Jessica Mathews, the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has a generally excellent op-ed in today’s WaPo. It’s titled “Match Iraq Policy to Reality”.
This op-ed, allied to previous work that Mathews and other Carnegie staff members including their “Arab Reform Bulletin” team have done, indicate to me that this small but venerable organization is probably nowadays the sanest and most constructive of the DC think-tanks when it comes to looking at Middle East issues. (Brookings’ Mideast programs having been taken over by Martin “divide and rule” Indyk; AEI still continuing in its role as incubator of the neocons; etc.)
Here is Mathews’ opening argument:
What was an emerging opposition [in Iraq] is now a full-fledged insurgency. The United States is still without a political strategy that recognizes this reality. As a result, the military is forced into a stop-go-stop hesitancy in which soldiers’ lives are being wasted and security continues to worsen.
The sobering truth is that a path to a not-awful ending in Iraq is extremely hard to see, and there may not, in fact, be one. The United States cannot use its full power to achieve security without causing so many Iraqi casualties that it would defeat our purpose. We do not have enough additional troops to send to achieve order through an overwhelming presence. Iraqi security forces are nowhere near up to the task and will not be for a long time. Thus the paradox: While achieving a degree of security is the overwhelming priority, a change of political course is the most important step.
Attentive JWN readers will probably understand why I think Mathews is so percipient–namely, that she seems largely to agree with my own conclusions.
She continues:
What is needed is a policy that takes deadly seriously what Iraqis believe about why the war began and what the United States intends. These beliefs — that the United States came only to get its hands on Iraq’s oil, to benefit Israel’s security, and to establish a puppet government and a permanent military presence through which it could control Iraq and the rest of the region — are wrong. But beliefs passionately held are as important as facts, because they powerfully affect behavior. What we see as a tragic series of American missteps, Iraqis interpret — with reason when seen through their eyes — as evidence of evil intent.
I actually disagree with her when she says flat-out that all of those Iraqi beliefs are “wrong”. I generally try to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their “true” motivations, and perhaps I’m prepared to do that regarding whether the “real intention” of the Bush administration in invading Iraq was, “to get its hands on Iraq’s oil, to benefit Israel’s security, [or] to establish a puppet government”.
However, on the establishment of “a permanent military presence through which it could control Iraq and the rest of the region”, I judge that there is quite enough evidence to support the conclusion that that war goal was indeed one that motivated the decision to invade. For example, look at the haste with which, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Bushies, (1) uprooted the longstanding US military presence in Saudi Arabia and moved to sever all remaining operational reliance on those bases, and (2) set about building those 14 “enduring” military bases inside Iraq…
Indeed, is there are other possible explanation for the construction of bases described in those terms??
(And of course, to provide political protection for any longterm basing agreement in Iraq– a country with a long history of deeply held anti-imperial sentiment and policy– the Bushies would then, necessarily, have to aspire to put and keep in place a compliant puppet government, as well… )
Anyway, that’s a relatively small quibble with Mathews’ broader argument… It’s just that she is prepared to give the Bushies that much more benefit of the doubt regarding their motives than I am…
Her argument continues thus:
Continue reading “Good sense from Jessica Mathews”