I could be wrong, but I think the future of Iraq is much more likely to be as is laid out in this article: http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060106-113859-3850r

Highlights:

‘The Conventional Wisdom being propagated by the Bush administration is that the creation of a new, broadly based coalition government in Baghdad enjoying a clear democratic popular mandate will isolate the insurgents and their supporters and give the new government the freedom to crack down far more effectively on them than its predecessors….But there is no sign yet that the new Iraqi forces, even when they can operate independently, have any capability of defeating the insurgency or developing adequate intelligence to penetrate it.

As for U.S. military intelligence on the insurgency, it is as good as it possibly can be from the outside and its tactical and political assessments are second to none. But it is very clear from published reports and official Department of Defense figures that the U.S. military is still almost totally shut out of the insurgency and has failed to penetrate it….And even all these problems beg the most important questions of all that are never asked in all the Babel of mainstream U.S. media discussion of the insurgency.

Are the new Iraqi forces reliable? Can they be counted upon on a large scale to risk their own lives and incur heavy casualties in order to capture and hold significant insurgency leaders? There is no real evidence yet that this is the case.’

And with this not being the case, the chance of a significant or serious US withdrawal is slight. And that means the insurgency will continue, or (as I suspect) get worse (or better, depending on your point of view).

It is true, of course, that the British ‘won’ in Malaya and the US won in the Phillipines. But those were very different situations, in very different times. At the end of the day, the British were forced out of India, and the Americans kicked out of Vietnam.

I’m afraid I’m more inclined to agree with the author of the article quoted above:

‘This week has been a harsh awakening for the American people from the illusory good cheer on Iraq of the Christmas season: But it is all too likely that there will be far worse to come. ‘

Look, to get in and out of Fallujah the residents still have to produce an ID and submit to retina scan, the city is surrounded by a wall. This happens with more and more of the towns and villages there. Basically, it’s like a bunch of concentration camps. If it goes the way it does, the insurgency in the Sunni triangle is bound to subside eventually. And the folks in the South are willing to compromise.

It’s true that Bushies’ bullheadedness is a factor, of course.

I think you mean trillions of dollars.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1681119,00.html

Well for a start, Sharon (and almost every Israeli politician) is an infinitely more canny and sussed political operator than Bush and Rumsfeld et al. As Chomsky has never tired of pointing out, this should have been one of the easiest occupations in history. It took real genius to f**k it up to this extent.

Secondly, the Palestinians are a homogenous, ethnically ‘coherent’ (if i can put it that way), basically secular people. Even after years of attacks, Hamas are still a minority party. Iraq on the other hand is divided at least three ways, is riven with fundamentalism, and seems to be on the point of complete political and economic disintegration.

So I think the chances of the insurgency being fundamentally beaten by 2007 are slight. On the contrary, I think (and have droned on about this for about a year now) that if the Americans stay for much longer (say another five years) then civil war is inevitable.

Why did I set my sights so low? Because I had not yet forgotten what it was like in a world in which Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq. The Iraqi people were suffering under a painful sanctions regime whose inevitable lifting was virtually guaranteed to rejuvenate the country’s non-conventional weapons programs. Tens of thousands of unwelcome-but-necessary US troops were camped out in Saudi Arabia, protecting the corrupt Saudi princes from their neighbor, and provoking the ire of Arabs across the Middle East. Saddam Hussein was busily supporting and assisting terrorists all over the world, most likely including Al Qaeda. And the notion of even a moderate, tentative movement towards liberalization in the Arab world was universally considered ludicrous.

All told, the improvement since then has been spectacular, and spectacularly cheaply bought.

Yeah, Dan, replacing an anti-Western secular dictatorship with an anti-Western islamic republic with growing ties to Iran is quite the “improvement”. Great plan, and it’s “cheap” to the tune of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis.

BTW, quit with the long-discredited “Saddam supported international terrorists” bullshit.

