THE United States and its allies are hostage to a war in Iraq they’ve already lost. Hostage, because they can’t abandon the place for all the reasons they went there in the first place. Lost, because they’ve failed to achieve almost all of the objectives they set for themselves, initially and subsequently.
When the Coalition of the Willing thundered into Iraq on 20 March 2003 they expected to fight a short, sharp war. The Pentagon, infatuated with technology and firepower, promised shock and awe. Prime Minister John Howard, his confidence bolstered by Office of National Assessments advice that a quick victory would be ‘the mostly likely outcome’, promised that our troops would be home in months, not years.
But three years on the fighting is still raging, estimates of the Iraqi death toll from military action range from 30,000 to over 200,000, and some 2,500 Coalition soldiers have been killed. The financial bill is equally appalling: about $250 billion American dollars just for the US so far, with the eventual cost to America estimated to reach as much as two trillion dollars.
Such human carnage is incomprehensible to many Australians, especially those who have never seen one dead body, let alone the horrific effects of gunshot, shrapnel and burn wounds. They should try and imagine it some time; what it would be like to see their family cut down in front of them, or to themselves experience the agony of having their legs blown off in a country where hospitals look like slaughter houses and where pain-killing drugs are a luxury. And while they’re at it, they should think about what it would be like to barricade themselves in their home every night, pissing themselves with fear, as they wait in the dark for the door to be kicked in by some trigger-happy kid soldier or wild-eyed religious zealot.
These images of how many Iraqis live now are made more shocking by the memory that there were always other ways to deal with Saddam Hussein: the obvious ones were a better containment strategy, such as that the international community still finds acceptable with Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, or an attempt to bring Saddam in from the cold, as was done with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi.
The dishonesty, illegality and mismanagement of the misadventure
Instead the US opted for a war lost at conception by the flawed assumptions underpinning it: like how the invaders would be greeted as liberators, how the Iraqi administration would recover quickly from the disruption of the invasion and go on to run the country, and how Iraqi oil production would ramp up quickly to fund the rebuilding.
The dishonesty, illegality and mismanagement of the misadventure also help to explain the loss we now confront. Inside Iraq such concerns fuel the widespread hatred of the Coalition and its allied fledgling Iraqi administration. Outside Iraq there is still little sympathy and support from countries in a position to help resolve the mess, in particular from Islamic states which could have played significant peace broking, peacemaking and peacekeeping roles.
Much of the blame rests with US President George W. Bush for being incapable of understanding the complex nature of the project or being able to bring to bear the management and leadership skills needed to pull it off. In turn he has been poorly ‘served’ by ideologues like Vice-President Dick Cheney who have consistently monopolised decision making at the exclusion of subject matter experts. Illustrative was the sidelining of former US Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, for contradicting Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by telling Congress in early 2003 that a much larger force would be needed to impose authority over Iraq than Rumsfeld had planned.
Nor did things get any better after the war started. The failure to stop the anarchy at the beginning allowed the destruction of much of the infrastructure that was needed to run the country. And then the incompetent Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer made mistake after mistake, like disbanding the remaining Iraqi army, sidelining senior Iraqi bureaucrats, pushing back the establishment of an interim government and mismanaging the reconstruction budget. There is no compelling evidence that the Coalition’s management got any better afterwards.
The one assumption that probably was correct three years ago was that the Iraqi population south of the Kurdish zone would be cohesive enough to stay together through the jolt of a short war. But this assessment is now obsolete, as the protracted security and power vacuum, and accumulating resentment against the Coalition, has fostered the anarchy which now wracks significant parts of the country. Much has been made lately of the prospect for civil war, especially by advocates of the intervention keen to blame the mess on anyone but those who started it. But such talk is a gross over-simplification of the internecine conflict now raging in Iraq, one which encompasses everything from guerrilla war to terrorism to criminal behaviour to social fracture to religious schism.
That Iraq is now lost is a strategic blunder of unprecedented proportions that will be a curse on the US and its allies for decades to come. Remember that this war had little to do with weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with terrorism, but everything to do with the US’s determination to safeguard and enhance its global ideological, economic and military hegemony. But, three years on, America’s floundering efforts have become not a symbol of US power, but of its significant limitations.
A rock and a hard place
For this reason alone Washington thinks that it must appear resolute, no matter how many people die or how much it costs. People like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld believe that the US would be so fundamentally discredited by cutting and running from Iraq, that doing so is simply not an option they can contemplate.
A potential circuit-breaker remains the collapse in US public support for the war, which could pressure the Bush Administration to put the political survival of the Republican Party ahead of its ideological obsession with US global dominance. This year’s mid-term elections are a crucial way-point in this regard, where a Republican Party thrashing at the November poll would be a sweet thing for the opponents of the war. In the lead up to the 2002 mid-terms the Bush Administration’s determination to play up the threat posed by Iraq helped the Republicans do well at the ballot box. A memorable moment in that campaign was George W. Bush’s concern in October 2002 in Cincinnati about Saddam’s ‘nuclear mujahideen’.
