The Coetzee Principle

The release of journalist Jill Carroll has understandably sent a wave of relief through all concerned observers of Iraq. Though her return to safety is a cause for celebration, some of the circumstances surrounding her release should give US policymakers pause to contemplate. The statements that she made on tape just prior to and just after her release about the “lies” of the US government and the “good treatment” afforded her by her captors were, according to Ms. Carroll herself, coerced, and should by no means be held against her. Such statements give some aid to the propaganda efforts of the insurgency, but it would be unreasoningly cruel to expect Carroll to lay down her life rather than make them.

Her captors reportedly told Carroll that they had infiltrated the Green Zone and would be watching her closely after her release. If she “cooperated” with the US embassy she would be killed. This would explain why even after her release, when she was already in the office of the “moderate” Sunni political party to whose custody she had been given, she continued to make recorded statements about being “well treated.” Her colleague at the Christian Science Monitor ultimately had to persuade her to come into the Green Zone, the place where (had she been thinking reasonably) she would have realized she would be safest. After witnessing the murder of her interpreter and having been in the life-and-death power of her captors for almost 3 months Carroll cannot be blamed for having taken their threats at face value.

Indeed, the deliberate nature of her captors’ threats and the specificity of the comments they elicited from Carroll were transparent attempts to mitigate the damage from what was ultimately a political victory for the Coalition. What is difficult to explain, however, is the tacit assistance Carroll’s captors received toward their propaganda efforts from the “moderate” political party that managed the actual exchange. Why, immediately upon arrival to “safety” was Carroll placed in front of a camera and interviewed about the treatment she had received from her captors? Though Carroll may clarify what her state of mind was after she has recovered from her ordeal, it seems likely that she was still in the very impressionable state of terror induced by her captors’ threats, and nothing had yet been done to reassure her that she was, in fact, safe. Why would her “liberators” record an interview with her before she had been securely passed into the hands of the US embassy (or at least the Iraqi security forces)? The intent may be murky (to a degree), but the effect is quite clear. The fact that Carroll repeated her statements about being “well treated” once she was already “safe” provided corroboration for the video recorded by her captors prior to her release.

Reading about these circumstances brought to mind the novel Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. In that book set in post-apartheid South Africa, the white protagonist, David Lurie, and his daughter are assaulted by a group of black men. Lurie is later shocked to discover one of the assailants at a party being hosted by his employee, a black farmer named Petrus. It turns out that the men are kin by marriage. Though shocked and angry, Lurie does not believe that a conspiracy has transpired. Rather, he deduces that he and his daughter have fallen victim to something far more “anthropological.”

The hasty interview by Jill Carroll’s “moderate” Sunni liberators may well be an example of the sort of “anthropological” occurrence Coetzee describes, and it is only one instance of many in which such “anthropological” forces have worked and are working to subvert the Coalition mission in Iraq. Sunnis who have entered the political process are almost certain to retain cultural and social ties to kin and associates fighting as part of the insurgency. Attempts to end sectarian or ethnic violence will be sabotaged by tribal allegiances, persistent blood feuds, or patterns of religious authority.

In a recent OpEd piece Thomas Friedman coined a new epithet for the Iraqi insurgency: “Islamonihilists (a term which I will confess brought The Big Lebowski immediately to my adolescent mind).” The US could not have anticipated, says Friedman, the emergence of such a foe- one that is committed only to destruction without any positive plan for what to build amid the ruins. This portrait is clearly wrong. Any serious student of Iraqi history, society, and culture should have been able to anticipate the insurgency currently faced by the emergent Iraqi government and the Coalition. There is no denying that the insurgency is tragically nihilistic in its effect, but this is because of the disparity of its constituents’ goals and the asymmetry between the insurgency’s power and that of its opponents. The insurgents do not “believe in nothing,” they believe in a whole bevy of goals, ideas, and motives. Some of these are reducible to simple self-interest as understood in a particular social and cultural context. Some of these are fantastic dreams whose impracticality is matched only by their potential destructiveness. Some of these are crypto-fascist ideologies that are truly repugnant. If the insurgents were truly “nihilists” their defeat would be a much less complicated affair. In fact, as the circumstances surrounding Jill Carroll’s release demonstrate, the insurgency draws fuel from a whole complex of historical, ideological, and “anthropological” forces that make its defeat by the US extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.

Negotiations Underway

This Sunday (3/26) a joint Iraqi-US Special Forces team conducted an assault in which 16 people were killed, 3 were wounded, and one man being held hostage was freed. According to US commanders the 16 people were insurgents, the structure in which they were held up was a secular building. According to Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr the building in question was a mosque, those killed were worshippers. One need not question the sincerity of US commanders to know that this situation does not bode well for the Coalition mission in Iraq. The whole truth of the incident may never be knowable, yet the very fact that the Coalition and the Iraqi government disagree as to whether or not casualties of the conflict were "insurgents" poses a serious conundrum that compels analysis.

There are basically three possibilities, each of which bears serious negative implications for the Coalition mission in Iraq (though to varying degrees):

1)The situation was basically as Minister Jabr and others have described it, and the joint US-Iraqi patrol accidentally targeted innocent civilians. If so the incident need not necessarily be held up as an indictment of the US military mission, it could simply be a tragic mistake induced by the fog of war. What is most troubling in this particular case, however, is that as grave a situation as such a mistake would create, this is by far the most optimistic of the three possible scenarios. If those killed on Sunday were innocent worshippers one need not dig deeply to find the source of Shi'ite anger over this incident. If any part of what US commanders currently say is true, however, then the possible motives of Shi'ite politicians like Mr. Jabr become quite complex, and none of those possibilities bode well for the US.

2)Those killed in the raid were armed members of a Shi'ite militia group (most likely Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army). If so then the other aspects of the US report were likely true- the militiamen used deadly force against the joint team and were holding an innocent (presumably Sunni Arab) detainee. The use of the term "insurgents" to describe such combatants by the US military is understandable- whatever those militiamen had done before Sunday the moment they turned their guns on US and (especially) Iraqi soldiers they became insurgents. But the strident denials and accusations of the Shi’ite political leadership underscore a troubling fact. If those “insurgents” were, in fact, Shi’ite militiamen they belonged to a constituency that in ordinary circumstances supports the nascent government and is represented within its leadership. If those constituents become “insurgents” in any significant numbers then the entire complexion of the Iraq conflict will have been completely transformed and the task of state-building will become exponentially more difficult.

3)Though scenario #2 is bad, there is one possibility which is even worse (in the sense of portending even greater difficulties for the Coalition)- that the 16 people killed in the raid were in fact Sunni Arab insurgents, and that for ulterior motives the Shi’ite political leadership is seizing upon the ambiguities of this incident to fabricate a crisis.

Of these three possibilities #2 may be judged most likely by appeal to Occam’s Razor; many dark purposes and coincidental mishaps would have to be afoot for #1 or #3 to be the “absolute truth.” Deciding which of these three scenarios is “real,” however, is not essential toward analyzing the implications of the current crisis except as a matter of degree. If the Shi’ite political leadership in Iraq felt that their political and strategic interests were completely aligned with those of the Coalition their reaction would not be this extreme even if scenario #1 were the case, and scenario #3 would be totally unimaginable. Even President Talabani’s eminently reasonable step of convening a joint Iraqi-American investigative committee would not have been necessary even in the case of scenario #1- Shi’ite leaders would have found a much less complicated way of letting the US military off the hook for a clearly regrettable mistake.

Whatever actually happened on Sunday, what is going on right now in Baghdad is very clear. A negotiation is transpiring, one between the Shi’ite political leadership and the Coalition command over control of the political and military machinery of the emergent Iraqi state. The Coalition (and behind them the governments and citizenry of the US and its allies) want to see an Iraqi government that possesses a monopoly on the use of force, that fully integrates secular and Kurdish Iraqis, and that will foster a political process that may draw Sunni Arabs away from the insurgency. The current crisis indicates that the Shi’ite political leadership are opposed to some or all of these objectives- they would preserve the independence of the Shi’ite militias from the Iraqi regular army, insist upon a cabinet and prime minister of their choosing and their constituency, and would defend their followers’ prerogative to pursue a bloody campaign of anti-Sunni sectarian violence. Determining how many of and to what degree these goals are cherished by Shi’ite leaders requires discovering how far removed their claims about Sunday’s incident diverge from actual events. Even if everything Shi’ite leaders claim about the incident is true, their strident denunciations and unequivocal political response (the Shi’ite parliamentarians’ break-off of negotiations for a new government, the Baghdad governor’s unilateral termination of US-Iraqi security coordination) send a clear message that their priorities diverge from those of the Coalition and will be acted on nonetheless.

A negotiation is in process, and it is hard to see how the Coalition can possibly come out the winner. Shi’ite leaders are playing a very strong hand- if pushed too hard they could quit the government and throw their militias into the insurgency. This would not spell absolute defeat for the Coalition, but it would exponentially complicate the political and military task at hand. The US army has defeated Shi’ite militias in the field before and would most likely do so again, but if the militias were driven underground the loss of the security shield they have been providing would leave sensitive targets like the Golden Mosque more vulnerable to attack by the Sunni insurgency, setting in motion a potentially endless vicious cycle of accelerating sectarian violence and making the strategic climate increasingly more dangerous not only for Iraqis but for Coalition forces as well.

