war based on a lie. Regardless of that overwhelmingly nullifying fact, its supporters claim that since we started the war we must continue it allegedly until some truth may be derived from it to justify their erroneous decision to go to war in the first place. Or in other words we must continue to fight the war in Iraq mainly because they don’t know any way to end it which does any credit to themselves.
So this week, if you’re keeping score, we aren’t talking about the “war on terror” that nebulous piece of indefinable and unachievable nonsense, which has always been both everywhere and nowhere and could be described as either more or less than it actually was, but we are back to talking about Iraq being all about fighting al Qaeda. This was one of the core untruths that started the war.
Along the way we have abandoned other cherished theorems of the administration, like being met with open arms by the Iraqi people, or building Iraq into a perfect neo-American, pro-Israeli democracy anxious to let American companies run their oil fields, or of transforming the entire region through the reverse domino effect. Now it is just back to al Qaeda and the regurgitation of that old tried and untruth in a slightly different guise. Now we are being told again that al Qaeda operatives in Iraq are really the same people who attacked us on 9/11.
Therefore we attacked Iraq as part of the war against al Qaeda even though there was neither history of al Qaeda in Iraq nor any actual members of al Qaeda in Iraq when we attacked. Once we got bogged down in Iraq and created a civil war there because we didn’t have either a plan for the post war or enough troops to put into effect a plan even if we had had one, some foreign fighters who now claim to be in sympathy with al Qaeda have arrived in indeterminate numbers in the country to attack us and Iraqis who cooperate with us.
So now the administration has come full circle, recycling the old lie. It really is déjà vu all over again. An al Qaeda presence in Iraq has at last been discovered as its own self-fulfilling prophecy. For what can it be but truly visionary leadership to imagine enemies where none exist and then pursue policies to eradicate them only to cause these enemies to magically appear before our very eyes exactly where the administration had predicted they would be? Finally, though its took some doing and seems to take us in the opposite direction from what we should have wanted, the Bush administration has some tangible proof that they are truly the farsighted visionaries they have always claimed to be. Now we are told we have to stay and eradicate the presence of al Qaeda in Iraq even though they are only there because of us.
Unfortunately, this has created a war within a war. This is a series of circles in a series of circles. Not only can we not win the war against al Qaeda as long as the civil war in Iraq rages out of control around us, we can’t end the civil war as long as our presence keeps generating new members of al Qaeda and creating new militias in Iraq. This “second front” against al Qaeda of which the President is so proud, is really our back and we are surrounded. It places our troops in an impossible situation because now they are being attacked from all directions and even, on occasion, by our own allies. With our current leadership and this bizarre policy in place who in his right mind really believes we can win either war?
As for al Qaeda in Iraq they are hit men, hired guns, there primarily because the American occupation affords them cover for their deadly, indiscriminant anarchy. Only administration propaganda has ever had them as a permanent, legitimate player in Iraq’s future that the Iraqi people themselves would tolerate once we have withdrawn.
Therefore the latest central reason of this completely unnecessary war has arisen only because of the war itself and this secondary issue of al Qaeda in Iraq will undoubtedly fade away once the mistaken war does. Therefore the President’s key point, that al Qaeda is now the issue, forget democracy in Iraq and finding a solution to the Iraqi civil war, is defeatism on its face. If we want to fight al Qaeda they are still where they have always been, in the Pakistani - Afghani border areas, still plotting to attack us in the US while we are bogged down in a war within a war fighting a few folks who call themselves al Qaeda but who never have attacked the United States. The only real strategy to stop al Qaeda that could conceivably work is to attack them at the source of their power, not at a tributary. Like much of what the President says about Iraq, his latest policy explanation as to why we need to stay the course is merely wrong. We cannot effectively pursue and win the war against al Qaeda until after we end the war in Iraq, not before.
But then the President is not really putting forward a strategy to win the war but merely engaged in cynical public relations designed to protect himself and his pretensions, which unfortunately works completely contrary to establishing an effective strategy to protect the United States. So after four years, amazingly, we still have no goals, no timetable, no fulcrum points, no achievable goals, nothing but a return to the original starting point of the invasion which was in error to begin with to justify its continuance.
