Mirages From The Quicksand

I always read Maureen Dowd's column, but it is mostly for laughs. She does have a way with words, but for the last two years she has done little with those talents other than to lob invective bombs at Bush, Rumsfeld and most especially Cheney. Not that they don't deserve it, and not that her rants don't make you smile, but mostly it is cheap humor, and, as with all such humor, it generates, along with a laugh, a twinge of sympathy for the targets and a rueful reconition that the vituperation and ridicule are little more than a sophisticated version of playground name-calling.

Today was a bit different, though. In a column entitled "Lost in the Desert" (subscription required), she writes with what comes close to anguish about the lack of options in Iraq. As she can do so well sometimes, she sums it all up in a single sentence:

It’s hard to remember when America has been so stuck. We can’t win and we can’t leave.

She can't entirely eschew ridicule of Cheney, of course. (Note to Rob re your comment on this earlier post -- I think her predicition about Dick is closer to the truth):

Dick Cheney and his wormy aides, of course, are still babbling about total victory and completing the mission by raising the stakes and knocking off the mullahs in Tehran. His tombstone will probably say, "Here lies Dick Cheney, still winning."

But apart from that, she does a good job of capturing the sense of sadness that I think so many of us share about the mess we are in. For those of you who don't have a "Times Select" subscription, here's an excerpt:

The good news is that the election finished what Katrina started. It dismantled the president’s fake reality about Iraq, causing opinions to come gushing forth from all quarters about where to go from here.

The bad news is that no one, and I mean no one, really knows where to go from here. The White House and the Pentagon are ready to shift to Plan B. But Plan B is their empty term for miraculous salvation. . . .

Kofi Annan, who thought the war was crazy, now says that the United States is “trapped in Iraq” and can’t leave until the Iraqis can create a “secure environment” — even though the Iraqis evince not the slightest interest in a secure environment. (The death squads even assassinated a popular comedian this week.)

The retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who thought Mr. Bush’s crusade to depose Saddam was foolish and did not want to send in any troops, now thinks we may have to send in more troops so we can eventually get out.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, whose soldiers pulled Saddam out of his spider hole and who is returning to Iraq to take charge of the day-to-day fight, has given up talking about a Jeffersonian democracy and now wishes only for a government in Iraq that’s viewed as legitimate. He has gone from “can do” to “don’t know.” He talked to The Times’s Thom Shanker about his curtailed goals of reducing sectarian violence and restoring civil authority, acknowledging: “Will we attain those? I don’t know.”

At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. John Abizaid sounded like Goldilocks meets Guernica, asserting two propositions about the war that are logically at war with each other. He said we can’t have fewer troops because the Iraqis need us, but we can’t have more because we don’t want the Iraqis to become dependent on us.

He contended that increasing the number of our troops would make the Iraqi government mad, but also asserted that decreasing the number would intensify sectarian violence.

This a poor menu of options.

While I think Maureen is right that no one knows what to do, there remains no shortage of people who talk like they do. Today's column by David Ignatius in the Washington Post is a case in point, and the real impetus to this post:

What will contain the Iraqi civil war, in the end, is that none of the regional powers can tolerate a shattered Iraq -- not Iran, not Syria, not Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, not Turkey. Nor do most Iraqis want a dissolution of their unitary state. The Iraqis will restabilize their nation when the "nationalist forces" -- including ones we don't like, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency -- make common cause under a regional mandate.

Only the United States can broker the regional conference that will allow a political transition in Iraq. That's our leverage now -- diplomatic clout, more than military power. If the neighboring powers can help apply a tourniquet to stop the bleeding in Iraq, America can begin to step away.

There are so many things I think are wrong with this that I don't know where to start. To begin with, Ignatius largely assumes away the core problem by characterizing forces like the Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency as being "nationalist." If that were the case, there wouldn't be much of a problem. But it is not. The warring factions in Iraq are not fighting for a nation, they are fighting for sectarian domination. They are in favor of a "nation" if, but only if, their sect or tribe gets to run it. As such, "common cause" between them is possible only if they are willing and able to become nationalists; i.e to sublimate their sectarian hatreds to the common cause of creating a nation. Does anyone see that as even being remotely likely in anything like the near term?

Then there is the idea that the regional powers -- Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey -- are the ones who can bring the warring factions together. There are (at least) two problems with this assertion. First, for the "regional powers" to play any role at all, they would have at least to agree on a desired end state. But these powers are not really all that much different than the factions warring within Iraq itself. Iran is militantly Shite, Saudi Arabia is militantly Sunni, Jordan and Turkey are largely secular, and the Assad regime is concerned only with preserving its own power. Contrary to Ignatius' assertion, there is an outcome that each of these powers fears more worse than a fragmented Iraq: a united Iraq dominated by one or the other (or, in the case ot Turkey and Jordan, either) of the religious sects currently at war. Getting these countries even to agree on an acceptable outcome does not seems much more likely than getting such agreement between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency. Ignatius makes the mistake so common to Americans: he takes as his premise that everyone else wants what we do. It just ain't so.

But, even if it were, even if we could hope that the regional powers could come to agreement on an end state to be pursued jointly, what in the world makes Ignatius or anyone else think they could achieve it? What are they going to do that the Americans are not? Is it just that they are Muslims and are therefore presumed to have greater influence over other Muslims? In some cases (e.g. Israel/Palestine), that idea may have some force. But in the case of Iraq, at least, it founders again on the sectarian/tribal nature of the conflict. This is not (at least not primarily) a war between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is a war between Shites and Sunnis. Being Muslim alone is not enough to give the regional powers influence any more than being "Christian" was enough to give the Pope influence over Heny the VIII.

But the part of Ignatius' "solution" that really appears to be preposterous is this: "Only the United States can broker the regional conference that will allow a political transition in Iraq." If there is any power in the world that is thoroughly discredited in the Islamic Middle East it is the US. We can't even get our allies to help us. What sort of delusion is it that allows one to suppse that the US has the ability to forge effective alliances between, say, Iran and Saudi Arabia? This sort of thinking is just more of the neoconservative nonsense -- the sense that America is all powerful -- that got us into Iraq in the first place. Despite 25 years of trying, we have not even been able to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the fact that we do have real influence over at least one of the parties to that conflict. How in the world are we to broker a peace between two parties both of which hate us and neither of which is dependent on us? Most of all, how do we persuade a charter member of the "axis of evil" -- a country against whom we are even now contemplating going to war -- to help us in that effort?