Such a situation would obviously pose risks for the Shi’ite leadership, but they may well feel that another armed conflict with the US military will do much less to erode their position of leadership than joining the kind of government the Coalition desires would do to improve it. They may also feel that the Coalition has much more to lose from an open break with the Shi’ite leadership than vice-versa, and in this perception they would seem to be very correct. US commanders are effectively caught between Scylla and Charybdis- if they “blink” and concede Shi’ite leaders the degree of control and autonomy they demand the resulting sectarian violence will greatly deter efforts toward a political resolution of the insurgency. If they force the issue and drive the Shi’ite parties into an openly hostile posture toward the emergent government they may face the same spike in sectarian violence coupled with the lethal opposition of the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades. Looking ahead it seems certain that this negotiation instigated by Sunday’s incident can only end one way- with US officials further alienated from political control of the state-building process and military control of the counterinsurgency.

All of this raises the question of what the US should do next. One option is to call the Shi’ite leadership’s bluff and push the long-standing political agenda of the Coalition. This option is all too likely to result in the worst-case scenario described above, however. Another possibility is to back away from demands for a unity government and an end to sectarian violence on the part of the militias and continue the Coalition mission at current levels. This option is much safer in the short-term but carries with it very serious long-term risks. If the Shi’ite political leadership come to feel that they may depend on the security shield of the US army in the absence of any checks upon their political program their aggression may not ultimately be exclusively directed at their Sunni compatriots. Their confidence might lead them into policies that violently alienate the Kurdish and secular Arab constituents of the nascent government, at which point the Coalition would be faced with an irreparable political process and irredeemable strategic chaos.

Faced with these possibilities, a staged withdrawal becomes the increasingly imperative option left to the Coalition. In the short term a gradual withdrawal would likely produce a spike in insurgent violence. But in the long term a withdrawal will have two crucial effects:

1)It will drive a wedge between the most extreme elements of the Sunni insurgency led by Al Qaeda and secular Sunni Arabs with whom they are currently allied. In the face of the threat posed by the US ideological and nationalist tensions have already somewhat undermined the operational unity of the Sunni Arab insurgency, in the absence of that threat those tensions would likely cause the insurgent “coalition” to crack and hemorrhage personnel into the political process.

2)US withdrawal would undermine the secure complacency of the Shi’ite political leadership. Left to defeat the insurgency on their own they would most likely avoid alienating their secular and Kurdish governmental co-participants and rein in the bloody sectarian violence being perpetrated by the militias.

It would be alarmist to suggest that the crisis set in motion by Sunday’s incident (whatever actually occurred) spells imminent doom for the Coalition mission. Even so, it is hard to see how coming days and weeks will fail to end with the range of strategic options open to the Coalition significantly narrowed. Future historians looking back on current events may well mark this week as a crucial turning point that set the Iraq conflict moving in a fundamentally new direction.

The "Civil War" Red Herring

Discussion of late in media and government circles about whether or not Iraq is "on the brink" of civil war or will ultimately experience a "genuine civil war" has become quite surreal. All of this pondering and ruminating demonstrates the fundamental myopia of American observers of Iraq, an incapacity to see past any model in which all Iraqi actions must be understood as a response to the US occupation. If a wake-up call on this score was needed the attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra should have sufficed. Right now virtually every action undertaken by political players in Iraq is directed at other Iraqis, not the US. Even attacks on US soldiers are part of larger maneuvering to acquire purchase as the Iraqi political field realigns itself. Call it anything you like- "civil war," "internal conflict," "the Grand Waltz"- by any name the fundamental contest right now is between the Iraqis themselves, the US is largely an interested bystander.

If the Golden Mosque attack was not enough, Saddam Hussein's cynical comments at trial yesterday should be a clear indication of just how little the US factors into the current political calculations of Iraqi combatants. Hussein's call upon Iraqis to stop fighting one-another and turn their guns on the US is not only farcical but disingenuous. A report just published by the US army shows that up to the last hours of his regime Hussein remained far more fearful of his fellow Iraqis than he was of the US. Hussein's top commanders operated under the assumption that they would have access to secret stockpiles of chemical weapons. They were shocked to find out that no such stockpiles existed, and that Hussein had refused to admit as much only out of fear of uprisings in the Shi'ite south. Hussein's bluster at trial is as empty as the stockpiles of WMD's for which he was overthrown, he knows from personal experience that Iraqi factions' fear and enmity of one-another will ultimately trump their concern about the US.

The only salient questions about the current Iraqi-on-Iraqi conflict are a)how intense and destructive it will become; b)how it will ultimately be resolved. Outside groups like the US, Iran, and foreign jihadis can exert some limited influence with regard to the former question, but have virtually no control over the latter. Right now the battle lines are basically drawn between those who oppose the emergent government in Baghdad and those who accept it. Anti-government forces remain "underground," irregular, and technologically unsophisticated. There are as yet no standing "anti-government militias," nor are there likely to be as long as US forces remain in Iraq. It is uncertain, however, whether such militias might not spring into existence as soon as the US troop presence falls below a critical level. Even if such an event did not occur, having no standing militias has not prevented the anti-government insurgency from waging a horrifically violent and destabilizing campaign of terror.

In other words, the best case scenario is that the conflict in Iraq remains basically bipolar along current lines and at current levels of violence. Pronouncing that this situation is "not a civil war" is both cold comfort to those who are living through it and little help toward planning for future policy. Moreover, as "tolerable" as the current situation may be, it is very difficult to predict with any assurance that it will not get much worse. Groups that are currently participating in the political process may decide to break away and take a violently independent stand. Any number of scenarios are possible: the Mahdi Army vs. the government vs. Sunni insurgents; SCIRI vs. the Mahdi Army vs. the government vs. Sunni insurgents; SCIRI vs. the government vs. Sunni insurgents vs. the Kurdish pesh murga etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. The conflict could quickly degenerate into a fluid multipolar bloodbath akin to what Lebanon experienced in the 1980's. The key fact in contemplating all these variables is that none of these developments hinge upon how Iraqis feel about the US, all will be determined by how much (or how little) Iraqis trust and are willing to cooperate with one-another.

Being that the US has virtually no control over this latter condition, US policymakers should give up asking purely semantic questions such as "is this/will this become a civil war?" and begin focussing on what are the likeliest long-term outcomes in Iraq given the intrinsic conditions of Iraqi society and politics. In other words, no matter how violent the conflict becomes or how long it persists, what forces are likely to emerge intact once the situation stabilizes? Answering this question requires relinquishing the illusion that the US may control the long-term evolution of the Iraqi political field. Perfect predictions are impossible, but the clearest guide of what will emerge as Iraq moves forward is the state of Iraqi society and politics prior to the US invasion.

The career of Saddam Hussein provides one model of a stable homeastasis toward which Iraqi politics has gravitated in the past- an authoritarian oligarchy centered on the kinship and clan ties of a single family. That formation is not likely to recur, as the conditions which helped it gestate (the rise of the Ba'ath Party, the Cold War) are gone. The breakup of Iraq or the absorption of parts of Iraq into Iran are also unlikely, otherwise they might have occured earlier during the Iran-Iraq war.

One key figure to watch at present is Moqtada al-Sadr, as more than anyone else he excercises an authority which germinated in the social and political conditions of pre-invasion Iraq. The only person that might surpass al-Sadr in that claim is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but his authority is rooted in ancient tradition where Moqtada's represents a very current response to events and circumstances in present-day Iraq. The Sadrist movement is an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of the Arab Sh'ia community. Oppression and economic hardship combined with the charismatic leadership (and violent demise) of Moqtada's father and uncle have caused a volatile millenarian movement to coalesce among his followers. Moqtada himself does not bear any of the standard credentials of a regular Shi'ite cleric, his leadership rests entirely on the charismatic legacy of his family and the millenarian fervor of his adherents. Though novel, the deep-rootedness of al-Sadr's authority is demonstrated by his remarkable durability- he remains a key player in Iraqi politics despite having led two rebellions against the US occupation.

A close examination of al-Sadr's post-occupation career reveals the precariousness of religious leaders withn the Iraqi political field and provide a potential barometer of the fortunes of the emergent government. In the wake of the humiliation of Ba'athism Islamic religion enjoys the broadest political prestige in the wider Iraqi community, greater even than that of the emergent government and the democratic processes of which it partakes. Neither the orthodox Shi'ite clergy or Sadr's maverick community, however, stand a real chance of emerging victorious from a total contest of "all against all." Sectarian distinctions make religion as potentially divisive as it is motivational in Iraqi society, thus strategically handicapping any leader who would appeal to religion as a key to mass-mobilization.

Of all the leaders appealing to religious rhetoric and authority al-Sadr enjoyed the potential to ride his religious message the furthest, if anyone ever stood a chance of forging an Iraqi "theocracy" he did. I confess to a degree of speculation, but in much of al-Sadr's rhetoric I perceive the possibility that he was flirting with a politically instrumental act of apostasy. He seems to have envisioned a break with orthodox Shi'a and the formation of a "third way" predicated on the charismatic legacy of his own family, a new Islamic community which could integrate both Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs and disaggregate (this is key) itself from the non-Arab clerical community of Iran. Such a community would have been a very powerful force, one that could potentially have emerged victorious if a political collapse in Iraq had become severe enough.

That possibility (admittedly remote) seems to have been precluded by the Samarra mosque bombing. The bombing incited a spontaneous and brutally violent wave of anti-Sunni retribution from al-Sadr's followers. Al-Sadr himself would have been powerless to rein in his followers in the wake of the Samarra atrocity, and the resulting rift of bad blood is not likely to be bridgeable by any act of apostasy. That attack and much of the gratuitous anti-Shi'ite violence seems, in part, to have aimed at just this result- to prevent either Moqtada al-Sadr or anyone else from formulating a religious message that can bring disparate forces together across the sectarian divide.