I’d just like to point out that this is a contradiction.

SINIYAH, Iraq – Villagers watched from rooftops as U.S. military bulldozers heaved a wall of sand into snaking lines around their homes Saturday in an attempt to trap insurgents believed to be hiding among them.

The drastic tactic in Siniyah came after weeks of increasingly bold insurgent attacks, including almost daily roadside bombs targeting 101st Airborne Division soldiers patrolling the village, 155 miles north of Baghdad.

“This is not in any of the courses they teach in the Army,” said Maj. Shawn Daniel, who oversees operations for the 3rd Brigade’s 33rd Cavalry Regiment. “But if bad people are coming to Siniyah to attack coalition forces, let’s catch them at the gate.”

I think it’s quite possible that the insurgency will have significantly declined by the end of 2007. Sharon has done it, I don’t see why Bush can’t repeat it. Walls, buffer zones and missiles, walls, buffer zones and missiles – it’s not brain surgery.

This point is vapid, as of course the US does not even have diplomatic relations with Cuba. The only reason Guantanamo is able to stay in Cuba (i.e. as a military base) is because it has its own power and water resources.

However I think Soru is to be praised for actually giving us (as a true social scientist should) falsifiable predictions as to what he thinks Iraq will look like. Most of the other cheerleaders for the war were far too canny to do that, and instead phrased their predictions in such an ambigous way that they could claim afterwards that ‘things turned out basically as I predicted’.

Personally I think the chances of things turng out, by the end of 2007 along the lines of Soru’s predictions are close to zero but hey.

However, it strikes me, despite attempts at precision that there is still considerable ‘wiggle room’ in these predictions.

For example.

‘by the end of 2007, maybe not all the troops will have left, and there will probably be mercenaries, military advisors, air support, spooks, whatever. But they will clearly be on the way out, and remaining only by the writ of the Iraqi government.’

What do you mean ‘clearly’? Clearly to whom? Are you implying by the phrase ‘they will clearly be on the way out’ that by (say) 2009, ALL US troops will have left Iraq?

‘The humanitarian situation will be unambiguously better, in the vast majority of the country’.

What do you mean ‘unambiguously’? Give me something quantitative I can get my head round.

I also don’t understand point 6. As you are aware there is a low level civil war going on in Iraq, and I find it highly unlikely the radical Sunnis will apologise for killing what they see as a pro-Iranian stalking horse (i.e. the main Shia political Shia movements).

My final point is much more simple.

Do you think Soru, that in terms of deaths per month (or deaths per year) that the insurgency will have significantly declined by the end of 2007?

Also: despite the presence or otherwise of US troops, do you think they will still be carrying out combat operations outwith the control of the Iraqi government (as they are at present) by 2007/early 2008? (In other words, does your phrase ‘by the writ of the Iraqi government’ mean that that government will actually have control over the Americans on a day to day basis?).

Permanent military presence != permanent occupation, as the example of Cuba shows. Something analoguous, a base maintained by implicit threat of force on openly hostile terrority, is conceivable, but pretty unlikely, even just looking at the logistics (no open-water access for resupply), let alone the politics (it would be unambiguously imperialism).

A better example of a permanent presence without occupation, in any meaningful sense, is Germany (I say meaningful purely to bypass people like the wingnuts who refer to the US federal goverment as the ZOG). A genuine democracy willingly lets military bases stay in peacetime.

That’s the thing that became impossible in 2004, with Fallujah and Najaf. If anyone doubts that, go ask an Iraqi, anyone outside the Green zone, or read an opinion poll.

The US definitely wanted bases, and there was, before the war, nothing impossible about the idea of them getting them. Effectively, the US won something like that in Kuwait in the last Gulf war, as it deployed from there in this one. The thing is this: Bush screwed that part of the deal up. This is because he is a bad president, judged at a purely managerial level – just not good at his job, unable to impose a coherent plan on different warring factions.

