Handing Iraq Over to Insurgents? Simply Ridiculous

On “This Week” with George Stephanopolous, US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld claimed that an early US withdrawal for forces from Iraq would amount to delivering the country to Zarqawi. To this, I will borrow on of John Stassel’s “give me a break.” This is one of those Hobbesian scare tactics that the current administration artfully employs to justify its Iraq policy and steer the debate on Iraq away from real policy issues. It is a claim which is as spurious as an attempt to claim the contrary.

What lies at the end of the road in Iraq is a deep “UNKNOWN.” The void of unknowns remains compounded by regional power dynamics which will interfere with Iraqi politics. The US invasion of Iraq uprooted a vertically authoritarian politico-military structure to replace it with a horizontal representative democracy. However the only stakeholder in a sustainable Iraqi democracy seems to be the Americans, who perceive Iraq as the bedrock of a new United States foreign policy in the Middle East.

Iran, it has been proven by recent intelligence estimates, supports a Shia takeover of Iraq and the potential creation of an Islamic state along the Iranian mould.

Syria favors a predominantly Sunni Baathist return to power. Meanwhile the Turkey remains deeply suspicious of gains made by the Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq. Implications of these gains could be projected into the fight for Kurdish regional autonomy in Turkey. Hence the United States policy in Iraq is bound to run afoul against these regional security dynamics.

It would be impossible to return post-Saddam Iraq to the kind of stability status quo ante bellum because of the conduct of the military operations in Iraq. The US invasion subverted a deeply entrenched sectarian military-intelligence structure. Elements from this subverted structure, which currently form the core of the insurgency, are bound to remain antagonistic against the reconstruction of a post-Saddam military-intelligence structure.

On the political level, the end result of democratic rule in Iraq is bound to favor the numerically superior Shias. This leaves a number of options for Sunni political participation, one of which is maintaining the insurgency as a form of political expression. The response to insurgency activity would have to be the construction of a non-sectarian military-intelligence structure in Iraq to support a non-sectarian republic. The parsimony of Shia retaliation against Sunni insurgent provocation is not bound to continue after US forces exit from Iraq, hence the serious potential for civil war in Iraq.

If the Secretary of Defense looked more closely, he would and should be more worried about the potential for civil strife, than the possibility of terrorists taking over.