All this is to say that the strategic valence of the Iraqi conflict is conditioned by forces that the US cannot control and to which the US is largely irrelevant. Al-Sadr's decision to remain within the political process indicates that, for the moment, the emergent Iraqi government enjoys the greatest chances of rallying the critical mass of support necessary to survive and impose a resolution in the current conflict. Al-Sadr may yet break from the government, but that decision is more likely to arise from a prior weakening of the government (through corruption or in-fighting) than to be its cause. Though this gives some cause for optimism, the very fact that the continued legitimacy and stability of the government hinges on al-Sadr's participation (and others much like him) indicates that in its final form it may be far from the model of liberal democracy hoped for by the Bush regime.

What should be clear is that the complexity of the situation in Iraq is such that the US presence cannot induce a particular or predictable outcome. The degree of violence in Iraq may rise steeply in the wake of a US withdrawal, but the resulting outcome of that violence is not likely to be very different than it would be had the US stayed longer. The ultimate fate of Iraq lies in the hands of Iraqis, the best policy the US can hope for is to help the Iraqis get wherever they are going with as little bloodshed as possible.

Fueling the Insurgency, Supporting the Troops, and the Case for Withdrawal

Josh Narins' pointed comments about my last entry on "Reading Signs in the Rubble in Iraq" (and its "Update") persuade me that I must clarify why, though I do not feel that the US is currently causing the insurgency, I yet advocate a speedy withdrawal of US forces. Josh cites General Casey's September 2005 admission that the US occupation is "fueling the insurgency." This view is difficult to contest, a fact which forces upon me the question: how does "fueling the insurgency" differ from "causing the insurgency" or "aggravating a bad situation?" If I insist (as I do) that the latter two positions are inacurate while the former has merit, is this then a study in contradiction or a pointless semantic game? I would argue not, for the following reasons:

1)One must be clear about what is meant by "fueling the insurgency." I would insist that the U.S. is fueling the insurgency principally by motivating a larger number of rank-and-file troops to join the insurgent cause. The leadership of the insurgency, both "foreign jihadists" and Iraqis have, for the most part, taken up arms for reasons independent of the U.S. occupation. The spectrum of political agents that compose the insurgency have deeply intrinsic social, economic, and ideological reasons to oppose the political order currently emergent in Baghdad, and those reasons cannot be reduced to the notion that it is a "US puppet regime."

2)Though a larger number of rank-and-file troops have swelled the ranks of the insurgency because of the US presence, the removal of that stimulus is not likely to decrease the absolute numbers of insurgents at the moment of withdrawal or anytime soon thereafter. Anyone who assumes that once the US leaves those who joined the insurgency out of anti-US anger will simply lay down their arms and go home is working with a woefully unrealistic and ahistorical model of how political and military movements evolve. Though many of the soldiers in the insurgency may not have joined for the political or ideological motivations of the insurgency's leadership, it would not take much for those leaders to persuade their followers, having secured their commitment to armed conflict, that all of them share the same intrinsic interests and that "the cause" must press forward even after the US withdraws. Even those insurgents who are not persuaded of the larger political goals of their leaders are not likely to break ranks- a sense of comradery, fear of reprisal, or sheer inertia are likely to be enough to maintain force coherence, especially if sectarian and regional animosities continue to trend upward as they have.

3)Though the presence of US troops is "fueling the insurgency," the steady application of lethal US military power is at the same time eroding the insurgency and limiting its operational freedom. At current troop levels the US will never strategically defeat the insurgency, but tactically it can hem it in and cut back its growth in one area even as it accelerates in another. Thus the assertion that the US is "fueling the insurgency" and that the US is "causing the insurgency to grow" are two different propositions. The growth of the insurgency in recent months is difficult to gauge, it is hard to develop a significant metric that would definitively indicate a trend. I have seen no evidence, however, to prove that the insurgency is growing faster than the US military's capacity to retard it or that it is growing faster than it would were the US not there at all. The clearest analysis is that of stalemate- the insurgency is growing about as fast as the US military's ability to cut it back.

Advocates of the "causing the insurgency" and the "aggravating a bad situation" positions would argue that a US withdrawal will cause the insurgency to slow or shrink, but this assertion has little empirical basis. In the immediate aftermath of a US withdrawal the insurgency will almost certainly not decrease in intensity for all of the reasons I outlined in #2, above. Moreover, movement in any number of variables over which the US has no control (the quality of leadership among insurgents, the smoothness of the political process in Baghdad) could cause the insurgency initially to grow.

All of this analysis forces the question, is there anything the US could do to proactively turn the tide in Iraq? I argued in my last post and in previous posts that yes, theoretically the US might adopt a new strategic posture that could reverse the trend of the insurgency. Such a posture would resemble what Andrew Krepenevich called an "oil spot" strategy, one which I would assert (contra Krepenevich himself) could be pursued effectively if the US force in Iraq were doubled.

Josh Nagins points out that any suggestion that an increase in troop strength would aid the situation must be looked upon skeptically, and his caveat is well taken. He points to the fact that 49% of Iraqis express no opposition to attacks upon US soldiers. One must understand, however, that "not opposing attacks against US soldiers" and "supporting the insurgency" are two different things. The various insurgent factions are pursuing a complex of programmatic goals, many of them mutually contradictory. The fact that all of them are committed to violent opposition to the Coalition creates an illusion of consensus, both among the insurgents themselves and between the insurgents and the larger Iraqi public. But the clearest contradiction of that illusion is the attack upon the Golden Mosque. Would Josh or anyone else claim that 49% of Iraqis approved of that action? This would of course be ridiculous.

All this speaks to the fact that where the insurgency is in step with general Iraqi opinion in certain realms, it is far out of step with it in others. Josh noted that 80% of the South Vietnamese population stood opposed to the US occupation of that country. The difference between 49% in the Iraqi case and 80% in the Vietnamese case may not be dismissed as incidental. Support for attacks on US soldiers falls short of an absolute majority in Iraq because the US mission complies with Iraqi aspirations in a way that it ran counter to those of the Vietnamese. In Vietnam the US was fighting to keep the Vietnamese nation partitioned, a goal that was deeply anathema to the Vietnamese people and that therefore could not have been effected through the application of any amount of US power. In Iraq, however, the US is fighting to maintain Iraqi unity, an ideal that virtually all Iraqi Arabs cherish, as demonstrated by their willingness to fight in its defense during the long Iran-Iraq War. The 49% of those who when polled voice support for attacks upon Americans is probably lower than the true number of those who are furiously angry about the US occupation. The 49% number is not higher only because some Iraqis place Iraqi unity ahead of their anger over foreign occupation. This is not to suggest that all or most Iraqis believe that the insurgency is fighting to fragment Iraq, but many do feel, with good cause, that this is a potential consequence of long-term insurgent success.

One must keep in mind about the insurgency itself that it is energized entirely by "entropic" forces to the virtual exclusion of cohesive or constructive forces. The diverse and mutually antagonistic groups that make up the insurgency thrive on sectarian animosities between Sunnis and Shi'ites, ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds, and ideological conflicts between secularists and Islamists. These same tensions, however, make it well-nigh impossible for the insurgency itself to develop a coherent program of its own. In other words, the insurgency cannot really "win" a civil war, its best hope is to cause virtually any cohesive governing body to chronically "lose." It can do this by exploiting the fissures in Iraqi society from which it draws power through provocations like the Golden Mosque bombing.

Herein lies the reasons why the US might theoretically contribute proactively to the defeat of the insurgency. As little hope as the insurgency has of actually taking over Iraq, it is devilishly hard to defeat. Virtually the only thing any force (the US or otherwise) could do to effectively contest the insurgency's anarchic onslaught is to throw up and fortify security cordons around key regions and sites of weighty symbolic significance like the Golden Mosque. If the insurgency can be prevented from launching provocative attacks it is likely to start hemmorhaging political capital and in time it will begin losing grass-roots supporters to the political process. This is in essence what Krepenevich calls the "oil spot" strategy; so-named because orderly government spreads out from the areas within the security cordons to the rest of the country like an "oil spot" expanding through a piece of cloth. I agree with Krepenevich that that strategy might be effectively pursued in defeat of the insurgency, though I would conceed that there is no telling how many months or years it would take to succeed. Moreover, I would (unlike Krepenevich) further admit that such a strategy would require twice the troops we have in Iraq right now, as the task of maintaining security cordons places a lower premium on mobility and firepower and requires a greater number of eyes and ears on the ground.

This last fact is the block upon which any plan to maintain the US troop presence in Iraq falters. If effectively prosecuting the counterinsurgency demands twice the number of troops we have now for an indeterminable period of time, we are forced to ask can we/will we make that commitment? The practical answer to either of these questions is an unequivocal no. From the very beginning the Bush administration has underestimated the difficulty of both the military challenge of controlling Iraq and the political challenge of managing public opinion about the conflict at home in the US. It is highly unlikely that the US public would ever have been willing to suffer twice the number of casualties we have suffered thus far, and any hope that they might support such a sacrifice was squandered by early Bush regime rhetoric about easy victory, WMD's, connections to Al Qaeda, and "mission accomplished." Most of the US public has lost faith in the Bush administration's competence to conduct the occupation of Iraq at current troop levels, any move to increase, much less double troop strength would cause a complete political meltdown here at home, thus precipitating precisely the immediate withdrawal so decried by supporters of the war.

Once one accepts that the US could only contribute to the defeat of the insurgency by doubling its troop presence and that that is a political impossibility the case for withdrawal becomes irrefutable. In the final analysis the struggles over when or how the Coalition withdraws or over whether the insurgency contracts or expands are both preliminaries to the real contest in Iraq. The real contest is over the final shape of the Iraqi state and over the distribution of powers and resources within the Iraqi nation. That contest is deferred until either a)the US commits the troops and resources necessary to genuinely participate in it (an impossibility) or b)the US withdraws from Iraq. The occupation of Iraq at current troop levels is a potentially endless stalemate, real change in Iraq awaits the break in that stalemate by one means or another.

