US Interests and GWOT Realities

Two able observers offer views of the US’s approach to and problems with war that are quite distinct from each other, yet poles of the same issue: How to wield our power and armed might.

They both see the same enemy, international terrorism, but one sees it necessary to play to international opinion in order to engage the enemy while the other believes that our first priority is to maximize our national interest, and international opinions will follow the victor.

I lean toward the latter, because it is what experience has taught. The US’s national interests are not those of ephemeral international opinion. The US has waffled between our interests and whatever the latest international waffle. Thus, our policies have too often been nonproductive and allowed our opinionated enemies to whittle away at our moral authority.

Both observers may be classified as “conservative,” but represent differing strands.

Shelby Steele’s specialization is race relations and multiculturalism. Angelo Cordevilla’s specialization is the wielding of power.

Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which says that our war in Iraq is not one of survival of our world, in which all means are legitimate, but one of discipline to retain a status quo – even though part of a larger war of survival. Therefore, Steele writes:

Great power scares unless it is exercised within a painstaking moral framework. Thus, moral authority is the single greatest challenge of American foreign policy. This is especially so in wars of discipline, wars fought far away and for abstract reasons. We argue for such wars as if they were wars of survival because we want the moral authority that comes so automatically to them. But Iraq is a war of discipline, and no more. If we left Iraq tomorrow there would be terrible consequences all around, but we would survive.

Our broader war against terror, on the other hand, is a war of survival. And it is rich in moral authority. September 11 introduced necessity and, in its name, we have an open license to destroy that stateless network of terrorism that attacked us. America is not divided over this. It was Iraq--a war of discipline--that brought us division. This does not mean that the Iraq war is invalid.

Ultimately, it may prove to be a far more important war in preserving a balance of power favorable to America than our war against al Qaeda.

The prime difficulty in Steele’s approach is that he separates Iraq from the wider, existential war. Battles are not fought in a vacuum, but must serve the wider war aims. The attendant difficulty in Steele’s views is that international opinion is largely a shifting mirage, made up of small self-important elites projecting their own, usually leftist and almost always unrealistic and insulated views, whose loyalties rapidly shift with who is powerful and willing to exert power.

That’s where Angelo Codevilla comes in. Codevilla is a student of Machiavelli, who described the rules of the game of power. The rules may be used for good or ill, but to negate the ends accomplished by the necessary means is to create weakness and allow the field to those willing to use the rules for ill ends.

”a prince ... cannot observe all of those virtues for which men are reputed good, because it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity, against frankness, against religion, in order to preserve the state."

Codevilla takes the US severely to task for its failure to follow the rules in Iraq and the broader Middle East. His critique should be read in full. It’s not what most, either conservative or liberal, neocon or realist or defeatist, are accustomed to hearing. But, it cuts to the heart of our bleeding for four years, and the limited best outcomes we face. Codevilla has been consistently opposed to our entering Iraq, seeing bigger game afoot, and the confusion of our aims. He’s been proven correct, so far. His forecast, therefore, should be taken seriously. Most important, his indictment of our befuddled policy class requires a new realism in Washington.

A long article by Codevilla in the Claremont Review says that the US has played to the self-interests of Middle Eastern Sunni despots and to the commercial interests and moral confusion of Western Europeans, rather than to American interests.

Working as they did under the banner of democracy, State and the CIA's limited efforts on behalf of their favored Iraqi group (also that of the Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians)—the Sunni Arabs—fostered only vain hopes and fruitless strife. Moreover, few of these half-hearted imperialists realized how thoroughly the religious, social, and cultural identity of Iraq's Shia majority had been subsumed by political movements; nor did they anticipate that the Sunni minority would refuse to accept the loss of political power and socioeconomic primacy inevitable in the fall of the Ba'ath party dictatorship—their dictatorship. In short, the authors of the occupation imagined that the Iraqis could easily be induced to forget the things that were most precious to them, and to reconcile themselves to a regime invented for them in Washington….

The U.S. foreign policy establishment's vision of Iraq was of a country united and governed by a secular elite that would transcend confessional and racial differences. But those differences would not be transcended, except by violence. A vision at odds with reality could not be the basis of an agenda….

