The war in Iraq is now over. All American combat operations are suspended. The troops are going home. Hooray. The Iraqi prime minister has addressed the Iraqi people. The U.S. president has addressed the American people. The ships are loading. Goodbye to all that!
Someone should tell the “Islamic State of Iraq,” a.k.a. “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and many other cells and fronts, that the “occupation” is over. They can stop blowing up innocent civilians now. Alas, owing to some misunderstanding (and I am being facetious), terror incidents have spiked in the past two months and the Islamists are on something of a bender.
One is reminded of the wonderful peace that was achieved in Gaza when the Israelis finally did what the international community had been demanding for a long time, pulled up all stakes, and left that “occupied Palestinian territory.” For some unaccountable reason (and I am still being facetious), Hamas did not get the message, quickly took over the lame local PLO administration, and attacks on Israel stepped up.
The situation in Iraq is different at one level. If the Islamists take over, there may be no immediate, additional external threat. It is a unique domino, and, when it falls, it just falls.
Will this happen? After seven-plus years of foreign engagement in Iraq, which went well beyond military incursion into extravagant “rebuilding” programs (the quotes because most of what was “rebuilt” was never there in the first place), we really don’t know.
We do know, or should know, that the vast majority of the Iraqi population, including those in the politically-dispossessed Sunni minority, hate the Islamists even more than we do. We know that, long before the invasion, the Iraqi people had the most secular-minded and “post-Shariah” outlook of any of the Arab peoples. And indeed, President George W. Bush and his so-called “neo-conservative” advisers were banking on this to make Iraq a regional “showplace of democracy.”
But the great majority of any people would rather not be governed by violent psychopaths with apocalyptic visions. They don’t always get a choice in the matter, and, even when they have more power than they realize, may still surrender to totalitarianism, in the false belief that this “will bring an end to the violence.” Ask the Germans how it works out.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Islamist totalitarians, in the West, has been to convince a growing share of our population that Muslims are all insane (as we once thought Germans were); whereas, I know at first hand that this is not the case. It does not follow, as Bush came close to arguing, that the inhabitants of the Muslim world are “just like us,” or even that they want to be. Many mistakes were made in Iraq by taking naive assumptions too far.
Americans have never quite mastered the Art of Imperialism for reasons that touch deeply on America’s own “exceptionalism” among the nations of the world. This art begins with realizing that the people you are trying to rule, or at least influence, are much different from your own and have their own preferred ways of doing things. And yet they are sane for all that, and some mutually satisfactory accommodation can be achieved, so long as you retain the guns.
I am not advocating Imperialism. I am merely pointing out that if, as in this situation, one finds oneself cast in an Imperial role, one should try to play it well. But I should add that the Americans were playing it better and better as time went by, and they stopped insisting on doing everything the American way.
This included the big “infrastructure” spending. Yet we have now learned that the entire American effort in Iraq, from beginning to end, in all of its ramifications, cost substantially less than last year’s single-shot Congressional “stimulus” package (and was probably much better for the U.S. economy).
Iraq is stronger today for the length of time U.S. and allied forces stayed: not only because they were able to root out more of the Islamist domestic enemy, but also because the country as a whole had more time to find its equilibrium and restore many of its own pre-Saddam civil traditions.
Iraq is now alone. It is, by regional standards, a kind of model, but no longer a model that might be copied, as it was at the height of the U.S. incursion, when even Libya’s Gaddafi was voluntarily offering to make mutually satisfactory accommodations with the West.
Except for Israel, and Turkey for a while, Iraq is now the only regional state in which the rule of law has some traction against the rule of tyrants, but, for that very reason, it is now the principal target of the region’s most evil powers, and they are volubly encouraged by the U.S. departure.
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