The Informationist

We can admit what should have been obvious from the beginning, and recalibrate accordingly.  From day one, it was clear that we were committing to a multi-generational investment in Iraq, along the lines of those that we made in Germany, Japan, and South Korea.  The Arab world has been backsliding at least since the fall of the Ottoman Empire (its backsliding before then was part of a broader trend).  Arabs remain torn between the “pan” dreamers who see Sunni Arab hegemony from Gibraltar to the Shatt-al-Arab as a birthright, and the “nationalists” who simply want to claim their own piece of Middle Eastern real estate and integrate it into the Westphalian system.  Most recent leaders have paid lip service to the former while drifting towards the latter.  (Like the 19th century pan-Slavic and pan-Germanic movements, pan-Arabism has assumed many forms.  Some of its forms have nominally include Shiites, Christians, and non-Arab Sunnis, but it remains at heart a Sunni Arab movement).

In 1990, Saddam arose as the first significant pan-Arab leader since Nasser.  His invasion of Kuwait should have forced the rest of the Arab world to choose between myth and reality, but the “international community,” led by Bush & Baker, let them off the hook.  Instead, the “Arab street” seethed over its own impotence and increased its blame on the West for its troubles.

When Iraq hit our collective radar screens again in 2002, we had spent more than a decade preveting the global liberalization wave from taking root in the Arab world; we had frozen its suicidal mythology in place until it exploded in our faces.  The challenge now is to help the Sunni Arab world defuse its own mythology before it proves as destructive to Arabs as Hitlerism was to Germans and Stalinism was to Russians (set aside the unfortunate outsiders who fell within their sway).

Had anyone been honest enough about the task we were undertaking, we could have had an honest debate about its merits, but relatively few were willing to be that straight.  We had--and have--to help an entire region deprogram itself before it repeats 1914-53 Europe with better weapons.  The Bush adminsitration entered with only enough troops to depose Saddam--nowhere near enough to do what needs to be done.

So where does that leave us now?  From a military posture, we clearly need more troops.  We also need less gentle rules of engagement.  Our actions in Falluja in April 2004 were unconscionable; a tough military response could have flattened the insurgency then and there.  As we find successive hotbeds, we need to flatten them.  Evacuate whoever you can, and then behave as if the absence of a clear victory is a loss--because it is.  The insurgency will end if and only if the retrograde Sunni element believes that the U.S. is bigger than they are, stronger than they are, and as committed to victory as they are.

We also need to change our diplomacy.  The majority of Iraqis are not Sunni Arabs.  Yet, we keep looking for “help” to “allies” who dread nothing more than losing a key player in their dream of Sunni hegemony.  It is hard to imagine anyone whose interestes were more antithetical to those of the U.S. than Lakhdar Brahimi, an old Arab League apparatchick.  We must work with Shiite and Kurdish leaders to ensure that they develop a system respectful of minority rights--and then explain to our Arab “allies” that Iraqi Sunnis must participate fully as the minority that they are.