Part 19 (1/2)

But some questioned whether the U.S. effort would ever reach the desired end state described by Chaplain Davis. ”It seems to be getting better, but you really can't tell,” said Cpl. Toby Gilbreath, as he stood outside Patrol Base San Juan, an imposing bunker west of Baghdad.

”I would like to think that there are still possibilities here,” Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice said in the coffee shop of the al Rasheed Hotel downtown in the Green Zone. ”We are finally getting around to doing the right things.” Rice was working on an Army lessons learned project but was expressing his personal opinion. ”I think we're getting better, I do.” But, he continued, ”is it too little, too late?”

AFTERWORD: BETTING AGAINST HISTORY.

MID-2006.

H.

istory will determine if President Bush was correct in a.s.serting that the invasion of Iraq ”made our country more secure.” But the indications at this point, during the war's fourth year, aren't good. Globally, fear and distrust of the U.S. government increased. Regionally, the war in Iraq distracted the U.S. military and intelligence establishments from maintaining a single-minded focus on the pursuit of bin Laden and al Qaeda. So while there is a small chance that the Bush administration's inflexible optimism will be rewarded, that the political process will undercut the insurgency, and that democracy will take hold in Iraq, there is a far greater chance of other, more troublesome outcomes: that Iraq will fall into civil war, or spark regional war, or eventually become home to an anti-American regime, or break up altogether. In any of these forms it would offer a new haven for terrorists.

In January 2005, the CIA's internal think tank, the National Intelligence Council, concluded that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for a new generation of jihadist terrorists. The country had become ”a magnet for international terrorist activity,” said the council's chairman, Robert Hutchings. There was no question that there were more terrorists in Iraq in 2005 than there were early in 2003, when President Bush had accused the country of harboring terrorists.

Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan and an outspoken opponent of the war, said that under the care of the Bush administration, Iraq had become a failed state of the sort that produces terrorists. ”Iraq was not a failed state in 2002,” he noted.

The invasion of Iraq has proven unexpectedly costly, with the loss of several thousand American soldiers and of an untold number of Iraqis. During 2004 and 2005, the cost to the American taxpayer was running at about $5 billion a month, meaning that by mid-2006, the total cost of the adventure had surpa.s.sed $200 billion. It is staggering to think of how that amount of money could have been spent differently to achieve the Bush administration's stated goals of countering terrorism and curtailing the proliferation of weapons of ma.s.s destruction. Just $1 billion in aid, for example, might have changed the face of education in Pakistan and helped draw out the poison of anti-Western teachings there.

The policy costs to the United States The costs go well beyond that initial bill of blood and treasure; Iraq is likely to dominate American foreign policy for years. As the ”National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” the doc.u.ment released by the White House in November 2005, put it, ”What happens in Iraq will influence the fate of the Middle East for generations to come, with a profound impact on our own national security.”

In Iraq, the U.S. position also suffers from the strategic problem of the fruit of the poisoned tree-that is, when a nation goes to war for faulty reasons, it undercuts all the actions that follow, especially when it won't concede those errors. The administration stubbornly won't deal with being wrong on WMD, and its refusal to make amends appears to have intensified the reluctance of many other nations to partic.i.p.ate in the pacification and rebuilding of Iraq. Likewise, the administration won't admit to propounding tenuous links between Iraq and anti-U.S. terrorism. This is an arguably greater error, because it may have contributed to the problem of some U.S. troops' conflating the war in Iraq with the 9/11 attacks, and so led some to treat Iraqis as despised terrorists rather than as the prize in the war.

Another policy cost, yet to be paid, is the damage done to the credibility of its policy of preemption. Admittedly, waging preventive war will always be controversial in the United States. But the threat of it may be precisely what is needed to deal with a belligerent, nuclear-armed North Korea when that regime is on the verge of collapse, or for dealing with the Pakistani nuclear a.r.s.enal after an Islamic extremist coup. ”How many people are going to believe us when we say, 'It's a slam dunk'-to use George Tenet's phrase-'Iran has nuclear weapons'?” David Kay asked on CNN. ”The answer is going to be, 'You said that before.'”

