Thread: Sure, Barack, you didn’t vote for war in Iraq. That was the easy part

Sure, Barack, you didnt vote for war in Iraq. That was the easy part | St Opinion | Opinion | Telegraph

Sure, Barack, you didn’t vote for war in Iraq. That was the easy part
By Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 18/02/2007

If politics were a fairy tale, Barack Obama would surely be the next president of the United States. With his melting pot roots (father Kenyan, mother Kansan, born in Hawaii) and his molten hot rhetoric, he can seem like a cross between Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy -a living opportunity for Democrats to relive the Sixties, but without the bitter arguments that split the party over civil rights.

An Obama victory in '08 would also exorcise the memory of that other lingering 1960s nightmare: Vietnam. It was, after all, Kennedy who committed the United States to military intervention in what was effectively Vietnam's civil war. But Obama's line is diametrically opposite. If he's said it once, he's said it a hundred times: he did not vote for the Iraq war.

Last month, he went a step further, introducing a bill ("The Iraq War De-escalation Act") that would mandate "a phased redeployment of US forces with the goal of removing all US combat forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008".

Were this bill to become law (which is, of course, unlikely), the last American soldier would be out of Iraq with seven months of presidential campaigning still to go.

Obama's anti-war stance is widely seen as his trump card as he goes head to head with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Despite her best efforts, Sen Clinton finds herself in John Kerry territory, having originally voted for the war, but now opposing it. Should Obama win this contest, his supporters reason, he would also be well placed to beat any of the Republican front-runners. John McCain is seen as particularly vulnerable on Iraq. Not only did he support the war; he has also backed President Bush's latest attempt to salvage the situation with a "surge" of extra troops.

Yet conventional wisdom on presidential races at this early stage nearly always turns out to be wrong. Obama's stance on Iraq may yet prove to be his biggest vulnerability -just as McCain's consistency, based on years of hard-won military and political experience, might just be his biggest strength.

Take a look at Obama's arguments for a speedy US withdrawal. Speaking on the Senate floor on January 30, he asserted that "redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve ... political settlement between its warring factions".

The key is "to give Iraqis their country back", since "no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war". He repeated these words when he announced that he was running for the presidency last weekend.

But Obama's claim that an American withdrawal would somehow "pressure the Sunni and Shia to come to the table and find peace" is a fraud.

On the contrary, an American withdrawal is much more likely to lead to an escalation of the conflict that is tearing Iraq apart. In a devastating paper for the Brookings Institution, Daniel L Byman and Kenneth M Pollack have pointed out that, given the vast potential for violence that exists in the Middle East, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

"The only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like maelstrom," they argue, "is 135,000 American troops." I would go further. Iraq has already matched the level of violence witnessed in the Lebanese and Bosnian civil wars. And it could get much, much worse. If the US pulls out, as Obama recommends, Byman and Pollack predict "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die". There could also be huge economic fallout, with oil prices surging above $100 a barrel as the war spilled into neighbouring countries.

A key lesson of recent civil wars is that they seldom stay localised: think of the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. In each case neighbours became involved, often as a result of the huge refugee flows caused by the initial conflict. If Iraq follows the same pattern, Byman and Pollack suggest, we could expect to see 13 million internally displaced people and 6 million cross-border refugees. Terrorist organisations would flourish. A major regional war could break out between Iran and the predominantly Sunni powers to the west of Iraq.

Obama's call for rapid withdrawal from Iraq would make some sense if he was an old-fashioned isolationist. But he's not. His best-selling memoir-***-manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, dismisses isolationism as unworkable: out of both self-interest and altruism, the United States has no alternative but to "help make the world more secure". Looking back on what happened in Rwanda, he reflects that "an international show of force ... might have stopped the slaughter".

"Disorder breeds disorder," he writes. "And if moral claims are insufficient for us to act ... there are certainly instrumental reasons why the United States ... should care about failed states ... that are numbed by civil war and atrocity. It was in such a state of lawlessness that the Taliban took hold of Afghanistan. It was in Sudan, site of today's slow-rolling genocide, that bin Laden set up camp for several years."

Obama has also accused the Bush administration of doing too little to stop the murderous policies of the Sudanese government towards the people of Darfur. In an article in December 2005, he argued that "advisers from Western nations" should be embedded within the African Union's mission in Darfur, and that the United States should "work with other nations to provide military assets to African Union forces, such as attack helicopters and armoured personnel carriers".

Indeed, he went so far as to urge the deployment of "a UN or Nato-led force". "If the United States does not change its approach to Darfur," he declared, "an already grim situation is likely to spiral out of control."

Wait a second. Here are two grim situations, each likely to spiral out of control. But in one (Sudan) Obama recommends military intervention, while in the other (Iraq) he recommends military withdrawal. Am I missing something?

What is particularly objectionable is that Obama appears to have forgotten Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule, as famously enunciated on the eve of the invasion of Iraq: "You break it, you own it".

Far more than in Sudan, the United States has a burning moral responsibility to prevent Iraq from plunging into a bloodbath. When Obama refers to "someone else's civil war", you have to ask how he thinks this civil war got started.

Sure, Barack, you didn’t vote for the war. Somehow you intuited that the intelligence on Saddam's WMD was bogus - no mean feat for a rookie senator. But that doesn't absolve you from dealing with the mess Bush and Co have made.

In the acknowledgements section of The Audacity of Hope, Obama gives profuse thanks to his adviser (and my Harvard colleague) Samantha Power, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell was an indictment of Western impotence in the face of successive genocides from Pol Pot's Cambodia to Milosevic's Yugoslavia.

I assume Obama has read Power's book. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have grasped its implications.

Back to the political fairytale. It is January 20, 2009, and Barack Obama is being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Just as he demanded, the last American soldier was airlifted out of Baghdad's green zone the previous March. Since then, Iraq and its neighbours have been consumed by a tide of sectarian violence unlike anything seen since Rwanda in 1994.

The death toll is estimated to be as high as half a million, and rising. The United Nations has officially condemned the Shiite government's murderous expulsion of the Sunnis of south-eastern Iraq as genocide.

In Washington, the question on everyone's lips is: Will President Obama call for US military intervention to halt the killing?

Now, that would take real audacity.

• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University

Niall Ferguson