Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (22 page)

Just this incomplete sample provides a pool of released Sunni and Shiite prisoners numbering nearly thirty thousand, 137 of whom are identified as al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda–related fighters. The justifications offered by Arab governments for these releases vary. Some claim they are to commemorate religious holidays or political anniversaries, others describe them as part of national-reconciliation plans, and some are chalked up as simple “escapes.”
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In some of the official statements announcing prisoner releases, Islamists are said to be excluded from the prisoners being freed; in others they are specifically included. In all cases, the releasing governments are Muslim police states worried about their internal stability in the face of rising Islamic militancy across the Muslim world, the animosities of populations angry at Arab regimes for assisting the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the powerful showings Islamist parties have made in elections across the region.
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While the motivation of Arab governments in releasing large numbers of prisoners is not now possible to definitively document, those regimes are likely aware of the attraction the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will have on newly freed Islamists, and that it might take no more than a slight incentive to dispatch some of the former prisoners to the war zones. It may well be that the West is seeing but not recognizing a replay in Iraq of the process that supplied a steady stream of manpower to the Afghan mujahedin two decades ago.
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None of the foregoing should be attributed to hindsight. It is the result of conducting a war that is dominated by the policies formulated and actions taken by the history-challenged men and women of the U.S. governing elite. These individuals appear to have known nothing of the Sunni-Shia schism; failed to review the U.K.’s 1920s-experience in Iraq; lacked the common sense to know that decades of persecution and likely civil war would follow the overthrow of a brutal and long-dominant minority regime; and were ignorant of the from-prison-to-jihad policies of many Muslim states, and especially our Arab allies. Thus, today’s Iraq disaster and its strong anti-U.S. repercussions around the Islamic world may have been unintended, but they were anything but unpredictable. Our leaders lacked not clairvoyance but humility and a basic knowledge of history.

The Cold War Hangover Bedevils Iraq

Because U.S. leaders had good, snappy slogans—democracy! elections! women’s rights! etc.—but no achievable war aims in Iraq, the U.S. military was fated to be defeated in Iraq no matter how well it performed. The victory of the Islamists, as noted, was complete when the first U.S. military boot hit Iraqi soil. That said, however, the Cold War–era assumptions that U.S. political leaders, senior bureaucrats, and generals brought to the war might well have defeated America even if our war aims fell within the scope of reason possessed by those with a high school education.

First, Washington’s preparations for war clearly progressed on Cold War time. The war in Iraq was going to be a cakewalk, and so U.S. leaders spent a year leisurely and publicly getting ready to attack. They thereby gave Saddam time to disperse his irregulars and their ordnance and to cultivate animosity and hatred of America among Muslims because of the increase of U.S. forces on the Arabian Peninsula and Washington’s manifest, licking-its-chops eagerness to invade Iraq. The year also allowed domestic Iraqi Islamist groups like Ansar al-Islam, later renamed Ansar al-Sunnah, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization to build bases, acquire arms, and ready reinforcements. The year-long run-up to the war likewise allowed external groups like al-Qaeda to map out secure travel routes to Iraq and to build a reserve of recruits and funding for use there. When the U.S. invasion came, the Islamist forces that would be the core around which the Iraqi insurgency formed were on the ground, and they were well positioned, armed, prepared, and rested.

Together with this glacial pace, Secretary Rusmfeld and his so-called military transformers, aka the RMA’ers, handicapped the U.S. military by giving it a total of 140,000 men and women to conquer and control a nation-state the size of California. As in Afghanistan, the Rumsfeldian plan of spare human forces and plentiful precision weaponry allowed U.S. forces to quickly destroy a brittle regime but did not permit the consolidation of U.S. control, the annihilation of all enemy forces, or the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, especially the manpower-heavy requirements of fighting a steadily growing insurgency. Had Iraq been an isolated and difficult-to-access country, Rumsfeld’s mix of forces might have prevailed, but given that each of Iraq’s contiguous Muslim neighbors was eager to defeat U.S. democracy-building efforts in the country (and there is no excuse for the Bush administration and Congress’s failure to factor this certainty into prewar planning), the force was and is entirely inadequate to contest a war against insurgents armed with AK-47s, RPGs, IEDs, and all the other weapons that the RMA’ers deemed hopelessly obsolete and nonthreatening to U.S. forces.