But it’s even worse than this because al Qaeda is not trying to drive us out of Iraq at all, as the President claims. They are pleased to keep us in Iraq as a ready target as long as possible. Why bother with the difficult logistical chore of attacking us in the United States when for a fraction of the cost, twice the ease to themselves and with a much greater pool of fighters to draw from, they can attack Americans in Iraq? Who doubts that Iraq has already been every bit as costly for us, with no end in sight and no benefit on the horizon, as was 9-11? How this war is supposed to discomfort the real al Qaeda in Pakistan must be a mystery to them. Since when is it in our interests to do what best serves our enemies interests at the expense of our own?
Finally the President appeals to our national pride and tells us that our enemies will take comfort in our “defeat” should we draw down forces in Iraq whenever we draw down forces in Iraq. Let us be as clear as we can possible be here. We cannot be defeated in Iraq because we have never had anything to win there in the first place outside the fevered imaginations of our leadership. The military has already won the war in Iraq, engaged in regime change and given the Iraqis a democratic government. It is the politicians in Washington who are defining our way to defeat because the administration never been able to define any real national interest or path to “victory” in Iraq because there never was one there to be had in the first place.
So even though everyone agrees that we can’t win a political victory in Iraq with our military might alone, that is the only effort underway in Iraq today. Though it has long since been clear that there was nothing for us to win in Iraq, there remains much there for us to lose. And that is exactly what we are doing everyday we stay trying to achieve unattainable and indefinable political goals by means which can’t possibly succeed.
3 Fear not, we’ve still fear to fear
Of course, the fear is still there. This is what the enthusiasm for the war in Iraq as it was sold to the American people was really based on. Proponents of the war go shrill and cross eyed when they talk about how opponents of the war have no plan “B”. This takes a lot of gall from people who have never bothered with a plan “A” for Iraq. Our political class invaded Iraq for no reason that was not untrue then let it fall to ruin for four long years, getting worse everyday, without peep or whimper while real Americans paid the ultimate costs for their mistakes. Now they refuse to budge from a plan which never had a purpose in being or hope of success in its continuation, all the while bombarding us with a shifting set of false claims, wild excuses and irrational contentions. This is irresponsibility of a sort we have never experienced in this nation before.
The people who screamed for this war against all the good advice in the world, remind us of the folks who rode out from Washington in their little buggies, in long dresses and top hats, to observe the first glorious battle of the Civil War and were shocked at the carnage as the Federal troops fled by them in terrified retreat. Similarly, the administration and the Congress entered us into this war casually, have fought it incompetently and still have not come to grips with the crisis they have made.
After predicating their planning around ease of victory in Iraq our great warrior class now turns petulant and demands that someone come up with a perfectly soft landing from the open ended and premeditated disaster their bottomless incompetence and endless paranoia have subjected us to. Otherwise, and this is their only plan, they insist we must stay in Iraq forever and absorb all the continuing costs and loss of life, rather than that these simpletons should ever have to disavow their cherished illusions and take a political risk for the good of the country. As a final insult to our intelligence their code word for this political cowardice is victory.
After planning no military or diplomatic contingency for Iraq if things did not go optimally well, the President’s Party’s continuing intransigence ensures that no intelligent debate about the future of Iraq may ever occur. This will only ensure that no new national policy may arise and virtually guarantees more suffering in its wake. After burning all our diplomatic bridges with our traditional allies before the war, the administration still is pursuing no credible or coherent diplomacy with them nor has it bothered to open any new lines of effective communication with any of the nations in the region to minimize the spread of the crisis the war is creating.