A third strategic error has been less noticed-the cost of being backed by a phony coalition. By pretending to have the West behind it, the Bush administration committed the prestige prestige of the West to a military adventure in the Mideast without having the of the West to a military adventure in the Mideast without having the resources resources of the West behind it. This became increasingly evident as the U.S. presence was challenged and the coalition continued to dwindle. There is a possibility that the incompetence of the U.S. occupation and the unwillingness of other Western nations to become involved will lead Islamic extremists to underestimate the genuine strength of the West, which is extraordinary, and barely tapped yet. Of such miscalculations, wars are made. of the West behind it. This became increasingly evident as the U.S. presence was challenged and the coalition continued to dwindle. There is a possibility that the incompetence of the U.S. occupation and the unwillingness of other Western nations to become involved will lead Islamic extremists to underestimate the genuine strength of the West, which is extraordinary, and barely tapped yet. Of such miscalculations, wars are made.

There are two additional costs that grow out of the way the Bush administration handled the coalition it brought to Iraq. One general at the Pentagon worried-given what he called the shabby treatment of those nations that did partic.i.p.ate, such as Poland and Spain, which were invited to a peacekeeping mission and then asked to partic.i.p.ate in combat-about what will happen the next time the U.S. government seeks international partic.i.p.ation in a military operation. And allies have a new distrust of the U.S. government's decision-making processes, which proved defective during the run-up to the war, and then again during the occupation. ”The fact that our judgment was flawed has created an enormous legitimacy problem for us, one that will hurt our interests for a long time to come,” commented Francis f.u.kuyama, a political theorist who first came to Was.h.i.+ngton as an intern for Paul Wolfowitz.

Then there are opportunity costs that may become painfully evident as events unfold. What if we wake up one morning and there has been an Islamic extremist coup in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? The U.S. military is already stretched thin, so if a military response is deemed necessary-and it likely would be, given that one country dominates the world oil market and the other possesses nuclear weapons-we may be sending in tired troops or units that lack training.

One way to prevent war is by early engagement. In particular, the use of small numbers of highly skilled troops who can train local militaries in humane but effective methods of operation is a proven way of quenching possible insurgencies, and also of deterring terrorist organizations from finding new sanctuaries. (Individuals can hide but groups generally need safe locations in which to meet and plan, and to cache supplies.) In the U.S. military, the troops expert in that sort of foreign internal defense mission are Special Forces. Yet, said one Special Forces veteran, by mid-2005, the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were consuming more than 80 percent of the Special Operations forces, meaning that smaller problems elsewhere may be growing through neglect.

Another cost of continuing heavy engagement in Iraq is that it could embolden adversaries to act. For example, former Defense Secretary William Perry warned in a January 2005 talk in Hong Kong that some senior Chinese generals were advising the Beijing government that it was the right time to deal militarily with Taiwan, while the ”U.S. is pinned down in Iraq and will not be able to come to the defense of Taiwan.” Likewise, the U.S. investment in Iraq may have given Iran a window of opportunity in which to develop nuclear weapons.

Yet inside all these problems there lay a major victory for President Bush and his plan to transform the Middle East. Like it or not, the U.S. government through his actions has been tethered to Iraq and to the region around it as never before. Under him, the U.S. military has carried out its first ever occupation of an Arab nation, and the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in an attempt to change the nature of politics there. Whether or not his vision of transforming the Middle East occurs, it appears that the United States won't be detaching from the region anytime soon. ”If the government falls, we'll have to go back in,” in a third war, commented John Lehman, a Reagan-era Navy secretary. The stakes are simply too high to let Iraq become a sanctuary for anti-U.S. terrorists.

The best case scenario: The Philippines, 1899-1946 For the U.S. government, success really means staying in Iraq for years. The alternatives are failure in some form-either a unilateral withdrawal and abandonment of Iraq, or ejection by an anti-American government. ”The average counterinsurgency in the twentieth century has lasted nine years,” Gen. Casey said late in 2005. ”Fighting insurgencies is a long-term proposition, and there's no reason that we should believe that the insurgency in Iraq will take any less time to deal with.” So while it is likely that there will be a series of cuts in the U.S. military presence in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, it also remains likely that thousands of troops will be there for many years to come.