Once ensconced in Iraq, the U.S. military found itself set up for defeat by a peculiar weakness of the American governing elite’s mind: the inability to perceive even dimly the role that land borders play in achieving security either at home or overseas. Faced with a situation where some of the fighters, ordnance, and funds to support the Iraqi insurgents were moving into Iraq across the country’s borders with Jordan, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, a decision to close the borders did not require a rocket scientist’s brain, only common sense. To have done so would have slowed the pace at which foreign fighters and externally acquired materials of war could join the fray. Likewise, closed borders would have made insurgent field commanders inside Iraq unsure about the dependability of the inward flow of replacement fighters and suicide bombers for their units and therefore probably would have limited their willingness to undertake operations likely to result in heavy casualties. From the U.S.-led coalition’s perspective, closed borders would have isolated our enemies in Iraq, allowed a more systematic approach to eliminating them, and facilitated an ability to measure the damage being inflicted—and therefore progress made—by avoiding a situation where insurgent manpower grew daily via open borders. Clearly, closing Iraq’s land borders would have been all-win for America and all-loss for its enemies. Naturally, the borders remained open; indeed, the Bush team’s only real concern with Iraq’s borders was whether it could work up the issue of the unclosed Syria-Iraq border into a
casus belli
with Bashir al-Assad’s regime.

Closing the borders could have been accomplished by one of three paths. First, a massive effort by the Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians, Kuwaitis, and Iranians could have done the trick, but they were not going to act because they wanted a U.S. failure in Iraq and were improving their internal security by unloading their Islamist firebrands across the borders. Second, the U.S. military and its coalition allies could have massively reinforced their armies of occupation and done the job themselves. This was a nonstarter, however, as it would have made clear that Secretary Rumsfeld’s transformed and massively expensive, light, fast, and precision-weapon-armed military could not do what hordes of old-fashioned ground-pounding infantry could do to ensure a U.S. victory. Third, Washington could have tried some combination of the two, if it had been able to extensively use a tool that is very effective in closing borders—the land mine. Alas, the land mine is the mortal enemy of many of the Cold War’s antinational groups—NGOs, UN components, human rights organizations, etc.—and their large-scale deployment apparently was never seriously considered. Washington was content to lose Iraq and Afghanistan by allowing insurgents easy and reliable cross-border access because they were fearful of offending the antinational groups, and they were even more afraid of the frenzy those groups loved to whip up among their media and academic supporters.

Several other Cold War leftovers helped to defeat America in Iraq. The Bush administration’s goal of creating a secular, pluralistic, and multicultural post-Saddam Iraqi society could have been imagined only if even the most conservative Republicans, neoconservatives, and just plain war hawks fully bought into the multiculturalists’ bankrupt notion that all cultures are equal and able to live together peacefully. While the vote-chasers in both houses of Congress, especially on the Democratic side, naturally endorsed the sham war aim of multiculturalism, one would have hoped for more historical awareness from the reputedly hard-headed Republican “realists.” But such was not the case, and so America’s initial goal was unachievable, not to say laughable. That U.S. leaders thought such an outcome possible in Iraq can be seen only as confirming the immense insularity, ill education, and willful mental isolation of the bipartisan U.S. governing elite. History gives no reason to assume that different cultures can easily coexist, the noted historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has written, and “[w]hat makes less sense is the pretense that relations among the embodiments of different cultures should be harmonious.”
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Any American tourist, business person, intelligence officer, or soldier who has spent any time overseas, particularly in the Muslim world, knows unashamedly from first-hand experience that (a) in terms of fairness, legal equity, broad opportunities for improvement in life, and basic security, American society is superior in every way to anything they encounter abroad, and (b) be that as it may, most Muslims are immensely proud of their religion and history, have no wish to become just like Americans, and regard anything that smacks of secularism as inherently inferior to their way of life and an affront to their faith, indeed, as fighting words. Only among the U.S. governing elite is multiculturalism an attainable goal, and it has that status only because our elite, while extraordinarily well traveled (usually at the taxpayers’ expense), is crewed by common-sense-immune, history-ignorant, mental isolationists who are eager to shove politically divisive and tolerance-fraying multiculturalism down the throats of U.S. voters and are able to see but unable to understand anything overseas that does not mesh with their preconceived notions. “Yet our mastery, our very knowledge of the world remains spotty in the extreme,” Fouad Ajami wrote of U.S. leaders in October 2000. “We have traffic with the rulers of Arab and Muslim states, but it gives us precious little insight into these lands.”
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To this day, truer words were never spoken.

