Iraq exit strategy

George Will's logic is ruthless (give them democracy even if it means they end up fighting a civil war) but I agree with it. The situation in Iraq, as it stands, is a catastrophe, pure and simple.

Weirdly, what brought home to me exactly how badly things have got in Iraq was the injury suffered recently by B.D., the gung ho American warrior who is one of the characters in the Doonesbury comic strip which I see every morning in my daily newspaper (here in Japan, it's carried by both The Japan Times and the International Herald Tribune.)

I opened the paper one day and B.D. was crying out in the darkness, was plainly unable to see, and plainly he'd been wounded, and I was shocked, and the thought went through my mind:-

"But he's a comic book character! He's immortal! How can he possibly be injured?"

And I had the horrific notion that B.D.'s face had been blown away, though in the end it turned out that he's only lost a leg, and below the knee at that.

But B.D.'s personal catastrope really got through to me, imaginatively, in a way that Japanese television's daily accounts of American dead and injured have totally failed to.

The other thing that made an impression on me was the Battle for Falluja. It goes roughly like this:-

Four American contractors get murdered and George Bush decides that someone must pay. So there's an American attack on the Iraqi city of Falluja. Whether the murderers are nailed by the attack is an open question, but it is reported round the world that hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed. (The figure we were hearing on Japanese TV was, at one stage, seven hundred civilian dead.) (As in, for example, old men, women, children.)

Now, what was that supposed to achieve? Is it the case that "The boss wants dead bodies and the boss gets what he wants?" Or is that too crude? Is the Iraq war moving into a phase of unabashed reprisals against civilian populations? Or is the operational theory the notion that the presence of the guilty justifies the extermination of the innocent. ("The guys who shots the cops are somewhere in Harlem. Go nuke Harlem.")

Then what happens next? Well, the marines move into the outskirts of Falluja, and get shot at by insurgents, and shoot back - with a view to achieving what?

On TV, for a few days we watch this desultory combat, with people getting killed on both sides during a notional ceasefire. Allegedly, according to certain media reports, during this time the guys at the top (right at the top) quite simply can't make up their minds what they want to do next. (Destroy the city to save it? Well, that would be one option.)

And then? Well, then the marines pull back. Having achieved - what? I mean, from a military point of view, what was the mission? What were they aiming to achieve in the first place?

Sure, from a blood-and-thunder perspective, it was pretty impressive. The marines were said by their offices to have "fought like lions," and the Iraqis certainly showed an impressive willingness to stand up and fight against a technologically superior force, even if dying was the penalty.

But, if you were writing this as a war story, you'd be left with one big (one huge) unanswered question: what's the plot? What's the rationale? What was anyone involved in that battle actually trying to achieve?

The Battle for Falluja, as far as I can see, was, from a conceptual point of view, a disorganized exercise in random mayhem, rather like a Mad Max movie (motorbike gangs at war in a post-apocalyptic landscape.)

The longer this thing goes on (the longer the Iraq war goes on, that is) the harder it is to avoid the conclusion that the guys right at the top don't have a clue what they're doing.

As there's no plan, and as I personally can't think of a plan, if I was advising the current American emperor then I'd seriously push the George Will solution:-

"Boss, it may end up being a bloodbath, but at least it'll be their bloodbath, not ours."

Let the Iraqis have an election - a real election, one that respects the will of the majority - then just walk away.

That said, I don't think that the Americans, under either Bush or Kerry, will do anything so sensible. The root problem, I think, is American optimism, the notion that, for every problem, there's a smiling solution. Somewhere.

What I think is going to happen is that the American administraton (regardless of who is running it) will muddle ahead (or, rather, round and round in bloody circles) for another two or three years, trying to engineer some kind of gimcrack solution which will bring a stable American-friendly secular government to power in Iraq.

It won't work. By now, we've seen enough blood on the streets to know that of a certainty. The supposed "democracy" that is supposed to (somehow) materialize in June (next month!?) is certainly not going to be the answer. (A government, but no power to make laws and no veto powers over military activity, either.)

So the outlook is for continued war in Iraq. And the problem of war is that it militarizes people. The longer war continues, the more extreme the tendences are going to be. Moderates are going to get squeezed out of the picture or are going to evolve in the direction of extremism.

And this is bad for the world as a whole, because the problem is starting to metastasize.

What worried me recently is killings in Thailand as the government reacted (some say over-reacted) to Muslim dissent in the south of the country. Since I'm living in Japan, Iraq is both physically and psychologically distant, but Thailand is much closer in both senses.

So I vote for the George Will solution. Give the Iraqis their freedom and accept the consequences, even if the consequences include "theocratic elements". (It's an Islamic country. People don't wake up in the morning yearning to vote for Mickey Mouse.)

That's the solution.

But what will happen is this: two or three more years of killing (or maybe four or five or six or seven) followed by an American withdrawal. When the Americans withdraw, they will leave behind them a puppet government of some description (secular, free-market, pro-American) which will last two years (maximum, but don't be surprised if it fails in the first six months), after which the Iraqis will forge their own government, which may look a bit like that of Iran.

Whoever ends up ruling Iraq will then have the job of uniting a country composed (to simplify a bit) of three blocs, the Shiites, the Sunni and the Kurds.

To avoid civil war and pull the country together into a cohesive unit, there will be one obvious strategy: unite the country by confronting the people with the threat of external aggression.

Given that the Kurds probably can't go it alone (alone, they'd be a tempting target for their Turkish neighbors) the external threat may persuade the Kurds to reach some kind of long-term accomodation with the Shiite majority, skipping the civil war phase.

As for the problem of bad blood between the Sunni and the Shiites, however - well, the obvious political solution to that, under the circumstances, will be anti-American nationalism.

And the longer the Americans stay in Iraq, killing and getting killed, the more extreme that anti-American nationalism is going to be.

In closure, a flashback:-