The consequences of invasion (fwd)

Hardhitting editorial from AsiaTimes, and it is particularly germane to
what has been discussed here of late.  Iraq has become a trap for the US,
because turning tail is not an option (especially for the neocons).  As a
result, the likelihood of future war increases, precisely because of the
weakness of the US position.  What are the alternatives?  What has been
discussed by no one as yet, as far as I know, is the likelihood of a UN
resolution which will replace US troops with international peacekeepers,
and further, the likelihood that such an outcome will be successful in
stabilizing the situation.  Perhaps if Iraqis are granted self-government
now, and peacekeepers are introduced into sensitive and border areas, the
mess precipitated by Bush can be contained and gradually cleaned up.
Failing that, I don't see much of a future for a UN-administered
operation, either.

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bstremli@binghamton.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 00:01:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: Boris Stremlin <bstremlin@yahoo.com>
To: bstremli@binghamton.edu
Subject: The consequences of invasion

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EG22Ak05.html

Jul 22, 2003

Middle East
COMMENTARY
The consequences of invasion
Asia Times Online

Even given that there may have been considerable
justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power
in Iraq because he was a notorious despot and a
vicious murderer, it is probably time to step back and
attempt to take a clear look at the strategic
implications of what America has got itself into with
its invasion of Iraq.

Pro and anti-Bush partisans in the United States are
making it increasingly hard to break through the
static. But it is imperative that before it is too
late, American policymakers, both in the
administration and the Congress, put aside their
partisan squabbling to examine the possibility that
the US is trapped as it was trapped in Vietnam 30
years ago, or as the Russians are today in Chechnya.

If the US and its only effective ally, the United
Kingdom, are indeed trapped, the strategic
implications are even worse than they were in
Indochina. Vietnam was surrounded by stable client
states that were going to survive in America's orbit
whether Vietnam fell or not. That is not true in the
Middle East.

It doesn't matter at this point whether 16 words in
the president's State of the Union speech in January
referring to Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from
Niger were false or not. It doesn't matter if the
premises enunciated by the president and his handlers
for getting into Iraq were right or wrong, or if the
public was deceived. The cold fact is that 150,000
troops are there now. Even if Bush's war turns to
folly and the voters defenestrate him a year and a
half hence along with his handlers, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick
Cheney, the next administration, Democrat or
Republican, is going to have to decide what to do.
There are no options, easy or otherwise.

The geopolitical reality and the unpalatable fact is
that the Bush administration has put the US into a
desperate position where it cannot get out of Iraq
without a victory, no matter how bloody or how long it
takes. It has to find Saddam and his sons and either
kill them or capture them. It cannot, as Senator
Richard Russell of Georgia advocated during Vietnam,
declare victory and get out. Departure, from the
standpoint of global stability, is unthinkable. The
American people would have to pay for that in blood
and treasure.

That is because unlike Vietnam, Iraq is at the heart
of the most volatile region in the world today.
Israel, an American client state, is completely
surrounded by countries that would destroy it if given
the opportunity - and a precipitous American departure
from Iraq would do nothing but encourage Israel's
enemies. Worse, without the military and economic
might of the US to prop them up, the Middle East is
rife with unstable governments likely to fall with the
enthusiastic assistance of al-Qaeda and its Messianic
leader, Osama bin Laden.

Whether we like it or not, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait,
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia
possess 45 percent of the world's oil reserves. Iraq
and Iran control probably another 20 percent. For
Japan, the US and the eurozone, access to those
petroleum reserves is vital. Without it, their
economies would come to a stop. This was clearly a war
begun for ideology and not for oil. But an American
departure from the Middle East would make it all about
oil. The protesters who say it is all about oil today
would find to their tears that they are depressingly
right.

In a country where every convoy is prey to a grenade
rolled under a truck, a land mine, a mortar round, a
B40 rocket or a sniper's bullet, and every guard post
is vulnerable, it appears that casualties cannot be
minimized. They will probably increase, especially if
nervous, angry GIs begin to retaliate against the
population at large, as they did too often in Vietnam,
with tragic consequences.

The trap that closed in Vietnam led to a 25-year
period during which America's military was essentially
traumatized about going to war. The Vietnam debacle
led to the imminently sensible Powell Doctrine, named
for Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State. Under
this, war is only to be undertaken as a last resort,
only when there is a clear risk to America's national
security, and to be delivered with overwhelming force.
Finally, and most important, a clear exit strategy is
essential.

Powell began to formulate his doctrine as a platoon
commander in Vietnam, and he refined it all the way up
the ranks until he became the chairman of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff. He applied it in the 1991 Gulf War,
and again in Kosovo, where he was extremely reluctant
to involve the US. But tragically he appears to have
either repudiated the doctrine or he was overruled by
Cheney and Rumsfeld, who clearly did not think they
needed an exit strategy from Iraq, despite the
cautious advice of their generals.

They were wrong.

If the US military were to pull out at this point,
leaving Saddam alive, he would probably be back in
power in Iraq in a matter of weeks and the jubilant
citizens of Iraq who welcomed the fall of his statue
would be slaughtered. The survival of an unknown
number of America's other client states - Bahrain,
Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan -
could no longer be guaranteed. They would be under
threat not only from Iraq but the jihadis led by bin
Laden. Israel would have to be heavily fortified or
evacuated to North Dakota.

Contrary to belief in much of the world today, the US
did not cut and run in Vietnam. The US lost 57,000
dead from combat and noncombat causes in Vietnam, with
another 153,303 wounded. From the time the first
regular troops arrived aboard the jeep carrier USNS
Core in 1961, US troops fought there for 11 years.

In the end, they did it without the backing of the
American public, which long since had soured on a war
seemingly without a long-range or even immediate
strategic goal and without the prospect of victory in
sight. The American military ultimately was corrupted
and demoralized by the war, which led to the most
traumatized generation since America's Civil War.

The parallels between Vietnam are real enough. But the
parallels between Iraq and the Russian experience in
Chechnya are even more disturbing, where destruction
has been so total that the state, the economy and even
Chechnya's population are virtually moribund,
exhausted, corrupted and bathed in blood. Both the
Chechen rebels, propped up by international jihadis,
and the Russians themselves are locked in a death grip
that apparently cannot be broken. If the war on the
ground in Iraq starts to look like this, the Americans
are in for serious trouble.

It remains a question when and if the American public
will again get fed up with the casualties among its
fighting men and women. For seven and a half years,
during its most intense involvement in Vietnam, the
Americans averaged 528 combat troops killed per month.
That is about 17 per day.

So the policy question that Democrats, Republicans,
anti-war and pro-war activists and ordinary voters
have to ask is this: Before this becomes a quagmire,
what is the US going to do? Because abandonment is
unthinkable from a Western geopolitical standpoint, it
is probably best for the Bush administration to
swallow its considerable pride and ask for help from
as wide a spectrum as possible of the United Nations,
which has considerable experience in nation building
and peacekeeping, however ineptly it does it. That
will be a hard thing for Rumsfeld, Cheney and Paul
Wolfowitz to do.

Already President George W Bush's popularity is
falling. After just three months, 40 percent of the
American people think there was not sufficient
justification to go to war. What will happen if, as
the American military says, it takes four to six years
to pacify the country?

Today, the coalition forces are averaging roughly one
GI killed per day. Sixteen to go.








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