U.S. Tactics at Odds with Contradictory Iraq Strategy

The long-awaited report by David Petraeus to the US Congress on the war in Iraq has provoked a debate about tactics rather than what is needed: a debate about strategy. The tactics are those of the US troop surge (a weasel word for escalation). Observers agree that the surge has had some effect in reducing violence in parts of Iraq, temporarily if not permanently. But this success, if it is a success, ignores the larger question of US strategy.

The US did not invade Iraq to provide it with a police force. The goal is not reducing Iraqi violence as an end in itself.

The tactic of reducing violence by Shia and Sunni militias and jihadists, some Iraqi and some foreign, was supposed to serve two goals: reconciling the Iraqi population to the central government and giving Iraq’s three main ethnic groups -- Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds -- time to agree on a stable power-sharing arrangement in a national unity government.

Unfortunately, it appears that however successful the surge may be as a tactic, the two strategic goals are incompatible. The Iraqi nation cannot be reconciled to the Iraqi government if there is no Iraqi nation, only three ethnic nations, each of which prefers a government it controls to one in which it shares power with the others.

Petraeus is a brilliant soldier and he has sought to apply the time-tested lessons of counterinsurgency in Iraq. The purpose of a counterinsurgency or pacification strategy, carried out by native troops and their foreign advisers, is to provide firm and enduring security to the people so they are not intimidated by rebels. Through time various non-military projects will win the hearts and minds of the population over to the government’s side.

It is not true that counterinsurgency efforts by outside powers supporting local allies are always doomed. The Americans, although they failed in Vietnam, succeeded in The Philippines in the 1950s and the British succeeded in Malaysia in the ‘60s. The premise of traditional counterinsurgency is that there is one government and one population. The premise is reflected in the term nation-building: there is one majority nation and a majority nation-state.

However, traditional counterinsurgency does not apply to dissolving multi-ethnic states such as Iraq, an incoherent entity created by the British from a few Ottoman provinces and artificially held together by the tyrannical rule of members of the Sunni minority until the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This is why the second aim of US strategy -- buying time for the formation of a national unity government -- is at odds with the first. If the end result of the Iraq war is not going to be a united Iraq but Shia, Sunni and Kurdish successor states that will be formally or informally independent, then it makes no sense to buy time to win over hearts and minds to a national government that will never exist except on paper. Instead, the strategy should be to accept the partition of Iraq as inevitable and to define the borders, rights and duties of the three successor states, be they independent or part of a loose and all but nonexistent Iraqi federation.

It is clear -- as it should have been all along -- that Iraq is similar to Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union: an artificial agglomerate that has broken apart along ethno-national lines once the dictatorship holding it together lost its power.

This being the case, the sheer folly of the US and British effort becomes apparent. It is as though, when Yugoslavia began breaking apart, the US and NATO had occupied the entire country and declared war simultaneously on all separatists -- Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians -- on the theory that Western forces would fight indefinitely until a centralised, democratic Yugoslav government could be restored. Or, to use another example, it is as though the US and NATO had occupied the disintegrating Soviet Union and had chosen to fight on all fronts against every secessionist movement: Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Uzbeks.

It makes no sense to say that a tactic has achieved movement towards a goal when the goal -- in this case, Iraqi political unity -- is almost certainly unachievable. As philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote: “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.”

The beginning of wisdom is to realise that the US needs a new strategy in Iraq, not new tactics in the service of an unworkable strategy. Recently the US has experienced successes in getting Sunni leaders to co-operate in suppressing jihadists in their territories. This success, however, exposes the falsehood on which the Bush administration has based its justification of the war since 2003: the claim that the US has been fighting a single group called “the terrorists”, consisting of Sunni and Shia militants as well as al-Qa’ida-linked jihadists.

The US should build on this success by reaching out to Shia militants as well as Sunni militants, on condition that they agree to capture or kill jihadists operating in their territory. Iraq has degenerated into a Hobbesian anarchy in which power grows from the barrel of a gun, as well as from the minaret of a mosque. If mullahs and militias are the real authorities in Iraq, not powerless politicians in a paper parliament, then to avert the further unnecessary expenditure of Iraqi as well as American and British lives, the US should build its policy on this fact.

The choice is not between staying in Iraq as long as it takes to create a democratic, territorially intact state and abandoning Iraq to al-Qa’ida. It is time for Washington to accept that Iraq will be divided and that the authorities in the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish successor states will include some militants who formerly fought against the US.

The goals of the US and its allies post-Iraq should be basic: preventing al-Qa’ida from acquiring bases in any of the Iraqi successor states, preventing any of the successor states from carrying out ethnic cleansing or genocide, and preventing outside powers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia from fighting a proxy war in the rubble of Iraq.

Achieving these three goals will be difficult, but at least they are not inherently impossible, unlike the present US goal of buying time for the emergence of a united, democratic Iraq by simultaneously fighting Shi’ites and their Sunni enemies.

To conclude from the limited tactical gains of the surge that this impossible strategy has a chance of success would be to ignore the counsel of another 20th-century philosopher, George Santayana: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”