The U.S. government knew well enough that nearly all of those shooting at U.S. soldiers were Sunni Arabs, usually attached to Saddam's Ba'ath party, who were using foreign Wahabi suicide bombers—usually Saudis—as ordnance. Nevertheless, its response to the Sunni insurgency has been to try to co-opt it by arming and empowering those Sunni Ba'athist military figures who promise somehow to temper attacks on Americans. This purchase of truces as if there were no tomorrow was the hallmark of General David Petraeus's 2003 command in Mosul. It was the thinking behind turning Fallujah over to a Ba'athist general in 2004, who, in turn, made it into the insurrection's citadel. It is also, alas, the thinking behind the plan for extricating U.S. forces while maintaining a veneer of success that Petraeus was sent to execute in 2007, especially in Anbar province. The plan consisted of sending some 35,000 additional U.S. troops to provide "security" in Anbar province by working with some Sunnis, and in Baghdad by working against some Shia. Achieving lower U.S. body counts would underpin claims of success. But because one side's security is another's insecurity, troops on the ground know that "security" is inherently meaningless. This demoralized them, strengthened America's worst enemies among the Sunnis, and convinced the majority Shia that America was intent on double-crossing them. Whatever tactical victories the surge may bring, it is a formula for strategic defeat. Refusing to choose sides, the U.S. armed forces end up the enemy of all—and, surely worst of all, feared by none….

Statecraft would have required viewing Iraq's realities—which reflected the growing worldwide enmity between Sunni and Shia, between Arabs and Persians—from the standpoint of what America could do to crush or cow regimes that export terror, whether Arab or Persian, Sunni or Shia. After the invasion, only our occupation prevented Iraq's Shia majority from ripping out the Ba'ath party's last bloody roots, both to avenge its tyranny and because it is Sunni. Had the Shia done this, the Arab world's Sunni regimes would have begged America not to let the same fate befall them. The Shia, for their part, would not have had to be persuaded by what America had done for them, but would have been impressed by what it could let happen to them. The lesson for all would have been that America turns its enemies over to their enemies' tender mercies. In short, statecraft would have meant subordinating the wishes of the Iranian, Turk, and Arab regimes to American interests—not fighting their battles for them or trying to compose their differences. America fights only its own enemies. Only by denying the logic of statecraft did occupying Iraq make sense. But once the occupation commenced and reality began to bite, only a double denial of statecraft's logic prevented our establishment from enabling one side's victory over the others, or crushing all….

U.S. establishmentarians, who regard all religion as hokum, cannot fathom the differences between the Sunni and Shia variants of Islam, which mean so much to Muslims. Hence our experts have also been unable to tell the difference between serious Muslims and the secular legions that clothe their hate and contempt for us in Muslim garb. Our establishment thinks that because religion is the mother of strife, the enemy of modernity, it must be humored and subdued in the short term, then marginalized and eventually eliminated. This mindset prevents intelligent judgment about why we might prefer some religious expressions to others, and ensures the enmity of all who believe in God….

What follows from the foreign policy establishment's apolitical division of mankind into "moderates" and "extremists" is an art of politics, if that's the right term, that prevents considering what anyone is, or should be, moderate or extreme about. It abstracts from right and wrong, honor and shame. It leads to moderation in pursuit of America's interests. Then, in the hope of avoiding worse threats to our modest interests, it leads to finding moderation in those who threaten us. It becomes the promotion of "moderation" for its own sake, and then boils down to coaxing "extremists" into "moderation" by involving them in profitable and (supposedly) addictive arrangements. Our establishmentarians imagine they can moderate our enemies by promising them that they can get most of what they want through cooperation; and tell the American people that if we were to forcefully oppose our enemies, that would only radicalize them further….

The establishment behaved toward Arab terrorist states as it did toward terrorist individuals and groups. After all, inspiration, money, and organization for anti-American terrorism does not come from Mars. It comes from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Iran, and elsewhere; until 2003 it came from Iraq. The official disclaimer that these states' media, schools, and private wealth and infrastructure enable terrorism, independent of government authority, is as incredible as the PLO's. These regimes embody anti-American causes. If they treated anti-U.S. terrorism as they do terrorism against themselves, the world would sleep safely. One reason they do not is that the U.S. designates them as "moderates," making their activities acceptable and their goals generally praiseworthy. Indeed, preserving these regimes' health and comfort has been one of the U.S. establishment's prime concerns. By contrast, statecraft is about our national interest….

