The Grand Delusion

Great powers should never entangle themselves in tribal conflicts. That lessons has been lost on the Bush administration, which has managed to tie down U.S. troops in the middle of a civil war in the heart of the Middle East. The U.S. faces a diabolic choice: 1) Leave Iraq and watch the country explode or 2) stay and allow a disastrous war to sap America’s financial and military strength. The Iraq war has revealed Bush’s moral clarity to be nothing but a mushy mirage.

The conventional wisdom among conservative commentators is that the surge is working. Critics of the war, they contend, are in a state of denial about the reductions in violence and the political progress being made. Even worse, conservative commentators insist, opponents of the war calling for a withdrawal would consign the U.S. to a humiliating defeat just when victory is within reach. Once again, so the argument goes, liberals are so blinded by their hatred of President Bush that they would hand al-Qaeda a decisive military and propaganda victory.

All of this reflects a complete misunderstanding of what is happening in Iraq. Put simply, only a small fraction of the violence in Iraq is instigated by al-Qaeda affiliated groups; the vast majority involves criminal gangs, sectarian militias, and the like fighting it out for political supremacy. The U.S. military is the only force capable of preventing Iraq from descending into a full-scale civil war that the ill-advised invasion and botched occupation precipitated in the first place.

Rampant corruption is a virtually ineradicable impediment to reconstruction and political reconciliation. Criminal enterprises and politicians are siphoning off the country’s oil revenue to line their pockets and build their power bases, which insures that there are insufficient resources to rebuild a unified and pluralistic Iraq. Violence is down for several reasons that have little to do with the surge. First, much of the ethnic cleansing has already taken place as the country has been divided up into ethnic enclaves. Second, Sunni insurgents, recognizing they were on the losing end of a civil war, have made a short-term tactical alliance with the U.S. military in the hopes of bolstering their financial and military position for the day the expect to take on the Shiite led government.

Subsidizing Sunni security forces has bought a temporary lull in violence, but it carries with it long-term costs, both to the U.S taxpayer and in so far as it amounts to arming a force opposed to the government we are counting on to keep Iraq from disintegrating. It is ironic in the extreme, of course, to see the Bush administration handing out cash to Sunni security forces patrolling neighborhoods in Iraq while at the same time millions of our fellow citizens are facing foreclosures here at home. When Americans begin to realize that we are paying former Sunni insurgents not to fight us I expect the architect of this debacle, George W. Bush, will be about as popular as Heather Mills would be at a Beatles convention.

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