...The sergeant, a military intelligence officer named Zachery Brown, told me how the repeated deployments were driving up divorce rates among noncommissioned officers. They were also hard on single men like himself, but this, he said, was not the reason he was leaving. "I don't want to get too political," he observed, "but the way it looks now—it's almost as if we're fighting a perpetual war." He was quick to point out that he was "a patriotic guy" who had joined the military right after September 11. Sent to Afghanistan, he had felt that he had genuinely been able to help people. Back in the US, he had started taking classes, and that, he said, is when his "liberalization" had begun. It had continued in Iraq. "We're helping people here," the sergeant said.
If we weren't here, there are a lot of people who'd be dead the next day. But we're spinning our wheels. Al-Qaeda is defeated, but now we face Iraq's internal problems. They have to be handled politically and socially. I wouldn't say that I don't believe in the mission here, but we're not going about it in the right way.
Was there another way? "No, I don't really think so," Brown said. General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy, with its stress on protecting the local population, had been very effective, but, he added, "it's a thin veneer. Beneath it—no matter how we try to make it look—we're ultimately occupiers. And I don't think you can democratize a country by being occupiers. Though we've made a lot of progress, the core issues remain. And if we can't find a political solution to them, we'll never get out of here." Most of his fellow intel officers, he noted, felt the same way...
At the same time, I'd gotten a look at the crushing effect the war is having on the troops. The breakdown in the Army has advanced so far that in a mere thirteen hours, I could see the rising dissatisfaction, anger, and rebellion within it. The message from the soldiers themselves was that keeping so large a force in the field over the long term seemed unsustainable.
But how to draw that force down? As Sergeant Brown had observed, the success in Dora and other neighborhoods has been largely tactical in nature. Only by joining it to a broader political strategy could the space created by the surge be fully exploited. What was the US doing in that regard? Did it have an exit strategy?
No one knows. The Americans certainly do not know, and they never will be able to figure out who or what is on first, because in Iraq, there are so many fissures within fissures, so many groups who may, or may not, be receiving aid, in the form of weapons (as with Iraq) or money (as with Saudi Arabia) to do so many various things, including but not limited to:
1) supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq
2) fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq
3) supporting Al Qaeda against the Americans and the Shi'a but fighting them when they kill Iraqi Sunnis
4) supporting SCIRI and Mr. Hakim
5) supporting the Da'wa Party
6) supporting the Shi'a of the Jaish al-Mahdi
7) Supporting the Shi'a of the Jaish al-Mahdi but not their leader, Moqtada al-Sadr
8) supporting any group that kills Americans, whether or not it is Sunni or Shi'a Arab
9) supporting the corrupt government of Maliki
10) supporting the handful of incorruptible officials who have left that same government and bewailed the corruption that is made possible, in pertinent part, by American aid that allows the Iraqi government to keep, and play with, and distribute to particular friends and family of particular officials, that $100 billion in oil money that Iraq has received in the last two years but refuses to spend in support of the country as a whole
11) supporting fellow Arabs in Mosul and Kirkuk, whether Sunni or Shi'a, as long as they are fighting against Kurdish domination of those cities
12) those fighting for an independent Kurdistan
13) those fighting for an independent Kurdistan under the Barzanis
14) those fighting for an independent Kurdistan under the Talebanis.
15) those fighting for a resurrection of Ba'athism as the only way to continue to keep rule by the Sunnis
16) those fighting -- all dozen of them -- for the liberal democracy that George Bush thinks he has brought to Iraq, with its purple-thumbed election just like those in the West, and that Constitution (just like those in the West), and the respect for the rule of law (just like what happens in the West), and the equal treatment for ethnic minorities (Kurds and Turcomans in Arab-ruled areas, Arabs and Turcomans in Kurdish-ruled areas), and the equal treatment of religious minorities, Assyrians and Chaldeans and Yazidis and Mandeans and Armenians (just as in the West), and the free market that helps to make men free (just as in the West), and all the other wonderful things that have been transplanted to Iraq, and are taking root, root, root (just as in the West).
Oh, I could go on.
But so could you.
And we have hardly scratched that meretricious surface of Iraq, a place where the only "victory" that could conceivably be achieved was achieved more than four years ago, by February 2004, when the following had been accomplished:
Saddam Hussein had been captured.
Saddam Hussein's sons had been killed.
The game of Fifty-Two Pickup had been successfully played, and almost all of the major figures in Saddam Hussein's regime had been captured, or killed, or were on the run.
The country had been scoured for WMD, and it had not been found, and David Kay had issued his report that clearly recognized this.
By early 2004 the unacknowledged (by the Americans) transfer of power was then complete. I don't mean the transfer of power to some "transitional government" put in place by the soi-disant Coalition, with some Allawi or Jaabari there. No, I mean the only transfer of power that counted: that from the Sunni Arabs to the Shi'a Arabs.
By early 2004 that transfer was over and irrevocable. The Sunnis had lost, and while they would never acquiesce in that loss, they will never regain power in Iraq. And this fact is something that, being Muslims, they will not accept. They will fight on, forever, and they will attempt to receive, and will receive, support from Sunnis abroad. Whatever those "Awakening Councils" do or do not do, in exchange for all kinds of money and weapons from the Americans (you didn't think the Iraqi government, which is an agent of the Shi'a, would supply that money, or those weapons, to any Sunnis, even those fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, did you?), the Sunnis in them plan to undo what the American invasion did in causing them to lose power, and place, in Baghdad and in Iraq.
And the Shi'a will never give up that power. And why should they? There will be, there are, fights within the Shi'a camp, as there are within the camp of Sunnis. And it will go on for a very long time, and instead of being disturbed by this, instead of believing credulously in the warnings from such disinterested "allies" as Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt, (all of them eager to have the Americans stay to prop up the Sunnis, and delay the day when the Shi'a rule over fabled Baghdad and the land of the Two Rivers has at long last to be recognized, a blow to Sunni pride and history-haunted sense of what is fitting), and there is always the hope that the Americans, being manipulated and used by their Sunni "allies," who don't want them to bomb Iran's nuclear project, but do want them to stand as a barrier against Iran's army and to prevent it from intervening too much in Iraq, and then, possibly, in the Gulf ("Arabian" not "Persian") itself. On the other hand, the rise of the Shi'a in Iraq will appeal to the Shi'a in Bahrain (where they constitute 70% of the population and the Sunni ruler worries), in Kuwait (where they are a large minority, treated by the Sunni majority as one would expect the Sunni majority to treat them), in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province (where all the oilfields are located, and so too are all of Saudi Arabia's native, and resentful, and most ill-treated Shi'a).
If you recognize the meaning, and menace, of Islam, then all these fissures and fissures within fissures, all these distinctions, and lines of force, and leaders with ambition -- such as Moqtada al-Sadr -- can hardly be kept straight. But one thing should be kept straight. If two men, or four men, are in a barroom, and they all hate each other, and wish to kill each other, and at the same time they all wish to kill you, here's a bit of advice: don't go into that barroom, or don't stay in that barroom for very long, once you have grasped the situation. And above all, don't stay in that barroom and risk your life, in order to keep those two, or four (or six or eight) different people who all hate you, from harming one another.
Tiptoe out, and stand outside, listening to the thuds and the blows and the screams. And if occasionally you feel the need to throw inside a knife or a gun to this or that participant, do so. But don't go in yourself. Wait, watch, sit down, and take the time to figure out what you can do to make sure that others, related to the men inside, don't manage to settle in that next town over, beyond a few miles of mesquite, the town where all your kinfolk still live.