When, after 9/11, the Bush Administration decided once and for all to rid America of Saddam, it did not at the same time rid itself of the approach to international affairs that had turned military victory into strategic defeat in 1990-91. Rhetoric aside, its strategic priorities in 2003 were identical to those of the previous decade: catering to the Sunni Arab world's supposedly "moderate" interests. Arab governments strongly opposed the invasion. But once it happened, they just as strongly demanded, for the same reason, that the U.S. occupy Iraq: above all, they wanted Iraq's Shia majority to be kept under some sort of Sunni control. That meant keeping Iraq together, but keeping its majority from ruling. Our establishment answered the call by occupying Iraq for half a decade, tergiversating between democracy, meaning Shia power, and "national unity," code for re-empowering Sunnis. No surprise then that the U.S. government's penultimate act in Iraq, the "surge" begun in 2007, aimed to arm as many Sunni militias as would take U.S. arms, ostensibly to fight other Sunnis we choose to call al-Qaeda, and to forcefully suppress some Shia militias in Baghdad. The media have passed along the U.S. government's ignorant acceptance of some terrorists' baseless self-identification as al-Qaeda, and "Liaison Services" reports that this or that group is part of al-Qaeda. The original al-Qaeda, made up of "Afghan Arabs," was never much and is mostly gone. But countless people use the name to frighten America and to shield their sponsors. Labeling Sunni violence al-Qaeda lets the U.S. government pretend that the struggle in Iraq is not between Iraqis for Iraqi stakes, with Sunnis supported by Arabs and Shia supported by Persians. Credulity covers its continuing effort to co-opt the Sunnis. Thus did our establishment further enable Iraq's factions to fight one another, and motivate all to fight us.

But note well: all of the above policies work against the interest of the United States, which is to force Arab rulers to clamp down on any and all who might harm Americans, lest the Arab rulers themselves be killed….

Our establishment's problems in Iraq stem from its crazy commitment to the Saudis' and other Sunnis' struggle against Shia Iran. Designating the Sunni world as Islam's "moderate" wing, despite the increasing influence of Saudi Wahabism within it, takes no small dishonesty. So does forgetting that the overwhelming majority of anti-American terrorists, their media, and their money come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, and Palestine—the Sunni world. Nor will the excuse wash that appeasing the Sunni world is some kind of shield against Iran's soon-to-be nuclear armament. How could that be? Moreover, Iran's nukes would be directed at the Sunni world foremost—just as a hypothetical Egyptian or Saudi bomb would be directed against Iran. Israel seems to have followed us in a de facto alliance with the Sunni world against Iran. But that the Saudis, et al., might shield Israel against Iran is even less plausible than that they might shield America. Since we Americans have even less control than we have interest in this struggle, we should not make it ours nor export silly notions.

Our interest lies in being feared and respected by both sides.

It’s a bloody ending to our occupation of Iraq, actually after our occupation, that Codevilla foresees. Codevilla sees the US’s interests best served by letting that confrontation put some real fear into the neighboring Sunni satraps, to stop their double-dealing and actually end the terrorism they foster on the rest of the world and their fellow Arabs.

AND, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial notices that the Sunni Arab states, source of most human-explosive-devices, fail to post ambassadors to Iraq, perhaps noting that, “A functional Muslim democracy -- federalized, pluralist, majority-led and imposed by American arms -- is a worrying precedent for the autocratic houses of Assad, Saud and Mubarak.” Similarly, they play at peace at Annapolis while continuing to insist on self-demolition by Israel. The US’s participation in their charade is simply ridiculous, not to mention scandalous, that our youth should shed their blood and our nation its honor in furthering their agendas rather than our own. Our primary interest is in their stopping their furtherance of international terrorism, and that’s little happening as long as we permit them to get away with it, brazenly.