Iraq: A sinkhole, not a quagmire

For too long, I and many others in the commentatoriat have been describing
the war in Iraq as a Vietnam-like “quagmire” for the US.  It is
now clear that’s a poor analogy.  It implies, after all, an area
through which one slogs with great difficulty and perhaps great
losses– but that there is, potentially, a solid piece of land on the
far side of the quagmire at which, through doing enough tough slogging,
one can arrive.

Not true.  It now seems clear– and the events and decisions of
the past week have confirmed this– that there is no solid “far side” of
this troublesome terrain that
the US can reach simply by doing more slogging. 
Instead, the sticky mud that we thought was just a quagmire has in fact been
a temporary cap sitting atop a massive sinkhole, and the sinkhole is
now poised to swallow up the whole of the US’s until-now little
questioned position of hegemony in the Middle East, as well as, on a
longer but linked time-scale, the position of unipolar military
hegemony the US has held over the last 17 years at the global level.

Here are the relevant facts as I see them:

1. In a situation in which
there are already clear strains on the US military’s worldwide
force-planning system, President Bush this week announced unequivocally that his decision has been to prioritize
the Iraqi theater over the Afghan theater or planning for any
other potential military contingencies around the world. 

Bush did this by hiding behind the skirts of his top field commander in Iraq and saying “Whatever Gen. Petraeus wants for Iraq, Gen. Petraeus
gets.”  But we should all be quite clear about what the broad implications of what Bush was saying there: he was simply blowing off the requests from the Afghan
government and the NATO allies that the US considerably beef up the
contribution it makes to the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan.

We could call this Bush’s “anti-Dannatt moment.”

He was also blowing off the concerns that the highest members of the US military have expressed about the strain the US force planners are already under, as a result of the overstretch in Iraq. On Wednesday, the Army’s vice of staff, Gen. Richard Cody told
the House Armed Services Committee quite explicitly that, “The
current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the
sustainable supply and limits our ability to provide ready forces for
other contingencies.”

The strain on the US force planners will be all the more acute, because
Bush also sought to appease his critics from within the US military
by announcing the reduction
of the “standard tour” that service members are sent on in Iraq or
Afghanistan from 15 months to 12 months.

In terms of force planning and the ability of the US military to
confidently prepare for any number of contingencies around the world–
Taiwan Straits? renewed problems with North Korea? turmoil in Egypt?
Haiti? Somalia? etc– Bush is certainly now “planning” to bequeath to
his successor a system in complete disarray.

(As a convinced pacifist, I don’t view the prospect of the end of the
US’s worldwide military empire as a bad thing.  But this empire
could end in a large number of different ways, many of which could end
up inflicting considerable harm and suffering on citizens of
the world’s most vulnerable countries.  Hence, all of
us– Americans and non-Americans, alike– now have a considerable
responsibility to try to ensure the shift away from a US-dominated
unipolar world is negotiated in such way that it occurs in as orderly, equitable, and
sustainable a way as possible.)

2.  Though Bush has given
Gen. Petraeus broad latitude to cherry-pick whatever he wants out of
the US force-planning system, the US budget, etc., in fact there is no way Petraeus or any
other commander can “win” in Iraq. Indeed– as we saw
demonstrated very clearly during last week’s hearings– there is not even any
publicly announced definition of what “winning” would mean there.

 This is the “sinkhole” aspect of the problem.  You pour in
money and service-members, and they just get gobbled up.

Sen. Barack Obama’s questioning of Petraeus in the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee spoke directly to the issue of “What would it mean to ‘win’
in Iraq?”  Petraeus was quite unable to provide a clear answer.

3.  There are, meanwhile
many clear– and extremely worrying– signs that Bush and Cheney have
decided that the current
best way to “justify” the US military presence/engagement in Iraq is by
linking it more clearly than ever to the administration’s anti-Iran
campaign.

We could make a very long list indeed of the many “justifications”
the Bushites have adduced for their military engagement in Iraq over
the years…  None of these justifications has proved
sturdily convincing over the long haul, or even the medium haul. 
Hence the need constantly to generate new ones.

In this latest campaign of linking
what the US military is doing in Iraq to the continuing campaign
against Iran they contort
human rationality and logic in a way that would be hilariously
funny were it not so deeply tragic and depressing.  Here are
some examples:

• Administration officials accuse Iran of providing various forms of
  support to Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement and militia, which engaged in
  some tough battles against the Iraqi government’s security forces in
  the past two weeks.  Well, this is probably true.  But the
  Iranian government has also, more stably and over a period of many
  years, been giving continuing support to the Badr Brigades militia that
  is allied with the current Iraqi government.  (Do we still need to
  remind anyone of the fulsome welcome that Iranian President Mahmoud
  Ahmadinejad got from Iraq’s PM and President on during his recent state
  visit to Baghdad?)
• They make no mention at all of the fact that Iran’s powerful
  Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani recently called on Iraq’s current
  oppositionists to stop shelling the Green Zone in Baghdad. Oops, that
  development just didn’t fit into the Bushists’ narrative of Iran
  playing a big spoiler role inside Iraq. 
• They made scant mention, too, of the fact that it was the head of
  Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who negotiated the key ceasefire that
  interrupted the recent fighting between the Sadrists and the ISF in
  Basra.
• The Bushists are now trying to rush around the Arab world trying
  to tout the “Arab-ness” of the regime in Iraq– this, in contrast to
  the “Iranian-ness” of the regime in Iran.  This new “Arab-ness”
  narrative may well have been introduced after it became clear for
  various reasons that the “anti-Shiite” narrative with which they had
  previously tried to mobilize the Arab regimes against Iran had
  failed.  But to see them touting the present Baghdad regime for
  its notably “Arab” qualities is particularly amusing after having seen
  them spend the first four years or so of the occupation of Iraq
  deliberately trying to erase the Arab identity and affiliation of
  Iraq’s government and as many of its people as possible.  That
  included installing Kurdish Iraqis as both the government’s president
  and Foreign Minister, as well as systematic efforts to start describing
  all Iraqis as either “Shiites, Sunnis, or Kurds” rather than building
  on the identities of being either “Iraqi” or “Arab.”
• Meanwhile, actually, within the Iraqi Shiite community, the
  Sadrists are considerably more “Arab nationalist” in their outlook and
  positions than pro-government groups like Badr/ISCI, which have a much
  more closely pro-Iranian orientation.