The a.n.a.logy here is to the American war in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century. That episode began badly in 1899, with a combination of poor strategic planning and presidential inattentiveness, and a media that acted as cheerleaders for war. Also like Iraq in 2003, it began as a conventional conflict and was transformed into a guerrilla war. And when U.S. troops proved poorly prepared, and some reacted with brutality, the American public was dismayed.

But by late 1900, the U.S. Army had begun to adjust. Commanders spread their troops among the people, where they were able to learn the ident.i.ties of their enemies and to seize many weapons. They trained local police units that, though troubled, eventually became an effective counterinsurgency force. Drawing on its experience in the American West, and resolved not to repeat the mistakes it had made there, the Army was ”determined to preserve the Filipino by raising his standards and cultivating his friends.h.i.+p,” said one officer quoted by Brian Linn in his history of the Philippines War. By 1902 the war was over, but U.S. forces remained in the country for decades. It was, wrote Linn, ”the most successful counterinsurgency campaign in U.S. history.”

Settling into such a posture of keeping a lid on the insurgents while whittling them down to irrelevancy would mean that the U.S. war in Iraq was returning to its pattern of containment-albeit this time on the ground. If that happens, it is likely that future historians will come to look at the U.S. effort from 1991 on as one long war, beginning with a short ground battle, followed by twelve years of containment done largely from the air, then another short ground fight in 2003, followed by another decade or so of containment-this time on the ground, and inside Iraq. No one expects the insurgency to disappear, but the hope would be to keep a lid on it, limiting its reach and intensity.

The doubt that hangs over even this most optimistic of scenarios is the duration of American popular support for maintaining a significant military presence for years to come. The question will become increasingly pointed with the pa.s.sage of time, because as long as American soldiers are in Iraq, some are likely to die violently. The aim would be to reduce U.S. losses from two or three a day to that number a week, and eventually to that number a month, on the calculation that the American people would stand for such a rate of casualties.

The middling scenario: France in Algeria or Israel in Lebanon It is equally possible that while the U.S. military makes improvements in its tactics and in the quality of Iraqi security forces, the political clock will run out on the effort there, either domestically or in Iraq itself, and that the U.S. will retreat before the job is done. Even if the U.S. military is able to turn most security functions over to Iraqi forces, that is unlikely to end the fighting. Because the Sunnis aren't reconciled to being a minority in a democracy, said Bing West, the s.h.i.+te-dominated Iraqi security forces essentially are going to have to conduct their own occupation of the Sunni Triangle for years to come. Thus, any U.S. withdrawal would almost certainly lead to far more violence.

The closest a.n.a.logy to the U.S. experience in Iraq may be the French in Algeria. There are of course many differences-France was a colonial power, it had a million citizens residing in Algeria, and its military was reeling from a stinging defeat in Vietnam. Also, the French had been in Algeria for over a century and had a much better feel for its Arab and Berber cultures. The biggest difference is that a sovereign Iraqi government able to stand on its own would represent a victory for the United States, while an independent Algeria was a defeat for France. Yet there also are some striking similarities; most notably, in both wars a Western power found itself enmeshed in an Arab land fighting a primarily urban battle against a murky mix of nationalists and Islamicists.

Algeria ended badly for the French. Their military became steadily more effective, but so notably brutal, with three thousand prisoners supposedly murdered, that the French public was repulsed. Ultimately, parts of the French army, feeling betrayed by the nation's politicians, rebelled, and even tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate President Charles de Gaulle. ”They won tactically on the ground but brought down the French government by losing its moral authority-that's not a victory,” noted Gen. Mattis, a Marine commander who has long studied the Algerian conflict in the belief that it was emblematic of the wars the United States was likely to fight. That said, France recovered smartly, and in the decades since the Algerian crisis has enjoyed more political stability than it had for most of the twentieth century.

The U.S. Army isn't going to launch a coup d'etat, no matter what happens in Iraq, but a premature U.S. withdrawal likely would have severe consequences, especially for the Mideast. ”To push Iraqi forces to the fore before they are ready is not 'leaving to win,' it is rus.h.i.+ng to failure,” said Sepp, the insurgency expert who advised Gen. Casey in 2005. If we leave too soon, he and his colleague Col. Hix argued, we might just be setting ourselves up for another war. ”It is not beyond the realm of the possible that the United States would find itself in the position of leading another invasion of Iraq ... to make right what was allowed to go wrong for the sake of expedience,” they warned.

