Destroying Iraq To Save It

Robert Dreyfuss

May 08, 2006

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of   Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com

Perhaps the most famous quotation from the Vietnam War was the comment from an American commander who said casually that his forces “had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Last week, Senator Joe Biden joined that commander in cold cynicism, proposing to divide Iraq in order to unify it. Specifically, he proposed to redraw the map of Iraq on the Yugoslav model, fracturing it. “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group—Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab—room to run its own affairs.” Biden added innocently: “Decentralization is hardly as radical as it may seem. … Things are already heading toward partition.”

It is not the first time that a plan for breaking up Iraq into three or more parts has been floated. In fact, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations—who co-authored the proposal, which was published as an op-ed in The New York Times on May 1, has been pushing this discredited notion for years. Gelb is the source of the Sopranos-like quote in the Biden-Gelb piece that suggested the United States should make the Sunnis “an offer they couldn’t refuse.” Gelb has also proposed the idea of permanent American military bases in Kurdistan.

Like mini-Churchills puffing on cigars and carving up the Ottoman Empire—in way that protected the oil that fueled the imperial British Navy—Biden and Gelb resemble nothing as much as amateur imperialists.

It didn’t take long for experts, other Democratic senators and Iraqis to slam the idea, but it’s clearly an idea that won’t go away. Perhaps not coincidentally, Biden delivered a speech pushing the breakup of Iraq at a meeting of the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, at which a celebration was held for the 90th birthday of Bernard Lewis. Lewis, a neoconservative theoretician and former British intelligence operative, has been an adviser to Vice President Cheney, the CIA’s James Woolsey and others, and he has pushing for years the notion that the Arab world must sooner or later undergo what he called “Lebanonization”: that is, disintegration along ethnic and sectarian lines. That is an idea developed at length by David Wurmser, the Middle East adviser in the office of the vice president, and it is clearly the preferred option of a many leading Israeli thinkers who believe that by dividing their Arab neighbors into squabbling statelets they can be weakened, at least, if not conquered.

Commenting on the Biden plan, Judith Yaphe, a widely respected Iraq analyst who spent years at the CIA, said with characteristic bluntness:  “This is such a terrible idea in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start. If we push Iraq in this direction it will be civil war for sure, and what we have now will look like child's play.” Yaphe and others, such as David Mack of the Middle East Institute, have pointed out that Iraq cannot be neatly divided and that its cities (especially Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk) are highly mixed ethnically. Those cities have already become killing fields and urban battlegrounds in Iraq’s ongoing civil war—and it could get much worse. The fact is that there is simply no good way to break up Iraq without doing untold damage to the war-battered people who live there, and anyone who cares about the living beings who inhabit the country cannot countenance any proposal to push it toward partition.

Biden may have given away the real reason he is pushing this unworkable plan—namely, that the alternative is the withdrawal of U.S. forces. In his Times op-ed, he says so. “The frustration of Americans is mounting so fast that Congress might end up mandating a rapid pullout,” he says, with some alarm.

In fact, across the political spectrum, among the U.S. military and from Iraqis themselves there are mounting calls for America to get out of Iraq.

It is an open question whether American disenchantment with the war in Iran or the opposition to the U.S. role in Iraq among Iraqis will peak first. Among Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, hatred for the U.S. occupation of Iraq is mounting fast. Listen to Mohammed Bashar Najafi, the son of one of Iraq’s four grand ayatollahs: “Beside every cabinet minister there is an American advisor. Each province has an American advisor. Each city council has an American advisor. The country is occupied, and this occupation is a weight on the chest of Iraq.” Polls in Iraq, though obviously unreliable given the state of war that exists, have for years revealed strong majorities in favor of a U.S. pullout.

Tom Hayden, former California state senator and antiwar activist, reports: “A majority of the new Iraqi parliament’s 275 members will support a one-year U.S. withdrawal deadline if the issue is raised, according to answers by reliable Iraqi sources to questions from this correspondent. … 87 percent of all Iraqis favor a withdrawal timeline.” Hayden says that between 140 and 160 members of the newly-elected parliament want a U.S. timetable for withdrawal. Last year, at least 100 parliamentarians wanted the U.S. out of Iraq—but the new parliament opposes the occupation even more strongly because it includes more Sunnis, Hayden reports.

The occupation of Iraq is now proceeding according to two separate time frames, as seen by the Bush administration. The first is the domestic political one, according to which the administration needs to demonstrate some modest troop drawdown in advance of the ’06 elections. The second is the far longer view—in which many tens of thousands of U.S. forces remain in Iraq for many years. Defeating the now-twin insurgencies—the Sunni one and the growing Shiite one, which exploded in Basra yesterday, downing a British copter and killing at least five British troops—and assembling a pro-American government of former exiles and warlords may seem like Mission Impossible. But 100,000 troops—fighting a resistance movement without access to high-tech war-fighting tools, heavy weapons or armor—can last a long time in a stalemate, and might even be able to impose, eventually, a peace of the dead in Iraq. President George W. Bush calls that “victory,” but to the rest of the world it looks like the return of 19th-century colonialism.