The level of destructiveness of the Iraq conflict is likely to escalate in the immediate aftermath of a US withdrawal, but that fact is not in and of itself an argument against such a move. Indefinite stalemate is no more politically sustainable in the US than a doubling of troop strength, thus withdrawal is inevitable. The spike in violence after a US withdrawal is a "hard medicine (I am sensible of the distastefulness of referring to real human tragedy in such glib terms, but I can think of no better expression to convey my meaning)" that Iraq will have to take sooner or later, the best way the US can minimize the suffering of the Iraqi people is to break the stalemate sooner rather than later and in an orderly fashion (as opposed to the panicked rush to the exits that would follow a true political meltdown at home).

Opponents of the withdrawal might object that it could potentially lead to an insurgent victory, but there is no merit to this case. Once both the "fuel" provided to and the deterrence imposed upon the insurgency by the US occupation are removed, the insurgents will be left to sink or swim for themselves in the turbulent waters of Iraqi society and politics. Though the insurgency draws upon powerful entropic forces that might sustain it for a long while, its complete inability to produce a coherent program for a united Iraqi government makes their ultimate defeat inevitable. This fact more than any other argues compellingly for the wisdom of withdrawal.

Beyond this, there is one other condition that argues irrefutably for withdrawal, and this was my principal motivation for including an "update" to my last post. Though in writing about the Iraq conflict I am prone to discussing the US military in coldly factual and statistical terms, we must all remember that behind those facts and statistics are real human beings that are suffering and dying in our name and at our behest. However much one may have supported the initial invasion of Iraq, one must concede that it is fundamentally unfair to call upon our men and women in uniform to prosecute a mission that is locked in stalemate. If one accepts that the final result of the Iraq conflict will be similar whether the US withdraws over the next one year or ten, one is forced for the sake of our troops and the obligation we as a nation owe them to acknowledge the moral imperative to withdraw sooner rather than later.

Reading Signs in the Rubble in Iraq: Update

Nicholas Kristof reports in today's New York Times on a poll taken by Zogby of 944 soldiers currently serving in Iraq. Asked "How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?" 72% answered that U.S. troops should pull out within one year, only 23% said that they should stay "as long as necessary." 2/3 of those polled said that "to control the insurgency we need to double the level of ground troops and bombing missions." I take this poll to read that most of our soldiers serving in Iraq would agree with me- since the only militarily effective option (doubling force size) is a political impossibility withdrawal should happen now and should proceed quickly. Our soldiers have served valiantly, well, and at terrible and growing cost. Even if keeping current force levels in Iraq could indefinitely preserve a status quo that is better than what would follow a withdrawal, it is simply unfair of those of us who continue to live in comfort to force that sacrifice upon our men and women in uniform.

Reading Signs in the Rubble in Iraq

The destruction Wednesday of the Golden Mosque in Samarra gives the lie to myths from both "the left" and "the right" (of the US political field) concerning the war in Iraq. The complete devastation of not only a Shi'ite holy site but an architectural work of art presents an unequivocal message to anyone who is paying the slightest attention. Like the destruction of the ancient Buddhist collosi by the Taliban or the felling of the Twin Towers by Al Qaeda, this crime was the work of those who will accord no dignity or value to any human achievement that does not square precisely with their very narrow theological vision.

Claims from "the left" that "we (the US) are causing the insurgency" are shown false by the attack on the Golden Mosque. By calling this claim "a myth" I am not focusing on the more limited sense of the US having caused the insurgency by the very act of invasion, but on the broader notion that the insurgency continues only because of the US presence and would evaporate were the Coalition to withdraw. The Golden Mosque exists in a symbolic universe of which the US is virtually no part, its destruction has grievous consequences that will resonate far beyond any time threshold for a US withdrawal. Nothing about this atrocity can be interpreted as a response to foreign occupation, and it is preposterous to suppose that those who committed it would somehow lose the motivation to do so had the US already withdrawn.

Even before the Samarra bombing the ongoing distress of Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll gave the lie to "leftist" myths about the insurgency. Perplexed comments about how Ms. Carroll was "the wrong" person for insurgents to kidnap woefully misreads the nature of the insurgency and the rationale behind its strategy and tactics. The fact that Ms. Carroll wrote pieces sympathetic to the Iraqi people and exposing the suffering war and invasion has brought to them means very little to the insurgents. If anything, it makes Ms. Carroll a more appealing target, because her dilemma creates confusion and demoralization in a US public trying to make sense of the conflict. Whether or when the US withdraws matters much less to the insurgency than insuring that all aspects of the Coalition occupation are conducted in as disorganized and ineffective a manner as possible, and confounding any attempt by the US public to rationally comprehend what is going on in Iraq helps sow the seeds of chaos and discord.

The attack on the Golden Mosque sends a different kind of message serving complimentary ends. Where the Carroll kidnapping creates confusion and dissonance, the Samarra attack aims at brutal transparency- it precisely targets one of the deepest fissures in Iraqi society. Taken together both crimes demonstrate a truth that the US leadership and public seem slow to grasp: this conflict is no longer about "us," and in a certain fundamental sense it never was.
Here is where cherished myths of the "right" may be seen fallen amid the rubble of the Golden Mosque. First of these is the notion that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was ever a vital or effective response to 9/11. If one asked US security analysts in 2002 what precautions were being taken to guard against Al Qaeda attacks upon Shi'ite holy sites one would have been greeted with a look of total incomprehesion. By taking upon itself the custodianship of Iraqi society the US and its allies have effectively increased their scope of liabilities without any corresponding increase in assets. The invasion has unleashed forces within Iraq and the greater Middle East that the US does not fully understand and is ill-prepared to control.

Beyond this, where the "left" propounds the myth that the US is causing the insurgency, the "right" clings to the myth that it is within the power of the US to end it. President Bush routinely insists that he will not be held to an "artificial political timetable" in deciding when US troops will be withdrawn. This assertion, however, elides the fact that the Bush regime is itself already in thrall to a tactical and strategic posture artificially dictated by politics. As I have written in previous posts the only effective application of US military power at this juncture would be to guard against tragedies like the Golden Mosque bombing, but effectively executing that mission would require a massive increase of US troops in Iraq. The Bush administration remains wedded to a "search and destroy" strategy that relies on the superior firepower and mobility of US troops, despite the fact that such tactics have not retarded the insurgency's ability to commit atrocities like the Samarra attack. This decision is driven principally by politics, since an increase in US troop deployment would create a corresponding and deeply unpopular increase in US casualties, thus the Bush administration's decrial of "political timetables" is either hypocritical or deluded.

It is too early to predict what the disfigured dome of the Golden Mosque portends for the future of Iraq. Even Saddam Hussein did not so gratuitously profane Shi'ite holy sites, it remains to be seen whether the fabric of Iraqi society can withstand the stress of this kind of barbarity. The US is certain to emerge as a loser in this instance, though. Already Iraqis on both sides of the sectarian divide are blaming the US for allowing this atrocity to occur. Whether that judgment is fair or not it is entirely predictable, and it forces the question of how much good the US presence can effect and how much longer it should continue. In strategic terms the choice is clear- either the US must commit the number of troops to the Iraq occupation sufficient to provide security to all vulnerable sites of significance like the Golden Mosque or it must draw down quickly and transfer all apparent and real responsibility for security to the emergent Iraqi government. It was never likely that the US public could be persuaded to support the former option, and early Bush regime rhetoric about "mission accomplished" makes it now a political impossibility.

A "Deep Historical" and Pangeographic View of the Cartoon Fracas

The uproar over the Jyllands Posten "Muhammed cartoons" is the latest chapter in the tragic-comic deterioration of relations between "the Islamic world" and "the West." At this point questions about the right of Jyllands Posten to publish the cartoons and the nature of the response in the Islamic community have been discussed ad absurdum in the blogosphere and beyond. Having come to this party too late and having too little of profit (or Prophet) to say, I must restrict my comments to the "Western" reaction to this fracas. Violence and death threats are obviously a vile response to a series of cartoons, but little progress will be made by fighting intolerance with more intolerance. Though I sympathize with the civil-libertarian impulses behind a website like The Face of Muhammed,it does little to foster mutual understanding. Pronouncements like-

For 1400 years, Islam has waged war on all surrounding non-Muslim civilizations. During the course of history, Christianity was reformed, Europe colonized the world and set it free again, dictators lived, reigned and died, and totalitarian regimes emerged and vanished.

But Islam stayed, unreformed. And today, it imprisons more than 1 billion people, moderate and radical souls alike, in a huge gap of difference to the rest of us. Across political divides, across national boundaries, across various degrees of freedom, across race, people or religion, black or white, rich or poor; it stands out as our opposite. Only Muslim reformists seek to lessen the gap. And their voices are quickly silenced.

In modern times, waves of immigrants from Muslim countries have entered Europe. All European countries have been subject to islamization; the process of slowly incorporating Islamic values and Muslim customs into our way of life. Far East countries like India, Thailand, Indonesia and China are experiencing the Muslim Jihad. Israel lives with it. America feels it. Africa suffers from it, and is too weak from disease and poverty to resist.

It is suddenly coming to our attention that Islam is not, cannot, and will not be integrated or assimilated to the values of freedom and democracy. Islam is not only a religion; it is a totalitarian and expansionistic political ideology.

