The Depressing News from Iraq

Dateline: choppy United commuter flight from Providence to Washington Dulles, crack of dawn 5 April

Got home with family very late on Saturday from the trip that was my Fatherís funeral in hometown Boscobel WI. Fabulous secretary back at Naval War College looked ahead and realized I was scheduled to fly out of Providence Sunday night to teach at first-ever Office of Force Transformation short-course for foreign military officers on Network-Centric Operations early on Monday in Washington DC. She calls OFT and gets them to switch my talk to 10am, and then books me early flight into Dulles instead of usual BWI, so I get to skip drive around DC beltway. That, my friends, is a secretary you send flowers to.

I am feeling antsy. Clearly the news from Iraq is trying, because it reminds us exactly how hard it will be to connect Iraqi society to the world outside when there are so many within that tripartite nation (Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish) committed to making sure it remains disconnected.

The one group we get along with well (Kurdish) basically wants out, which would open up its own can of worms with key ally Turkey. But they have seen that connectivity with the outside world works to their advantage, and they sure as hell donít want to be shut down again, either by the Sunnis regaining their authoritarian grip or the Shiites pulling them into Iranís orbit.

The Shiites in the south have been quiet up to now, meaning we had two out of three relatively stable, but the violence over the weekend suggests that rising ìstarsî within that community (the young cleric whose call triggered the mini-uprising) will use the unstable situation as any ambitious would-be authoritarian leader might: to retain (was he about to be arrested for complicity in assassinations of rival Muslim leaders?) and expand his power base (he begins to eclipse Ayatollah Sistani, the top religious in southern Iraq).

Meanwhile, the Sunni triangle continues to boil, as areas that had benefited from Saddamís rule know full well they cannot recapture their dominant standing in Iraq unless the Americans leave.

What emboldens everyone is the sense that this is a Vietnam redux: simply wear down the American public with enough deaths of U.S. soldiers and encourage the sense that it is America alone that is left holding the bag in Iraq. In my book, I call this worst-case scenario ìBlack Hawk Down: The Series.î It is a combination of two negative outcomes. The first question to generate the scenario is: Does the make-over of Iraq succeed or do we get stuck with Americaís West Bank? The second question is: Does the Saddam take-down become the ìchosen traumaî of the Muslim world or does it trigger a Big Bang of change in the region? So the worst case scenario is a combination of Americaís West Bank and ìchosen trauma,î meaning the occupation becomes the mother of all Intifadas.

One of the most disturbing notions I have heard from the Bush campaign is that any and all news from Iraq is good for his re-election. If itís bad news, that emphasizes the ìwar presidentî image (he needs to get even tougher), and if itís good news, that also emphasizes the ìwar presidentî image (his toughness has prevailed). Clearly, this is a short-sighted definition of a global war on terrorism, and it scares me to think that such political opportunism will blind this administration to what needs to happen in coming months: we need to internationalize this occupation to demonstrate that the world will not let Iraq slip back into disconnectedness, no matter how much violence some are willing to generate.

But instead of focusing on the players we need to bring into this future worth creating, or those most incentivized to see a properly executed GWOT both shrink the Gap andóby doing soóextend globalizationís advance, most of the calls you hear from experts about how we need to internationalize this occupation focus on NATO and the UN. This is the point of my piece that should appear in the Washington Postís Outlook section this Sunday (delayed a week): we need to bring into this coalition the rising pillars of the East, such as China, India and Russia.

Why the reticence? As the profile of Condi Rice in todayís New York Times indicates once again, the Bush Administration came into office with a strong sense of urgency not toward dealing with terrorism, but for dealing with Russia and China (and frankly, India too, although this was pushed more by DoD than the White House). Why this focus? Itís simply what this crowd knew best: great power politics. That bias is what holds up our grand strategy today: we constantly seek to address the past (Whoís responsible for 9/11? How can we please our old allies in Europe?) than deal with the future (Why are we planning missile defense against the largest source of our trade deficitóChina? Why canít we get Indian peacekeepers in Iraq and instead declare old puppet Pakistan a ìmajor, non-NATO allyî?). The Cold War habits of this administration die very hard.