Could the US stay the course in the Iraq quagmire?

THE UNITED STATES IS in a quagmire in Iraq, as in Vietnam four decades earlier; the lessons unlearnt, mistakes afresh, its amoral rectitude hurtling it to doom. It fights in Iraq, as in Vietnam, an unseen enemy, whose numbers rise by the day with every indiscrimate bombing of innocent and helpless Iraqi men, women and children. Like in Vietnam, a civilisation three millennia younger than Iraq, Washington went to war on a lie: in Vietnam, an attack on a US patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin; in Iraq weapons of mass destruction. But by the time it was discovered, the war had solidified against the unseen enemy. Nothing could now stop it, political careers depended on it; but as American casualties mounted, and more young men sent as cannon fodder, the public reception to the war changed to outright hostility.

Vietnam was a proxy war of the Cold War giants, the United States and the Soviet Union. To Washington it was a civilising mission, as in Iraq now, and made mistakes galore to a military end it cannot win. The United States is in Iraq for the geostrategic control of oil and its geopolitical control of the Middle East. In Vietnam, it was to best Moscow and keep South Vietnam firmly in the hands of what was touted then as the free world. If you look deep into it, the underlying raison d'etre for the two wars are based on the belief that nations which do not imbibe the Judea-Christian civilisation, especially if they are not Caucasian by anthropological definition, have no place in this new world.

But it forgot that an invading force however welcome at the start misbehaves in time, rouses the invaded into anger, helplessness, frustration, impotence, insecurity, to momentous rebellion. It may not be reflected in those joining the rebels and nationalists out to assuage the rape of their country, but in the indifference with time to the invasion. This is worsened by the confident belief in Washington that the insurgency is short-lived because it has won no tactical victories; the US, on the other hand, claims it has had no tactical losses and have lost no battles. True, but it misses two salient premises: the guerrillas win not with set-piece battles but by attrition, wearing the enemy down, locking in the enemy's armies to static duties amidst national fear and hatred. In Iraq, the US-led invasion does not control even the territory it holds. When it moves on, the rebels take charge.

In Iraq, we only know that the war zone is along the corridor from Mosul in the north and Najaf in the south, less than a score of towns. We are led to believe that the rest of the country is pacified, or firmly in US-led control. Even what happens in the corridor is known for only what the US chooses to reveal or if journalists were there. But with reporters and cameramen forced to remain in their hotels because it is so dangerous outside, what they cover is spotty and disbelieved. No attempt is made, unlike in Vietnam, to find the truth beyond the official claims. It does not control the countryside. It cannot claim it does, for it does not even attempt to secure it, unlike in Vietnam where at least it tried. It biggest mistake was to assume that once the strong leader is removed – President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, President Saddam Hussein in Iraq – and a client regime installed, all will be well. It found to its cost it could not be more wrong.

The revolving-door governments in South Vietnam had as much legitimacy to its people as the US-appointed governments of expatriates in Iraq. Mr Ayyad Allawi could get standing ovations in the Congress in Washington, but his government represents a constituency not of the Iraqis but of Washington; his future in Iraq after Washington departs is less than that of an ice-cube on a hot plate. He would only be the first of several more governments, each with lesser authority than its predecessor, as Iraq descends into civil war or worse. But the fiction is spread of a new democracy in the making, a glorified future of bread and roses, a model for all autocratic governments in the Middle East. But the body bags and deaths of the natives tell a different story.

What went wrong, in Iraq and Vietnam, is this belief that an alien model can be force-fed on a country by conquest. It worked in Japan after World War Two because it had had elections for decades, and its culture demanded that the loser in a war is at the mercy of the winner. But this would not work elsewhere, least of all in ancient civilisations with different value systems. Washington and other Western nations believed, wrongly, it could, and continues to pay the price. Mr Vladimir Putin, only the latest of autocratic Russian rulers, finds that democracy challenges the iron control he and his predecessors were accustomed to. The emerging Russian democracy faded as the realities of control had to be faced. And so it is, and would be, in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East, where control, for all its democratic appearance, is still rooted in the iron fist, with or without the velvet glove.

When the decision to invade is founded on a lie, it faces two countervailing pressures: the belief in the invader to establish his view on the conquered and propounded by mercenaries and quislings, with the desire of the conquered to maintain their self-respect and throw the invader out. It took years for this to emerge in Vietnam, but scarcely weeks in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq, the US-led invasions discounts the power of nationhood and dismisses the forces against it with a litany of labels: pro-Sunni, pro-Shia, pro-Saddam, pro-Baathists, pro-Al Qaeda. But it does seem clear that the force of nationalism unites the disparate often anathemic groups to a common belief in who they are.

What is frightening in Iraq is that the war is fought as a video game, with the latest weapons brought to bear on a country for no reason than to test the weapons it has, and dazzle the world with its military and scientific precision while conveniently forgetting its handiwork on the ground. As in Vietnam it angers the innocent. Modern war targets innocents, who fight back by joining the insurgents. In this video war, the aim is to kill as many of the enemy with little or no loss on the killers. So no attempt is made to engage the enemy except from the air. Every thing is seen from this perspective, not realising, nor understanding, that however technological or efficient the killing machines, what counts most is what it does on the ground. When it cannot fight without air cover, the guerrilla war is lost. When the guerrilla kills more invading soldiers, it throws this belief out of kilter. It happened in Vietnam. It would in time in Iraq.

There is another. When the guerrilla in Iraq believes the invader has no staying power, all he has to do is kill more of them and wear him out even if takes decades. The US, after all, pulled out of Lebanon in the 1980s when a car bomb blew up a US marine hostel and killed about 250 Marines; and out of Somalia a decade later when the rebels killed about 20 Marines. It took more than 50,000 killed before it left Vietnam. The belief is that in Iraq leave it will. The war is sold in the US as a war of Islamic terror, one which it cannot in time justify. Then dissolution sets in, as casualties rise, and then the battle, for the nationalists and rebels in Iraq, is over. The signs of battle fatigue is already seen. It cannot send in the nearly 500,000 troops it needs to hold the peace in Iraq; and has to make do with a force one third of that. Like in Vietnam, the US did not know how to handle the peace. In the end, it boils down to what it always was: a US-led coalition forgot that one went to war when no other option exists, not when it is one of several. It is now caught in the classic conundrum: it can pull out or stay on, but it has lost whatever it does.

[This is my column in Harakah, the PAS party organ, in its latest issue, published today, 05 October 2004, and headed "The Iraqi quagmire: Could the US stay the course?"]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com