Victory Is Not an Option
The Mission Can't Be Accomplished -- It's Time for a New Strategy

By William E. Odom

Sunday, February 11, 2007


The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

No task is more important to the well-being of the United States. We face great peril in that troubled region, and improving our prospects will be difficult. First of all, it will require, from Congress at least, public acknowledgment that the president's policy is based on illusions, not realities. There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it.

This is not to say that Arabs cannot become liberal democrats. When they immigrate to the United States, many do so quickly. But it is to say that Arab countries, as well as a large majority of all countries, find creating a stable constitutional democracy beyond their capacities.

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis' rising animosity toward the United States. Even supporters of an American military presence say that it is acceptable temporarily and only to prevent either of the warring sides in Iraq from winning. Today the Iraqi government survives only because its senior members and their families live within the heavily guarded Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and military command.

As Congress awakens to these realities -- and a few members have bravely pointed them out -- will it act on them? Not necessarily. Too many lawmakers have fallen for the myths that are invoked to try to sell the president's new war aims. Let us consider the most pernicious of them.

  1. We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess -- the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a "failed state," or some other horror. But this "aftermath" is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.

  2. We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

    Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran's ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences.
  3. We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq's doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.
  4. We must continue to fight in order to "support the troops." This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops?


During their first tours, most may well have favored "staying the course" -- whatever that meant to them -- but now in their second, third and fourth tours, many are changing their minds. We see evidence of that in the many news stories about unhappy troops being sent back to Iraq. Veterans groups are beginning to make public the case for bringing them home. Soldiers and officers in Iraq are speaking out critically to reporters on the ground.

But the strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops. Did not President Harry S. Truman make it clear that "the buck stops" in the Oval Office? If the president keeps dodging it, where does it stop? With Congress? Embracing the four myths gives Congress excuses not to exercise its power of the purse to end the war and open the way for a strategy that might actually bear fruit.

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Second, we must recognize that the United States alone cannot stabilize the Middle East.
Third, we must acknowledge that most of our policies are actually destabilizing the region. Spreading democracy, using sticks to try to prevent nuclear proliferation, threatening "regime change," using the hysterical rhetoric of the "global war on terrorism" -- all undermine the stability we so desperately need in the Middle East.

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a "tactical draw" and make "regional stability" our measure of "victory." That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.
If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery.
If he stays on his present course, he will leave Congress the opportunity to earn the credit for such a turnaround. It is already too late to wait for some presidential candidate for 2008 to retrieve the situation. If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy.

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yale and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020901917.html



 

Lt. General William Odom and the march back to Realism

Written by Henry Midgley

 Monday, 12 February 2007

Yesterday's Washington Post carried a stinging rebuke to President Bush concerning the latter's policy in Iraq. Lieutenant General William Odom though cannot be dismissed as a simple minded anti-war protestor- an experienced officer in the United States Army who was a member of Jimmy Carter's National Security Council and served under Ronald Reagan as head of the National Security Agency and Director of Army Intelligence, the General has an impressive CV. Not to mention the fact that he presently teaches at Yale and is a member of the Hudson Institute.

It is hardly news that Odom opposes the war in Iraq- in April 2004 he argued that the war in Iraq was "one of the great strategic errors of the post-Cold War era" and he has also described the war as potentially "the greatest strategic disaster in US history".

Jonathan Cutler in a typically discerning piece on his blog names Odom as one of the leading advocates of a detente with Iran in Washington and he recommended leaving Iraq back in 2005.

As a former official under Reagan and a former Vietnam veteran as well- Odom's scepticism about Iraq and his public criticism of the war from a thinktank that receives much of its support from conservative sources in Washington, Odom's scepticism becomes much more interesting- it points to some of the ideological differences that the war in Iraq has brought to the fore. Ideological differences which are very evident in the way that he casts his criticism of the Bush administration in the article yesterday in the Washington Post.

