Testing Our Constitution in Iraq

Amidst stories about the new Iraqi Constitution (or lack thereof), the NYT dropped an editorial this Sunday as to whether the war is already lost. The key event is the Ohio death incident a few weeks ago & the precipitous drop in support for the war it accentuated. Point is not that the loss of lives is high, but what are they dying for? WMD? No. WOT? No. Democracy? Looks unlikely. If I were Al Queda I would launch a Tet offensive right now. Interesting is that some stock market pundits are half expecting it.

While the Iraqis debate their constitution, we must reconsider ours for the war.

Why carry on the fight? Oil? Honor? The best argument seems to be what Colin Powell is supposed to have told Bush - if you break it, you own it. The reason to stay is to fix what we broke. We have now created the conditions that we would have gone in to fight over! Pathetic, but there you are. We have to get the terrorists out of the western desert, and we have to keep the voracious neighbors out. Beyond that to expect democracy is a bit much. My recommendation:

Cut & stay. Pull back to three bases (south/port, middle/Baghdad, north/oilfields) and stay there to keep Iran & Syria out. Use the army not to police the streets but clean up the terrorist cells.

Divide & Conquer. Push federalism. One source of insurgency is the Sunni minority trying to keep the Shi-ites from gaining the whole thing. The Kurds in the North have a working democracy of sorts - they have had 15 years of autonomy since the 1991 war to develop it. We all know Iraq is a post-colonial construct. The Ottoman Empire had instead three provinces. Attempts to centralize Iraq over 4000 years have proven difficult. Let it be federated & let the US Army in the bases keep the neighboring wolves at bay while the country settles into a federation with common defense and currency.

Divert & Distract. One of the smarter moves LBJ made in 1968 when the North Koreans plucked one of our spy chips (The Pueblo) was to low-key the whole affair. Keep it off the news. Let diplomacy work. Time for that in Iraq. The Brits pacified Malaysia from Communist insurgency when it looked like one of those Vietnam dominoes, but it took them 14 years. Iraq too will take time. Keep it off the radar screen to give the military the chance.

Comments

[Rich Melmon]

Similarities to Vietnam are minimal. There is no Ho Chi Min. There is no national force equivelent to the North Vietnamese. The insurgents have an agenda that appeals to a vanishingly narrow segment of Iraqi society. They can disrupt indefinitely, but govern... never. Very different from the dynamic of Vietnam.

Federalism is a forgone conclusion. The question is, can it be stablized in this particular constitutional process. Unlikely.

There is now and likely will be an ongoing civil war. Perhaps at the current level of intensity for many years. The question for the US is how much does it play.

The Shia's, however they may bitch, need us to keep from getting killed by the Sunni's. Which keeps us there to keep the Iranians, Saudi's and Syrians from getting too crazy. The Kurds are already autonomous. They only have to worry about Turkey. It seems unlikely Turkey will mess with them.

Bush will take down the Republican party over this because he has been incompetent in backing Rumsfeld, the village idiot who thought he was so much smarter than everyone else. He has compounded this by insisting on his fantasy version of progress there, rather than bluntly telling Americans what's up.

And, in spite of bitter protests, the world is better off, not so much because Saddam is gone, although that is a good thing, but because it may have unlocked a new dynamic that, in many decades, may change the nature of the Middle East, which was otherwise hopeless beyond human reckoning. That's why we did this, even though the administration will deny that.