Choice time: Iraq or Afghanistan?

This was basically the message that Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt was posing when he spoke to The Daily Mail last week; and he was answering it in favor of Afghanistan, arguing basically that the western nations “should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon.”
His argumentation was based mainly on operational considerations: Namely the fact that, as he assessed it, the western presence in Iraq “exacerbates the security problems,” whereas

“There is a clear distinction between our status and position in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which is why I have much more optimism that we can get it right in Afghanistan.”

Dannatt did use a little bit of legal/political argumentation– namely, when he drew a distinction between, as he put it, the western forces having “kicked the door in” in Iraq, and their being in Afghanistan “at the invitation” of Karzai’s government. (He glossed over the door-kicking that did, in fact, occur in Afghanistan in October-November 2001, and the fact that Pres. Karzai, just as much as Pres. Talabani and PM Maliki, was installed under the auspices of the US-led occupation force. No matter.)
But the main thing is that, at an operational level– in terms of the prospects for mission success– Dannatt was arguing for concentrating the efforts of the British military and perhaps also that of the US military in Afghanistan rather than in Iraq.
And once Dannatt had expressed his view in public about the urgency of this situation, Tony Blair was forced to say he “agreed with every word.” (Game, set, and match to Dannatt, I would say.)
Is this discussion also being held in Washington? I very much hope so. I strongly suspect it is already being intensively held at the headquarters of Centcom there in Qatar… But it certainly needs to be held in Washington, too.
What are the strategic implications of this choice that now presents itself with increasing urgency– between Iraq and Afghanistan?
Of course, all of us could readily argue– as some of us did at the time– that this was a choice that should have been confronted and thought through carefully back in early 2002, the time at which Rumsfeld and the President started their planning in earnest for the invasion of Iraq, and for the concomitant diversion of much-needed resources and attention away from the post-invasion stabilization mission in Afghanistan.
But no, they did not confront that issue and that fateful choice back then. So now, four years, many scores of thousands of lost lives, millions of blighted lives, and $335 billion of war spending later, the US leaders, US citizenry, and the world will have to face it very soon now, and on terms very different from those that existed back in 2002.
Iraq vs. Afghanistan. For US strategic planners, this is quite a tough choice.
Is it one that this US government will try to make alone? Is it one that, at this point, any US government can make alone? I strongly suspect not.
I clearly need to write a whole bunch more about this issue in the days ahead. But my first thoughts are these:

(1) The tasks the US faces in both countries are different. In Iraq, the task can only at this stage be described as being to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the US position. After the collapse of Operation “Forward Together” or whatever this latest debacle was called, catastrophe-avoidance seems to be the best that Washington can hope for. How might it be achieved? At this point, only through entering into speedy discussions with all of Iraq’s neighbors, over a plan for reordering the main strategic features of that immediate region in a way that will allow a speedy and orderly drawdown of the US troop presence inside Iraq…
In Afghanistan, by contrast, though the strategic position of the NATO forces is pretty stretched and challenged, still there is some hope that, with some reconfiguring of the international troop presence and considerably increased investment of international attention and resources, the country’s situation might yet be stabilized…
(2) The strategic importance of each country within the world system is distinct. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan and the other “Stans” to the east of it were at the epicenter of the “Great Game” that was played out between the three power centers of British India, Russia, and China. Today, the British no longer rule India, and there have been many other changes in the political/strategic geography of the region. But it is clear that the country remains a locus of intense concern to numerous different powers, including Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and the other Stans… It is harder to see what NATO’s actual direct interest in Afghanistan is. It strikes me, NATO’s interest (and that of the US) is largely derivative, being focused on the “draining the swamp” aspects of the campaign against border-straddling terrorist groups. That makes NATO’s presence there somewhat “altruistic” rather than being motivated only by crass national self-interest. Altruism is not a bad thing. But surely it would be better to do it much more through economic and political stabilization measures that worked rather than through the present reliance on military measures, which seem not to?
The strategic importance of Iraq, for many people in the US, can be summed up in three concepts: Oil, Countering Iran, and Protecting Israel. As we now know, when the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq back in 2002-2003, Iraq did not, in fact, form any threat to Israel, at any level, and it still does not today. That leaves Oil, and Iran as issues that we need to talk about. Regarding oil, the US occupation regime in Iraq has done a lousy job of shepherding the reconstruction of the Iraqi oil industry. Indeed, it has left much of Iraq’s oil sector in tatters. The oil sector, Iraq’s people, and the world will be much better off once public security, public order, and orderly government can return to Iraq, and that is quite evidently– based on 42 months of experience now– not going to happen so long as the US occupation continues. Regarding Iran, the two main tasks are, it seems to me, to avoid a catastrophic US-Iran confrontation, and to find a way to restore order and predictability to US-Iranian relations. Discussions over Iraq can be an appropriate lead-in to this.
(3) The world-political challenge of achieving this retrenchment of the US global empire. We need to be quite clear: the strategic dead-end the US forces face in Iraq today is the result of significant and quite ill-considered imperial over-reach by the Bush administration. So Washington cannot at this point simply make one quick decision: “Okay, we’ll stick with Afghanistan; let’s forget Iraq” (or, more likely in my view, the other way around), implement this, and then get back to business as usual… There are a whole host of reasons why that would be impossible. Anyway, just as with the retrenchment (shedding) of the colonial empires by Britain, France, and other European powers that occurred in the post-WW2 era, so with the retrenchment of the US military empire today, the whole of the political system within this globalized world of ours will have to adapt itself to this shift…

But let’s all think where this might lead. Let’s think of being able to build a world that is more truly based than the present order on the principles of human equality and care for the flourishing of all of God’s children. And let’s place a huge focus on making the transition to this new situation orderly and peaceful. In the timeless words of A.J. Muste: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
That has never been demonstrated more clearly than through the tragic fate of the Bush administration’s attempts to build a “stable and just” world order through the use of military violence.