Talking Turkey at the TurkeyBlog

Sunday, December 05, 2004

from AOL Headlines:
Insurgents Try To Derail Ballot
Weekend attacks kill dozens
Can Iraq hold January election?

The answer, of course, is that it must. That way lies victory. Backing down or postponing elections, insures that the violence will continue and the elections will be continually postponed.

Contrary to the newspaper headlines, the insurgents are in a world of hurt. Not for the rate at which they're taking casualties. Not because the U.S. led coalition is militarily superior. But because there is nowhere for them to go and nothing for them to do. Not proactively.

Right now, the U.S. has a plan. It may not be the best plan. But it goes like this: The quasi-representative governing council will be replaced, at the end of January, with a democratically elected government selected by those people who can and will vote. At this point, Iraqi sovereignty will rest in the hands of the Iraqi people. Those whose candidates didn't win may feel robbed. Some may declare the whole thing fraudulent and first refuse to vote and then deny that the government represents them. Big deal. We have that here, though on a much more controllable scale.

The thing about the U.S. plan is this. Each time we make a major move, we have a little less power and the Iraqi people have a little bit more. In time, the insurgency will be facing Iraqi police more often than American, British and other foreign soldiers. And in time, as Baathists get discouraged, the Al-Qaeda led insurgency will contain more foreigners in percentage terms than the defenders of the Iraqi people. That is, they'll be the Red Guard, or Action Directe or - in their fondest hopes - the IRA. They'll be a threat. They'll be a problem. But they won't be fighting for the people or for Iraq except in their own minds. Those who aren't cynically just in the game as spoilers to begin with, that is.

The thing about the insurgents' plan is... it doesn't exist. It's very sweet to dream of rebuilding the caliphate starting with Iraq, but Saddam Hussein couldn't do that in 25 years with the Iraqi establishment working for him. The people are not taking to the streets to tell America to go home. More importantly, they aren't taking to the streets to demand the rule of Allah.

Once upon a time, dreams of a Caliphate, starting with Afghanistan, may have seemed remotely plausible. The fatal mistake was attacking the U.S. before having de facto control in more than one country. Had they gradually radicalized Pakistan, then Kashmir, then built a real alliance with Iran, we might have woken up on some September 11, say 9/11/12 with a hell of a mess on our hands. We might have been attacked by a "country" or coalition that comprised half of Central Asia and had good prospects, after the attack, for wooing the Central Asian republics - Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - to join the fun for a real epic struggle. But, Osama bin Laden is not immortal. Is he now dead or alive? At the moment, we think he's alive. But does/did he have enough time on his hands to wait another decade to set the game in motion? And had he thought this game out beyond his own lifespan?

The Taliban, let us stipulate, were headcases. They believed in magical thinking, specifically that if they made Allah happy, Allah would render null and void the laws of politics, governance, sociology and history and make them kings among men. 9/11 makes perfect sense if you think God will be so moved by your gesture that he'll smite the Americans. Apparently, though, Allah's decided to watch and see how this one plays out. Maybe he saw how the Christian deity came out in Europe after playing favorites with the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs all those years and decided it was a bad gamble. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have realists in them, people who know that wars are won by building upon strategic victories until things turn to your advantage. It's not clear that Osama is among these.

Were it not for the problem of getting pummeled on the battlefield, though, the insurgency would still face a big problem. Like the dog who catches the car, they would be faced with the question, what now? The Taliban are the only parties to this latest brouhaha who have experience dealing with this question. They did almost as well as Yassir Arafat at constructing a civil society based on protracted struggle for Allah's triumph. (Arafat did somewhat better since he was really constructing an uncivil society based on protracted struggle for his own enrichment and continuing power - it helps to understand your real aims in a venture like this.) If the insurgency postpones the elections - thanks to violence plus certain Sunnis and others threatening to take their marbles and go home if the vote is held - the question on January 30 will be, for them, what now? They can drink all the non-alcoholic beer they want and drive through the streets honking their horns, but it won't change the fact that tomorrow is not only another day, but another day just like January 29. That is, a day when the insurgency has no means of winning over the Iraqi people, no means of governing them and no control or understanding of civil institutions of the sort that turn insurgencies into governments.