In fact, the people who authored this thoroughly un-American, preemptive and imperialistic war against a weak and unarmed nation are the most cowardly and least ethical and most helplessly frightened people our political system has ever produced. No administration has behaved so gutlessly, carelessly, dishonestly and politically in wartime and no Congress has been more craven and complicit in support of them. The traitors are the ones in this country who promoted this pernicious war and are now too spineless to get our troops back out of it. They would actually rather watch Americans die needlessly overseas than admit their errors at home because admitting errors implies you must actually accept responsibility and devise solutions to correct them. They would rather others die first.
George Bush speaks elaborately of the multiplying crises in the region, from the ascendancy of Hamas among the Palestinians, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the increasing influence of Syria and the growing strength of Iran coupled with the continuing deterioration of Afghanistan and the dangerous uncertainties of Pakistan. He also claims, self-servingly, that al Qaeda is weaker than before 9/11, a fact disputed by his own CIA and our own eyes. Then he absurdly refutes himself a moment later by claiming that this severely weakened force has now become so powerful in Iraq they are on the verge of taking over if we should ever even think of leaving.
What he doesn’t say is that each of these problems he enumerates to one degree or another has come about or been made much worse as a direct result of the war in Iraq and all of his administration’s other misguided policies in the region. Instead of change, however, which would take thought and personal courage, he says that we must at all costs continue the very policies which are causing these problems in order to counteract the very problems these policies are causing!
So amazingly, unbelievably, after four years of failure these defeatists have no coherent goal that’s not based on a kind of perfectly gutless wishful thinking based on the Iraqi government’s capability, fortitude and willingness to help us out. Stay the failed course at all costs, the people be damned, is the only plan the administration has to offer for our staying.
This is not a strategy for success but the circular logic and sophistry of a fool or a madman. Perhaps only capable of being understood by someone who works in an oval shaped office.
4 The Lack of Command of our Commander
Our President seems unduly proud of reminding us that he is the Commander in Chief. He is his own name dropper. As it suits his whim he has unquestionably personalized and glorified this war in Iraq as no president has ever personalized a war. Yet as a part of his leadership style he selectively takes credit for things he doesn’t deserve credit for and apportions blame to others for all his own mistakes.
One day he struts around on the deck of Abraham Lincoln (as precisely opposite what the real Lincoln would have done as is possible to imagine) prematurely boasting that major combat operations in Iraq have ended - at least four years too soon as it’s turned out - while trying to steal political credit for himself from the troops who actually won the first stage of the war. That’s when the Iraq war seemed to be going well. As things have steadily deteriorated over these four years, however, he now pretends that the entire progress of the war has been out of his hands from the beginning and all the mistakes were the intelligence community’s, the military’s and the diplomats’ fault.
He claims that he has never overruled the military though everyone knows perfectly well he has, consistently and on key points, even on the biggest one, troop strength, the one we have never been able to recover from and the one error which ensured that everything that followed from it would fail.
The only thing our Commander in Chief seems really sure of is that he is the Commander in Chief. He takes Napoleonic pride in this and adopts all the arrogance of his position with none of the level of skill, hard work or knowledge which might ensure his having success at it. Therefore, it is strange when he says that he simply cannot allow Congress to meddle in this well crafted war he has put together in Iraq because “that would ensure defeat!”
He says this as if in some bizarre otherworld existence of which he is lone inhabitant, leaving control of this war solely in his hands isn’t exactly what has rendered our success in Iraq so inconceivable.
In point of fact the President has never said a single word about Iraq or held a position about the world that is even remotely close to being accurate. He never does anything to further the war, doesn’t work long hours at it, doesn’t ask probing questions, doesn’t study or engage in difficult diplomacy, he merely decides not to question his previous questionable decisions while repeating the same lame excuses and inane words of encouragement meant to be inspiring that have long since ceased to inspire anyone.
There is such a barely distinguishable line between public relations and dishonesty in this administration that they seem to acknowledge no meaningful difference between the two. He persistently confuses his own ego with the national interest, surrounds himself with yes men and cronies, infuses politics even into the law, science and foreign affairs, and blithely presides over the chaos his own policies have created while pontificating that none of it is really his fault and opining that maybe history will exonerate him. He continually conflates pure propaganda into policy debates in place of verifiable facts and to the exclusion of reasoned debate builds his strategy around public relations rather than uses public relations to clarify sound strategy to the public.
