World Watch Focus: Evaluating the Mission in Iraq

20060612

     On 9 June 2006, Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, wrote an interesting piece for Fox News about his argument for why the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi should be the last signal for why the US should withdraw its forces from Iraq. While I agree with some of Mr. Carpenter’s basic premises, his major theme that the US should withdraw from Iraq altogether is flawed.

     Like many analyses of the situation in Iraq, Mr. Carpenter tries to fundamentally oversimplify the very complex problem that is the current conflict in Iraq. This oversimplification takes the form of the argument that the US presence there is tied to some sort of specific, simple set of criteria that, once met, will signify the ability for the US to withdraw its forces.

     Without a doubt, Mr. Carpenter’s assessment that the foreign insurgency has been on decline and may have been fatally wounded is correct. Further, his assessment that the major portion of the violence in Iraq is now sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites is also cognizant and noteworthy. Unfortunately, the conclusion arrived at by these assessments, namely that, now that Saddam Hussein is gone, the Baathists relegated to virtual powerlessness, and al-Zarqawi is dead, the US should declare its mission complete and leave.

     This assessment is flawed because it fails to understand the conflict in Iraq in the terms of the larger conflict between the rest of the world and fundamentalist Islam, a conflict larger than just Iraq or the current War on Terror. The situation in Iraq reflects the core of that larger conflict, both in the sectarian struggles of the Sunnis and Shia and in the blatant presence of the US in a region and a society that predominantly hates the West and all that it stands for.

     The US presence in Iraq acts as a bulwark against what could easily become a regional sectarian conflict between the forces of fundamentalist Sunnism and fundamentalist Shiism. When Saddam Hussein was in power, the secular Baathist regime kept these forces in check, preventing the age old dispute between these two factions that find their natural border in Iraq from flaring into wider war. Now that Hussein is gone, there is no other power than the presence of the US in Iraq to prevent this very same thing.

     There is no doubt that the sectarian violence in Iraq is both tragic and unpreventable by the US presence. Instead, the US presence acts to prevent that violence from spreading by the intervention of outside parties like Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia in that conflict. The US presence acts as a warning against those parties to look to their own concerns and to leave Iraq to its own. Without the US presence in Iraq, there would be no force to balance against those foreign interests.

     To this end, the US policy in Iraq obviously needs to adjust to the developing situation. Obviously, US forces will not be able to prevent the sectarian violence in Iraq. Instead, the US mission there should transition to focus on helping Iraq maintain its sovereignty while also providing significant military support to Iraqi forces against the larger sectarian groups when such opportunities present themselves. The US must give Iraq a fighting chance to deal with its problems itself, and such a chance cannot be achieved by immediate and unconditional withdrawal of some or all of US forces.

     The US presence in Iraq also acts as a foil against Islamic fundamentalism itself, whatever the particular variety may be. The longer US forces stay the course in Iraq, the more the terrorist forces of Islamic fundamentalist become frustrated by their inability to affect the course of world events by their violence. As this frustration grows, these terrorists become more desperate, thereby taking greater and less calculated risks and exposing themselves to ever greater probability of destruction by both US and allied forces wherever these terrorists hide and operate.

     Ultimately, the US presence in and any withdrawal from Iraq must be considered not only in the context of the prevailing situation in Iraq but also in the context of Iraq’s greater strategic importance to the global conflict with Islamic fundamentalism. If the US and the world are to win the so-called war on Islamic fundamentalism’s terrorists, that victory must be achieved by taking that fight to the terrorists. As long as US forces are in Iraq, the US is directly in the middle of the conflict among and against the enemy it will be fighting long after the current situation in Iraq is relegated to history.

DLH