Another potential circuit-breaker is the 2008 US Presidential election where the winner, Republican or Democrat, will have had to offer the American people some sort of plan to resolve whatever situation exists in Iraq at that time. But if the war is still raging — a credible scenario given the little prospect of any enduring improvement any time soon — then he or she will find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
Paramount will be the need to maintain control over Iraq’s massive reservoir of oil. This was always Saddam’s strategic weapon, the one thing that gave him genuine power over other countries, including the US. Iraq’s deposits are huge — some experts predict they are greater than Saudi Arabia’s — and Saddam’s power to decide how much he produced, who he sold it to, and in what currency he would be paid, have long been much more worrying issues for Washington than Saddam’s weak armed forces and contained WMD programme.
No way is Bush’s successor going to let go of control of Iraq’s oil now that the US has its hands on it. America doesn’t need to own it, just control it. But for that Washington must be sure there is a pro-US government securely in power in Baghdad, an incredible proposition for the foreseeable future, or keep enough troops in Iraq to stop the country falling into the abyss.
Bush’s successor will also be compelled to continue to look out for Israel, making unthinkable again the option of abandoning Iraq to anarchy or the prospect of control by hardline Islamists — especially those possibly aligned with Iran or the other emboldened players in the region. Against this backdrop, the US will continue to believe that it has no option but to keep a large military force in the Middle East where Iraq is now the last suitable basing option. That the US has been building a string of permanent bases across Iraq is no accident.
All of which raises again the questions: why did Australia join the invasion of Iraq? Why are we still there? And how much longer might we be involved? Obviously we didn’t sign up because of fear of WMD — sensible people understand now that the Howard Government’s unambiguous concerns were not backed by intelligence advice — and no evidence has ever emerged to substantiate any of the Government’s suggestions of Iraqi links to the broad extremist network linked to al Qaida. Nor could the Howard Government’s objective been simply to remove Saddam, because John Howard made clear before the invasion that he “couldn’t justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime.”
Obsessive relationship with US
Rather, our story is all about John Howard’s obsessive relationship with the US, and the Bush Administration in particular. That’s the only substantive reason we went to Iraq and the only substantive reason we’re still there. And in it is the answer to how long we’ll stay, which is for as long as Washington is desperate for us to be involved, and John Howard is in power and prepared to risk the limited political pressure arising from his unpopular war.
Central to the Howard Government’s policy has been its tailoring of a military commitment which looks good and bolsters the idea of a Coalition, but which is tiny and mostly out of harm’s way — so much so, it seems, that some senior US officers in Baghdad have discretely mocked their Australian counterparts for not being allowed to operate routinely anywhere dangerous or do any so-called heavy lifting.
Such criticism would grate with John Howard’s romantic notion of war — assuming one of his minders dared to tell him of it — but it’s been a small price to pay for staying on the right side of the line between adventure and disaster. And it’s a fine line indeed. Imagine the effect of one lucky shot by an Iraqi nationalist or foreign jihadist, with a cheap missile into an air force Hercules climbing out of Baghdad with 50 diggers in the back. Crump, and our war dead go from zero to heaps. Literally.
Only time will tell if this week’s announcement of an expanded role for Australia’s small force in Iraq marks a departure from the Government’s low-risk strategy. In the meantime, however, the announcement is significant because it highlights the desperate measures now required to plug the constantly emerging gaps in the Coalition, especially now that British Prime Minister Tony Blair is finally buckling some to public pressure for a wind back in his country’s Iraq commitment.
That Australia has so far avoided casualties in Iraq is not to say that the war has not already affected our national security. Most obvious is the way in which the likelihood of more terrorist attacks against Australia has been increased significantly by the growing animus towards Australia in some quarters. Less obvious is the way in which we, like all countries, have been put at risk by the proliferation of nuclear weapons encouraged by the US’s demonstration in Iraq of its military power and willingness to use it, pre-emptively if necessary. No wonder places like North Korea and Iran have been so interested in nuclear weapons during recent years.
As I draw to a close I can’t but help think about the terrible mess our politicians have made in our name. Three years on and all the anniversary brings is another shocking week in Iraq and another round of frantic pleas from George W. Bush to ‘stay the course’. In my heart I know we’ve lost. Despite likely Coalition troop reductions as Iraqi forces assume greater security responsibilities — however prematurely — so much damage has already been done that the recovery of Iraq from here is destined to look more like the rehabilitation of a country destroyed by defeat, than the ascendency of one victorious.
And to think that sooner or later some Australian parents are probably going to be told that their soldier son or daughter died in Iraq in these circumstances. Maybe then John Howard will finally feel that he has become the war.
Andrew Wilkie is a former army lieutenant-colonel and senior intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments who resigned from the ONA in the lead-up to the Iraq war out of concern over the Government’s pro-war stance.
This article first appeared in The Age on Saturday.