He is such a phenomenally shallow, callow, unsophisticated and unscrupulous man so completely out of touch with reality that he apparently spends most of his time in a fantasy land of his own making trying to decide whether he most closely resembles Churchill or Washington. He consistently trivializes law, our constitution and the importance of events and suggests a completely imaginary historical relativism in claiming that actions cannot be judged good or bad until after a significant period of time has elapsed after the fact. Actually history happens daily and only a fool can’t tell the difference between the beneficial and the harmful immediately. In warfare the responses of success and failure are usually nearly immediate and the deaths are always permanent.
He persists in his delusional behavior even though the American people themselves are trying to tell him in every way they can that they disagree with his policy in Iraq. According to his own testimony, he doesn’t read polls or care about public opinion, read newspapers or listen to anyone who disagrees with him or communicate directly with the raw public or think we deserve to be told the truth when he does. Instead like the dysfunctional CEO of a failing corporation he only shows up to work occasionally to mumble inanities about winning, freedom, courage and democracy and to tell everybody to stay the course. This even though the course we are staying on has proven consistently disastrous and the “victory” we are allegedly seeking not only cannot even be defined but daily seems to be moving farther away from any attempt we can mount to catch it.
Clearly George Bush has lost the trust of the American people. He is fast becoming the Captain Queeg of the American presidency. He is, I think it is safe to conclude by now on the available evidence, quite simply and irrefutably the worst Commander in Chief in American history. He is a leader with few followers. No one else is so perfectly responsible for starting and losing this war. And the worse he fails the more he demands that his power go more unchecked. This is all on his head and those supporters of his who have allowed him to do it to us. Unless there is a complete turnaround soon eighteen more months of such drift and dereliction may be more than the nation can stand.
His supporters, the Republican Party, to their everlasting and, one would hope, permanent and electoral discredit – support him in this. They have also supported him in torture, secret prisons, illegal warrantless searches of the American people, his ever expanding claims of presidential privileges and the most astoundingly reckless and perfectly incoherent and illiterate foreign policy in American history.
Even the notoriously patient (or perhaps just increasingly tired and cynical) American people have begun to evince considerable disquiet over the deteriorating state of things. Only now finally, at last, have a few Republicans started gingerly trying to separate themselves from a few of the President’s perfectly counterproductive policies. But don’t be fooled, those sounds you hear are only the false poses and posturing of old pols trying to have it both ways while doing nothing in between. When thought comes to purpose, words to acts and push comes finally to a vote, they return back into the uninspired automatons they have always been and do just as they are told, promising much and doing nothing, as always.
The Democrats for their part are practicing the art of the small. Having won their majority in the last election they have still done nothing yet to earn it. As a general rule in Congress you always achieve to a level less than that which you seek. For the Democrats to try to achieve very little is actually to achieve not only less but to nearly pass into retrograde. They should remember it was not the brilliance of their personalities and genius of their proposals that won the last election and swept a few Republicans from office. Clearly they won this election by default. They played it safe and merely let the Republicans fail on their own while hanging around like scavengers to peck at the spoils of office.
This may have been the expedient route electorally but it has proven null legislatively. Because they played it so politically soft and safe in the campaign they have no quorum or policy which people can actually unite behind to move events forward. So they dither and fall in the public’s esteem. They promised change and have delivered none. Like the Republicans before them, though in a far more modest way, they have struck a fustian bargain – more sound and less fury. They are by every measure, by whatever standard you choose, the very opposite of bold in a time that requires it.
5 An Exit Strategy for Iraq
There remains only one last chance to salvage a good result from this exceptionally bad situation in Iraq. We must not only devise an exit strategy from Iraq but our departure as much as possible as a fulcrum to change the dynamic on the ground as we go. Staying the course is the only option which has proven it cannot possibly work. So naturally this is the only course we currently are pursuing.
