Part of a Terrorist Strategy
The flight of the Iraqi middle classes (New York Times; requires simple registration), which means among other things people with education and a more worldly viewpoint, is an especially dire sign for the future of Iraq. The goal of the terrorists is pretty clear: to murder, bomb, and destroy their way to total chaos. This is just one example of their strategy:
Trash is collected only sporadically. On April 3, insurgents shot seven garbage collectors to death near their truck, and their bodies lay in the area for eight hours before the authorities could collect them, said Naeem al-Kaabi, deputy mayor for municipal affairs in Baghdad. In all, 312 trash workers have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months.
Trash collectors, electricians, sewage repairmen, nurses, police officers, lawyers, and many other professions have been targeted, not for their ethnicity or their politics, but in order to wreck social order, destroy the infrastructure, and create such chaos that only the most vicious and brutal will survive to establish their rule. As I pointed out in this essay in Reason magazine (the third essay of the three that are linked),
The war being fought in Iraq is unlike any other. Parallels with Vietnam are of limited use for the simple reason that the Communists were seeking to kick out the Saigon government and replace it, not to create a firestorm that would engulf the region. For Al Qaeda in Iraq, it won’t be over if the U.S. and allied forces withdraw, or the U.S.-backed government falls. In fact, many of those fighting the U.S. and the elected government don’t want the U.S. to withdraw. They want to draw us in further, hoping, as Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri recently put it, to “make the West bleed for years.” Nor is World War II a useful comparison: Once the Fascists and Nazis were beaten, they were beaten. They didn’t go underground and wage a war of destruction; their ideology was effectively defeated with their armies.
The goal of at least a large faction among the insurgents is to create maximum chaos and maximum bloodshed. They account for a tiny fraction of the Iraqi population, and no one really knows what percentage of them are foreigners, but they are ruthless and determined. They will also be very difficult to defeat. No accommodation is possible with them. The existence of an armed faction that is dedicated to destruction per se makes the job of defeating the insurgency all the more difficult.
George Will’s remarks at the Milton Friedman Prize dinner in Chicago were quite on target when he lambasted the administration for their decision to invade. The administration’s naivete in thinking that all you had to do was to remove a dictatorship to uncover a democracy has been shown to be absurd. Criminally so. (The issue of WMD is more complex, since it seems that they sincerely believed that Saddam had poison gas and biological weapons. Nonetheless, the president’s decision to award a medal to the man who presided over the “intelligence” fiasco was a deliberate thumb-in-the-eye to the American people.)
It’s long past time for the U.S. to craft a careful withdrawal strategy that sets goals for the Iraqis but makes it clear that U.S. forces will be gone and therefore that Iraqis will have to create peace among themselves. As the fiasco with Ibrahim al-Jaafari (who refused to step down, even though it was clear he could not be confirmed) made clear, factions will jockey for power and delay any defeat of the terrorists so long as they think that the U.S. will be there to protect them. That safety net for politicians has to be removed. They will have to fashion their own safety net by fashioning peace themselves among the factions.
“The administration’s naivete in thinking that all you had to do was to remove a dictatorship to uncover a democracy has been shown to be absurd.”
Yes and no. The administration’s main -and indeed criminal- mistake has been not to enforce order. That gave a window to the terrorists/insurgents.
The vast majority of Iraqis supported and still supports representative government. Educated exiles were willing to come back to participate.
The Bush administration made a lot of mistakes, but the current naysayers have it a little too easy. The situation is still not lost.
As far as your opposition to the invasion is concerned:
1) Would you deny that Saddam had a WMD program? (perhaps as opposed to stockpiles – but what happened to the stockpiles the UN found and that are missing?)
2) Did you think the sanctions-regime (which was crumbling and which hurt the population most) and the no-fly zones could have gone on forever?
3) Do you really think Saddam was not supportive of terrorism against the West? The evidence suggests otherwise (Andrew Sullivan recently linked to apparently real documents showing Saddam intent on bombing London, amongst other places)
4) Do you think we would have been better of with Iraq in the hands of Saddam’s sons, five years down the road, perhaps after a power struggle between them?
5) Do you really think we could afford to let the Middle East continue to be misgoverned as in the last decades, with oil revenues supporting such misgovernment as well as the radical islam that erupted as the main opposition to this misgovernment?
Life is tough. Frequently there are no easy options. I have little faith that the Bush administration is going to redeem itself in the way it continues to handle the war, but at least they deserve credit for deciding to invade. Although, to be fair, I think Gore would have invaded too. And he probably would not have made the mistake Bush did. I say that as someone who voted for Bush (yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time).
It may indeed not be lost. Let’s hope that the people there can forge some kind of constitutional consensus that would provide a foundation for peace. I’m all for that. I’m also not very optimistic.
1. Yes, Saddam had had a poison gas and biological weapons program in the past. That’s not in dispute. Did he dismantle or destroy those weapons? Well, we didn’t find any. I think he did, but he didn’t want the Iranians and the Kurds to be too sure about it. So he sent out signals and intelligence patter to convince his enemies that he did have it. It was a risky strategy and he lost. So did we.