Odom's analysis
So lets turn to that article and try and understand why Odom does not beleive that the Bush strategy for Iraq will or can work. There are a number of objections here- but in reconstructing the thought pattern and where the dissent comes from it is neccessary to take Odom's article out of sequence and try and analyse what his key insights into foreign policy are and how they differ from the administration's way of looking at the world and at the way that American interests are best protected throughout the world.

Odom's primary insight from which all his other insights into the way that Iraqi politics work and the input that America can make is contained in these sentences in the Washington Post article,

the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly "constitutional" -- meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.


For Odom the argument that the United States could impose a democracy upon Iraq is a false one. He argues that rather than imposing democracy American foreign policy would be much better turned towards the objective of increasing stability within the Middle East. A stability, that Odom beleives, is the objective of the Europeans, the Arab states and the Arab peoples. In his view- withdrawing from Iraq will incentivise stability within the region and make Iran come to the table and negotiate with the United States, or as he puts it

Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.


Analysing Odom
Odom therefore in many ways reminds one of a typical realist. His view is that stability trumps all other concerns in the Middle East. He doesn't argue that the governments of the Middle East produce their own chaos- rather he suggests a stable international environment including a peace for Israel will lead in the end to a pacification of the entire region. This kind of position you might say rises from a preoccupation with the workings of governments- for Odom unlike say Bill Kristol or Michael Ledeen- other governments matter and they matter precisely because he treats the problem of Middle Eastern terrorism not as a problem of the systemic organisation of the Middle East, but as a law and order problem. If you see the issue in that light- you begin to see the virtues of propping up governments even if you dislike them.

But the argument between Odom and Kristol and the others goes much deeper than cynical realists versus idealist neo-conservatives. There is also an argument going on here about the nature of democracy. Kristol and his allies beleive that democracy is very simple- it is the people's will reflected in the government. In an interesting exchange with Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review, Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan for example used the word Democracy almost totemically:

Lopez: How does postwar Iraq look in your estimation? Could Iraq, postwar, realistically become a democracy?

Kaplan & Kristol: Iraq should become a democracy. After all, the president has repeatedly cast the impending war as an effort to bring democracy to a land that for decades has known only dictatorship. Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower.


Odom though isn't as concerned with democracy per se as he is with the institutions surrounding democracy- he raises within the article the interesting question of a division between democracy and constitutional democracy. In many ways what Odom says in the Washington Post strikes me as very similar to Fareed Zakaria's 2005 article in Newsweek where Zakaria argued that elections in Iraq did not mean that the country had reached democratic nirvana. Odom wants us to beleive that democracy means more than elections but means both institutions and also a popular spirit in favour of democracy- at one point he suggests that the major problem with the Iraq war was in trying to democratise a part of the world which in his opinion has never sustained democracy. Furthermore he makes a cogent case that a democratic Iraq may not be a pro-American Iraq- noting that even as of 1914 the majority of Americans opposed the British in the first World War.

Conclusion- Why should we care?
It might seem a little quixotic to dedicate so much space to analysing the reaction of one ex-general (no matter how well connected) to the Iraq war and its aftermath but I do think that what we are seeing here is some of the strands of an emergant critique of neo-conservatism in the international arena. Basically Lt General Odom argues that the neo-cons failed to understand the region that they invaded. He suggests that in this region of the world pro-American sentiment may only be sustained by stability not by permanent revolution. Far more cuttingly though he argues that they fail to understand the very nature of democracy, rather than being produced as it is in the fantasies of Michael Ledeen by invasion and occupation, it is more likely to be born by indigenous efforts from the ground up. It also in Lt. General Odom's view has to be related to the contexts of the region- and it has to recognise constraint. The Jacobin model of the people's will being ennacted is not in his view democracy and simply holding an election does not mean that the people rule. Rather it is the practise of consistant law and the power of civil society which make a democracy.

Lt. General Odom is a long standing critic from the right of American foreign policy. His criticisms do to a degree make sense- there is something puzzlingly simplistic about the Neo Conservative narrative. His own influence I would suggest is minor- but the arguments he advances can be heard elsewhere and furthermore the way that he attacks neo-conservatism and particularly its understanding of what democracy means is very cogent.
 
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