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Informed Comment - Dec 26, 2006
http://www.juancole.com/

Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006

by Juan Cole

1. Myth number one is that the United States "can still win" in Iraq. Of
course, the truth of this statement, frequently still made by William
Kristol and other Neoconservatives, depends on what "winning" means. But if
it means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian
government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the
near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The
Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to
meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi
politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is
frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large
swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of
being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an
extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of
the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias
on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for
years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force
can hope to stop.

The United States cannot "win" in the sense defined above. It cannot. And
the blindly arrogant assumption that it can win is calculated to get more
tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more thousands of American soldiers
and Marines badly wounded or killed. Moreover, since Iraq is coming apart
at the seams under the impact of our presence there, there is a real danger
that we will radically destabilize it and the whole oil-producing Gulf if
we try to stay longer.

2. "US military sweeps of neighborhoods can drive the guerrillas out." The
US put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush
the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and the number of
attacks actually increased. This result comes about in part because the
guerrillas are not outsiders who come in and then are forced out. The Sunni
Arabs of Ghazaliya and Dora districts in the capital are the "insurgents."
The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement or
"insurgency" with less than 500,000 troops, based on what we have seen in
the Balkans and other such conflict situations. The US destroyed Falluja,
and even it and other cities of al-Anbar province are not now safe! The US
military leaders on the ground have spoken of the desirability of just
withdrawing from al-Anbar to Baghdad and giving up on it. In 2003, 14
percent of Sunni Arabs thought it legitimate to attack US personnel and
facilities. In August, 2006, over 70 percent did. How long before it is
100%? Winning guerrilla wars requires two victories, a military victory
over the guerrillas and a winning of the hearts and minds of the general
public, thus denying the guerrillas support. The US has not and is unlikely
to be able to repress the guerrillas, and it is losing hearts and minds at
an increasing and alarming rate. They hate us, folks. They don't want us
there.

3. The United States is best off throwing all its support behind the Iraqi
Shiites. This is the position adopted fairly consistently by Marc Reuel
Gerecht. Gerecht is an informed and acute observer whose views I respect
even when I disagree with them. But Washington policy-makers should read
Daniel Goleman's work on social intelligence. Goleman points out that a
good manager of a team in a corporation sets up a win/win framework for
every member of the team. If you set it up on a win/lose basis, so that
some are actively punished and others "triumph," you are asking for
trouble. Conflict is natural. How you manage conflict is what matters. If
you listen to employees' grievances and try to figure out how they can be
resolved in such a way that everyone benefits, then you are a good manager.
Gerecht, it seems to me, sets up a win/lose model in Iraq. The Shiites and
Kurds win it all, and the Sunni Arabs get screwed over. Practically
speaking, the Bush policy has been Gerechtian, which in my view has caused
all the problems. We shouldn't have thought of our goal as installing the
Shiites in power. Of course, Bush hoped that those so installed would be
"secular," and that is what Wolfowitz and Chalabi had promised him. Gerecht
came up with the ex post facto justification that even the religious
Shiites are moving toward democracy via Sistani. But democracy cannot be
about one sectarian identity prevailing over, and marginalizing others.

The Sunni Arabs have demonstrated conclusively that they can act
effectively as spoilers in the new Iraq. If they aren't happy, no one is
going to be. The US must negotiate with the guerrilla leaders and find a
win/win framework for them to come in from the cold and work alongside the
Kurds and the religious Shiites. About this, US Ambassador in Baghdad
Zalmay Khalilzad has been absolutely right.

4. "Iraq is not in a civil war," as Jurassic conservative Fox commentator
Bill O'Reilly insists. There is a well-established social science
definition of civil war put forward by Professor J. David Singer and his
colleagues: "Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at
least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces
against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by
the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5
percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson
and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92,"
Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.)" See my article on
this in Salon.com. By Singer's definition, Iraq has been in civil war since
the Iraqi government was reestablished in summer of 2004. When I have been
around political scientists, as at the ISA conference, I have found that
scholars in that field tend to accept Singer's definition.

5. "The second Lancet study showing 600,000 excess deaths from political
and criminal violence since the US invasion is somehow flawed." Les Roberts
replies here to many of the objections that were raised. See also the
transcript of the Kucinich-Paul Congressional hearings on the subject. Many
critics refer to the numbers of dead reported in the press as
counter-arguments to Roberts et al. But "passive reporting" such as news
articles never captures more than a fraction of the casualties in any war.
I see deaths reported in the Arabic press all the time that never show up
in the English language wire services. And, a lot of towns in Iraq don't
have local newspapers and many local deaths are not reported in the
national newspapers.