-harken back to hysterical 19th century rhetoric against the "Yellow Peril" or the "Elders of Zion." The idea that Europe and Christendom have evolved and changed while Islam has remained static is fundamentally ridiculous, as is the notion that while Islam "has waged war on all surrounding non-Muslim societies" Europe has only been so benign as to "coloniz[e] the world and set it free again." One would imagine that the Crusades had never happened and the British Raj was a giant tea party.

Only marginally better are more academic flights of ethnocentrism like this one by Theodore Dalrymple:

Anyone who lives in a city like mine and interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is anything intrinsic to Islam—beyond the devout Muslim’s instinctive understanding that secularization, once it starts, is like an unstoppable chain reaction—that renders it unable to adapt itself comfortably to the modern world. Is there an essential element that condemns the Dar al-Islam to permanent backwardness with regard to the Dar al-Harb, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically than the Nokia telephone company of Finland?

I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islam’s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.

This kind of pseudo-historical analysis falls flat on many fronts, foremost of which is the latent assumption that a comparison between Christianity and Islam can account for the sum total of the human experience. Many, many societies and cultural traditions did not develop a "distinction between church and state." China did very well without it until 1911, Judaism was no different than Islam in this regard (Moses provided the model of a prophet-king Dalrymple perceives in Muhammed).

Moreover, Dalrymple vastly overstates the positive light in which Christianity and "Western" society may rest after a genuine historical comparison to Islamic civilization. Dalrymple complains of a lack of seperation between church and state in Islam, but temporal and religious authority were much more distinct in the Islamic caliphate of medieval Spain than in the Christian kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella which succeeded it. The caliphate saw a golden age of interfaith tolerance and flourishing humanistic culture, the Christian era brought forced conversion, expulsion, and the Inquisition.

Indeed, for most of the past millenium Islamic societies were far more open and tolerant of religious and intellectual diversity than those in the "West." Conversion under threat of death made sense within a Christian theology, as the flames of Hell awaited infidels sooner or later. By contrast Muslims were specifically forbidden to use such methods upon "People of the Book," a designation originally meant for Jews and Christians but ultimately extended to Zoroastrians and Hindus.

"Westerners" are prone to adopt an air of superiority because the forces that condition global modernity- industrialization, nationalism, market capitalism- first took root in Europe and the Americas. But a complacent feeling of superiority conveniently overlooks the facts that a)none of these "Western" achievements would have been possible absent much that was learned or acquired from Asian, African, Native American and Islamic civilizations; b)these forces have transformed the world at a terrible cost. The same societies that cultivated the "freedom of the press" so vaunted (and so abused) by Jyllands Posten also gave rise to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Holocaust, two World Wars, the Soviet Gulag, the massacre at Srebenica, etc., etc., etc. It is difficult to find a crime committed by an Islamic society to match the worst offenses of "the West." The economic and technological conditions of Islamic societies may have changed more slowly than those of "the West," but at the same time their histories have been marked by less violence. Where is the Islamic Antietam or Verdun? "The Face of Muhammed" would label Islam a lumbering, changeless monolith, but can its author have forgotten that some of the worst totalitarianisms produced by "Western civilization" only fell 17 years ago?

Finally, all of the lamentations about poor, changeless Islam ignore the intense diversity of Islamic communities around the world today. The most egregious violence engendered by "Cartoongate" has transpired in the Arab world, but that community houses less than 1/4 of the world's Muslims. The largest Muslim communities in the world are in South and Southeast Asia (in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia...), and in those societies the response to the Jyllands Posten flap has been far less extreme. Do these responses manifest Islam's incompatibility with modernity? Of course not. The Jyllands Posten cartoons, all considerations of "religious taboos" aside, were genuinely offensive. The kind of anger on display in much of the Islamic world is not far from what a series of cartoons featuring hook-nosed, money-counting rabbis would occasion in the world Jewish community.

Reductionist analyses like those of "The Face of Muhammed" or Theodore Dalrymple recapitulate the same error of the original Jyllands Posten cartoons. To caricaturize Islam as regressive or incompatible with modernity is to play into the hands of those who would truly like to make it so. If Europeans and Americans keep sermonizing Muslims about their chronic inferiority, more and more of them, out of sheer exasperation, will turn to those like Osama bin Laden who will feed them equally ridiculous pabulum about Islamic superiority. To deny that some aspects or segments of the current Islamic community should change would obviously be wrong, but insisting that Islam itself precludes any community from ever changing is patently ridiculous. No one living in Ferdinad and Isabella's Spain could ever predict that that society would embrace the liberal ideals championed by Jyllands Posten. Declaring any culture or society absolutely incapable of change is to deny the humanity of its inhabitants, and dehumanizing others is the surest route to strife and sorrow.

Hand-Wringing and Indignation Over Hamas

Hamas' victory in Palestinian elections will no doubt injure the peace process and bring further suffering to both Israel and Palestine. Try as one might, it is hard to peer ahead and see a good future outcome from these events. Even so, the tone of U.S. and European news coverage of Hamas' electoral triumph is benighted and egregiously biased. Again and again one reads of the "mistake" Palestinian voters have made and how they must be shown that their choices have "consequences." As if they can possibly be in the dark on that score.

Responsible international governments will not be able to negotiate in good faith with a Hamas-led government as long as it remains constitutionally committed to the destruction of Israel. Hamas' victory thus gives them an effective veto over the peace process, unless and until Hamas reforms its charter all progress along the "road map" is halted. Pundits and magi across the globe are shaking their heads and decreeing that Palestinian voters should have known as much, now they will have to reap the whirlwind. But Palestinians went into voting booths having read the same newscasts that the rest of the "shocked" world had, declaring that though Hamas would poll strongly Fatah would emerge with a ruling majority, so interpreting this last election as a popular anti-peace mandate is a fallacy.

Moreover, no one that I have read or heard has even contemplated putting some of the blame for Hamas' victory where it obviously belongs- on the Bush and Sharon administrations. Ariel Sharon's bold realignment of the Israeli political field demonstrated that he was earnest in his moves toward Palestinian statehood. Even so, his policy of unilateral disengagement sent a clear message to Palestinians to which they were obviously paying attention- it does not matter who is in charge on the Palestinian side, Israel will pursue whatever policy it deems best. If the composition of Palestinian leadership can have no influence on Israel's actions, then Palestinian voters can not be wholly blamed for disregarding how their vote might impact the peace process in the long term.

In more instrumental terms the Sharon policy helped engineer Fatah's defeat through cloaking it in a mantle of impotence. To the extent that pundits around the world will grant any rationality to Palestinian voters at all, they bemoan the fact that Fatah's inveterate corruption has led to this dark day. Corrupt Fatah is, but I challenge anyone to find a living member of Fatah who can compete with Jack Abramoff for sheer unscrupulousness. However corrupt Fatah may be, their poll returns might have been much higher had the recent Israeli pullout from Gaza not shown them to be totally irrelevant to that process. Indeed, the unilateral nature of the pullout made it a PR bonanza for Hamas, enabling them to go from hiding underground to parading armed through the streets overnight, thus taking credit for an event in which Fatah was given no "sound bite" presence whatsoever.

The U.S. Bush administration must share in this blame, for though they trumpet the value of democratization in the Middle East they have done very little to proactively nurture it (and yes, I am counting the policy in Iraq). If democratization is truly a cherished Bush goal, they should have understood that a Hamas victory could be disastrous to that end and taken a much more active role in Israel/Palestine affairs much earlier. Instead, the Bush administration created no genuine Israel/Palestine policy of its own but gave its imprimatur to every Israeli policy that have helped bring about Fatah's electoral defeat. Hamas is now in a position not only to derail the peace process, but to set back the cause of democracy in the Arab world by decades. If, having cast their ballots in one of the most democratic elections the Arab world has experienced in recent years Palestinians are then made to suffer (as is inevitable should Hamas prove intransigent), what other message can Arabs around the world possibly receive but that democracy is a pointless charade?

In the end blame for Hamas' victory extends beyond the Bush and Sharon administrations and the Palestinian voters themselves. Blame falls on all of us who have been observing events in the Middle East and have failed to perceive that this might occur. The lesson of the Palestinian election is the same as that of other events in the region- unilateralism is a failed policy and a doomed approach to reform. If the U.S. and Europe want to engage the Middle East in a way that will bring progressive and meaningful change it must do so in concert with autonomous and independent partners in the Arab community. Depriving Middle Eastern people of agency will produce the same negative results as would occur if the U.S. or Europe were treated with corresponding paternalism.

Critical Moment for Israel

The stroke which has so severely incapacitated Ariel Sharon this week is a tragedy not only for him personally but for all of Israel and Palestine. Flawed as they may have been, Prime Minister Sharon's policies had restored forward momentum to a peace process that was fatally stalled, and his centrist Kadima Party seemed poised to win an electoral mandate to continue that progress. The sudden departure of Mr. Sharon from Israeli politics creates a crisis of uncertainty that could set the peace process back years.

By all reports, the Bush administration is sensible to the urgency of the situation. Secretary of State Rice has canceled planned overseas trips to remain in Washington and monitor the evolving Israeli scene. The loss of Mr. Sharon will hopefully shock the Bush White House out of the passivity that has marked its orientation toward Israel/Palestine since assuming office. U.S. influence is limited at this juncture, but it is critical that the White House use all of its powers to carry the peace process forward through this perilous transition.

What can the U.S. do, and what should U.S. policy be at this point? The U.S. cannot guarantee that Sharon's centrist Kadima coalition will remain intact or that its leadership will remain committed to Sharon's policy line should it do so. It can and must, however, continue to assert its traditional role as broker in the Israel/Palestine peace process to assure that the principles laid down at Oslo are not entirely abandoned.

