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COMMENTARY
August 14, 2004
Lost in Iraq
In the first two years after 9/11/01 the Bush administration acted decisively if in slow motion. Now it is frittering in slow motion. I am less and less able to understand what the President thinks he is doing in Iraq; and were it not that his opponent is John Kerry I would expect him to be in serious electoral trouble. The news out of Najaf and Kut is murky but it appears that for at least the sixth time since last autumn a powerful and successful U.S. Marine attack on some of Iraq's more notorious embedded "bad guys" is being halted before completion. It is the same story after each round: the Marines have the enemy on the ropes and then a ceasefire is agreed. The enemy is given a few weeks to regroup and then the battle resumes with fresh ambushes costing unnecessary U.S. casualties. What had seemed so promising in Najaf was the permission given by both Iraqi and U.S. authorities to pursue Moqtada al-Sadr's psychopathic blackshirts into the Wadi al-Salam cemetery and the Imam Ali Shrine from which they had been firing with impunity. There is absolutely no moral let alone legal objection (in international law) to such pursuit: Americans (and Israelis for that matter) should be at liberty to destroy mosques cemeteries or any other positions from which the enemy is firing when necessary. These will not cease to be used as cover until the scruples are disowned. There is of course a public relations objection when a Western army is fighting a Muslim adversary within a Muslim country. The "optics" are not good but the Bush administration gets no points for optics anyway. Part of their mission is after all a teaching exercise in which Western rules of warfare are among the subjects that must be imparted. If the Americans are expecting the Arabs to master representative democracy and constitutional law it follows that they expect them to learn the Geneva Conventions: easy way if possible hard way if not. According to reports emanating from the other side al-Sadr himself has been thrice grazed by shrapnel in the action (which brings him even with Sen. Kerry in combat wounds). Reports from Najaf indicated that the Marines and their rather timid Iraqi police colleagues had al-Sadr's forces boxed in. The blackshirts are still as of this writing exposed and in confusion and the Marines have been killing them in large numbers while taking almost no casualties themselves. This should be the moment to finish with the "Imam Mahdi Army". In Kut Iraqi forces and their allies have captured more than 30 street fighters who came illegally from Iran and other evidence that Iran's ayatollahs are feeding the fire if not lighting it. It is the right moment for the Bush administration to confront Tehran over this as over nuclear weapons in a very heavy way. Likewise the U.S. military is now deployed along long sections of the Syrian frontier to stop the insurgency which the Assad regime won't stop -- partly because it can't. The Syrian Ba'athists need their entire 400 000-man army to keep the regime in power and shifting large forces to the frontier would invite trouble in Damascus and elsewhere. But since Bashir Assad's regime is also on the short list of regime-change candidates why not send U.S. search-and-destroy parties promiscuously into Syrian territory and just see what happens? Likewise cop-outs in the Sunni Triangle. And CIA complicity in the ludicrous charges brought by an Iraqi kangaroo judge against Ahmad Chalabi -- the man whom the Bush administration owes for more practical help than any single Iraqi and whose advice was routinely better than any the administration took. (And meanwhile back in Washington and in Porter Goss the appointment by Mr. Bush of a new CIA director who is part of the same failed intelligence culture as the man he is replacing.) In the Middle East especially the law of survival is: help your friends and hurt your enemies. The Arab Street is not Sesame Street and no sympathy is gained by being sweet and ineffectual. But hopelessly trying to find a way to make your enemies love you has re-appeared as the American way. The Bush administration is proving almost Clintonesque in its willingness to let its most lethal enemies off the hook (as Bill Clinton repeatedly let Osama bin Laden go when the latter's erstwhile allies offered to shop him). To Middle Eastern observers with their conspiratorial obsessions this hardly counts as gentlemanly behaviour. It instead suggests to that Arab Street that the U.S. and its visible enemies are secretly in cahoots. The American military is superb but the political will to use it decisively is not there. For again it is Clintonesque to use an army to strike public relations poses. Armies are designed for destroying things. Either there is a war to finish or they should return to barracks Stateside. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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