Friedman's False Choice

According to Thomas Friedman's latest op ed in the New York Times, the time has come to face the facts in Iraq. The situation there, as Friedman correctly describes, is worse than civil war: "it's gone from breaking apart to breaking down."

Given this, Friedman presents us with a choice: "10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch."

Putting aside my astonishment that Friedman would even consider the "10 year" scenario, and putting aside the fact that we would have to kill just about everyone in Iraq to "win" (we have no idea who the enemy is at this point, so everyone would be fair game), it has been obvious for some time to most reasonably sane and informed Americans that we need to get our troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible.

I would argue with Bush's latest propaganda that Al Qaeda is "fomenting" the insurgencies in Iraq. No, Mr. Bush, we are the prime "fomenters" of both Al Qaeda and the insurgencies in Iraq. And it is for that reason that we must leave.

One might justifiably ask, why is Bush still, given the obvious mounting catastrophe in Iraq, so intent on staying the very course that created that catastrophe? The answer is that, like "the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail ... no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed," Bush has the same face-saving goal: America must succeed ... no matter how many Americans and Iraqis have to be killed. Of course when asked to define "success" or "completing the mission" Bush has no comprehensible answer. We are beyond answers, even if Bush were to finally attempt to give us an honest one; Iraq has self-destructed to a point of 'no mission possible.'

The sad fact is that this war was fought needlessly and recklessly for Machiavellian motives never divulged to the American people -- and that those motives still have not been admitted or discussed honestly in the mainstream media. It was the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons, under false pretexts -- and hundreds of thousands have died as a result.

It is past time for the American people to face those facts, make the tough choices, and bring our troops home.

There is, in fact, only one way to help stabilize the situation in the Middle East caused by Bush's invasion of Iraq. It starts with the American people demanding that George Bush and Dick Cheney resign or face impeachment.

The only way to restore American credibility and good faith in the world, the only way for us to credibly try to re-engage Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the other nations in the region, the only way to restore trust in America as a peace-loving nation is for Americans to demand a complete change in foreign policy -- from the current fiasco of American domination and its accompanying wars of aggression to a policy of promoting world cooperation and peace.

We, the people, are the United States of America. And it is we, the people, who have the responsibility to take it back and work to tear down the destructive walls erected over the last six years and build new bridges of peaceful cooperation and friendship with the international community.

We, the people, voted for change. Bush and Cheney won't give us change; that much they have made quite clear. It is now up to us to demand that Congress hold Bush and Cheney responsible for the damage they have done internationally and to our own country.

Ten months or ten years? No, Mr. Friedman. The only choice we have is to change our leadership and its aggressive neocon foreign policy. And we must demand that change now.

Ten Months or Ten Years
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq — and “self-sustaining” is the key metric.

In his must-read new book about the impact of culture on politics and economic development, “The Central Liberal Truth,” Lawrence Harrison notes that some cultures are “progress-prone” and others are “progress- resistant.” In the Arab-Muslim world today the progress-resistant cultural forces seem to be just too strong, especially in Iraq, which is why it is so hard to establish durable democratic institutions in that soil, he says.

“Some may hark back to our successful imposition of democracy on West Germany and Japan after World War II,” adds Mr. Harrison. “But the people on whom democracy was imposed in those two countries were highly literate and entrepreneurial members of unified, institutionalized societies with strong traditions of association — what we refer to today as ‘social capital.’ Iraq was social capital-poor to start with and it now verges on bankruptcy.”

On Feb. 12, 2003, before the war, I wrote a column offering what I called my “pottery store” rule for Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” It was not an argument against the war, but rather a cautionary note about the need to do it with allies, because transforming Iraq would be such a huge undertaking. (Colin Powell later picked up on this and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution, but Mr. Bush did not heed Mr. Powell’s advice.)

But my Pottery Barn rule was wrong, because Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course. But instead we created a vacuum by not deploying enough troops.

That vacuum was filled by murderous Sunni Baathists and Al Qaeda types, who butchered Iraqi Shiites until they finally wouldn’t take it any longer and started butchering back, which brought us to where we are today. The Sunni Muslim world should hang its head in shame for the barbarism it has tolerated and tacitly supported by the Sunnis of Iraq, whose violence, from the start, has had only one goal: America must fail in its effort to bring progressive politics or democracy to this region. America must fail — no matter how many Iraqis have to be killed, America must fail.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Poster Credit: Bushflash.com

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