Russian Notes: Post-Iraq war II

So what is to follow Dunkirk? There is a furious debate in Washington between two schools of political and military experts. If we imagine ourselves back in June 1940, one side is demanding that the bloodstained regime of Churchill (Bush) should confess its errors and crimes, surrender, and try to involve in the regulating of Europe such really rather moderate politicians as the chancellor of Germany and the prime minister of Italy. They too, after all, have an interest in the stability of the whole region.

Their opponents, fulminating at the cowardly amoralism of such a position, demand that we should fight to the end, throwing into Dunkirk more and more units of the British (American) Army until we achieve "victory" there.

Some 70 percent of the American establishment belongs to the first school. They are a very mixed bunch. On the one hand, there are the left-wing intellectuals that predominate today in the American mass media, universities, think tanks, and the movie industry. Their hearts are always ready to be filled with ideological sympathy for any monster that can be classified as belonging to a national liberation movement or the struggle against imperialism.

On the same side, but with a different perspective, are the Baker realists, still operating with such concepts as the "balance of power," "containment," a hypothetical "stability" that lost all meaning with the disappearance of a bipolar world back in the late 1980s, and are totally inapplicable to today's world of asymmetrical challenges.

All of them are effectively proposing that America should pull out of the Middle East and pretend, presumably only until the next act of mega-terrorism, that Islamic radicalism is not a challenge to Western civilization, that this notion is a fruit of the sick imagination of the neo-conservatives, and that with the withdrawal of the West most of the problems which today so irritate progressive Islamic society will disappear of their own accord.

Some 20 percent of those participating in the debates in Washington know only too well that this is a course of surrender by the West which, in a short period of time, will lead to a geopolitical catastrophe in the Middle East and Central Asia, and leave the road clear for sleeper cells of al Qaeda and kindred organizations in Europe and the United States itself.

Most of the members of this minority, however, including a hero of the Vietnam War and the most probable presidential candidate of the Republican Party in the 2008 elections, Sen. John McCain, are calling for "victory" in Iraq without defining what they mean, or formulating a clear mission for the additional troops they propose sending to Iraq.

Initially, victory was defined as bringing democracy to Iraq. Nobody is talking about that nowadays. Today's definition of victory is only to avert a civil war and ensure Iraq has a functioning central government.

Unfortunately, no such victory is in the cards. America does not have the ability to change the dynamics of a conflict underpinned by 14 centuries of sectarian feuding and the shared memory of the "friendship of the peoples" in Saddam's Iraq, which was a concentration camp for the Shiites and Kurds.

Even if it were feasible, this aspiration, although undoubtedly very noble, is quite unrelated to the existential problem facing the West in the Fourth World War, which is how to resist a ruthless attack on several fronts by a radical Islam that denies "Satanic" Western civilization the right even to exist.

It is too late for us to dwell on old errors and miscalculations, or the complacent arrogance of the United States in 2003. We are now in 2007, and what we have primarily to concern ourselves with is not Iraq but the West, which is currently losing a different war. More precisely, the United States is losing it while Europe and Russia, sitting in the same boat, continue with malicious glee to savor the spectacle of America's failures and humiliations, and decline to recognize what resultant dangers threaten them in the very near future.

Reconciling the Sunnis and Shiites is not a goal for the West in the large-scale and probably very protracted war in the Middle East. Let the Sunnis and Shiites, and Saudi Arabia and Iran who are their backers, concern themselves with this. It would have been equally absurd if, during the Third World War (the Cold War), the West had busied itself with trying to reconcile the Soviet Union and China. In Iraq, the Shiite and Sunni militias are unquestionably committing atrocious crimes against their own civilian populations. They, however, are not the enemy that directly threatens the United States and the West. That enemy is the sub-divisions of al Qaeda operating in Sunni regions. Given effective intelligence, it would be much easier for the Americans to deal with these sub-divisions from a distance, without getting under the feet of competing militias. Incidentally, the Shiite militias, unencumbered with the bourgeois prejudices of the Geneva Convention, are likely to sort out the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq far more mercilessly and effectively than the troops of the coalition.

When Senator McCain was asked in a recent television interview what mission he would propose for the additional American troops the Bush administration is planning to send to Iraq, he replied that it was essential to defeat the militia of Moqtada al-Sadr. When his interviewer protested that the majority of Shiites see al-Sadr as their only defense against Sunni death squads, the senator conceded that, in order to allay the fears of the Shiites, the United States should first come down heavily on Sunni insurgents, and only after that on al-Sadr.

It seems to me that this interview demonstrated the absurdity of defining victory as averting a civil war in Iraq. In just the same way, a famous NBC interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in early August showed up the absurdity of attempting to define victory as the establishment of democracy in Iraq. In terms of the situation in 1940, Mr. McCain's strategy would be to throw the remnants of the British Army into the furnace of doomed Dunkirk.

In Iraq, the U.S. is confronted not by a military problem but principally by a semantic problem. Two erroneous definitions of victory have led to a psychology of defeat that threatens to turn into a real defeat in the global war against Islamic radicalism.

Other than the Kurds, the United States has no ally in Iraq that it is obliged to defend on either moral or pragmatic grounds; and it has no foe that it should destroy other than the organizations of al Qaeda. Both these aims could be attained far more effectively and with immeasurably fewer losses by redeploying American troops to Kurdistan, and possibly Kuwait, and dissociating from the Sunni-Shiite conflict.

If we look at the longer-term strategic aims of the West in the Fourth World War, they should exclude overly ambitious and fanciful plans to transform the Islamic world through democratization or to overcome a 14-centuries-long schism.

The limited resources of the besieged West should be concentrated on the more modest task of protecting its own identity as a civilization from aggressive penetration by radical Islam. Military priorities in the Middle East should be given to USSOCOM forces that are provided with ground and air support from friendly territories.

Rejecting unrealistic goals in Iraq will allow the U.S. to emerge from the false paradigm of victory or defeat and to obtain the breathing space it needs for re-analyzing the current course of the global war against Islamofascism.

One of the tasks which seems to deserve the prior attention of American strategists is to attempt to restore the strategic alliance with Russia, hopes of which glimmered briefly in the autumn of 2001 but seem today to be in ruins. I'll address this issue in one of my next columns.