At the very least, if the West has found Baathist regime unacceptable for humanitarian or foreign policy reasons, the invaders have no responsibility regarding a new Iraqi order. A person who stops a street robbery does not have to guard the victim on her way home. The “Do not harm your neighbor” rule could be strengthened into an ambiguous and costly “help your neighbor” in time of dire necessity, and only extreme situations would allow the rule to be expanded into “help others.” As soon as the extreme danger passes, it’s up to the victims to care of themselves. Help often brings unintended consequences—affirmative action or the well-intentioned US help to the Iraqi people included. The helper, however, need not rectify the negative consequences of his help, provided that they are less evil than the original problem. In the American democratic framework, the civil strife of the free Iraqi people might be a lesser evil than Saddam’s dictatorship. Not even 0.1 percent of the Iraqi population dies annually in the violence. A deaths toll so statistically minor should not concern outsiders.

The ambiguity of help in extreme situations is limited. The evil is clear, and the helpers mostly agree on how to counter it. In moderately dangerous situations, options are many. Should the US push for democracy or a benevolent authoritarian regime in Iraq? Should the Baathists be left in power to efficiently handle security, or a new major party should be developed from scratch? The alternatives are many, and they are not for the outsiders to decide. The locals’ choices might now be obvious. Sunni Iraqis won’t like a democracy that brings the Shia to power. Shia won’t like liberalism, but will opt for a somewhat religious society. Separatist Kurds detest Iraqi nationalism. The readjustments will be bloody, and will hardly bring the results envisaged by Washington planners. The only legitimate concern of the West is that the new Iraqi regime remains non-aggressive toward other countries.

So far the US arranged for a truce with Iran, which temporarily scaled down its support for Iraqi guerrillas. The US also persuaded the Kurds to refrain from openly seceding from Iraq, and the Iraqi government to refrain from dismantling the de facto Kurdish state. Even if all the major Iraqi groups root out their terrorists, the groups will still have plenty of opportunities to fight among themselves.

Iraq’s mirror is Lebanon: a religiously fragmented state oscillating between fragile, frightful balance and bloody chaos. The Iraqi situation is made worse by the low probability of its government doing away with terrorists completely. As the Israeli example shows, even a few dozen killed are still a big deal when media inflate the stories. Iraqis are happy now with the decrease in violence, but after a year of quiet they will adjust their expectations and view even small terrorist acts as signs of growing instability.

Iran nourishes its influence throughout the Middle East and Africa, and it is unlikely that Iran will abandon the perfect opportunity to influence Shiite Iraq. The Shiites would not be happy about the necessity of reaching consensus with the Sunni minority. Too many forces influence Iraq from within and without. It cannot exist as even a remotely liberal, democratic country. It was for a reason that Iraq never existed before the British created that Frankenstein.

Iraq will become an unofficial Iranian province, fall to a strongman, or fall apart.

The reduction in the number of casualties and roadside bombs in Iraq looks awesome until we realize that further improvement will be much harder. The US Army made security progress in Iraq by three measures: buying the short-term allegiance of the Sunni tribal elders, flushing some guerrillas out of their convenient urban strongholds, and convincing Iran to step down its support for the guerrillas. Now the list of macro-level solutions is exhausted. The residual guerrilla warfare represents the activity of small, semi-independent groups without state sponsors or fortified towns. They planted a whopping 1,560 roadside bombs in October.

The Mahdi Army, part of which suspended its military activity, is a militia rather than a guerrilla group. That is, the Mahdi Army is a large, relatively organized, and thus targetable force. The guerrillas who are attacking in Iraq now are small and loose, a target as formidable as drops of mercury in the grass. The excellent US Army did everything which could be done in military terms. Further improvement is only possible through painstaking police work, or more realistically, through Saddam-style wide-scale terror against the supportive population.

The Israeli example is instructive: it is possible to prevent 95-98 percent of terrorist attacks, but the 2-5 percent which take place eventually break the popular resistance and force major concessions. Iraq can never achieve a prevention ratio on par with small, totalitarian Israel. One market bombing a week somewhere in Iraq is a rate sufficient to bring the government down. Terrorism is cheap, simple, and its resources are inexhaustible.

