Russian Notes: The post-Iraq war

In 2003 I thought I had a fair idea of the geopolitical and socio-economic thinking behind the United States' operation in Iraq. The Americans knew perfectly well that the main sponsor of the terrorism confronting them was Saudi Arabia, and that the main ideologists of the Jihad were the Wahhabi clerics. They were inhibited from publicly stating this obvious fact, in part because the American economy was highly dependent on Saudi oil, and in part because the Saudi lobby in Washington D.C. is immensely influential.

After the overthrow of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, a new, pro-American government would be assisted to revive the oil industry. Iraqi oil would flood onto the world market, knocking the stuffing out of the Saudis, and allowing the United States to adopt a very different tone with its "sworn ally." There is no telling whether such a logical plan really existed in 2003, or whether, as has often been the case in the past, the pressure leading to a decision to go to war was the resultant force of a dozen nonsensical causes. It does not really matter now.

What does matter is that a conceptual catastrophe has led to a paradox. Never before has the military and economic might of the United States been more impressive; and never before has the United States been so weak, irresolute, vacillating, isolated from its traditional allies, generally bamboozled and to all intents and purposes impotent on the international political scene.

The situation in which the Americans find themselves in Iraq is absurd. They have been drawn into a civil war in which they are trying to prevent two groups of fanatics, both of which hate America, from butchering each other. Opinion polls tell us that 67 percent of Iraqis applaud attacks on the Americans. This statistic appears in the Iraq Study Group report presented by James A. Baker and Lee H. Hamilton.

That 67 percent is a very uneven average, derived from 0 percent in Kurdistan, where the Americans are viewed as liberators, and 85 percent in the rest of Iraq.

It is worth saying that today the figure would be 0 percent among the Shiites too if it had not been for an act of perfidy by the United States at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. America called upon the Shiites to "rise up against the tyrant," and then stood back as Saddam's elite Republican Guard units drowned the ensuing rebellion in blood.

The ideologist of this treachery was the political realist, James A. Baker, who thought in terms of maintaining stability and a "balance of power."

Today America's Saudi partners are urging, indeed, demanding that the United States should continue to act as a buffer, protecting from the Shiites the very Sunni insurgents who have been responsible for more than 70 percent of American casualties. This is too much even for the Americans, hidebound as they are by political correctness. They are beginning to think, if not yet to say out loud, that the centuries-long conflict between the Sunnis and Shiites might just be as neat a strategic opportunity for them as the Sino-Soviet conflict was in the years of the Cold War.

The real players here are not the Sunnis and Shiites as such, but Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two regimes which most actively sponsor and organize anti-Western Islamist Jihad. They are a kind of Islamist version of China and the USSR in the 1970s, in confrontation with the West, but hating and fearing each other even more.

In today's Zeitnot in Iraq, when time is running out for America, and almost Zugzwang, when it faces being forced into a move that will cause it to lose the game, the only sensible thing to do is to redeploy American troops to pro-American Kurdistan. Their function would be to guarantee the security of a territory where, through their own efforts, the Kurds have created a land at peace, and to mount special operations against al Qaeda terrorists and other sundry internationalists in other parts of Iraq.

The Sunni and Shiite sons of the Iraqi people, if such a people can meaningfully be said to exist, need to come to terms on their own, without the involvement of outsiders whom they wish to murder.

The Iraq Study Group's recommendation to prolong the delights of being the buffer in someone else's civil war for a further year before finally pulling out is no solution in either political or strategic terms.

The diplomatic recommendations of Mr. Baker's team of realists are even more ridiculous. The U.S. is advised to ask for help from Iraq's neighbors, Iran and Syria. Help with stabilizing the situation in Iraq? If either of them had any interest in that they would have been working on it long ago. To assist America's mission? Both regimes hate America and would take great satisfaction in maximizing its humiliation.

They might, of course, in the best traditions of the oriental bazaar, make promises, but they would extract a high price. Iran would want nuclear weapons, and Syria the Golan Heights and Lebanon. Mr. Baker has already put the Golan Heights on the negotiating table in one of the paragraphs of his report. As regards Lebanon, where Syria is working hard to overthrow the democratic government through the agency of Hezbollah, Mr. Baker is prepared to surrender the country to the Assad family"again. That was the price paid for Syria's participation in the anti-Saddam coalition of 1991.

The crowning piece of well-intentioned idiocy in the diplomatic section of the ISG report has long been parroted by almost everyone in Washington, and by absolutely everyone in Europe. It runs to the effect that we must go back to the root of the problems which so perturb the Islamic world, and that these are primarily the failure to resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestine. We must redouble our efforts to revive the peace process on the basis of the road map agreed by the Quartet.

What are they going on about? True believing Muslims in Iraq are abducting and brutally murdering each other, boring into people's skulls with electric drills (the patent for this belongs to a Shiite "patriot," Abu Deraa), and it's all supposed to be the fault of the Jews? In fact, the devious formulation of these Western politicians conceals a sneaky little thought: "If we surrender Israel, do you think they will leave us in peace?" Well, no, actually, they won't. This is a war, and it is a war not against Israel but against the West. Iraq has been the West's Dunkirk in the Fourth World War. What comes after Dunkirk? Certainly, it was not the end of the Second World War.

America is weighed down by its failures, the absence of a clear strategy, the hatred of its enemies and the exultant malice of its friends. This malice is taken to absurd lengths by its politically correct left-wing intelligentsia who dominate the mass media. But if America loses its nerve now, the days of the West as a free and independent civilization will be numbered.