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COMMENTARY
August 30, 2003
Nation-building
Should the Americans withdraw from Detroit? While they have been able to hold Detroit since General Harrison recaptured it after the Battle of Lake Erie (in 1813) hardly a day now goes by in which there is not an ambush or a killing. The rate has been rising through Detroit's notoriously long hot summer. If the standard is one killing per day -- the current average in Iraq is a little less than that -- then the U.S. should also withdraw from Chicago New York and Los Angeles. An analysis of the statistics in proportional terms suggests further quick withdrawals from Memphis Dallas Baltimore Philadelphia and of course Washington DC. Pay no attention to the sycophantic supporters of the President who argue that anything resembling a U.S. retreat will leave the world in chaos. These are the people who got the U.S. into the quagmire in the first place by stepping aboard the Mayflower. They said the occupation of America would be a cakewalk. They said the Indians would dance in the streets when they arrived. Opinion is already shifting and in New England where people are much more angry with President Madison than with America's foreign enemies opposition to the War of 1812 is running very high. Okay -- I'll stop now. I admit I played a couple of rhetorical tricks in the preceding paragraphs. Though no more than in a typical editorial of the New York Times. The issue in Iraq should not be American resolution. Nor should I think will it be so long as George W. Bush remains President and regardless what the polls may say (they are still solidly behind him incidentally). What the Bush administration grasps fairly grittily is that the U.S. must give no signal of retreat to the Arab-Islamic world. This is because the rhetoric of Al Qaeda and political Islamism which can be even more deceitful than the Times depends centrally on the depiction of the U.S. as a paper tiger. However the enemy both inside and outside Iraq do not only look at the U.S. administration for signs of irresolution. As Bernard Lewis -- our wisest living generalist on the Middle East -- wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal Open debate is obviously meaningless to those whose only experience of government is ruthless autocracy. What they think they see is division and fear -- and these encourage a return to their earlier perception of American degeneracy. Such a return could have dangerous consequences, including a renewal and extension of terrorist attacks in America. Note that last line carefully. Prof. Lewis himself sees a direct connexion between what happens in Iraq and attacks inside America. So do I and so does everyone whom I consider to be well-informed. The issue in Iraq is thus not whether the U.S. should stay or leave. It is instead the extent to which the U.S. should engage in "nation-building" there. As his critics remember and his friends too George W. Bush campaigned against the whole idea of nation-building by Americans abroad. What he has been trying to do comes perilously close to what he rightly campaigned against. Not nation-building by the U.S. but a concentrated U.S. effort to enable nation-building to take place within Iraq and Afghanistan and soon elsewhere. I compared it myself a year ago to one of the labours of Hercules -- the cleaning of the Augean stables. He is trying to create the conditions for the "river of democracy" to wash through the Middle East; just as President Reagan before him tried to create those conditions for Eastern Europe. The American role in Iraq should thus be limited to providing security for the transition to an Iraqi government much more acceptable to Iraqis and to the world than the horrific government that preceded it. The perfect is the enemy of the good however in this case as in most. A crudely representative Iraqi government that is reasonably benign is much preferable to an elaborately correct constitutional system that takes fatally too long to engineer. The Iraqis must then be left to consolidate democracy at their own pace. Which is why Prof. Lewis is also right in taking the U.S. Pentagon's position against that of the U.S. State Department. >From the beginning the Pentagon wanted to co-operate more closely with Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress and effectively shepherd them to power as the broadest available pro-democratic coalition on the analogy of Hamid Karzai and his coalition in Afghanistan. The State Department has fought and sabotaged this every step of the way while lacking its own practicable alternative. They argued that Mr. Chalabi and company were not to be trusted and/or were not up to the job. By now it should be clear that the Iraqi National Congress is indeed up to the job. They dominate the provisional government enjoy broad support across all ethnic and factional lines and Mr. Chalabi himself has shown considerable political savvy. State's argument has been proved totally wrong and the transition to home-rule under the INC can be safely accelerated. This would leave the U.S. Army in place for as long as it is needed. But with a lower profile in a supporting role. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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