The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (9 page)

Liberals scoff at the idea that such military wimps as Iran could ever be a threat to our borders or existence as a nation. They seem to forget that if Islamofascists get the bomb, conventional military power will mean little. If the objective is simply to attack and disable the West with little fear of reprisals, there is nothing like having an entire regime with the mentality of a suicide bomber willing to hit the United States with a few carefully synchronized nuclear attacks. That would be better than an invasion. And just as I wrote in the prologue to my book
Showdown With Nuclear Iran
, Ahmadinejad’s dream of wiping Israel off the map could be done with one nuclear strike centered on Tel Aviv.

Many liken the battle in Iraq to the war we fought in Vietnam but miss some key points of comparison. First of all, the Communists we fought in Vietnam were nowhere near being able to strike us with nuclear weapons. Some say the cost of Iraq is too high and point to Vietnam again in comparison. While I don’t support the idea of one needless death among the sons and daughters who fight in the U.S. military, we need to realize that we have lost approximately three thousand soldiers in Iraq as compared with the roughly fifty-eight thousand who were lost in Vietnam. While the cost of the war in Iraq is escalating, has anyone really stopped to consider the cost of retreat? If we don’t win the war in Iraq and end the terrorist threat there, we will certainly have the chance to do it again when it “comes to a theater near you.”

Have we been so quick to forget the lesson of
The Ugly American
? Perhaps we have, because today the term no longer refers to the hero of that book—a physically ugly but innovative man who went to Southeast Asia to use his inventiveness to raise the standard of living. Instead we use the phrase to refer to a bombastic, egomaniacal consumer of other cultures’ resources so many in the world have come to see as the worst of American culture. Despite this, the main lesson of
The Ugly American
was that we lost the war in Vietnam not because of insurmountable odds but because Washington refused to let the military on the ground fight the war without being micromanaged by congressional committees and commissions. Those who called the shots refused to study the Viet Cong and Communists and counteract to their tactics. Traditional rules of firepower and the use of military strength to capture territory did little good in the jungle where lines meant nothing and guerrilla ambushes were easier than head-to-head clashes. The use of standard infantry techniques from World War I and II were constantly defeated in this chaos, and it is proving to mean even less in the streets of Baghdad. Do politicians again think they know better than military experts about how to win a war?

Isn’t it interesting that there was not one active U.S. or Israeli general or even a specialist in Middle Eastern history and politics among the Iraq Study Group members? There was no one but politicians, lawyers, and diplomats. Oddly enough, the members decided the answers in Iraq were political and diplomatic, not military. What they provided was a way out, not a way to victory and to protect our troops. They suggested that untrustworthy regimes should be brought to the negotiating table with Israeli land offered to appease them.

Following the release of the Iraq Study Group’s report, I debated the Iraq war with Al Sharpton on
Hardball With Chris Matthews.
The concensus of opinion from both Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Matthews was that Israel, not Iran, was the core of the problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to bring our troops home, but if we don’t bring them home in victory, we would only be bringing home a fight to our own doorstep.

If we are fighting a war against covert, guerrilla forces, then we need to let our military experts in covert, guerrilla warfare direct the course to victory. We need to disarm militant groups such as al-Sadr’s now possibly 60,000-strong Mahdi army; train the Iraqi forces to fight terrorism in their streets like the Israelis; let our special ops groups do what only they know how to do; and cut off the flow of weapons, finances, and soldiers from Iran and Syria to terrorists fighting in Iraq. We need to use our know-how and technology—things such as the Global Hawk, a long-endurance, high-flying, unmanned aerial vehicle—to watch the borders of Iraq and to close them to keep more terrorists and munitions from infiltrating the country.

At the same time, we need to continue to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq’s public services that our troops found barely functional when they entered the country. The tenets of life in a free society, such as schooling, medical treatment, transportation, freedom of religion, protection of the rights of minorities and women, and so on, must become “business as usual” in Iraq. This can only happen if the Iraqis find a new path to unity among the different ethnoreligious groups that were driven further apart by the Baath regime’s oppression. Iraq must find a way to emerge from this conflict whole, or else it will only be fodder for its neighbors to pick apart later.

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While the Iraq Study Group argued against dividing Iraq into autonomous regions, many in the United States still believe it is the best path to getting our troops home sooner. In May of 2006, in response to the continued sectarian death squads and civil violence between Shiites and Sunnis, Democratic senator Joseph Biden Jr. and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, were the first to introduce the idea of dividing up Iraq as had been done in the Balkans. In a nutshell, they suggested partitioning Iraq into three regions along ethnic and religious lines, having each sovereignty police itself, dividing Iraqi oil revenues between the areas proportionate to the populations of each, and withdrawing the bulk of our troops by the end of 2008.

The argument behind much of this? Provisions were already made in the Iraqi Constitution for this kind of extreme federalist separation of power. The thought is that it would end ethnic fighting and reduce the need for U.S. troops in Iraq almost as soon as the borders between these regions could be set.