On the fundamental level, what would constitute an American victory in Iraq? Substituting a friendly strongman for Saddam is a rational answer, but not one the US media would embrace. The politically correct Americans would prefer a democratic government in Iraq too weak to brutalize its people. Such a government would either have to rely on Shiites and suppress the Sunnis or try balancing the rival groups like in Lebanon. The best Iraq the US can hope for will be made in Lebanon’s image, and will be equally unstable. Given the Kurds’ separatism and the foreign Arabs’ support of the Iraqi Sunnis, the Lebanese model won’t last for long.

Republicans desperately need victory in the Middle East before the elections. They befriended a devil—that is, the ayatollahs. The Iraqi militia depends on safe havens and considerable financing, and Iran provided both. The easy way to reduce the fighting in Iraq was to convince Iran to desist. Iran agreed to desist. In return for what? A likely answer is that the US Administration compensated Iran for its help in Iraq with security guarantees. America will push for new sanctions but not attack the Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Administration probably worked on an agreement with Syria to limit the infiltration of guerrillas into Iraq, and resented an Israeli strike against Syria’s WMD facilities. Anyway, the US channeled considerable funds to Syria to strengthen its border security. Syria’s acceptance of the offer certainly hinged on additional demands, such as the Golan Heights.

The Annapolis peace conference serves both to soothe the US Administration’s Arab friends and as a stand-alone PR measure for the Bushies.

The purported discovery of Saddam’s documents, implicating him in everything from the attacks on America to terrorism to WMD came in suspiciously handy. Saddam’s connections with Al Qaeda are of the same stock as an average American’s connection to McDonald’s: like it or not, one day you eat there. Al Qaeda is a vague franchise, not an organization. Everyone in the Muslim world is linked to someone in Al Qaeda. The US, too, is linked to Al Qaeda through its support of the Afghan mujahedeen and the Iranian insurgents in Baluchistan. Pakistan, the US ally, was heavily involved with Al Qaeda. Syria works with Al Qaeda-affiliated Fatah al Islam in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar openly accommodate well-known Al Qaeda cells. Saddam’s intelligence operated throughout the world, from Pakistan to Czechoslovakia to America. Sure it had some dealings with some groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. No need to translate any documents to guess that. That’s not, however, corpus delicti by the standards of international intelligence services.

The documents reportedly implicate Iraq in the anthrax mail attacks in America. So what? The United States bombed Iraq, humiliated it, patrolled it with aircraft, imposed sanctions on it—and expected no retaliation? The anthrax affair, if true, was the mildest response imaginable on the part of Iraq.

Iraq’s plans for purchasing precursors for chemical weapons are no surprise, either. Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons, and both countries clearly stocked them after the war. It is surprising that the documents only show Iraq’s intent to procure the precursors rather than actual production. Iraqi chemical weapons, if there are any, are a negligible threat to Israel compared to hundreds of Syrian mid-range missiles, or worse still, Pakistani nuclear bombs. Iraqi WMD did not threaten America at all.

The touted transfer of Iraqi nuclear material to Syria is a sham. Syria reportedly received the uranium only enriched to a very low grade, not very different from nuclear waste available elsewhere. The transfer apparently arranged by the Russian military intelligence GRU already after the American invasion, is a shame to US intelligence. GRU likely moved the uranium to Syria for purely commercial purposes, but it is also possible that the enriched uranium was Russian. In that case, GRU needed to clear the evidence. The Iraqi uranium’s origin can easily be traced from the radioactive signature of storage bunkers. The translated documents show that Iraq collected nuclear know-how—a far cry from developing nuclear weapons.

There is no honorable end to the Iraqi war, but America needs to end it.

Supported by lush oil revenues, Kurds have fought for independence at least since the 1920s. They enjoy support from many corners. Iran supports the Kurds to bleed Iraq, Israel to obtain regional bases against Iran and Iraq, America to subvert Saddam and now Iran, and oil interests to receive concessions without tenders. Russia seems to support the Kurds to bug its historical rival, Turkey. None of these countries, however, wants to upset Turkey, everyone’s ally against Islam.

Turkey cannot afford to lose its Kurdistan. The loss of the Ottoman Empire still reverberates in Turkish society. Turkey never acquiesced to the humiliating loss of a piece of Cyprus to Greece. Independence for Turkish Kurdistan would humiliate the Turkish military and unleash a wave of Islamism in Turkey. America abandoned the Iraqi Kurds to Saddam after inciting them to revolt; Turkey expects the US to do nothing about large-scale Turkish operations in northern Iraq against the Kurds.

