The tipping point
Beyond America's borders, we should realize, people now await our failure in Iraq. Few really believe that Iraq could be the showcase of American political engineering. Fewer still think that this war in Iraq's Arab and Islamic neighborhood will yield a "reform dividend" and that the undemocratic habits of the Arabs will be changed by the kind of model we create in Iraq. Our enemies in the region, who had been seized with panic at the display of our military might, have drawn comfort from our recent troubles in the alleyways of Tikrit and Fallujah. Cunning men as they are, the rulers in Arab lands had hunkered down, waited out the first blow, and hoped to be spared. There were fears in Damascus and Tehran that these terrible regimes might yet fall to the great foreign power. There were worries in Cairo and Riyadh that Pax Americana could grow wiser in its ways.
Time and American impatience, these rulers hoped, could come to the rescue. Like the Brits who gave up on their Middle Eastern empire, we too, it was hoped, could grow weary of these "thankless deserts" and leave. Warfare is a straightforward endeavor, and we are good at it. But the Middle Eastern bazaars and alleyways are treacherous. Our enemies and our false friends alike were sure that we were destined to lose our way. That world in and around Iraq is good at frustrating strangers. Who had the perverse imagination to anticipate that Iraqis would sabotage their own oil pipelines and electric grids? Or that a Shiite community raised from subjugation would second-guess the foreign power that gave it the gift of deliverance?
Naive faith. For our part, we have handed our enemies some easy victories. We had appointed an Iraqi Governing Council composed of men and women of genuine standing drawn from the principal communities of Iraq. Yet no sooner had we created this council than we set out to declare that no appreciable power could be turned over to such an "unelected" body. No one needed to undermine our creation; we were doing a fair job of it ourselves. Our faith in elections was naive and misplaced. People in that country have subtly told us in every way they could that premature elections would not work and would simply ratify a sectarian division and bring to power the Shiite theocrats and the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime.
Our distrust of the Iraqis, our refusal to cede them power, have led us in odd and dangerous directions. We have been casting about for allies in peculiar places--Turkey, Pakistan, India. These are deadly and futile trails. The Turks can't be deployed in Iraq; the Ottoman Turks had governed Iraq for four centuries, and it was only British power in the First World War that blasted them out of that country. It will not do to say that the Turks have shed imperial habits and no longer claim pieces of Iraq for themselves. It will suffice that enough Iraqis will think that we have come into their midst to squander their sovereignty. Nor should we be rewarding the Turkish government with huge loan guarantees. The Turks betrayed us as we prepared to go to war. They denied us basing rights; they denied our forces the ability to strike from their country and hence crush the Iraqis with a pincer movement. They strung us along, hid behind parliamentary maneuvers, as they gave vent to an anti-Americanism that would make the French blush.
Nor ought we entertain any illusions about having the Pakistanis and the Indians pull our chestnuts out of the fire. There are Sunni-Shiite massacres and troubles in the cities of Pakistan; there are jihadists by the load in Pakistan's armed forces. The Pakistanis would bring these dangers and sectarian poisons. The Indians, too, are no strangers to religious upheaval; were they to come (and they never will), they would bring the fire along, and the animus of their Hindu majority toward Islam would further inflame an Iraqi setting with big troubles of its own.
Our deliverance lies in Iraq itself; there is no end run we can do around its people. Sooner or later, we and they will discover the truth of Iraq: whether the country holds together and whether Iraqis can surmount their cruel and tragic past. If we grant them our trust, we will have acquitted ourselves well. We will have set the stage for an early and honorable withdrawal and left something on the ground to point to with pride. Or, in the worst of circumstances, we will have shown that the thing was a noble failure, that we have no apologies for the hopes we brought along with the gear into a place that eluded the best of our intentions.
This story appears in the October 20, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.