Al Qaeda clearly profited from Iraq’s dissolution as a unitary state, but quite frankly al Qaeda will always have some cause célèbre. As a fundamentalist movement combating globalization’s creeping embrace of its sacred places, it will always have “infidels” worth driving out. Nothing short of complete civilizational apartheid will ever satisfy al Qaeda’s agenda, and even that would simply expand its geographic ambition. So if al Qaeda’s resurgence is hardly remarkable, and its temporary ideological profiteering in Iraq was simply a function of President Bush’s Big Bang strategy, then neither outcome adds up to a loss in this long war, even as neither points out the path to victory. As America’s combat role in Iraq inevitably winds down, our definition of progress must inevitably broaden beyond simply “killing weeds” to “growing some lawn.” As the guy who cuts my grass likes to say, you can’t do both at the same time.
And the lawn is growing. Foreign direct investment flows to the Middle East and North Africa have quadrupled since 2000. Thanks to Asia’s growing energy thirst, higher oil prices provided the initial trigger, but what’s truly important this time around is that the region’s oil-rich economies are choosing to invest in energy-poor neighbors, such as Morocco and Egypt, in desperate need of outside capital. Instead of governments leading the way, this time it’s private investors. Instead of white elephants, this time we’re seeing bold forays into all sorts of infrastructure and networks that link this region more effectively to the global economy. For now, it remains primarily the elites who benefit, with the big question being how much of this expanded economic opportunity in the coming years will make it to the masses, for there lies the youth bulge that Arab governments must manage lest idle hands be seduced by radical ideologies.
My point is this: In security terms, it’s always going to feel like we’re “losing” this war or—at best—achieving an operational stalemate. The real victory won’t come on any battlefield, however, but rather in boardrooms. In the end, we can’t kill bad guys faster than our enemies can grow them. Instead, we must offer them a more attractive recruitment package.
Progress isn’t about less violence, it’s about speeding the killing to its logical conclusion in any one battlefield to shift the fight to its next logical stand. After the Middle East, the next theater of combat lies to the south, meaning the war’s geography shifts to sub-Saharan Africa in coming decades. Americans are routinely accused of lacking strategic patience. We want our wars finished by the next major holiday or certainly by the next election. Given that mindset, we’re forced to subsist on current events for encouragement—as in, “Which famous al Qaeda figure did we kill this week?” But if you admit this is going to be a long struggle, you look for trends and not individual events to drive your strategic calculations. Ultimately, we’re trying to connect the Middle East to the global economy on the basis of something besides oil, turning all those idle young males into jobholders instead of bomb-throwers. Meanwhile, the radical Salafi jihadists seek to disconnect the region from what they see as the corrupting—and growing—influence of globalization.
Here’s the most important news in terms of America’s grand strategy: Time is on our side.
Consider the demographics. The Middle East is overwhelmingly young, with roughly two-thirds of its population under thirty. As a result, a huge youth bulge is working its way through these traditional societies, creating immense strains on modest educational systems and setting up authoritarian governments for persistently high levels of unemployment—a great mix for revolutionary change throughout history. After a baby boom, there’s typically a baby bust, and sure enough, fertility rates have dropped dramatically across much of the Middle East. That demographic inevitability yields the following positive trend: The Middle East will “middle-age” over the next quarter-century. Revolutions are a young man’s game, so Osama bin Laden has barely a generation to achieve his dream of civilizational apartheid. Because if he can’t, we’ll be looking at a very different Middle East come 2025. And we’d better, because, as far-sighted demographers point out, a subsequent “echo boom” (i.e., a follow-on smaller youth bulge begotten by today’s version) will emerge in most Arab states later that decade, meaning time is on our side—but not forever.
Three external trends will also fuel this transformation, each producing a profound blowback to the region. The first will arise in North America, and it will involve Islam’s religious reformation at the hands of women and young people within its ranks. Unlike in Europe, our Muslim immigrants are not socially and economically ghettoized, so it’s not surprising that Muslim women, once exposed to our gender equality, have begun agitating for a greater role in the practice of their faith. The same goes for Islamic youth who brazenly split the difference between Sunni and Shia by dubbing themselves “sushi”—a religious mash-up certain to infuriate their parents.
The second blowback will come from Europe, and it will involve Islam’s political reformation. Islamist parties will eventually emerge throughout Europe, inevitably mainstreaming themselves in the electoral process in much the same way that Marxist parties did during the Cold War. It sounds inconceivable, but it will be a very good thing because it will reduce the socioeconomic isolation of Muslim communities there. Europe either draws Muslims into the political process or resigns itself to watching numerous reruns of 2005’s Paris riots. Turkey’s the “lead goose” in this formation, and its innovative political accommodations of Islamist impulses remain impressive, along with its courage in contextualizing Muhammad’s many teachings within the framework of modern life.
The third blowback will come from Asia, and it will involve Islam’s economic reformation. The lead geese here will be Singapore, Indonesia, and especially Malaysia, where leaders are handcrafting a market-friendly and democracy-tolerant form of Islamic civilization. These Islamic states give proof to the lie that their religion lacks the genetic makeup to embrace globalization’s demands for economic and political freedom—or even religious tolerance.