PKK and other Kurdish guerrilla groups stain the image of good Kurds, but they have no choice. Nice nations do not secede or win sovereignty. The PKK is deliberately smeared. They are not a Marxist group, but operate many businesses. They trade in drugs; so did the British Empire just eighty years ago. Besides, supplying drugs to Europe is not a matter of creating new markets but rather wresting the existing markets from organized crime groups. The PKK benefited Europe by acquiring a large chunk of the drug trade: the proceeds fund the Kurdish struggle rather than gang wars and street crime in Europe. PKK’s drug trade, so to say, sucks the dirtiest money from Europe.

Turkish Kurds rightfully claim a state of their own. Preventing them from acieving it would result in considerable bloodshed. Carving a homeland for Kurds from Turkey entails unacceptable costs for the West. The best way to deal with the Kurdish issue is to abandon the US Administration’s obsession with preserving the artificial Iraqi state, that Frankenstein-state stitched together by the British. The Kurds must get a state of their own in Iraq. That would justly reward them for their help against Iraq and create a welcome source of perpetual conflict between Kurds and Arabs who consider Kurdistan an Arab land. Perpetually endangered Kurdistan will be Israel’s ally. Independent Kurdistan will be more wary of close relations with Iran than now, when Iran is the Kurds’ most reliable ally against Iraq. Independent Kurdistan’s territorial dispute with Turkey will be a conflict between these two states, and won’t draw the entire West into a dead-end war the West has no business in. And the Arabs will get the message: mess with America, and risk your state being cut into pieces.

The US invasion of Iraq would appear to have served Iranian interests; the Americans crushed anti-Iranian Saddam and delivered Iraq into Iran’s hands. Propaganda will obscure that public relations disaster. The Americans swallowed both the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation, and will similarly swallow ignominious withdrawal.

US Republicans insist on staying in Iraq largely to preserve some chance of wining the next election. Withdrawal amid incomplete security in Iraq would be trumpeted as political failure. The military-industrial complex supports the occupation of Iraq as an ad hoc replacement for the Cold War arms market. Corruption is another reason: billions of dollars in contractors’ profits pay for lobbying. Corruption is rampant in the Pentagon—and not only in regards to Iraq. The Pentagon approves commercial sales to Iran because of the sanctions, and the Pentagon’s bureaucrats route all orders through friendly contractors. When an independent supplier wins a tender, the Pentagon forces it to cooperate with its preferred contractors under the threat of blocking the deal. In several cases, the Pentagon interdicted legal shipments to Iran by uncooperative suppliers.

The Shiite empire’s expansion need not frighten Israel. Though Shiites are doctrinally more militant and centralized than Sunnis, Iranians are more civilized and intellectually advanced than Arabs. In the long run, Israel will have fewer problems with Iran than with Egypt. Fed up with the ayatollahs, Iranians are quickly secularizing, while Egypt has been taken by a wave of religious fundamentalism. Unlike the Egyptians, Iranians are friendly toward Jews: the only large and content Jewish community in the Muslim world lives in Iran. The Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah has no ambition to destroy Israel, and Hamas only nominally adheres to such a goal. The Shiite empire will engage the Arabs in an arms race, bankrupting them, and Arab crosshairs will be set on Tehran rather than Tel Aviv. Wahhabites and other Sunni radicals will fight Shiites rather than Jews; fighting fellow sectarians is simpler than fighting Israelis, and sectarians often hate each other more than they hate external enemies.

Bombings will not cease in Iraq if America and Iran settle the matter. It will take any Iraqi government years to re-create Saddam’s combination of pervasive turncoats and widespread brutality. America accepted former Nazis and even SS members (e.g., Schleyer) as top post-war German bureaucrats for the sake of efficiency, but they purged the Iraqi bureaucracy of the far more benign Baathists. The Iraqi government will prefer occasional bombings to losing American support, and subsidies over publicized crackdowns on civilian supporters of guerrillas. The Iraqi establishment welcomes a tolerable level of suicide bombings as a means to persuade America to provide more funds and weapons.

