Arguments about the number of troops needed to “pacify” Iraq have raged ever since US-led forces invaded. Finally President George Bush has realized the appalling folly of Donald Rumsfeld’s blind insistence that the job could be done with limited forces. But yesterday’s announcement by him is no case of “better late than never”. It is far too late. The way the occupation has been handled by Washington — the incompetence, the backhandedness, the arrogant assumption that the US rather than Iraqis can decide and make its future (seen even in little ways like bringing in foreign workers to rebuild the country rather than paying Iraqis to do it and thus giving them jobs and a stake in creating a new Iraq) — has broken the country. Sending in 20,000 extra troops at this point is not going to bring lasting peace or a united Iraq.
The new initiative speaks volumes about desperation yet is a sure path to damnation. The French threw massive numbers of extra troops into Algeria in the 1950s, the British did the same into Palestine and Cyprus. It did not work then and it is not going to work now. The US presence is a major part of the Iraq problem. It deepens alienation among the Sunnis, who see the Iraqi government and its military forces as puppets of and collaborators with the foreign occupiers, fuels resentment among the broad mass of the Shiites who likewise resent occupation but look to anti-American Iran as their mentor, and does nothing to foster reconciliation between the two communities. US withdrawal is the answer, not US reinforcement.
President Bush clearly still has no workable endgame in sight. The inevitable consequence of trying to impose peace by force on an increasingly resentful population is either that the peacekeepers have to stay on indefinitely or there will be withdrawal followed by chaos. It will be the latter — and the dispatch on 20,00 more troops only ensures that it will be all the more humiliating, like the scramble out of Saigon or the French departure from Algeria — a powerful and dangerous symbol of political impotence that may well light a fire of anti-Americanism across the world that make the present sentiments trivial in comparison.
That is not to say that Bush should have announced that the US was pulling out immediately. That would be just as disastrous. But there was another way. It would have been far more effective and visionary to follow the advice coming from the Iraq Study Group, the EU and so many voices and engage with neighboring countries to bring peace to Iraq. There is a deal to be done. Syria certainly wants dialogue with Washington. Neither Syria nor Iran can be ignored.
But Bush is still mesmerized by his fantasy of a world divided between those alongside the US and those against. Yesterday’s storming of the Iranian Consulate in Irbil shows how blinded he is by that fantasy and by the equally deluded belief that US power can win peace by force in Iraq.