Add it all up and you quickly realize that our victory isn’t defined as hunting down and killing every Islamic terrorist but simply not allowing their murderous tactics to poison these much-needed reformation trends within globalizing Islam. With time, such trends will push the Middle East to age out of its current political and economic stagnation. History says that as long as your population is overwhelmingly young, democracy is a hard proposition to achieve, but a quick tour of the planet also shows us that older nations are invariably associated with more democratic political systems. So yes, there will be many more Osama bin Ladens seeking to hold off these historical tides. But so long as America remains operationally vigilant and tactically agile, this long war will continue to unfold to our strategic advantage.
5. ADMIT TO THE WORLD AND TO OURSELVES THE EXACT NATURE OF OUR MISTAKES IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN.
First, I’ll stipulate that I don’t consider the invasion of Iraq to have been an unnecessary diversion in the long war.
The global jihadist movement chooses its fronts in this asymmetrical struggle, as does America. These targets don’t match up very well, but that’s because each side is fighting a very different war. The jihadists seek to hijack predominantly Muslim countries out of globalization, thus eliminating any risk of “Westoxification.” In response, President Bush toppled the worst dictator in the Middle East in the hope that the subsequent tumult would trigger significant change throughout the region, which it has—both good and bad. We endeavor to connect Islam to the globalizing world, while al Qaeda promises permanent civilizational apartheid. Only one of those outcomes brings lasting peace. For that reason alone, simply overthrowing the much-hated Taliban wasn’t enough. Al Qaeda’s leadership is forced to hide in off-grid locations like the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but its dream of totalitarian empire centers on the Middle East. By toppling Saddam, Bush brought this fight home where it belongs—the Persian Gulf. If the United States had concentrated solely on isolated Afghanistan, both the c
entral front and the cause célèbre would have simply been located in a state with no strategic significance to either side, playing into al Qaeda’s hands. The more you focus on Afghanistan, the more you’re sucked into the far bigger problem next door called Pakistan. Tempting, I know. But if we couldn’t handle 25 million Iraqis, what makes you think we’d do better with 172 million Pakistanis? It was better to throw down our gauntlet in Iraq, because there we got Iran, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt spinning in response. Scary, yes, but in terms of grand strategy, far more profound.
Must we stipulate that the Bush administration “sold” the war under false pretenses? Clearly, the White House exerted significant pressure throughout the government to use intelligence—however scant and faulty—to link Saddam’s regime to weapons of mass destruction. Like the crooked cop who shouts out, “He’s got a gun!” just before plugging a suspect about whom he knows otherwise, it’s tempting for Americans to disown the entire enterprise, especially because what Bush-Cheney truly lied about was the inevitable length and inherent difficulty of our resulting stay. But that was the intrinsic mistrust of the American people that the Bush administration consistently displayed. It was assumed that we couldn’t handle the truth.
Do we stipulate that the Bush administration magnificently screwed up the reconstruction of postwar Iraq? Hard not to. I’ve got a whole bookshelf of award-winning journalistic accounts on that score. But far worse than that, the Bush administration wasted the Big Bang’s momentum by rerunning the weapons-of-mass-destruction drama with Iran. This revealed the neocons’ stunning lack of strategic imagination, their tactical myopia hobbling those regional dynamics before they could pick up speed.
What wasn’t inevitable—and thus remains unforgivable—in this storyline was the amount of casualties we’ve suffered along the way, but let’s be honest with ourselves here, because the Bush administration was by no means solely to blame, even if it deserves the lion’s share. America’s political system and defense-industrial complex were fundamentally incapable of adjusting to this long war against violent extremism absent the sort of undeniable failure represented by our postwar mismanagement of Iraq. Failure is a harsh but excellent teacher. Long addicted to the Powell Doctrine’s central tenet of avoiding another Vietnam at all costs, we went into Iraq with the force we’d been building for the previous quarter-century. That military didn’t do postwars; it didn’t plan for them or equip for them or even have a credible doctrine for them. Rather, America was led by political masters who openly disdained such things.
What did that legacy cost us? Arguably as many as 3,000 American lives, or roughly what we lost on 9/11. Our military conducted a brilliant war in Iraq to topple Saddam’s regime, losing less than 140 troops over two months. From May 2003 through March 2004, our average postwar monthly casualty totals dropped from roughly 70 to just over 40, a decrease of almost 40 percent. Those eleven months constituted the lost year in our postwar response. For roughly the next three and a half years (!) we averaged approximately 75 deaths per month, until the surge, combined with the Anbar “awakening,” brought those numbers down. By not mounting a serious postconflict stabilization-and-reconstruction effort and refusing the advice of many military officers to abandon the big-base operational mentality and get our troops out among the people (the COIN strategy finally adopted), the Bush administration essentially let the postwar lapse back into war-level casualty rates. Does that make the neocons war criminals? No. Unfortunately it just marks them as amazingly incompetent strategists.
Now imagine the army we should have surged the moment Saddam’s statues fell: our troops riding in mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles, trained and operating according to our new counterinsurgency doctrine, and led by officers prepared for a long, hard postwar slog instead of an easy, light-up-your-victory-cigar endstate.