An Iraqi blogger writing under the t.i.tle The Mesopotamian laid out a scenario of what might come after a precipitous U.S. pullout. On Day 2, he wrote, al Anbar province would fall, ”even before the last American soldier leaves Baghdad.” That would be followed by fighting between s.h.i.+te and Sunni groups along the murky ethnic dividing line running southwest from Baghdad. In the capital, ”[a]ll shops and markets are closed and start to be looted.” Next, the Kurds would move to capture the key oil city of Kirkuk, on the edge of their historical territory. ”Turkey cannot allow that and invades from the north.” The Kurds would turn to Iran for protection, as would the s.h.i.+tes, who would feel abandoned by the West and betrayed once more by the United States. In response to the Iranian intervention, he predicted, a torrent of Arabs from Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would pour into Iraq to support their Sunni brothers. ”All join an infernal orgy of death and destruction the likes of which have seldom been seen,” he said, and oil prices would rocket past one hundred dollars a barrel as ”fanaticism sweeps the region.”

The prospect of such a catastrophe makes it more likely that the United States will remain in Iraq even if the country hovers for years on the edge of civil war. In that scenario, the U.S. strategy essentially would have to be to keep a lid on a low-level civil war for as long as possible, while also trying to keep U.S. casualties low enough that the American public doesn't demand an unconditional withdrawal. That sort of chronic occupation raises the possibility of another historical parallel. The U.S. experience in Iraq may come to resemble that of yet another Western-style military's attempt to pacify an Arab population: Israel's painful eighteen-year occupation of parts of southern Lebanon.

A worse scenario: civil war, part.i.tion, and regional war?

Even if the United States stays, there is no guarantee that Iraq won't slip into civil war. That threat hovers constantly, discussed quietly by American officers as a possibility and more openly by many Iraqis. Americans tend to remember the horrors of their own civil war and so a.s.sume that all parties would do their best to avoid it, a perspective that obscures the fact that there is a considerable pro-civil war lobby in Iraq. Essentially, there may be more people in the region who want to see the United States leave Iraq than want to see it stay, from Sunni Islamic extremists to their s.h.i.+te foes. The quickest way to achieve that ejection of the U.S. presence may be to start a civil war, on the calculation that the U.S. public wouldn't stand for seeing American troops die trying to keep apart the warring factions.

Some maintained that civil conflict already had begun in 2005. ”This is one of the stages of civil war we are in right now,” said Ayad Allawi, who served as Iraq's interim prime minister in late 2004 and early 2005. ”What you have is killings, a.s.sa.s.sinations, militias, a stagnant economy, no services.” Yet a genuine, full-blown civil war would be far worse. It likely would involve major ma.s.sacres of civiliansand a variety of foreign interventions, both covert and overt. A s.h.i.+te-dominated Iraqi government with its back to the wall might very well invite the Iranian military to join it in putting down the Sunnis, which likely would be done with such brutality that it would horrify the world.

Were Iraq to break up, it is possible that a s.h.i.+te south eventually would harness its oil money to build its military capacity, and then move southward to ”liberate” its s.h.i.+te brethren who live on top of Saudi Arabia's oil fields, warned T. X. Hammes, the Marine counterinsurgency expert who served in Iraq. Meanwhile, he predicted, there would be a multination fight for the oil fields of the north, likely including Turkey, a member of NATO. ”We have lit multiple fuses” in the region, he said. ”There will be multiple explosions. I'm thinking our grandkids could easily be there,” carrying on the fight decades from now.

Amin Saikal, director of the Australian National University's Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, worried that the United States, by turning over control of Iraq to its s.h.i.+tes, had altered the balance of power in the region. ”The traditional power equation in the Gulf is rapidly s.h.i.+fting in favor of s.h.i.+te Islam,” he wrote. ”If the present trend continues, the Iraq conflict could cause wider sectarian hostilities across the Muslim world, with a devastating impact on the region and beyond.”