It is important to note that the U.S. was very lucky in its little revolution. We did not start with people accustomed to living in fear and intimidation. We started with people who were relatively hardy, relatively self-sufficient and used to doing their own thing until they had tamed America enough for the Brits to conceive of actually having a society to rule over here. We fought not for Allah, nor God nor even free potato chips, but for the rights of Englishmen. We have the upper hand in Iraq in that we are again pushing for, after a fashion, the rights of Englishmen, which have in expanded form come to be the rights of Americans.

Getting to a free and civil society will be hard. Getting the Iraqis to worry more about their model of toaster than what their leaders - not rulers - are blabbing about today will take time. But it's been done. In the U.S., in the U.K., in Australia, even in France, Germany and Italy. Bit by bit, as freedom and self-rule come, the people get to a blissful place. A place where by means of an electoral upset every ten or twenty years, they can get the people who get their kicks organizing tax policy, police patrols, sewage disposal and freeway building to tred carefully and stay out of their hair. Sure, we complain. You have to, or the wonks will get uppity. But nobody in the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, Germany or Italy lies awake nights wondering if an untimely comment at the pub will land them in a body bag tomorrow. Even in Iraq, actually, people don't worry much about that anymore. They're more worried about the sort of people the Iraqi government can't seem to get fitted for body bags. You know, the folks who want to shoot at people, which totally kills business at your kiosk. The people who gun down would-be policeman, which makes it even harder to file a police report for your stolen t.v. in Baghdad than in New York. The people who want to kill you for Allah when you're trying to get to the office. Tacky people. Make a mess of everything for a God who loves them so much that he's letting them get slaughtered at better than ten to one ratios by the godless pagans. Embarrassing.

So, what of January 30? If the people vote, it's another defeat. This election matters. But who wins is already less important than it might have been. If there really were a chance of the insurgents' putting together a popular mandate, they'd be encouraging the people to get out to vote and show the Americans. In a few years time, their hands on the levers of government, they'd find a reason to cancel elections they controlled if things looked bad, and Jimmy Carter would write an op-ed about how those pushing for the elections were the same sort of people who harrassed Arafat when that good man was working so hard for peace.

So, if the Iraqi people elect leaders on January 30, those leaders will get a basketcase of a country where those idiots who still didn't know the game was lost continued to shoot people. Every bag of garbage successfully hauled away would mark a small victory and every shoplifter who got a day in court would mark a major victory. But it would be a step in the right direction: struggling, largely ineffectual leaders fighting to preserve... the government the people had elected. And hoping to serve those people well enough to get reelected. Brahimi will still blather, the U.S. will still fight, the insurgents will continue to agitate. But it will be a new game: defending the government of the Iraqi people. Or trying to overthrow it. A whole new ball of wax where, because it's no longer, Brahimi, America, etc, but the will of the Iraqi people, that is being challenged, the rhetoric will have to shift.

Best case scenario: An anti-American pol who has promised to boot us will win. And we'll start to withdraw. At that point, one of two things happens: The insurgents will recognize that all their attacks counted for less than two words - go home - from somebody with democratic legitimacy and, discouraged, they'll go home too. Or the insurgents will fight to overthrow the democratically elected government that claimed Iraq for Iraq, at which point that government can do anything it wants - including inviting us back for one more round if we're willing - to go after an insurgency plainly exposed as indifferent not just to what Iraqis want but to the idea of Iraqis being enough their own people to tell even the mighty U.S. thanks alot but you've done enough now.

By the way, would Iraq asking us to go home be a defeat? It would be played that way. But who cares? George W., I think, is man enough to smile about the country he liberated growing up enough to do without him. We would be wise to do so, too, forgoing complaints of ingratitude and giving thanks that our troops can come home and that we can act elsewhere without new burdens.

Only one problem: I suspect a pro-American leader will win, and not an anti-American one of the sort to get pissed when we, but not the insurgency, respect his authority. Oh well. Nice thought, though.

posted by gbarto at 2:10 PM

Sunday, December 05, 2004

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