The urgency of the crisis engendered by Prime Minister Sharon's affliction is exacerbated by the imminent and critically important elections to be held within the domain of the Palestinian authority on January 25. These elections are already clouded by doubts on many counts, some of which are beyond the control of the U.S. or Israel. Hamas seems likely to draw a substantial portion of the vote, an outcome that cannot bode well for the peace process.

Nonetheless, this likelihood does not make it wise or right for the Israeli government to obstruct the elections in any shape or form. Whatever success Mr. Sharon's unilateralism has enjoyed, Israelis will ultimately require a legitimate and authoritative Palestinian counterpart if the peace process is ever to produce a stable and postive outcome. Moves by the Israeli government to prevent polling in East Jerusalem are destructive of that end. Negotiations up to this point have established that East Jerusalem will and must be part of a future Palestinian State if it is to be geographically, demographically, and economically viable. To behave now as if the status of East Jerusalem is still in play is to throw the peace process in reverse and to undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian authority just when the peace process most requires that it be bolstered.

The U.S. should use any and all influence it can bring to bear to ensure that Palestinians are allowed to poll in East Jerusalem on January 25. A decline in the unity and focus of the progressive forces on the Israeli side of the peace process requires that there be a countervailing rise in unity and focus on the Palestinian side. Preventing polling of Palestinians in East Jerusalem will only erode the legitimacy and efficacy of the Palestinian authority at a moment when both Israel and Palestine can least afford such a contigency.

The Speech That Should Have Been

Yesterday's election in Iraq gives new cause for hope in the ultimate success of the Coalition mission. By all initial accounts the vote transpired even more smoothly than the elections of January that occasioned so much optimism. This latest round of voting is even more promising, as the large Sunni turnout opens new potential for that community to be drawn away from the insurgency and into the political process.

Against this context even opponents of the war must concede that President Bush's series of four speeches bode some good. Even if one feels (as I do) that the invasion was a mistake, the return of Iraq to stability and peace is obviously in the interests of the world at large, and the sustainment of US public support for the Coalition mission is essential to that end. In this sense the speech series obviously achieved some effect, polls show that US public apprehension about the Iraq conflict has decreased (marginally, but measurably) in recent weeks. Though the speeches themselves contained much that may be dismissed as empty rhetoric, in all fairness they displayed more candor than we have ever seen from this administration on the issue of Iraq.

Even so, I would predict that the morale-boosting effect of the speeches will be short-lived, and that their ultimate impact will be, on balance, more negative than positive. Pundits have pointed to distortions and ellisions within the speeches, but it is not for these that I would take the President to task. Having had such a complete void of candor from this administration, I can no longer evince surprise when it finally emerges within very strict limits. Rather, it is the overall logical thrust of the President's "plan for victory" that I find ill-conceived and rhetorically ill-advised.

The administration's division of the Coalition mission into military, economic, and political aspects is in itself sound, but in all these arenas the President described a process in which the US has far more control than is at all possible. This thematic message pervaded all four speeches, but a few examples may illustrate both its flaws and its dangers. On the political front the President invoked the example of Japan:

"After World War II, President Harry Truman believed that the way to help bring peace and prosperity to Asia was to plant the seeds of freedom and democracy in Japan. Like today, there were many skeptics and pessimists who said that the Japanese were not ready for democracy. Fortunately, President Harry Truman stuck to his guns. He believed, as I do, in freedom's power to transform an adversary into an ally. And because he stayed true to his convictions, today Japan is one of the world's freest and most prosperous nations, and one of America's closest allies in keeping the peace. The spread of freedom to Iraq and the Middle East requires the same confidence and persistence, and it will lead to the same results."

Democracy in Iraq is a laudable goal, and I agree with the President that it may ultimately be possible. But if and when it does happen, it will be because the Iraqis themselves, in a time and manner particular to their volition and situation, bring it to fruition. It is a mistake to assert that the US "plant[ed] the seeds of freedom and democracy in Japan," or that the current Japanese political system is wholly an American imposition. Japan enjoyed a period of robust liberal democracy during the late Taisho era (1911-1925), it was only after the advent of the Great Depression that it experienced a slide into militant autocracy. The post-war democratization of Japan was as much a return to normalcy as a novel restructuring. The proof of this is the counter-case of South Korea. That country was garrisoned by the US as intensely for as long a duration as Japan, yet it remained a brutal police state until recent decades. If democracy could be imposed by US power that process should have transpired at the same pace in both Japan and South Korea. The disparity of these two cases demonstrates that if and when democracy emerges it does so on the timetable dictated by the intrinsic social and political conditions of the country in which it occurs.

Turning to Iraq, it is clear that though yesterday's elections are a hopeful sign, the political road ahead is highly unpredicable and likely to be fraught with conflict and digressions. Too many variables completely beyond the control of US power remain in play for anyone to speak with any confidence about what the political situation in Iraq will be from month to month. Whatever the conceptual merits of the institutions currently under construction in Baghdad (and many Iraqi observers express dismay that they are dangerously flawed from the outset), in practice they will only become as efficacious as the elected Iraqi leadership make them. Much hinges on the willingness and commitment of Iraqi leaders to operate in good faith within the institutional parameters they themselves have laid down.

Though one need not be gratuitously pessimistic, it would be foolhardy to deny that powerful forces of sectarianism, ethnicity, ideology, tribalism, and regional tension militate against a happy outcome. Already there are troubling signs, such as raids by US soldiers that revealed secret Interior Ministry detention centers at which Sunni detainees had been tortured by Shi'ite paramilitary commandos. Only a few such instances in which Iraqi leaders display a willingness to abuse or abandon the strictures of the constitutional order could cause the legitimacy and functional integrity of the new Iraqi government to completely collapse. This is not to suggest that such a collapse is inevitable or that even if it occurred it would preclude the possibility of democracy in Iraq altogether. One must admit, however, that the road to a stable and free Iraq may be a long and hard one, and the US has no control whatsoever over how long and hard it becomes.

On the military side, President Bush laid down this strategic principle in his first speech at Annapolis: "As Iraqi forces take responsibility for more of their own territory, coalition forces can concentrate on training Iraqis and hunting down high-value targets, like the terrorists Zarqawi and his associates." Here again the President's strategy assumes a far greater degree of control than the US will ever achieve over the strategic situation in Iraq. As I have stated in previous posts, the combat-readiness of Iraqi forces will not evolve along a schedule laid down by US policymakers, it will depend on the pace at which the Iraqi government establishes its authority and legitimacy.

More than this, the notion that US forces will ever be freed to "pursue high value targets" rests upon a bevy of logical oversights and miscalculations. The very concept of "high value targets" begs the question "high value to whom?" In coming months the nascent Iraqi government is not likely to make the same distinction that US policymakers do, between those insurgents who are motivated by purely local regional or sectarian grievances and those like Zarqawi who are part of a larger global conspiracy aimed (in part at least) at the US. The Iraqi government is certain to view any and all insurgents as "high value targets," and may well resent the notion that US forces remaining on Iraqi soil focus their efforts only on those combatants deemed particularly dangerous to the US. Such a strategic realignment would certainly strain relations between the US military and its Iraqi hosts, eroding the already very limited influence that US policymakers have in all arenas of the Iraqi scene.

Even if such tensions were not a concern, the plan is of itself tactically impracticable. Since the beginning of the insurgency US forces have been hampered by their relative lack of linguistic and cultural skills essential to gathering intelligence and identifying insurgents. Given this fact, the notion that the same US forces will somehow be able to isolate one small segment of the insurgency as targets is absurd. That task would in any case depend upon the assistance of Iraqi forces in gathering and assessing intelligence, and again Iraqi forces are not likely to blithely lead their American partners only to the targets of US interest.

The "high value target" principle moreover bears distressing implications about the administration's ultimate intentions in Iraq. It would seem to suggest that they remain determined to continue the Coalition occupation until Iraq has been cleared of Al-Qaeda affiliates. Such a plan holds out very little hope of a "light at the end of the tunnel." Even if key leaders like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are captured in coming months, Al-Qaeda's foothold in Iraq will not be dislodged until the new Iraqi government achieves a position of unassailable legitimacy and stability, and that process is likely to take many years and require the exit of US forces. A determination to keep US forces in Iraq until Al-Qaeda is wholly gone is a recipe for a viscious-cyclical quagmire.

Given all these perils, the President would have been well-advised to give a very different speech or series of speeches. Exhorting the American public to the possibility of victory in Iraq is all well and good, but that victory, if and when it comes, will be of Iraqi, not US making, and may fall far short of what Americans would consider a "rosy" outcome. There are good arguments for keeping US forces in Iraq a while longer (how much longer is open to debate), but if the President expects the American people to accept those arguments he should admit to them that much of what happens in Iraq in the months and years to come remains beyond the control of the US. If some cataclysms do in fact occur in the road ahead, US support for the Coalition mission will only remain steady if Americans are frankly and openly warned of their potential. Though Bush's speeches evinced more candor than he has ever expressed, they fell far short of the degree of candor that will be required if the Coalition mission in Iraq is to remain politically sustainable.

The Future of China, as Seen from Taiwan (and Tibet, and Xinjiang, and....)

My last post was read (I am happy to note) by a number of critical eyes across the blogosphere, particularly Michael Turton in The View from Taiwan. I do not have many objections to Michael's perspective, except that he seems to be arguing against a case I did not make. My purpose was never to argue for the naturalness or even desirability of reunification with mainland China for the people of Taiwan, my post was commenting exclusively on the effect that cross-Strait interaction is likely to have on the political culture of China. In particular, I would not contradict Michael's assertion that-

"[E]ven China becoming a democracy would [not] entice Taiwan into the Chinese political embrace. One, and only one thing will create 'peaceful' union between China and Taiwan: the Taiwanese belief that China is willing to commit murder and mayhem on an island-wide scale, coupled with the calculation that they are unwilling to accept such destruction in exchange for their independence, that will cause them to pack up their tents and set out the white flag."