4.  This new ramping up of
the “anti-Iranian” justification for the US troop presence in Iraq is
worrying at a number of levels.  I ask myself: Is this just a
“justification” for whatever it is they’re hoping to achieve in Iraq,
or are they actually trying
to prepare the ground for some kind of  real military action
against Iran in the nine months that George W. Bush has left in office?

Personally, I still find this latter prospect extremely unlikely. 
After all, in the event of any form of US military attack against Iran,
the US troops deployed in Iraq are sitting ducks and hostages to
fortune– and these risks outweigh by a factor of tens or
hundreds the contribution that these troops could as a potential
“advance guard” or “supporting force” for this attack.  I have
considerable confidence that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the
serious, battle-tested men in charge of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff
all understand these realities.

On the other hand, as we know, George W. Bush prides himself on being
“the Decider.”  Well, given the huge cognitive constraints on Bush
being able to “decide” anything, make that Vice-President Cheney.

5.  Jim Hoagland, whose
work on Iraq I have frequently criticized in the past, actually has a
good piece
in tomorrow’s WaPo that tends to confirm my general confidence in
the judgment of the JCS, but raises some worrying questions about
Gates’s role. He writes:

The most intense arguments over U.S.
involvement in Iraq do not flare at this point on Capitol Hill
or on the campaign trail. Those rhetorical battles pale in comparison
to the high-stakes struggle being waged behind closed doors at the
Pentagon.

On one side are the “fight-win guys,” as
some describe themselves. They are led by Gen. David Petraeus
and other commanders who argue that the counterinsurgency struggle in
Iraq must be pursued as the military’s top priority and ultimately
resolved on U.S. terms.

In this view, the Middle East
is the most likely arena for future conflicts, and Iraq is the
prototype of the war that U.S. forces must be trained and equipped to
win.

Arrayed
against them are the uniformed chiefs of the
military services who foresee a “broken army” emerging from an all-out
commitment to Iraq that neglects other needs and potential conflicts.
It is time to rebuild Army tank battalions, Marine amphibious forces
and other traditional instruments of big-nation warfare — while
muddling through in Iraq.

About Gates, however, what Hoagie writes is not so encouraging.  He
writes that Gates, “has in fact encouraged the spirited debate between
the Petraeus and Fallon-Cody camps without tipping his own hand.” 
Interestingly, though, he writes that when Centcom chief Adm. William
Fallon was suddenly ousted from his post last month, the cause was not any differences between
him and Gates over the prospect of attacking Iran (or over the big
debate over force configurations).  Rather, it was, “Fallon’s
rigid, overbearing style and a refusal to listen to others
[that] gradually cost him Gates’s confidence, according to military and
civilian officials who worked with Fallon.” 

That leaves open the possibility that Gates still agrees
with what Fallon has said about the patent folly of the US launching a
military attack on Iran.

6.  So, back to this
sinkhole theory of Iraq.  How bad is it?  What will it leade
to over the next nine months?  And how can the next president
minimize the damage caused around the world by the latest series of
disastrous decisions made by Bush/Cheney?

I think for now, I prefer to leave this blog post where it is and
come back to these important big questions later.  All I can
sketch out right now is that

• The Iraqi sinkhole will almost certainly, within the time-frame
  of the next 3-5 years, draw in (and bring to an end) the US’s hegemonic
  position in the Persian Gulf region;
• Alongside the sinkhole effect of Iraq, we certainly need to
  consider the effects on the
  US’s worldwide power of the current and continuing crisis in the US-led world financial system,
  recognizing that
  the diminution of the US’s relative economic power in the world has itself
  been considerably hastened and exacerbated by the financial “sinkhole” the Iraq war
  has become for the US;
• The Iraq sinkhole will certainly– along with the crisis of US
  economic power and Middle Eastern developments including those in Egypt
  and Palestine– lead to a considerable diminution/dilution of the
  near-hegemonic role the US has exercized for the past 30 years
  throughout the broader Middle East;
• The effects of the Iraq sinkhole on the situation in Afghanistan
  and the rest of the crucial “Great Game Board” within Central Asia will
  become increasingly significant for the standing within the world power
  balance of NATO (aka the “West Militant”) — and for the standings of
  the other major parties rerepresented on the Great Game Board: Russia,
  China, Iran, and militant Sunnism;
• The next Prez will have to work extremely hard, and in an
  inclusive and creative manner if he (she?) is to minimize the damage to
  the US ctizienry and the world– and of course, to Iraq’s oh-so-suffering people– caused by this sinkhole.

… Well, my bottom line for now is mainly to urge you to remember
this: Iraq is a sinkhole,
not a quagmire.  There is no firm “bank” we can just slog through to on
the other side of this one.