I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. We still look like losing Whatever the tactical successes of the US surge, it is hard to believe that anything other than defeat and disaster await
Max Hastings
Tuesday April 3, 2007
The Guardian
Every now and again, grown-up people review their cherished opinions and prejudices. Does the evidence still stack up? Or are there grounds for thinking again? It seems especially important to do this at regular intervals with Iraq, because its fate is critical for the west.
Sceptics have for years been rehearsing a countdown to a day of doom. I am often among their number. But, as a compulsive consumer of the torrent of analysis and situation reports that comes out of Iraq, I sometimes shut my eyes and ask: is there a shred of hope?
Europeans are prone to think of the Americans who run the place as body-armoured oafs. If this was sometimes true in the past, it is certainly not so now. On the contrary, the US has belatedly entrusted the salvation of Iraq to its best and brightest - and I do not use that phrase pejoratively.
David Petraeus, who commands, is probably the cleverest and most imaginative general in the American army. He has assembled around himself a cluster of like-minded people, passionately committed to retrieving the country from the brink of disaster. Colonel HR McMaster, for instance, the most successful unit commander to have served in Iraq, was whisked back to Baghdad from an academic fellowship in London to join Petraeus's team.
Stephen Biddle, a civilian academic from the US Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of some outstanding papers on the country's plight, and was suddenly plucked out of Washington a fortnight ago to work 13 hours a day with Petraeus's brainstormers. Graeme Lamb, Petraeus's senior British deputy, is as able a soldier as the army has got.
Despite the latest Iraqi government figures showing civilian deaths up in March, the evidence is that
Bush's "surge", entrusted to Petraeus's direction, is achieving real results. In Baghdad, there has been a dramatic fall in the rate of murders, suicide-bombings, insurgent attacks. Many Sunnis have become deeply hostile to the depredations of al-Qaida's foreign fighters. In some cases, Sunnis have taken violent action to expel or eliminate the intruders, whom they no longer want as allies.
Aided by much improved intelligence, so-called Tier One special forces - of which almost one-third are British SAS - have been carrying out intensive operations to "harvest" insurgent leaders. Hundreds have been captured or killed. The Americans have exchanged a policy of dispatching troops daily on armoured excursions from their huge bases for one of holding positions to provide visible security in the midst of Iraqi communities.
General Barry McCaffrey, a retired US officer fiercely critical of his nation's policies in Iraq, has just visited the country, seen all the top brass, and delivered a report to the US Military Academy at West Point. McCaffrey is
full of praise for what Petraeus and his team are doing. He argues that there is now a slim chance of stabilising the country.
Yet everything turns not upon what Americans - much less the British - do, but upon Iraqis.
"Reconciliation is the way out," writes the general. "There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable US force levels." "Non-sustainable" applies, of course, to both the military and political constraints. Every senior officer engaged in Iraq knows that the British are easing out; the US army is stretched to its limits and beyond; the patience of Congress and the American people is ebbing fast.
It is common ground among all but irredeemable negativists that Petraeus's soldiers are doing better than anyone thought possible a year ago. Unfortunately, however, this is happening at three minutes to midnight. Pumpkin time is very close. Huge problems persist, first, with the paralysis of Iraqi rule. McCaffrey acknowledges "there is no function of government which operates across the nation".
Second, though progress is being made with training Iraqi soldiers and police, these are still a million miles from being sufficiently numerous, motivated, trained, or equipped to assume responsibility for the nation's security. McCaffrey calls for a hugely increased commitment to the forces: "We are still in the wrong ball park."
More than this,
there is no chance of stabilising Iraq unless its people are provided with public services that work, and its economy is functioning in a fashion that gives most of its citizens a clear stake in peace. Almost four years after Baghdad fell, basic facilities such as electricity and sewerage, together with local security against crime and kidnapping, work less well than they did under Saddam.
This remains the catastrophic failure of the occupation, and the likeliest cause of its doom. A senior British officer to whom I spoke last week argues that Iraq needs a Marshall Plan, civil aid on a scale greater than anyone has yet attempted - or than the US Congress in its current mood is willing to endorse.
For US policy in Iraq to have a chance of working, the indispensable ingredient is time. Yet the storehouse of this precious commodity was almost emptied before Petraeus arrived. Everybody concerned with Iraq - the American and British governments, the precarious regime in Baghdad, the insurgents, the population across the country - is staring at the calendar, looking towards January 2009.
When George Bush quits the White House, it seems unlikely that any successor will be willing to maintain a big commitment in Iraq. The game will be over.
Yet to put Iraq on its feet, to leave behind a viable society, a minimum of five years and hundreds of billions in cash will be needed. Many of the right things are now being done, too late to retrieve the mistakes of 2003 and 2004. McCaffrey's report mentions the need for regional dialogue. Yet even on this it is hard to turn back the clock. In the early days Iran might, just might, have been willing to talk and act in support of its own rational interest in a stable Iraq. Today, however, the British and Americans are engaged in something close to a proxy war with the Iranians, escalated by the seizure of British sailors.
The
foremost challenge is to persuade a sufficient number of Iraq's people to overcome a visceral desire to see their occupiers humiliated, and act on the basis of self-interest. However successful are Petraeus and his brightest and best in holding the ring, only the Iraqis can save themselves.
Today, as
McCaffrey acknowledges: "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." Surge or no surge, there are not remotely enough western troops in Iraq to alter this wretched reality. Only the people who live there can do it.
At the end of my own spasm of soul-searching, I cannot quit my place among the gloom-mongers. It is hard to believe that, whatever tactical military successes Petraeus's people are achieving - and these are real enough - Iraq's leaders, security forces and citizens can take the strain in real time. We still look like losing.
Yet this should never become cause for exultation, even among the bitterest foes of the Washington neocons. If defeat, chaos, regional war indeed come to pass, the Iraqi people and the security interests of the west will suffer a disaster for which the disgrace of George Bush and Tony Blair will represent wholly inadequate compensation.
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