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Posted June 30, 2003
By Pamela Harris

AMERICA IN IRAQ: THE IMPERIAL TRAP IS CLOSING

By Rich Rubenstein
ICAR Professor

In 1967, just after senator and future presidential candidate George McGovern
had returned to Washington from a fact-finding visit to Vietnam, I had the
opportunity of talking to him about his trip. "What did you learn over there that you didn't know before?" I asked. "Before I went to Vietnam," he answered, "I suspected that the war might be unwinnable. Now I think that it is probably winnable militarily speaking, but that the moral and financial costs are far, far too high."

Exactly. Iraq is not Vietnam, but Senator McGovern's calculus still holds - and so does its implications for American policy. Those of us who advocated a U.S. withdrawal from Indochina thirty-odd years ago were repeatedly told that
we could not possibly leave that part of the world after investing so much of
our blood, treasure, and reputation there. America would be discredited; our
will to fight would be sapped; other "dominos" would fall to Soviet power, etc. But an orderly withdrawal was the only sane policy then, and, with a guerrilla war under way in Iraq, it is the only politically and morally justifiable policy now.

The alternative, it is becoming clear, is an endless attempt to impose America's will by force upon a resentful and hostile people. For the past several weeks, lethal attacks by armed Iraqis against American and British occupying forces have taken place at the rate of one or two assaults per day, and the pace is stepping up. Secretary Rumsfeld, who admits that the violence is likely to continue for a long time, attributes it to pro-Saddam die-hards whom, he promises, coalition forces will eventually defeat. The Secretary almost certainly underestimates both the diversity of the opposition forces and the depth of their popular support (consider the recent attacks by infuriated Shiite civilians against the British). But even if his estimate is accurate, the policy he represents is self-defeating.

Rooting out a substantial number of guerrilla fighters, we know, involves the
use of intense violence, including draconian measures against the population
that supports or tolerates them: mass sweeps and arrests, the use of spies and informers, harsh questioning (if not torture) of suspects to extract
information, nullification of ordinary court procedures, hair-trigger responses to
apparent threats, and indefinite postponement of political reforms. Such
counter-measures virtually guarantee a high level of "collateral damage" and the further alienation of a populace already hostile to foreign occupation. This
generates, in turn, an increase in guerrilla recruits and organizations, further
resistance by the civilian population, intensified repressive measures, and a
spiral of violence that ends almost inevitably in the outright terrorization of
unruly "natives."

"Where's the quagmire?" Rumfeld asked jocularly during his triumphal tour of
Iraq. The answer is: Look around. We are now in it up to our necks. In fact, we are just beginning to realize that the second Iraq War represented a profound turning point in U.S. global policy. It is not just that President Bush and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis inflated estimates of Iraq's WMD in order to justify America's first "preventive" war, but that winning the war on the battlefield has put us in the position formerly occupied by the European Great Powers, and, before that, by a series of empires reaching back to Rome. For the first time since the Spanish-American War, we have become the long-term
occupiers of someone else's land.

Of course, U.S. officials proclaim themselves "liberators," not occupiers, as
the British did in India, the French in Algeria, the Germans in Poland, and the Romans in the land of Israel. But while Satrap-in-Chief L. Paul Bremer sends the Iraqi governing council packing and postpones elections indefinitely, other American officials are deciding whether Iraq's oil resources should be privatized, whether existing oil contracts should be honored, whether the Iraqi
state should be unitary, a federation, or a confederation, whether it should be an Islamic state or not, which political parties are to be recognized as legitimate, and which leaders are trustworthy enough to merit the status of
faithful American satellites.

Some liberation! Already, whatever moral capital the U.S. and Britain might
have earned by eliminating Saddam Hussein's regime has been squandered by a transparently imperialist policy. "Saddam was a brute," one Iraqi told me
recently, "but at least he defended our independence. Nobody who follows American orders can possibly be considered a legitimate leader of the nation."

Most astonishingly, this historic turn in America's relationship to the world has taken place without any discussion in Congress, save for Senator Byrd's
doughty speeches, and (except for Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean) without any serious dissent from the Democrats. As each day brings fresh news of American, British, and Iraqi casualties, both major parties seem inclined to accept an endless stream of body bags as the inevitable price to be paid for "liberating" and "democratizing" Iraq.

To this Orwellian rhetoric one must say no, no, and again, no. Two changes
in U.S. policy seem to me absolutely necessary if we are to find a way to live
peacefully in the world:

In the short term, we need to get out of Iraq. Never mind attempts to "humanize" the occupation. As other colonializing democracies have discovered, the logic of occupation is inherently repressive. The divided and impoverished people of Iraq need facilitators to help them decide their own fate, not occupiers to decide it for them. But American officials do not have the detachment or credibility needed to function as effective facilitators. A regional
organization - a Middle Eastern equivalent of the European Organization for
Cooperation and Security - could do this in short order, with the backing of the
United Nations.

Why not withdraw and let impartial authorities assist the Iraqis to reconstruct their society? The current U.S. administration will almost certainly resist this idea, claiming that it alone is competent to rebuild Iraq. But this do-gooder pose will fool no one. A refusal to end the occupation will make it clear that a lust for oil, not for freedom, motivates America's new imperial policy.

This suggests a further need for substantive, long-term policy change. We
must find a way to live in the world that does not put the U.S. in the position
of aping the old imperialist powers, and that does not entail the costs that
Senator McGovern correctly assessed as "far, far too great." Congress should
begin hearings immediately, calling experts as needed to identify alternative
forms of world order that will permit Americans, and all other members of the
world community, to secure their legitimate interests without reaching for the
forbidden fruit of global military domination. If we would realize the old Puritan ideal of becoming a light to the nations -- the "City on a Hill" - the first step will be to abandon the seductive, ultimately fatal dream of universal empire.

[The author is professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution of George Mason University.]