Instead of trying to predict what Iraq will look like when we leave and worrying ourselves to hand wringing inertia, it is time that someone in charge of this government began to worry not what may be best for Iraq in the future (their singular inability to do this is legendary) but to start to primarily concern themselves with what would be best for the United States today. That is the one and only thing we can control.
Demonstrably this means we must draw down our troops in orderly fashion. It doesn’t mean we abandon Iraq. But in doing what’s right for ourselves we will undoubtedly also have the best chance to provide assistance to Iraq now and in the future. Trying to build our policy around what we imagine is best for Iraq at whatever costs to ourselves is not altruism, it is self-destructive insanity. Up until now this attitude has only led to massive harm for both nations.
First off then a way forward in Iraq must start with the full understanding and acknowledgment that the most destabilizing feature in Iraq today is the American occupation. The idea that we must maintain the occupation in place to keep the country from falling apart is myth. Every day we have been mired there it has grown worse. Our open ended occupation of Iraq has caused a civil war in that country. To mitigate some of the effects of this civil war our occupation has caused we are told we must continue the occupation. This is, quite simply, not rational. This is a strategy which offers no end to itself. Only fools look at something that is not working, has never worked in the past and has no hope of working in the future and continues doing it over and over.
Therefore there is no real reason whatsoever to hope that the sacrifice of even one additional American life will make things one iota better in Iraq. On the other hand there is considerable evidence and quite a bit of reason to believe that our continuing presence as participants in our current capacity on the ground will make things even more divisive, violent, vengeful, longer drawn out and therefore even worse in the future. Our full, open-ended engagement into the distant future in Iraq (which is apparently what the hawks envision for us) is more likely to continue to turn this into a regional conflict rather than just a national one. At the same time the longer we stay entangled there in full force, the more the ground will continue to shift beneath our feet and the Iraqi government will continue to fall apart before our eyes. We can monitor, advise, contain, engage in vigorous diplomacy, help around the edges and try to keep it a fair fight if that’s what it comes to, but little else.
Since the occupation, as should be evident by now even to a blind man or a child, is the chief contributing cause to the dissolution it must absolutely be discontinued. Therefore any solution to Iraq must have a clear, gradual, phased withdrawal of Americans troops as its chief component. This will be the best result not only for the United States but for the long term interests of Iraq as well. This by no means means we should leave Iraq as thoughtlessly as we invaded it.
From a distance it appears the reason democracy has not taken hold in Iraq is that the new democracy has not been well founded there. Democracy, which represents such a radical departure from traditional governance in Iraq, was simply superimposed on a previous artificially imposed structure. Democracy must first energize from the ground up before it can be expected to work from the top down. A much deeper and more intrinsic structural shift should have been envisioned from the start. We have forgotten our own founding. In America local control and elections predated a national government. In Iraq we have reversed this notion and never established democracy at the local level which would reflect the shift to democracy at the nation level.
This appears to have created a severe structural and ideological imbalance in the country. We have established the branches of the tree of democracy which wave restlessly with every passing breeze without establishing the root and trunk which would provide it with endurance and stability.
This may still be rectified. It is still possible by a national reorganization to effect a national reconciliation. When a democracy is failing the answer is to create more democracy not less. It may seem counterintuitive at first but the best way to unify this country better is to first divide it into smaller pieces. The current provincial structure of eighteen provinces are too few. These units are too easily broken down into Shia, Sunni and Kurd. This may lend itself to easy organization but also limits the ability of the nation to properly cohere as well as, ironically, making such things as the oil revenues harder to share (which is to say easier to deny). On the contrary, smaller building blocks of equal parts in a structure oftentimes create a stronger and more stable structure than one composed of a few large building blocks.
Currently Iraqis are hearing they are a democracy but they are still thinking like a tyranny. Many Iraqis think that, rightly enough, as in the days of Saddam, if all power flows from a single source, Baghdad, whoever controls the few top spots in the government will control the whole country. They distrust the pliancy of the structure. They assume it is the traditional winner-take-all, devil-take-the-hindmost, system of governance they have unfortunately grown all too accustomed to expect from dictators. They expect that if the Shia control Baghdad, too much power will reside in too few hands and become too inflexible and dictatorially applied just as it was with Saddam. This is the very perception which must be overcome.