According to Peter Galbraith, a former State Department official and proponent of partitioning Iraq:

Apparently, the majority of the American people view the war as a tragic mistake, and President Bush’s approval ratings and the 2006 elections reflect the growing discontent. It seems more and more that a partitioned Iraq would permit the development of an exit strategy for the United States that an ongoing war cannot—but is that what we should do?

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While on the surface the idea of a partition plan looks reasonable, we don’t have to scratch too deeply before we see the flaws and the reasons why the Bush administration is refusing the proposal. In essence, those that support this idea are admitting that the sectarian violence is more than we can handle and that Iraq is already in the middle of a civil war. If this is true, why leave our troops in the crossfire?

This proposal ignores the fact that the violence is being motivated by Tehran, not Iraqi citizens. Iran’s goal is an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites. If we are to keep Ahmadinejad from doing what he wants in Iraq, stabilizing Iraq becomes all that much more important.

While dividing the nation into regions according to ethnicity and religion looks easy on a map, Iraq’s people do not just belong to three distinct groups. While the major groups are Shiite Arabs (55 to 60 percent), Kurds (17 to 21 percent), and Sunni Arabs (18.5 to 20 percent), the country has minorities of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Armenian Christians (roughly 3.5 percent), Turkomans (roughly 2 percent), and Mandians (roughly 0.5 percent).
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As would be expected, there is a good deal of overlap between the areas where these ethnoreligious groups live, especially around Baghdad, where much of the trouble has occurred. Drawing lines between them would force migration or cause greater distress for minorities. Baghdad would have to become a shared region similar to Berlin at the end of World War II and before the fall of the Berlin wall.

At this moment, despite what is covered—or not covered—on the nightly news, the Kurdish north and Shiite south of Iraq are relatively peaceful and prospering. The Kurds insist on the constitutional right to run their own region, and Baghdad ministries are not permitted the right to open offices in the area. The area is so buzzing with new building by investors that a perpetual dust cloud of prosperous activity hangs over all the major cities.

The Shiite south is run by clerics, militias, and religious parties under the guise of municipal and government offices. For all practical purposes, it has become an Islamic state similar to Iran. An ongoing American presence in the Shiite southern regions would only serve to further aggravate relations with that sector. The coalition troops are a catalyst for ongoing attacks. With the exit of all coalition troops, there would be less likelihood of friendly-fire incidents.

It is the Sunni Arab heartland of Iraq that has become the battleground for American forces, terrorists, Shiite militias, and leftovers of those who supported the Baathists. Baghdad is a city divided into armed camps. Concrete barriers protect public buildings, hotels, and the homes of the rich and powerful. The wealthiest Iraqis fund their own private security forces, as do ministers and other government officials. Baghdad has come under a miasma of murders, kidnappings, robbery, and rape—a poster child for the breakdown of civil authority.

While Sunnis are a minority (roughly 32 to 37 percent of the nation including Arabs and Kurds), they have ruled Iraq—and none too kindly—since the Ottoman Empire began control of the area nearly five hundred years ago. As a result, tensions between the factions have not been difficult to ignite.

The answer to ending Iraqi sectarian violence is not dividing Iraq into semiautonomous regions or states, but rather closing the spigot of Iranian and Syrian support of fractious militias and suicide bombers. It means securing the Iraqi borders so that the flow of terrorists and weapons into the country can be made much more difficult.

Again I say, since Syria is almost as much a puppet of Iran as Hezbollah, the road to victory in Iraq leads through Tehran. If we are to stop the fighting, we must squelch the hate-mongering flow of propaganda from the Islamofascists aimed at toppling the free world for their own agenda of Islamic domination. Eliminate the flame-throwers in Tehran, and don’t be surprised when the fires in Baghdad suddenly get small enough for the Iraqis to handle themselves.

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According to conventional studies, Iraq now holds the third largest known oil reserves in the world at roughly 115 billion barrels (this is behind Saudi Arabia’s 260 billion and Canada’s 180 billion). However, oil experts also believe that the deserts of western Iraq—only about 10 percent of which have been explored—may hold as much as 100 billion barrels more, while others believe that it may prove to have even larger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. It is a fact that seems to have Tehran and Damascus salivating and hoping the United States cuts Iraq up to make the pickings easier.

Iraq’s oil is also nearer to the surface than it is in other countries and therefore easier to extract, making it much more profitable. Estimates are that Iraq can produce oil at $1 to $1.50 a barrel, while it costs about $5 a barrel in other countries and as much as $12–16 a barrel in the North Sea. Analyst Mohammad Al-Gallani pointed out in the Canadian Press that of the 526 potential drilling sites in Iraq, only 125 have been opened.
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However, despite its potential, much of Iraq’s oil extraction infrastructure has been damaged in the wars of the last three decades, and it will take some time to get these fields efficiently productive again.