Other Cold War assumptions have also happily fallen by the wayside in Iraq. Obviously, amid the mounds of severed heads, disfigured, head-shot, and blindfolded corpses, destroyed holy sites, and random murders, the Cold War’s limits on violence are long gone, and the rules of engagement imposed by U.S. politicians and leaders who listen to the just-war theorists have made America’s military children targets rather than the killers they should be.
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And although Joseph Nye continues to lament that Washington has not used sufficient amounts of our “soft power” in the war against Islamists,
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events in Iraq have proven that soft power without definitive military victory is impotent. We have conducted repeated elections, built roads, dug wells, provided prenatal and most other kinds of health care, created employment opportunities, handed out U.S. cash by the unaccountable boxload, established schools, sung the praises of democracy loud, long, and multilingually, and generally exploited soft power to a substantial extent. And it has failed for two reasons. First, no matter how many of these soft-power components we bring to bear, we still run up hard against the fact that Muslims hate U.S. foreign policies. Most Iraqi Muslims appreciate better schools, health care, and water, but they still hate U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world—as in “Thanks for the dental work, but why did you stand by and watch Israel gut Lebanon in the summer of 2006?”—and it is arrogance to assume that potable water will make Muslims forget that they hate us for what they perceive as the infidel occupation of Iraq, the demeaning of their faith, and the killing of their brethren. Second, soft power will not work unless the enemy is first defeated to the extent that there is no doubt in his mind, or that of the local populace that supports him, that they have been well, truly, and conclusively whipped. William T. Sherman had the sequence exactly right when he said in 1864 that he would defeat his armed foe and “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war,” and only then, after such a persuasive defeat, would he become “the advocate of mercy and restoration to home, and peace, and happiness of all who have lost them to my acts.”
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In later years the U.S. experience in Vietnam and its current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have served to revalidate a conclusion made by a U.S. soldier fighting to suppress the Philippine Muslim insurrection more than a hundred years ago. “This business of fighting and civilizing and educating at the same time doesn’t mix very well,” the soldier noted.
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The Iraq war also has proven that the usefulness of advice and guidance from expatriates, exiles, and ethnic experts has not transferred well from the era of the Cold War. At a time when al-Qaeda and its allies are defeating the U.S. armed forces in the Iraqi insurgency—and other Islamist groups are making significant headway in places like Thailand, Bangladesh, Somalia, and the North Caucasus—the message from these advisers is invariably upbeat. Take Fareed Zakaria, for example. In 2002, Mr. Zakaria expected a “massive benefit” from the Iraq invasion because “[d]one right, an invasion would be the single best path to reform in the Arab world.”
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Two years later, when the tide was turning against the U.S.-led coalition, Mr. Zakaria was still confident. “[T]he bad guys are losing,” he wrote. “Unable to launch major terrorist attacks in the West, unable to attract political support in the Middle East, militant Islam is searching for enemies and causes…By now surely it is clear that al-Qaeda can produce videotapes but not terrorism.”
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And then there is the analysis of the Sarah Lawrence College professor Fawaz Gerges: “We are in the throes of the beginning of a new wave [in the Muslim world],” Gerges has claimed, while also dismissing al-Qaeda as a deadly nuisance, “—the freedom generation—in which civil society is asserting itself. Its vanguard is the generation under 30 years old, which represents more than 60 percent of the Muslim population.”
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Oddly, a good deal of scholarship suggests that the educated, under-thirty generation increasingly belongs to bin Laden and the Islamists.
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And again Zakaria, this time telling Americans not to worry but be happy because U.S. foreign policy and its actions in Iraq have not motivated Muslims to wage war against America; rather Muslims are just so dumb and gullible that “militant, political Islam has brainwashed young Muslims around the world who believe it is their duty to fight against the modern world.”
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Mansoor Ijaz takes Zakaria’s point about masses of retarded Muslim automatons and lays it on even thicker, thereby introducing a few shadowy Muslim wizards of Oz hiding behind Bedouin robes. “[A]l-Qaeda and its affiliate terrorist networks have evolved their global operating system,” Ijaz prates, “into an airborne virus capable of infecting concentrated cells of disaffected followers to carry out by proxy the orders of their hidden masters.”
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Taken together, the mostly inaccurate advice and guidance of these individuals and others of their ilk will ensure that America never gets back to Kansas.
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