This is normal. When people are asked to give up a piece of themselves as they invariably are with a democratic and federal structure they naturally feel ill at ease. They may doubt that the system will treat their religion, culture and economic security equitably. Naturally these fears can only be fully assuaged by many years of fair practice. In Iraq today there is not even the semblance of reliance between various regions in part because of the imperfect nature of the democratic system that has been put in place.
Democracy is first and foremost participatory and to the extent there is a break in confidence from top to bottom that community of interest is lost. It is much more easily lost where it has never been in a land such as Iraq which has never known democracy. Where it is possible to return some authority of governance to the people themselves by creating more opportunity for democratic action, the country by being divided into more parts, becomes more unified.
The idea of a federalist structure when the very premise of a democracy is not trusted or understood or where a community of beliefs and sense of shared advantages do not preexist is impossible. But where a nation is composed of many small democratic units which then culminate in a national, federalist government, then trust in its democratic institutions may be built up foundationally, from the ground up rather than the top down, and a confidence in the system may be engendered in its entirety.
If the current structure of eighteen provinces is retained then, if it is not provided for already, the Iraqi Constitution should be amended to establish many more departments, or sub-prefectures, within the current provincial structure. Perhaps as many as three to five or more per province could be created. This should be done with an eye to spread, honor and respect the traditional pluralism of society, diffusing differences, dividing authority and ensuring independence over private lives while awarding greater local control and more effective responsibility over smaller regions.
These departments would have their own governors determined by local elections who would then be given more direct responsibility (subject to their own elected councils) while being held to greater electoral accountability for the areas under their control. As it stands now the individual provinces are too large to be effectively governed by either a centralized democracy (though not too large to be governed by a theocratic or dictatorial regime) or any provincial government divided by ethnic, sectarian and tribal conflicts at odds with Baghdad.
It would be nice to believe that each of these sub-prefectures or departments could be perfectly divided along ethnic and religious lines, but of course, that will prove impractical. It would be of great benefit, however, if they are pluralistic enough to blur and mitigate some of the more obvious demarcations apparent in the outline of the large provincial structures currently in place. I don’t believe these currently drawn boundaries are particularly historical and yet it is along these artificial fault lines that the country is splitting apart.
Even so a wary eye should be given to divide these new governmental structures proportionately where possible and thus achieve a kind of internal balance within each department to represent a microcosm of the divisions in society at large. Only in this way can Iraq return to having a society where many of these groups have for many years been able to live side by side harmoniously. At the same this cedes the citizenry a greater sense of autonomy and local control of their day to day lives, it will allow some of the more abstract fears to be subsumed in local enterprise and reduce overall tensions in the country by making political divisions less certain, more ambiguous and not so readily acrimonious and divisible along ethnic and religious lines. Establishing these democratic workshops and laboratories will allow people to share in some of the benefits of national society that they can actually get their hands around locally. This creates the sort of innovative and vibrant local communities that older democracies take for granted. This is one of the essential building blocks of freedom.
Even though this may seem a fundamental change for Iraq, it is probably not. These governates should be created as much as possible along ancient, preexisting or historical boundaries where these can be determined. The establishment of many such smaller societal subdivisions is probably more consistent with the way things have always been done in the region in the land that is now called Iraq before invaders and dictators in modern times tended to centralize authority into their own hands. Tyrants don’t need any sub-provincial structure because they are tyrants. Democracy does need a stronger structural basis all across the country if it is to acquire a truly democratic cast and maintain its structural stability and integrity, which is absolutely vital to ensure Iraq’s cultural diversity and economic vitality.
To repeat the earlier line - the answer to a failing democracy is more democracy not less, more units of coherence and cells of democracy not fewer. Smaller units of governance are the battery capacitors, the true ballast of democracy, otherwise it invests too much in a top heavy system and tends to break apart along preexisting party, ethnic or religious fault lines. This is exactly what seems to have occurred in Iraq.