I would only add to Michael's observation that a)the Taiwanese people are not wrong in their belief that China is willing to commit murder and mayhem on an island-wide scale; b)nothing, not even China becoming a democracy will decrease China's willingess to use extreme force to prevent formal Taiwanese independence.

I must underscore that I am speaking in a completely non-normative mode. I do not approve of China's willingness to use force against Taiwan. No amount of disapproval upon my part or anyone else's can change the brute fact of Chinese nationalism, however, or the political realities to which it gives rise. As I have stated in earlier posts, the deep-seated nationalist aspirations of the Chinese people preclude their ever accepting a formal Taiwanese declaration of independence. Even in a China that was fully democratic and in which the CCP no longer existed a Taiwanese declaration of independence could only lead to a cross-Strait war. No mainland Chinese government could survive the political firestorm that would follow acquiescence to such an event.

That being said, it is also true (as I clearly stated in my last post) that Taiwan has had its own president, legislature, and judiciary, its own body of civil and criminal law, and its own military for over 50 years. It is not reasonable to expect Taiwan, having enjoyed de facto sovereignty for so long, to revert to being a mere "province" of China. What then, is the way forward? The world (as world peace and prosperity do in many ways hinge upon peace in the Taiwan Strait) seems to be at an impasse.

There is one solution that, though it would require extraordinary forebearance and compromise to be effected, might at once both preserve the dignity of Taibei and resolve many of the structural impediments hobbling Beijing. As I stated in my last post, one of the chief difficulties China must overcome to preserve its stability and prosperity is the supercentralization of its internal political structure. Beijing can not exercise the kind of micromanagerial control relegated to it by the PRC system over the provinces of China, so that even as the Chinese economy expands its progress is retarded by ever-acclerating irrationality, inefficiency, and waste. Though large urban movements as occurred in 1989 have not recurred, local unrest is becoming ever more frequent and destructive in rural areas.

China's only hope of avoiding cataclysmic meltdown is to opt for an eventual program of decentralization. All of the provinces of China must ultimately enjoy a great deal of autonomy and independence from Beijing- even more autonomy than the 50 states of the U.S. do from Washington, as each province is geographically, socially, and demographically more complex than even the largest U.S. state. As this process of decentralization occurs (assuming for the moment that the best-case scenario arrives), the question of the non-provincial territory of the PRC (the so-called "autonomous regions") will naturally come into play.

Beijing is no more likely to ever grant Tibet, Inner Mongolia, or Xinjiang total independence than it is to Taiwan. Even so, it is not inconceivable that a reformed Chinese government might accede to a "bimodal" polity. In this scheme the 22 historical provinces of China would be fully integrated into a Chinese Federation. The autonomous regions of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia (Ningxia and Guangxi too, should they so desire) would be bound more loosely into a Greater Chinese Commonwealth. Commonwealth members would have many of the powers of sovereignty (thus the Dalai Lama could return to Tibet, Xinjiang could resolve its own policy toward Uighur language and Islam, etc.), they would only defer to Beijing on matters of foreign policy and defense.

If Taiwan were to join such a system as a Commonwealth member it could retain its own institutions and sovereign independence, and would benefit from the lowering of all logistical impediments to cross-Strait trade. This might seem like an impossibly optimistic scenario, but international trends such as that exemplified by the EU demonstrate that it is the downhill slope of history. A Greater Chinese Commonwealth is no more intrinsically unlikely than a European Union, it only seems so because where Europe had historically been artificially hyper-fragmented China has been artificially hyper-united. If despite centuries of destruction and hardship Europeans have finally moved toward a more rational reconciliation of disparate sovereignties, it is not too much to hope that China, whose suffering has been no less intense, might make an analogously rational move (albeit in, superficially at least, the opposite direction).

The Coming (Knock on Wood) Taiwanization of China

Speaking in Japan this week President Bush urged China to look to Taiwan as a model of political democratization. Though there are few occasions this is so, on this score the President and I agree. Taiwan gives the lie to any cultural-reductionist claims that democracy is incommensurate with Chinese civilization. When I first arrived in Taiwan as a student in 1987 martial law had just been lifted and the island was still a single-party state. Today Taiwan is among the most robust democracies on earth, a fundamental restructuring that was achieved despite profound diplomatic isolation and unrelenting intimidation from the Goliath across the Strait.

Though the success of the democratization of Taiwan is undeniable, the prospects for the "Taiwanization" of China are less than obvious. Within the first week of moving into the men's dormitory at Tunghai Univesity in 1987 I returned to my room to find that my American roommate Doug had been collared by a young student in the army officer's training corps who was earnestly delivering a sermon on cross-straits politics. He explained that the situation today was analogous to the days of the early Roman Empire. Though the Christians had been a tiny, persecuted minority then they eventually were able to convert the entire realm, and the people and government of Taiwan would transform China through a comparably subtle organic process.

Doug and I smirked. At the time it seemed like more of the patriotic pabulum dished out by Taiwanese leaders at state occasions, when speeches still regularly referred to the imminent day that the army would "retake the mainland." Taiwanese leaders no longer indulge in that kind of rhetorical bravado, but as Taiwan's political system and economy continue to thrive the picture that young officer painted looks less and less fantastic.

Taiwanization seems more and more likely at least in part because it is already under way. As China's economy has liberalized and cross-strait tensions have cooled (albeit incrementally) the PRC has become a major target of Taiwanese investment capital. At least a quarter of a million Taiwanese businessmen and women are resident in Shanghai, billions of Taiwanese dollars have built factories and office buildings across Southern China. Just as Taiwanese capital has flowed to China, mainland citizens have become increasingly enthusiastic consumers of Taiwanese products. Taiwanese pop music, movies, and snack foods have become ubiquitous in the PRC both north & south.

With such an ever-increasing volume of economic intercourse one can only wonder how long it can fail to slide over into the political realm, especially given that both governments remain, in name at least, dedicated to a policy of "eventual reunification." Indeed, such political intercourse has proven unavoidable. The PRC government particularly is in some respects hostage to its commitment to reunification, a condition clearly ilustrated by September's visit to Beijing by Taiwanese intellectual and parliamentarian Li Ao. Li Ao has been one of the most articulate and effective advocates of reunification on the Taiwanese political scene, a fact which no doubt inspired the PRC government to invite him as a state guest. One can only imagine their chagrin when in a speech at Beijing University Li launched into scathing critique of the anti-democratic nature of the PRC government and berated the school's faculty for lacking the courage to dissent.

The CCP fell victim to one of the enduring ironies of cross-strait politics- the constituency on Taiwan that is most ardently pro-unification is also most zealously anti-communist. Beijing's leaders cannot be ignorant of this fact or have had any doubts about Li Ao's political opinions- they must have been counting on some impulse to courteousy or political expendiency to ameliorate his tone. Li's audacity is not likely to slow the pace of political interchange across the Taiwan Strait, however, as the PRC government simply cannot afford to reject ties or relations with those in Taiwan who oppose what would for Beijing be a domestic political disaster, the spectre of Taiwanese independence.

Moreover, Taiwan presents a global model for China in more than internal structural terms. Taiwan demonstrates not only how successful democracy can be within a Chinese social and cultural context, it demonstrates how much more efficient ANY form of political and economic management can be if practiced on a scale smaller than that of the 1.25 billion Chinese citizens. Much of Taiwan's success is arguably attributable not only to more liberal political and economic policies, but to the greater efficiency that inheres when local interests on the provinical level have more autonomous control over their own fiscal policy and infrastructural development.

As impressive as economic growth has been on mainland China, there is little doubt that future progress (especially in critical areas like ecological management and equitable development) demands a relaxing of the supercentralization of the PRC political system. Many of the political and economic woes of the current regime stem from the same systemic forces that impeded and eroded the Chinese Empire- the fact that precious few institutional structures were in place to allow for the free expression of local interests or the reconciliation of conflicts between center and periphery. Though Beijing looks to a future in which Taiwan exists in the same relationship to itself as Hunan or Jiangsu, all China would arguably profit from a situation where those provinces' orientation toward Beijing grew closer to that of Taiwan.

Decentralization and democratization (two forces that must ultimately work in tandem) seem the only way forward if China hopes to preserve its prosperity and stability. In this respect the prospect of the "Taiwanization" of China grows even more likely. No structural change in the Beijing government will make reunification with Taiwan any less urgent an issue in cross-straits relations. Reunification is a nationalist vision which the ordinary citizens of mainland China cherish very ardently, and no amount of democratization or decentralization is likely to cool their feelings on that score. Given that fact, the likeliest scenario for reform in China is one in which Taiwanese political parties and Taiwan's government play a central role. This makes sense in pragmatic terms, as Taiwan is well-placed to provide the kind of expertise essential to this transition. Beijing might furthermore see real political advantage in welcoming Taiwanese participation, as it would be the clearest and most infallible route to defusing the cross-straits crisis. More flies are caught with honey, as the old adage goes, and the surest way to make reunification palatable to Taiwanese leaders and citizens would be to invite Taiwanese political parties to register voters and compete in elections on mainland China. Strange as it seems to contemplate, coming decades could potentially see a KMT or DPP president at the helm in Beijing.

This is of course a very optimistic scenario. Many, many things can and may go wrong to preclude such a happy outcome. Resistance on Taiwan to unification is never likely to be wholly overcome. Having had their own President and parliament it is difficult to imagine the Taiwanese people accepting return to the status of "province." This is not an insurmountable goal, though it is a question too large to treat here. Even given the many difficulties and contigencies, however, I feel confident that Beijing is not only well-advised but more likely than not to look toward Taiwan, and that the future will bring one form or another of "Taiwanization" to the political life of mainland China.