If all that force accomplished had been to keep its casualties from rising from that initial postwar average, we would have suffered at least a thousand fewer deaths. If we had attracted enough coalition forces to field a peacekeeping force on a par with those generated by NATO for Bosnia and Kosovo, or roughly two dozen troops per 1,000 local citizens, history says we could have reduced our casualty rates far more significantly. Approximately 85 percent of America’s cumulative casualties—or roughly 3,500 of the more than 4,100 lost by the fall of 2008—have come since that first, “lost” postwar year passed. It’s little wonder that our army’s younger officers are demanding systemic change.
As for Iraq itself, we’ve collectively entered a strategic space where it’s possible to chart real progress across three mini-states surrounding a politically dysfunctional but reasonably stable capital. Now, instead of trying to rebuild Iraq as a unified whole, we face the more manageable challenges of connecting the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni—in that order— to the global economy and then to each other, on more equal terms. It’ll be mostly oil at first, but at least they’ve all got some. The long-successful Kurds now become nation-building role models for the Sunni, whose tribes have given up trying to recapture Baghdad or regain their former dominance. Their tactical alliances with the American military in 2007 thus served two rather expedient purposes: driving out the hated and ultraviolent al Qaeda and protecting the Sunni from Shia militias and a Shia-dominated central government. America’s surge-extended force then focused in 2008 on driving out the remnants of al Qaeda in the north and reducing Iran’s clandestine military efforts among the Shia, where from the start Tehran cleverly backed all horses in the race.
Iran naturally wants to fuel Iraq-wide pressure to reduce America’s continued military presence, because the sooner the Americans draw down, the better Iran’s chances to further expand its influence, which is growing by leaps and bounds. Plus, a staunchly anti-American stance in Iraq dovetails nicely with the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to deter U.S. military intervention aimed at regime change, as well as its overall regional strategy of combining anti-Americanism with anti-Israeli fervor in a united Islamic front. Iran pushes the ideal of a united anti-American/ anti-Israeli Islamic front for the same reasons its Shia protégé in Lebanon, Hezbollah, makes common cause with Palestinian Hamas against Israel: It masks a reach for power by the historically oppressed Shia across a region long dominated by Sunni autocracies. By toppling Iraq’s Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein, and setting in motion the region’s first Arab Shia-dominated state, the Bush administration unwittingly revived Persian Iran’s revolutionary ambitions, which now must be quelled along with Iraqi Shiite ambitions to dominate Iraq.
Where our military’s counterinsurgency strategy succeeded best was in taking what seemed like an accumulating Iraq conflict and morphing it into a sequential conflict: Where previously our troops were facing al Qaeda plus Sunni insurgents plus Shia militias plus Iran, by the end of 2008 our agenda appeared largely reduced to just some Shia militias plus Iran. By flipping the Sunni tribes against al Qaeda, our forces effectively moved on to the next challenge. Can we backslide on that progress? You bet. This babysitting job is nowhere near to being done. But the Anbar “awakening”—as long as it holds—does represent an incredibly important tipping point when it comes to U.S. domestic support for our continued operations. As long as our forces seem to be moving sequentially from one challenge to the next, as they did in the Balkans across the 1990s, the American public will sense just enough progress to stomach our losses in this far costlier effort. Then there’s the larger question of whether Washington can stomach Iran’s increasing influence throughout the Shia and Kurdish portions of Iraq.
Thus, the great temptation in the months and years ahead will be to dip into military strikes against Iran under the dual premises of reducing its meddling in Iraq and setting back its efforts toward achieving nuclear capability. Plenty of political leaders fancy this route, especially if it’s limited to air strikes alone, so don’t assume the danger disappears once Bush left office. While this approach
would clearly satisfy our allies in Israel and Saudi Arabia, it will likewise push Tehran into an all-out effort at sabotaging our maturing victory in Kurdistan and our nascent success among the Sunni—not to mention yet again turning Hezbollah and Hamas loose against Israel. Unfortunately, a better, more patient approach would be to let our forces continue to make their careful efforts among Iraq’s Shia while the incoming administration focuses mightily on boosting Kurdistan’s continued economic emergence and jump-starting reconstruction and recovery in southern Iraq. If the stability holds, and that’s a big but worthy if, the best course going forward would be to lock in what security gains we can in Iraq before conflating that conflict with another involving Iran. After so many U.S. casualties, the American people deserve nothing less from a new president than an Iraq postwar finally done right.
6. WE ARE ENTIRELY READY TO WORK WITH THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO REMOVE THESE DEFECTS OF WARTIME INJUSTICE.
More than seven years after 9/11, the United States still struggles to create an alternative judicial system to prosecute terrorists for war crimes as “unlawful enemy combatants.” Over and over, the United States Supreme Court does not quite approve. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court (ICC), set up in 2002 to adjudicate such individuals for crimes against humanity, continues to grow in stature, competency, and—most important—actual cases. So the question begs: Why must America construct its own war-crimes court when the world seems content with the ICC?
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