"We Lost The War Before It Had Begun"

When Saddam Was Ousted From Power, One Corrupt State Was Replaced With Another. In That Sense, We Lost The War Before It Had Begun.

By Joshua Holland,
Posted April 10, 2007.
AlterNet

A majority of Americans now favor ending the four-year-old occupation of Iraq. They're not "choosing defeat," as Dick Cheney and other Bushist dead-enders contend; defeat in Iraq has been thrust upon us by an Iraqi population that has finally lost whatever measure of patience they once had with a bumbling and often brutal imperial power.

It's now a matter of time before our strategic class -- infused as it is with a profound sense of American exceptionalism -- is capable of catching up with that reality.

That we've lost the battle for Iraq was clear in Najaf this past weekend, as hundreds of thousands of Shia took to the streets to protest the American occupation.

Nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called America "the great evil" and urged his followers to unite in opposition to the U.S. presence.

The protests continued into Monday; the Washington Post reported tens of thousands again marched peacefully on the anniversary of Saddam Hussein's ouster, shouting:

"No, no to the occupier. Yes, yes, to Iraq." Demonstrators "burned and ripped apart American flags."

The sentiment they expressed was nothing new; for two years, poll after poll has shown that large majorities of Iraqis of all ethnicities and sects want the U.S. to set a timeline for withdrawal.

Most think that if the Iraqi government asked the Americans to leave, they wouldn't honor the request (which no doubt accounts for the fact that six in ten support attacks on U.S. troops).

A majority of Shias in Baghdad expect the security situation to deteriorate when the Americans leave, but they still want U.S. troops out of their country -- that's how thoroughly Iraqis' "hearts and minds" have been lost.

A week before the demonstrations, there was another development that got less attention but was just as significant.

Iraq's most senior and revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, rejected an Iraqi government proposal to reverse the "de-Baathification" process that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunnis unemployed and disempowered and with nowhere to turn but toward the insurgency. The move to bring large numbers of Sunnis into the government was seen as a last grasp at national reconciliation.

We've lost in Iraq; the political process is at a dead end. Al-Sadr is lost, and he was our bulwark against the dominance of pro-Iranian factions in the Iraqi government; al Sistani is lost, and he was our bulwark against al Sadr's nationalism; the Sunnis were lost to us long ago.

The only horse we have in the race is the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki -- a beleaguered nag with little credibility among the Iraqi masses.

We've lost in Iraq, and it's not the fault of the peace movement; nor is it because Americans didn't buy enough yellow ribbon stickers or show enough intestinal fortitude.

It's not because Iraqis -- or Arabs in general -- are savages who are unable to participate in a democracy.

It's because the administration and its proxies in Baghdad have worn out their welcome with an abundance of violence and often casual cruelty, with a shocking lack of respect for the human rights of the Iraqi people and a stunning degree of often ideologically driven mismanagement.

That conclusion was detailed (yet again) comprehensively in a new, book-length report published by Yale University this week.

The study, authored by Ali Allawi, an Iraqi government insider who has served at various times as Iraq's Trade, Defense and Finance Minister since the government of Saddam Hussein was brought down in 2003, called the mismanagement "shocking" and said that, by 2007, Iraqis had completely "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

"The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," writes Allawi.

According to a review of the study by the Associated Press, Allawi contends it was the "monumental ignorance" of those in Washington, people without "the faintest idea of Iraq's realities" who are to blame for the current state of affairs.

The disconnect between those, like Joe Lieberman, who accuse opponents of the U.S. occupation of "choosing defeat" and the reality in Iraq lies in what Allawi calls the "rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance" that's marked the occupation from the beginning.

The idea that great powers are only defeated when they "choose" to be is understandable, in a sense. Certainly the military power of the U.S. remains unrivaled.

But the fact remains that the United States is as poor at the use of "soft power" -- diplomacy, development, nation-building -- as it is proficient at blowing things up.

If the mission -- which has always been murky in its definition -- had been just to kill a large number of Iraqis, our armed forces would certainly be up to the task.

But the mission in Iraq, ostensibly, was to create a functional government.

That's not a military mission and it never was.

It required everything that U.S. foreign policy-makers lack: long-term thinking, the ability to put ideology to the side when pragmatism is required, respect for other countries' sovereignty and, most of all, a collaborative rather than imperial view of the world.

In that sense, we "lost" before the war was even begun.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.