6. "Most deaths in Iraq are from bombings." The Lancet study found that the
majority of violent deaths are from being shot.

7. "Baghdad and environs are especially violent but the death rate is lower
in the rest of the country." The Lancet survey found that levels of
violence in the rest of the country are similar to that in Baghdad
(remember that the authors included criminal activities such as gang and
smuggler turf wars in their statistics). The Shiite south is spared much
Sunni-Shiite communal fighting, but criminal gangs, tribal feuds, and
militias fight one another over oil and antiquities smuggling, and a lot of
people are getting shot down there, too.

8. "Iraq is the central front in the war on terror." From the beginning of
history until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. There
was no al-Qaeda in Baath-ruled Iraq. When Baath intelligence heard that Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi might have entered Iraq, they grew alarmed at such an
"al-Qaeda" presence and put out an APB on him! Zarqawi's so-called
"al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" was never "central" in Iraq and was never
responsible for more than a fraction of the violent attacks. This assertion
is supported by the outcome of a US-Jordanian operation that killed Zarqawi
this year. His death had no impact whatsoever on the level of violence.
There are probably only about 1,000 foreign fighters even in Iraq, and most
of them are first-time volunteers, not old-time terrorists. The 50 major
guerrilla cells in Sunni Arab Iraq are mostly made up of Iraqis, and are
mainly: 1) Baathist or neo-Baathist, 2) Sunni revivalist or Salafi, 3)
tribally-based, or 4) based in city quarters. Al-Qaeda is mainly a boogey
man, invoked in Iraq on all sides, but possessing little real power or
presence there. This is not to deny that radical Sunni Arab volunteers come
to Iraq to blow things (and often themselves) up. They just are not more
than an auxiliary to the big movements, which are Iraqi.

9. "The Sunni Arab guerrillas in places like Ramadi will follow the US home
to the American mainland and commit terrorism if we leave Iraq." This
assertion is just a variation on the invalid domino theory. People in
Ramadi only have one beef with the United States. Its troops are going
through their wives' underwear in the course of house searches every day.
They don't want the US troops in their town or their homes, dictating to
them that they must live under a government of Shiite clerics and Kurdish
warlords (as they think of them). If the US withdrew and let the Iraqis
work out a way to live with one another, people in Ramadi will be happy.

They are not going to start taking flight lessons and trying to get visas
to the US. This argument about following us, if it were true, would have
prevented us from ever withdrawing from anyplace once we entered a war
there. We'd be forever stuck in the Philippines for fear that Filipino
terrorists would follow us back home. Or Korea (we moved 15,000 US troops
out of South Korea not so long ago. Was that unwise? Are the thereby
liberated Koreans now gunning for us?) Or how about the Dominican Republic?
Haiti? Grenada? France? The argument is a crock.

10. "Setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is a bad idea." Bush and
others in his administration have argued that setting such a timetable
would give a significant military advantage to the guerrillas fighting US
forces and opposed to the new government. That assertion makes sense only
if there were a prospect that the US could militarily crush the Sunni
Arabs. There is no such prospect. The guerrilla war is hotter now than at
any time since the US invasion. It is more widely supported by more Sunni
Arabs than ever before. It is producing more violent attacks than ever
before. Since we cannot defeat them short of genocide, we have to negotiate
with them. And their first and most urgent demand is that the US set a
timetable for withdrawal before they will consider coming into the new
political system. That is, we should set a timetable in order to turn the
Sunni guerrillas from combatants to a political negotiating partner. Even
Sunni politicians cooperating with the US make this demand. They are
disappointed with the lack of movement on the issue. How long do they
remain willing to cooperate? In addition, 131 Iraqi members of parliament
signed a demand that the US set a timetable for withdrawal. (138 would be a
simple majority.) It is a a major demand of the Sadr Movement. In fact, the
32 Sadrist MPs withdrew from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance coalition
temporarily over this issue.

In my view, Shiite leaders such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim are repeatedly
declining to negotiate in good faith with the Sunni Arabs or to take their
views seriously. Al-Hakim knows that if the Sunnis give him any trouble, he
can sic the Marines on them. The US presence is making it harder for Iraqi
to compromise with Iraqi, which is counterproductive.
Think Progress points out that in 1999, Governor George W. Bush criticized
then President Clinton for declining to set a withdrawal timetable for
Kosovo, saying "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the
president to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

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