The Iraqi Occupation

I originally wrote this post on July 6 with the intention of finishing it up and posting it on the 7th, but obviously circumstance intervened. Not surprisingly, the recent spate of violence in Bagdad means this post is still topical, so it goes up today. At any rate, this doesn't reflect scholarship; it's merely the observations and thoughts of someone who is looking for a way forward from the calamity that is Iraq.

We are totally screwed in Iraq right now, but I recently read something very interesting. The argument was that right now, we're primarily only focusing on security. To win the "hearts and minds" of the people - the most difficult proposition in any occupation - we need to shift to include developing the social capital of the country. People are quite easy to recruit for terrorism/insurgency when they don't have the basic needs of civilization - housing, water, food, etc. This much seems self-evident

If you look at W's speech from the other night (early July), he identified the need for both a security track and a political track and then proceeded to talk virtually exclusively about the security track while paying only lip service to the political track. There are a litany of errors on the political track, but the gravest one at the moment appears to be that there is essentially no political track. What the people need is education, health care, sanitation, etc. "Winning" insurgency is ultimately about spin and sympathy. Past and present occupations (Algiers, Palestine) have turned on the PR war. The first Intifada, for example, is widely viewed as a success because the Palestinians did not use car bombs and the like - they used stones and things of that nature. When the Israeli's responded with rubber bullets and water cannons (and ended up killing a number of people), they lost sympathy while the Palestinians gained. That got the PLO to the table in 92 which was a monumental achievement, even if it didn't lead to a peace deal. Yet, ten years later when the Palestinians turned to violence in the second intifada, graphic images of Israeli civilian deaths turned world opinion against the Palestinians and they "lost" the second intifada. Israel has gotten away with a Berlin style security wall, ever encroaching settlements in the West Bank, and essentially carte blanche from the US.

If the US has any hope of finding a reasonable solution to Iraq, they have to capitalize on the fact that the insurgents are using the most violent means possible to stall the country. To continue on the Bush path is to acknowledge that 5 or 10 years from now, Iraq is going to be a violent, brutal, and underdeveloped place that is controlled by a tyrannical minority. But, if we can shift away from simply "winning" the insurgency and actually attempt to build viable, sustainable institutions, then we have a chance to get out of there in a relatively good situation. I'm not so optimistic that Bush is going to get this right. The fact that he still has Rummy in his employ is tremendous. Rummy pretty much single-handedly created the situation we have today, a situation that is universally seen as abject policy failure. (I'm not going to delve into this too deeply as others have done a far better job than I could. But the short of it is, just like in Vietnam, a civilian military authority refused to listen to his Generals who strongly argued that the 'Coalition' would need upwards of 500,000 troops to control the border. Rummy said 'poppycot' and now, after upwards of 100,000 would be terrorists have flooded Iraq from neighboring countries, we have an insurgency that is largely foreign in nature. Somebody give the man a raise.)

In the end, I'm not optimistic that things are going to get better, but I do think there's a chance it could get better with better leadership and policy. Sadly, Kerry was completely unable to articulate this message (or even think about it) prior to the election and we're stuck with a befuddled president who thinks the key to winning the war is to present a good face and be confident that "America is winning".

(And I'm not joking about that. In a true miscarriage of social science, the Bushies have employed a political scientist from Duke, I think, who identified the key factor in the US inability to "win" in Vietnam as a failure of Nixon, et. al. to present a positive face to the war. Forgot where I read that, but it's a scandalous thing, really. We lost Vietnam because of what happened in Vietnam, not because the American public turned against a dubious war effort. But, Bush has always surrounded himself with Yes men, hasn't he?)

Anyway, in IR, I know I'll never get away from Iraq, so I'm trying to stay on top of it while acknowledging that it's one bad situation in a world full of bad situations. The truly odd thing about that is that neo-liberals like myself find themselves embroiled in a neo-con world that was not of our making but that we're ultimately going to have to sort out. Nothing like stacking the deck and then trying to beat the odds with 21. (And by "we" I mean people in IR that actually have jobs and stuff.)