Chutzpah

President Bush yesterday accused Democrats in Congress of undermining the Iraq war effort by raising questions about how his administration used intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. This claim, wild on the face of it, is made doubly absurd in the wake of this week's bombings of hotels in Amman, Jordan. Where Bush would have us believe that, "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," events increasingly demonstrate that the Iraq conflict has entered a phase in which the tenor of American will is largely irrelevant.

Among many tragic facets of the brutal Amman attacks perhaps the most troubling is their provenance- they were planned in and executed from bases in Iraq. The Iraq conflict has thus finally afforded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an asset he never possessed (or could have acquired) during the reign of Saddam Hussein, a platform in Iraq from which to launch attacks against targets in the broader Middle East. This despite more than two years of Coalition occupation, 220 billion dollars expended, and more than 2000 soldiers killed. If none of these efforts could prevent Zarqawi from achieving the strategic purchase he currently occupies, it is ridiculous to suggest that the griping of a few Congressman can make any difference to how the conflict evolves moving forward.

President Bush's speech is a familiar tactic for his administration, to go on the offensive in the face of criticism. Where this kind of audacity has served them well in the past, it seems ill-considered under the current circumstances. There is little likelihood that the teapot controversy being plumbed by Patrick Fitzgerald and implicating Scooter Libby will brew into anything with the dimensions of Watergate. It can never be proven legally that the administration set out purposely to deceive Congress or the public at large, and the time it would take to even approximate such a case would easily run out before the end of this lame duck presidency. It would thus seem prudent for the President to let this storm blow over rather than roiling the waters by launching an illogical partisan counter-attack.

One reason the President might have chosen this tack is because the administration is contemplating a further long-term extension of the Coalition occupation in Iraq. I give the administration enough credit for political savvy, however, to presume that they know this will not materially change public opinion about the war, as this is the one aspect of the Iraq policy where they have demonstrated clear judgment. The Bush White House knew all along that public support for the Iraq war was soft- this is why they engaged in the kind of political hijinks that have fed Scooter Libby to grand juries and special prosecutors. Whether a crime was committed is a moot point, but what cannot be denied is that the administration made every effort to circumvent a genuine open and critical debate about the Iraq invasion and its potential consequences before going to war. Why was this done? Because all polling showed that the American public was deeply ambivalent about the Iraq invasion, an ambivalency that would have been exacerbated by a clear and open enumeration of the complexities and dangers inherent in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The administration knew that a long, arduous political process would be required to build a genuine consensus, indeed that if real criticism of the policy's perils entered the political bloodstream support might collapse altogether and the moment to strike might be irredeemably lost. This is why the administration resorted to strong-arm tactics like the "Valerie Plame" outing to quickly quash dissent and preserve the fragile support for the Iraq conflict just long enough to launch the invasion itself, trusting that the quick success of the policy would preclude any close scrutiny of the tactics employed in pushing it to fruition.

The optimism of the Bush White House on the outcome of the conflict has of course been shown false. If US troop levels had receded to the 30,000 soldier occupation force anticipated in Defense Department post-invasion plans there is little doubt that Scooter Libby would never have gotten near a grand jury. Though the administration was completely misguided about the strategic trajectory of the conflict however, its own actions show it was always clear-eyed about the nature of US public opinion. It is thus difficult to imagine that the President's audacious speech yesterday was made in hope of rallying public opinion for a much further extended occupation of Iraq. American patience with the war has bottomed-out, a condition which the Bush administration helped foster by short-circuiting open debate about its dangers and complexities. President Bush can chastise Congress's scrutiny of the justification for war all he likes, but he and his officials know that it is precisely the rhetoric of WMD's and links to Al Qaeda that has left Americans confused and disenchanted with the conflict as it stands now. No amount of punditry or posturing can unring that bell.

So why, then, has the Bush White House chose to launch this attack? One can only hope that a different, more rational motive underlies this rhetoric. The strategic trajectory of the Iraq conflict has clearly moved beyond the control of the US military. At this point, even if we were to double the number of US soldiers in Iraq it is unlikely that the Coalition could dislodge Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his confederates from his base in Iraq, much less quell the other elements of the Iraqi insurgency that are home-grown. Once a constitutionally mandated government is elected in December, the utility of US forces toward the defeat of the insurgency will rapidly move toward the negative spectrum. The intrinsic conditions of Iraqi society do not favor the long-term survival of Zarqawi and his operation on Iraqi soil, if an effective Iraqi authority can emerge from December's election it will likely, over time, dislodge Zarqawi from Iraq. Though US forces will be needed to protect the nascent government as it sets new institutions in place and begins to govern, if the US military presence is not seen to quickly diminish in the wake of its taking power the new Iraqi govnernment will suffer a crippling loss of legitimacy and prestige.

The time is thus now right for a staged withdrawal of US forces to begin. This process will not be a politically pretty one- as US forces withdraw the level of violence will likely increase. Ultimately the Coalition will depart from an Iraq still in the grips of insurgency and civil war, and Zarqawi and his ilk will be able to crow triumphantly that he drove the "infidel" off of Muslim land. Their triumph will not endure, however, as in subsequent months or years, once Iraqis are forced to choose between wholly indigenous options, foreign agitators like Zarqawi will see their base of support erode beneath them.

George W. Bush and his advisors hopefully see this picture or something like it. At the very least one can hope that they see the domestic political prudence of a US withdrawal from Iraq in the face of mid-term elections. This new rhetorical offensive is thus (hopefully) laying the groundwork for that policy shift. Any politically embarrassing sound-bites coming out of Iraq in the midst of a Coalition withdrawal can now be blamed on the Democrats- "Zarqawi would never have remained as powerful as he is were it not for the partisan attacks of Congressional Democrats." As deeply cynical as such a strategy clearly is, if it has been embraced by the Bush administration it is at least a hopeful sign that they intend to move the Iraq policy in a more rational direction.

Stand Up, Stand Down

As the date for the referendum on the Iraqi constitution draws nigh the question of what strategy the US and Coalition should pursue in Iraq remains neither less urgent nor more settled than it has been at any time in the past two and a half years. That the Coalition has reached this point without formulating a clear or effective counterinsurgency strategy is amazing, made more so by the fact that with the formation of a new Iraqi government the utility of the Coalition presence in Iraq (always problematic and limited) will rapidly wither away. To date US forces continue their round of search and destroy missions in northern Iraq, despite clear indications that such operations are doing nothing to stem the tide of insurgent violence or US casualties.

The only notion approaching a strategy that the Bush administration has offered is the "stand up, stand down" plan- the proposition that US forces will "stand down (withdraw)" as Iraqi forces "stand up"- as the Iraqi national army becomes capable of fighting the insurgency. This principle is either woefully misguided or deeply disingenuous. It is a fantasy to suppose that a national army could be constructed without a national government, yet both the administration and its critics here in the US have persisted in promoting this illusion.

Interminable debates over who is to blame for the slow speed at which Iraqi units have been made "combat ready" read like the dialogue of an Ionesco play. It has now been more than 30 months since the defeat of Saddam Hussein. I recently queried my father-in-law, a WWII veteran, and we determined that from the time of his joining the US Army until his landing in a combat zone in France was less than one year. Why would it take more than 30 months to turn citizens into soldiers in one instance and less than 12 in another? The answer is clear- to become a citizen-soldier one must first be a citizen, and to be a citizen one must have a government the legitimacy of which one recognizes and supports.

The truth of this assessment is clearly demonstrable in the case of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army. US forces were in Iraq less than a year when al-Sadr ordered his forces into the field against the US. Coalition commanders are fearful of sending Iraqi army soldiers to fight a small and primitively armed insurgency, yet Moqtada al-Sadr had no difficulty in mobilizing his men against the most technologically sophisticated and lethal combat force in world history. What could account for this disparity? Yes, the Mahdi army was tactically defeated, but can anyone doubt that the Iraqi army would be a much more effective fighting force if it had some fraction of the political will and internal cohesion of al-Sadr's militia? Today the most effective ex-Coalition forces in Iraq are those given a mission and esprit du corps by the larger institutions they serve- al-Sadr's Mahdi army, SCIRI's Badr Brigades, and the Kurdish Authority's Pesh Murga militia.

In this light one can see that waiting for the Iraqi national army to "stand up" prior to the Coalition withdrawal is totally unrealistic. The Iraqi national army will only begin to behave as such when at least the rudiments of an Iraqi nation emerge, and as long as Coalition forces remain in Iraq the Iraqi government will be perceived as a puppet regime. Once a new constitution is in place and an independent government is elected under its auspices (leaving aside complex questions of how legitimate the Constitution will be perceived to be given the difficulties in its drafting) there will be some hope that the Iraqi national army will cohere into a force capable of defending the new constitutional order, but that process will only begin AS Coalition forces begin to withdraw, NOT before.

A strong argument can be made that Coaltion forces must remain in Iraq to protect the formation of a new government and that subsequent withdrawal should be gradual and prudently conducted, but it is madness to insist that the Coalition must remain until the insurgency is defeated or even until the Iraqi national army proves itself capable of doing so. The Coalition cannot defeat the insurgency, as the presence of Coalition forces add as much fuel to the fire of the insurgency as their combat power depletes. The Iraqi national army, for its part, will only become capable of defeating the insurgency when it develops the same cohesiveness and political will displayed last year by the Mahdi army, and that will only happen when Coalition troops have withdrawn or at least begun to do so in earnest.