Contrary to Bush’s assertions, democracy cannot function under fire. Ancient Rome appointed dictators during national emergencies, and the police state of Israel is a democracy only in name. Market bombings disrupt the Iraqi economy, as do occasional kidnappings. Tired of insecurity, the Iraqi population will vote another Saddam into office. History knows a way of countering guerrilla warfare without massive harm to the population: paramilitary death squads. The underlying idea is countering a micro-threat on the micro-level without judicial review. Like Israel financed South Lebanon’s Army to act against the PLO (and should finance someone to act against Hezbollah), Iraq can encourage paramilitary organizations not directly traceable to the government to eradicate the insurgents. Lacking safe havens and strong backing, the guerrillas will eventually cease, though initially they will try increasing the scale of their attacks to grab headlines; larger truck bombings conform to such trend.

Iraq’s security problems are solvable; not immediately, but by attrition of the guerrillas over a period of years. The presence of US troops in Iraq compounds the problem rather than solves it. Many insurgents who are glad to fight the Americans won’t care to fight their fellow Iraqis; destabilizing the US-imposed order in Iraq is vastly more glorious than inconspicuous insurgency against yet another corrupt Muslim regime behind the headlines. Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia politically cannot quit supporting the guerrillas while US troops occupy Iraq. They might not quit even if the US withdraws.
American withdrawal from Iraq won’t repair the country, but the US occupation makes things worse.

In the current environment of raging media and self-serving political debate, evacuation increasingly looks like an honorable option in Iraq. American soldiers die and kill for nothing, senselessly. Such wars are only worth fighting when nations are prepared to gather their resolve and disregard the body count of their soldiers and enemy civilians. Starting a war in Iraq, which was non-essential for American people, has made inevitable the fall of Baghdad to a pro-Iranian insurgency. If things turn out well, the ordeal will end in a more orderly way than in Saigon.

Iran floods Iraq with Shiites to create demographic pressure and tip the elections. The Saudis, afraid of Saddam, influenced Bush to overthrow him. Now Saudis aid Sunni militia as much as Iran aids the Shiites. A Shiite Iraq is Saudi Arabia’s nightmare because it will energize the latent Shia majority in the Saudi oil regions. Iran staged many provocations in Saudi Arabia, sending huge numbers of pilgrims to Mecca to bug the Sunnis. Iran aims to bring down the Saudi monarchy in favor of Iranian-style democracy. Syria accepts Iranian protection but aids Iraqi Sunnis, not the Shiites. In Lebanon, Syria helped Christians, Shiites, and Druze. Pro-Syrian Shiite Hezbollah doesn’t want a civil war, but Saniora is pushing it against the wall to make the US interfere. Syria, like Saudi Arabia, needs a civil war in Iraq to distract the US from changing the Syrian regime. Syrian intelligence stirs up various Iraqi factions. Kuwait wants Iraq embroiled in civil war rather than planning against its historical subject, Kuwait. Iran needs that war to prevent the prospect of American invasion. Israel assists the Kurds to obtain a beachhead for a possible confrontation with Iran and Iraq. The Kurds don’t want a strong Iraq because it will deprive them of oil revenues. Turkey doesn’t want a strong Iraq, which kills Kurdish separatists, stirring discontent among Turkey’s Kurds. Neither does Turkey want a weak Iraq, which would allow Kurdish independence, again agitating Kurdish separatists in Turkey. Oil corporations clap their hands and line their pockets from the war in Iraq, which drives up oil prices and profits.
American military industries, which have been cash-starved since the end of the Cold War, needed the major procurement push resulting from the Iraqi war. American neocons want action against a rogue Muslim state. Iraq is a continuation of US domestic policy: the purposeless war is meant to fool the voters into thinking that the government is fighting terrorism while Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran develop nuclear weapons unhindered. America similarly covered its political errors with others’ lives in Lebanon (Israel invaded it after the US-sponsored democratic elections brought Hezbollah to power) and Palestine (America pushed for transparency and then prompted Fatah to fight democratically elected Hamas).

The Lebanese civil war was settled through the expulsion of militant Palestinians and exhaustion once Israel abandoned SLA and Syria reduced its financing of the warring factions. Iraqi factions are well financed from abroad. Lebanon has a history of balancing Sunnis, Shia, and Christians in an intricate power-sharing arrangement. Iraq historically suppressed those factions, each of whom are now advancing demands for power and economic gains. The Iraqi insurgency would be relatively easy to crush through wide-scale repressions against the supportive population, but liberal Americans don’t want to allow that. The Iraqi army was weak; it suffered defeats from the Kurds before Saddam. Now, with the commanders dead or in hiding, it would take years to build an army capable of crushing the insurgency.

Every power in the Middle East has an interest in continuing the Iraqi war, and who cares about the people?