Unfortunately, we can't turn back the clock to avoid dealing with sectarian thugs.
By Niall Ferguson
Los Angeles Times, 04 December 2006
IN KURT VONNEGUT'S "Slaughterhouse-Five," the hero has a hallucination — or, perhaps, a vision. A veteran of the strategic bombing of Germany, he turns on his television to be confronted by the uncanny spectacle of history played in reverse. American planes fly backward over Germany, sucking the bombs upward and miraculously extinguishing the flames sweeping through Dresden. The bombers land in England, where the bombs are unloaded and sent back to the United States to be dismantled. The explosives are returned to the ground. The air crews go back to high school.
I wonder if a similar vision has flickered tantalizingly through the mind of the Iraq Study Group's James A. Baker III: a vision of the Iraq war in reverse.
American soldiers, some dead, some maimed, would pick themselves up from the dust of Mesopotamia. Iraqi insurgents would suck the rocket-propelled grenades out of the American Humvees and allow them to reverse all the way back to their bases.
Saddam Hussein would be freed from jail, then taken to a hole in the ground where his beard would withdraw back into his chin. After a while, all the Americans would gather in Baghdad and cheer as a statue of Hussein was put back on a plinth. Symbolically, a Stars and Stripes flag would be used to unveil it. As a parting act of philanthropy, U.S. planes would suck dangerous explosives out of Iraqi power stations, ridding the country of the only weapons of mass destruction that were ever there.
Unfortunately, time's arrow travels in only one direction, though its precise arc can never be predicted. We are where we are, and there is no going back. So next week, the Iraq Study Group will present President Bush with some recommendations designed to move the United States and Iraq forward to a happier future.
It seems there will be three main proposals. First, there should be a "gradual pullback" of the 15 U.S. combat brigades in Iraq. (Where they should gradually pull back to is unclear. It could, in fact, be to existing bases in Iraq.) Second, the number of U.S. troops engaged in training the Iraqi security forces should be increased. Third, and most important, the U.S. should seek directly to involve Iran and Syria in the effort to stabilize not just Iraq but other Middle Eastern crisis spots.
All this appears, at first sight, like a welcome return to realism after the excesses of neoconservative idealism. But realistic solutions need realistic people to implement them. The trouble is that the three key figures in this particular story are increasingly surrealistic in both word and deed.
Take Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. According to a recent report by U.S. national security advisor Stephen Hadley, Maliki is consciously condoning "a campaign to consolidate Shia power in Baghdad." The evidence? "Repeated reports from our commanders … of … intervention by the prime minister's office to stop military action against Shia targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq's most effective commanders on a sectarian basis and efforts to ensure Shia majorities in all ministries … combined with the escalation of [Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi army] killings."
Pressed to clarify his view of Sadr during his joint news conference Thursday with President Bush in Amman, Jordan, Maliki unwittingly confirmed Hadley's analysis by describing the Shiite militia leader and his followers as "just one component that participate in the parliament or in the government."
To me, the Iraqi prime minister does not sound like the answer to the problem of escalating sectarian conflict. He is part of that problem.
Even more surrealistic, however, was the man standing alongside him at that news conference. At Wednesday's NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, Bush had already applied his favorite doctrine of preemption to the Iraq Study Group by emphatically ruling out "pulling the [American] troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." So much for gradual pullback, the bipartisan group's No. 1 recommendation.
On Thursday, Bush struck again. "This business about graceful exit," he told reporters, "just simply has no realism to it at all." Yes, to hell with realism. As for talking to the Iranians (another study group priority). to hell with that too. "Iraqis are plenty capable of running their own business," the president declared, "and they don't need foreign interference from neighbors that will be destabilizing the country." Just in case Baker missed that, the president threatened Tehran with "isolation" if it does not abandon its nuclear program.
Only one man in the world can outdo Bush when he is in this kind of Dali-esque form — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Connoisseurs of his surrealist style were given a treat last week in the form of a letter from Ahmadinejad "To the American People." Apparently co-written by Borat, this missive went beyond the usual U.S. denunciations by blaming everything on "the Zionists … [who] have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors." Yes, folks, Hitler was right all along: The Jews run America.
When confronted with such master practitioners of the politics of surrealism, it's hard to know how far back you'd have to go to sort this whole mess out. To find a credible Iraqi prime minister, I'd say you'd need to rewind the tape to 2004, when the opportunity was missed to crush Sadr's Mahdi army. To get to the last credible American president, you'd need to get to 2000. and give the election to Gore. But to find an Iranian leader who wasn't a dangerous fanatic? All the way back to 1979, before the revolution, I fear. Yes, it's been a pretty long road to this slaughterhouse. But, as Vonnegut says, so it goes.
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Citation: Niall Ferguson. "The surrealism of Iraq," Los Angeles Times, 04 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ferguson4dec04,0,7110224.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
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