As a scientist who has spent a lot of time with chaos theory, I find the notion that chaos would be the result of our letting the people of Iraq settle their differences without us very unlikely. In his WaPo column today, Harold Meyerson tells us why. Here's how he approaches the issue:
Why is the Iraq war different from all other American wars? (Passover is upon us, so I've posed the question in correct Passover-ese.)
In each of our other wars, American soldiers fought the same adversaries from start to finish. We fought the British in the Revolution and the War of 1812, Mexico in the Mexican War and so on. Only in the Korean War did we have to engage an additional nation's army (that of China) after the war began -- and if Douglas MacArthur hadn't pushed to the Chinese border, we might have fought only North Korea. In a number of wars, our enemies received aid from other nations (Vietnam from the Soviet Union, for instance), but the actual combat involved fighting only our original adversary.
Not so in Iraq, where we are now fighting our third distinct enemy
This analysis has merit for future debates about the war. Read on to see why.
I hope John McCain reads Meyerson's columnEnemy No. 3 in Iraq because he seems quite a bit mixed up about this situation. An understanding of neocolonialism would be a great help for anyone as muddy as he is about why these wars happen. When the Colonial powers pulled out of their colonies they followed a simple, but effective, strategy to insure long term economic dominance over their former Colony without the expense of maintaining a presence there. They found natural adversaries and fueled the animosity between them.
That makes our behavior in Iraq the fulfillment of a prophesy. It was made by Nkrumah in his book about Neocolonialism as the last stage of Imperialism. He told a parable which I will paraphrase from memory:
Neocolonialism will be the end of American power. The old Colonial powers are like the bunch of tough kids robbing a candy store. The US is the naive new kid who wants to get into the gang. The cops come and the tough guys hand the bag of candy to the new kid and take off. Guess who is left holding the bag?
Iraq is even sillier than that. We decided to occupy the place at this point in history. It seems clear that the folks who dreamed up this fiasco knew less than nothing about the country, the region and history. Meyerson takes us on a quick tour of what should have been very predictable to anyone who had knowledge of the situation:
In the war's first phase, we engaged Saddam Hussein's government and, after it fell, pro-Hussein and other Sunni forces that waged a guerrilla war against us. In its second phase, we fought a group that hadn't even existed when the invasion began, al-Qaeda in Iraq. By our own military's admission, al-Qaeda in Iraq was never responsible for more than a small fraction of the violence there, but it was the group most implacably hostile to our soldiers and to much of the civilian population. In this, we were greatly aided by the Sunni forces that had been our main adversaries in the war's first phase but which had come to loathe al-Qaeda. As the Sunni resistance took up arms against al-Qaeda, we reclassified the Sunnis as friends and armed them, though they remained opposed to the Shiite-dominated national government we claim as our primary ally.
Now, according to the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker before Congress last week, our main adversaries in Iraq are the Shiite forces being aided by Iran, the Shiite power next door. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been largely confined to the area around Mosul, and most of the attacks on U.S. forces and on the authority of the Iraqi government, they said, come from Iranian-backed Shiite militias, many aligned with Moqtada al-Sadr, who has spent the past several months in Iran. Then again, Iran also backs the Shiite-controlled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- which is why it was Iran that negotiated the cease-fire between Maliki's forces and Shiite militias after Maliki's offensive against the militias in Basra ground to a halt.
This is not a chaotic scenario. Chaotic scenarios are replete with unpredictable unintended consequences. Not that our wise leaders had the ability to predict this outcome, but that tells us little about them we do not already know.
The obvious question is: "What is it we need to stay there for?" The litany about a stable, democratic Iraq that does not have terrorists in it and poses no threat to its neighbors can not possibly be something a rational person would say. As Meyerson so aptly puts it:
Our current policy in Iraq, then, is to defend those Shiite groups aligned with Maliki, their closeness to Iran notwithstanding, against those Shiite groups, also close to Iran, aligned either with Sadr or in any event against Maliki. And just because we're now focusing on enemy No. 3 doesn't mean that enemy No. 1, the Sunni insurgents, won't take the field again against Maliki and our own forces -- only this time, they'll have the arms we gave them to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Our war in Iraq, then, is different from all our previous wars because we are occupying a nation at war with itself, where groups take up arms against us because we defend a government to which they're not reconciled, a government that may itself pose a strategic threat to our interests. In such a nation, we accumulate enemies simply through our ongoing presence.
If our chief concern is, as we now assert, the spread of Iranian influence, what we need is a Sunni-led government, which could not attain or hold power in majority-Shiite Iraq save by force. That is, we need another Saddam Hussein, only this time, one less antagonistic to the United States. But this would be a resolution we could not support, because it would make a mockery of our entire misadventure in Iraq.
So here we are in a very well ordered quagmire with leaders using words like "victory" and "defeat" in a situation where they never can be given meaning. Maybe they want more time to try to dream up something to give those useless words meaning? If so, it will never be worth another American or Iraqi life. The only thing chaotic about this entire mess is the thinking that got us there and keeps us there. Getting out of Iraq will clearly put an end to that chaos.
Update: Since I have been accused of playing semantic games here are some definitions of chaos:
a state of extreme confusion and disorder
the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos
(Greek mythology) the most ancient of gods; the personification of the infinity of space preceding creation of the universe
(physics) a dynamical system that is extremely sensitive to its initial conditions