As a practical measure, the net result of this reform, besides much greater local accountability and many more confidence building local elections, is that revenue sharing would be easier to justify when not so easily reduced to factional competition and abuse. Funds to these departments, as with, for instance, the oil revenues sharing law, would have to be split equally to each of these departments according to population. To deny funds to one ethnic group is to deny them to another and will sooner or later mean denying support to the ethnic group with which you identify. This is why factional disputes and prejudices in a true democracy, however persistent they may be, can never be permanently sustained.
Because of the deep disunion of Iraq at the outset these revenue sharing funds might also be temporarily conditional contingent on how well each department has been able to establish security in its region and how honestly and efficiently it has set about refurbishing its infrastructure. After that time, in which the unity of the nation has been secured, absolute parity must prevail if the nation is to grow strong enough to survive whole.
Furthermore, I’m not sure enough attention has been given among the Iraqis themselves to the question as to how a weak and divided Iraq could possibly stand for long against its neighbors without being absolutely dominated by them. An Iraq divided is an Iraq destroyed. It is in the Iraqi peoples’ own interests to put aside their divisions. The alternative is catastrophe. If their democracy fails, Iraqis will have to accept the dismemberment of their nation, the great reduction of their international autonomy and the certain disappearance of their effective influence in the world.
No one should be naïve enough to consider such a set up as a panacea or perfection in progress. There are problems and internal injustices inherent in any style of government. And of course, the very ones who must vote to institute such a change happen to be the very ones who have had such trouble reaching agreement up till now.
But to repeat the central point, sometimes it is necessary to break a structure apart and rebuild it with smaller pieces if it is to hold its structure. It would be far better for Iraq if the structure is broken apart and rebuilt through legislative action rather than civil war. Civil War simply means that Iraq will be broken apart in such a way that it will never be able to be put back together again.
Obviously the scenario I have just described seems a very complicated maneuver. But it is not as difficult as it seems. Obvious to everyone but our current administration, the United States will soon start to draw down and redeploy troops within and out of Iraq. This plan is not to be thought of as an attempt to undercut the national authority. It is not designed to supplant any other plans on the table including the Biden Plan. It may also be used in concert with whatever plan for withdrawal Congress decides on in order to consolidate whatever gains may have been achieved by the recent surge. It is a complement to other plans, the one thing that might tie them all together.
As Iraqis are expected to step up in our place they must have a separate, additional political and bureaucratic coherence to step into. This could more easily be met with a redrawn map and local elections put in place and voted on by the spring of ‘o8.
Combined with congressionally mandated benchmarks and timetables, this plan offers the best plan out there for a change of dynamic on the ground in Iraq. If instituted it should allow a major drawdown of troops by the end of Bush presidency which would allow a new president a much more promising situation in Iraq as his inheritance. This would give a new administration a valuable head start to reestablishing our diplomatic connections with the world that the current administration has let lapse. It will be an unmitigated benefit to the United States and to the world to put this problem in Iraq behind us as soon as possible.
It is normally true that having Congress micro manage the war through the secondary influence of their control of the purse, or by voting timetables and benchmarks into the public record is not the optimum way to conduct a war. That is exactly why Congress has been so willing to simply let this administration do its worst in Iraq for four long years. Now, however, Congress must assume the default position.
It is absolutely vital for the politicians in this country to step up and – by whatever means necessary - take control of this war to bring it to a swift and successful conclusion. It falls somewhere between naïve, disingenuous and dangerous to believe as the administration would have it that this can occur as the result of a temporary surge of troops. Someone has to take responsibility for managing this war and it is clearly not our persistently AWOL Commander in Chief.
A phased draw down and redeployment of troops combined with local elections may be the only legitimate way of achieving separation from Iraq that would have a chance of success. The one election we did sponsor in Iraq was the only thing the Bush administration has really ever done right in Iraq. It might serve us well to have another.