2. I was opposed to the sanctions regime, which in fact strengthened his hold on the people, by making them dependent on rationing and other favors from the state. The no-fly zone was a different matter and at least had the benefit of shielding people from Saddam’s merciless persecution. I don’t think that it could have gone on forever.
3. Saddam was supportive of terrorism against Israel, which has been well documented. He was a terrible figure. But I did not see any evidence of any involvement in 9/11, which the Bush administration implied (although without actually coming out and stating as a fact).
4. I don’t know.
5. I’m worried that U.S. government policies, at least with respect to Iraq, have made things worse. To say that there is a problem does not mean that just anything is a solution. This solution has probably made the problem worse.
Finally, I listened carefully to the administration’s case for war. I was willing to be convinced. But the evidence wasn’t there and the arguments didn’t convince me. I’m glad that Saddam is not in power and that he is on trial for murder, but I’m still not convinced that the decision to go to war was justified. Almost every policy has some benefits; the question is whether they outweigh the costs. I don’t think that that’s the case here. Having said that, of course, the question we face now is not whether to have gone to war, since that decision was made, but what to do now. I do not think that an open-ended commitment will solve the problem, but I also do not favor a pell-mell scramble for the exits that would surely leave a horrifying civil war in its wake. A measured but resolute and credibly committed withdrawal plan is certainly in order, not only for the sake of the American taxpayers and soldiers, but for the sake of the Iraqis themselves.
This post surprised me, Tom. The emotion and hyperbole is not something I expect on this site, although you did calm down in your response above.
“a deliberate poke-in-the eye”
Please. Do you really believe that or are your feelings hurt?
I wonder how many generals would have come out complaining in WWII had the culture we have now existed then, probably more, I suspect. The biggest problem I see is their communication with the public, which was ineffective, at best, for a short memory, what have you done for me lately, no attention span audience. If anybody expected this to be short, they’re ignorant of history, and if the administration actually thought this would be short, which I don’t, shame on them. I can’t believe the Pentagon would give them anything suggesting this was going to be a quickie, and if they did, shame on them also, but so what. So it takes 10 years instead of 3, the appropriate debate is whether it is worth 5000 casualties and 500 billion to remove a guy that would have been pursuing WMD for decades, and would have sold/given them to all kind of tyrants around the world if he was successful. In the space of a few years, Qhadifi gave up his program, which was quite advanced, Saddam is gone, replaced by the most liberal government in the ME, N. Korea is in secret talks w/ the US about giving they’re program up (supposedly), the Taliban is in the mountains, and Iran is surrounded and scared. Hmmm, not bad for a Hitler/bufoon/incompetant idiot from Texas.
We probably won’t know for decades, but this incessant whining about details misses the forest through the trees.
Oh yeah, the armed forces are fighting and killing them on their turf, not ours. And yet a majority of the country thinks the whole damn world is ending, geez, calm down.
“We probably won’t know for decades, but this incessant whining about details misses the forest through the trees.”
Chickenhawks and keyboard jockeys love little catchphrases, but as an individualist I find that I’d rather not treat people as trees. Maybe someday someone will see you as a tree to be cut down and used for firewood, for the good of the forest. I hope you still feel comfortable with your beliefs then. And I (and others like me) do not incessantly whine, rather I confront you as willful accomplice to the murder of the Iraqi people who, I notice, you didn’t include in your count of casualties. Do not attempt to dampen the severity of my belief with inappropriate verbiage.
Tom, I guess it’s a moot point, but I have a problem calling someone a terrorist when the target of their violence is a representative of the state they are fighting against, even a relatively benign figure such as a trash collector. I find the act reprehensible, of course, but it is rebellion, not terrorism they are committing in this case. It cheapens the word to use it wrongly.
Terrorist is exactly the right term. They are murdering people because they are carrying away trash. They do it to terrorize the population. That’s the origin of the term. It doesn’t mean “bad person,” it means someone who uses terror against the civiilian population to achieve their ends. Terrorism is a strategy and it is being used by some people in Iraq to create maximal chaos. It doesn’t cheapen the term to use it to denote precisely what it is intended to denote.
Really, Aaron, think about what you wrote. Please. Do you think it somehow legitimate to torture and murder postal carriers because they are employees of the state? What about people who got student loans? Is that rebellion, or just cold-blooded murder? “Rebellion” does not license what is happening in Iraq, with primary school teachers beheaded in their classrooms, trash collectors murdered, pet shop owners found dead with power drill holes in their feet and faces, car bombs detonated in crowded markets, and on and on and on. Nothing can justify that. Nothing. I dearly hope that the people who are carrying it out are captured, killed, or incarcerated forever. They are monsters.
And for “cb,” no, my feelings were not hurt by the president’s giving a medal as an award for incompetence and failure. I was simply appalled.
i just happened across the website and was struck by the parallels of the terrorist strategies in understanding how living in trash creates chaos, despair, and violence, and the low-level depression and return of crime and violence to my home of New Orleans which is still heaped with trash our government has refused to take any responsibility to clean up even 9 months after Katrina. I presume it is less strategic than pure incompetence, though perhaps deliberate incompetence, but in any case the parallel effects are noteworthy.