It’s less clear whether a corrupt or exploitative oil deal was ever an explicit goal – some say it was, it’s certainly possible.

But that was then.

The thing Bush does seem to have got right, and maybe even deserves credit for, is that he came to recognise that those original goals were unattainable, and so set about working towards the best attainable outcome, i.e.:

1. no ongoing military casualties
2. free market sales of oil (subject to Opec)
3. visible defeat for the jihadis

Achieving those goal would look something like:

1. by the end of 2007, maybe not all the troops will have left, and there will probably be mercenaries, military advisors, air support, spooks, whatever. But they will clearly be on the way out, and remaining only by the writ of the Iraqi government.

2. Iraq will have a goverment run by elected Iraqi politicians, and will be a democracy to the extent those politicians decide.

3. The humanitarian situation will be unambiguously better, in the vast majority of the country, than it was before the war (I think the picture now is mixed, rather the the uniform gloom of Baghdad-centric reports).

4. There will be media and intellectuals defending the position of the Baghdad government, praising its achievements and denigrating its enemies.

5. Police will be routinely arresting and trying those guilty of suicide bombings and other mass civilian killings.

6. the jihadis will be reduced to unconvincing press releases of how they really meant this to come to pass all along, and didn’t mean it when they killed all those Shi’a and electoral officials.

If that all comes to pass, will it have been ‘worth it’?

That will, of course, depend on who you ask: adding up and averaging different viewpoints is a pretty futile exercise – no doubt a billion Chinese will consider it all an evil western imperialist crime.

Judging by current opinion polls, quite likely a large proportion of Iraqis will think it was worth it.

Almost certainly a large proportion of americans will think it was not – after all, they won’t get the cheap oil they were implicitly promised. There will be a lot of bitter talk, especially from the right, over how the new Iraqi state is ‘islamofascist’ or a theocracy, because it will have the kind of laws the US had back in the 1920s or so.

There is one thing I hope to see anyone who considers themself left, liberal, or whatever, avoid: criticising Bush on that basis, saying he should have stayed longer and killed more people in order to impose some US vision of secular liberalism on Iraq.

soru

One of the most annoying aspects of this whole fiasco is the way that Bush and Blair and little Zhdanov’s like Hitchens have allowed this sordid invasion to be presented as a war against Islamo-fascism. Of course, as we saw recently, with the famous Bush ‘holding hands’ pic, Bush stands right behind the Islamo-fascists. The subtitle of Robert Baer’s excellent book ‘How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.’ tells the story.

Good links here: http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/09/12_baer.html

and here:

http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/fallhouseofsaud.html

The salient fact is that with a suddenly unfriendly Turkey, and with no Saudi bases, permenent bases in Iraq are a vital part of the new US geo-strategy. It would be a disaster for the US if they were forced out, as this would mean it would be far harder to do the US militaries’ real job there: protect help prevent any movement towards Saudi democracy, and watch Iran.

Are they all gone from Saudi? Is it just me, or was the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia not one of the reasons cited by Bin Laden for 9/11? I realise Iraq inexplicably became the focus of the war on terror after Afganistan (I understand they refer to Bin Laden as “He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named” in the White House) but it is interesting to note that one of the main terrorist demands has been met in part or in full.

Why did I set my sights so low? Because I had not yet forgotten what it was like in a world in which Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq. The Iraqi people were suffering under a painful sanctions regime whose inevitable lifting was virtually guaranteed to rejuvenate the country’s non-conventional weapons programs. Tens of thousands of unwelcome-but-necessary US troops were camped out in Saudi Arabia, protecting the corrupt Saudi princes from their neighbor, and provoking the ire of Arabs across the Middle East. Saddam Hussein was busily supporting and assisting terrorists all over the world, most likely including Al Qaeda. And the notion of even a moderate, tentative movement towards liberalization in the Arab world was universally considered ludicrous.

All told, the improvement since then has been spectacular, and spectacularly cheaply bought.