America and Iraq

>> Saturday, November 29, 2008

Barrack Obama
Well, is it victory or humiliation?

Nov 27th 2008 :
No happy ending, but the final chapter of the Iraq saga remains to be written
AFP WHO would have thought, when John McCain and Barack Obama were going head-to-head on Iraq during America’s election campaign, that the Iraqis would decide for themselves when to sling the Americans out? That, however, is precisely what they did this week when Iraq's government approved a troop-withdrawal agreement which the government of Nuri al-Maliki had spent a year squeezing out of its reluctant American interlocutors.

The agreement under discussion stipulates that American troops will withdraw into their bases by the middle of next year and leave Iraq altogether by the end of 2011. This is, on the face of it, a firm timetable. It contains very few ifs and buts and no clauses that give America the right to linger on uninvited. Iraq, it seems, will not be a home for the permanent military bases that some Americans wanted and many Iraqis feared. And even during the transition America has now promised not to use Iraq as a base from which to attack neighbours such as Syria (which it has raided openly at least once from Iraqi territory) or Iran (which it may also have attacked covertly).

As with every other twist in the Iraqi saga, the meaning of this latest turn is fiercely contested. Does it mark an astonishing American victory, snatched from the jaws of defeat? That case can certainly be made. In 2006 a panel of “wise men”, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, told Congress that America was failing in Iraq and had better start to withdraw. Under their plan, the bulk of America’s combat forces would already have gone by now. George Bush defied them, choosing instead to send even more troops. Now—thanks to that “surge” and the Sunnis’ rejection of al-Qaeda—the country is mostly at peace and has a democratically elected government confident enough to send its protectors home. So much for the idea that this was a regime of quislings designed to secure Iraq’s oil for America and serve the superpower’s colonial ambitions.

To Mr Bush’s detractors, by contrast, the withdrawal agreement is no victory, only the final humiliation in a miserable sequence of calamities that flowed from a misbegotten war. On this view, America is agreeing to leave only because its original designs have been comprehensively thwarted and it has no choice. When the troops go home, democracy will strike no lasting roots in the dust of Mesopotamia. Iraq will either collapse back into chaos, return to dictatorship, or fall under the spell and indirect control of Iran, its theocratic neighbour and America’s arch-rival in the Persian Gulf. Less mission accomplished than the mother of all American own-goals.

In truth, neither version is right. Mr Bush’s refusal to cut and run two years ago was indeed a good call, one history may judge to have stopped Iraq’s descent into an ever-blacker hell of sectarian killing and ethnic cleansing. But a prodigious quantity of killing and cleansing had taken place already, and no reader of our briefing this week (see article) could in conscience declare “victory” in a place the American invasion and subsequent civil war ended up laying waste. Iraq remains violent and fractious and its political institutions are weak. It has the potential at any moment to unravel all over again.

And yet to predict that Iraq is therefore destined to collapse into new chaos, or split into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish fragments, or become a satellite of its Persian neighbour, is too pessimistic. Though possible, none of these outcomes is inevitable. Iraq is rich in oil and—if its fugitive middle class starts to drift home—human resources too. Having looked into the abyss, Iraqis know, and are keen to avoid, the dangers of sectarian division. And though Iraq’s Shias are close to Iran, its Shias and Sunnis share an identity as Arabs that may encourage them to resist a Persian takeover of their politics. When America departs, a lot of Iraqis will want Iran to butt out too.
Don’t rule out the possibility of democracy

Something else may change as well. Several of the most disruptive forces in Iraqi politics, such as those of the militant Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who wants something close to an Iranian theocracy for Iraq, have built their appeal on the notion of resisting the infidel. When the infidel goes, the resisters will have to put forward a more concrete vision of the sort of Iraq they want. And now that Iraqis have had a taste of multi-party democracy, however brief and imperfect, it remains to be seen which vision they will choose.

Sources:
From The Economist print edition

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