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Stop Dithering in Iraq
Published: August 9, 2011
“But damn it, make a decision,” America’s secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, was widely quoted as saying just 11 days into his new job. He wanted the Iraqis to make up their minds. “Do they want us to stay? Don’t they want us to stay?” he asked, as the Iraqis hemmed and hawed.
I had thought President Obama had already made a decision: U.S. troops out in 2011. But now there is foot dragging on the part of the U.S. military and others in the administration.
Maybe just a few years longer until the Iraqi state is really up and running, say the foot draggers. America shouldn’t let all of its gains go down the drain by pulling out precipitously. America can’t allow Iran to turn Iraq into a satellite state, and on and on and on.
The Americans have been bullying the Iraqis to let them stay, and now the Iraqis have agreed to negotiate a continued U.S. troop presence. But it is time to get out.
After almost 10 years, the new Iraq is what it is, and we Americans should take Iraqi ambivalence for what it represents. Some Iraqis may want U.S. troops to stay on out of understandable fear for the future, but other Iraqis, notably Moktada al-Sadr, violently oppose any hint of a continued occupation.
A continued U.S. presence will be resisted. American soldiers will die, and most importantly, the goal of an Iraq able to make its own decisions and stand on its own feet will be yet again postponed.
It is way too late to say the United States has to keep soldiers in Iraq to counter Iranian influence. We should have thought of that before we invaded, because Iranian influence was guaranteed when the U.S. overturned the age-old Sunni domination of Iraq and empowered the majority Shiites.
The most holy Shiite shrines are in Iraq. Many of today’s Iraqi leaders spent their exile years in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s time. There are close cultural ties between Shiite Iran and Shiite Iraq. Trying to keep Iranian influence out of Iraq would be like Britain trying to keep American influence out of Canada.
But like Canada, Iraq is going to keep its independence. Iran is embroiled in its own troubles. It is not going invade Iraq. America’s nine-year war has shown the futility of that option.
Iran has seen American armies invade Iraq on its western border and Afghanistan on its eastern border, and has been threatened itself with military action by the Bush administration, which branded it one of an “axis of evil.”
Although Barack Obama has tried to ease tensions, force has not been taken off the table. It is no wonder that Iran makes trouble for America both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once the U.S. military has finally departed from Iraq, the Iranians will see less of a need to counter American influence.
Most importantly, there is no evidence that Iraqis want to be Iranian puppets anymore than they want to be American puppets. U.S. soldiers remaining strictly for training might be tolerable, but the recent joint Iraqi- American raids that killed a 13-year-old boy and an off-duty policeman should no longer be something American soldiers are involved in.
America went into Iraq for many reasons. In one of a series of new-to-the-job gaffs, Panetta told American soldiers that they were in Iraq “because on 9/11 the United States got attacked, and 3,000 not just Americans, but 3,000 human beings got killed, innocent human beings, because of Al Qaeda.”
Of course there were no links between Al Qaeda and Iraq before America invaded, and Panetta’s public relations team was quick to go into damage-control mode and correct what the secretary meant to say.
There were those who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but as Paul Wolfowitz famously said, that was just the excuse everyone could agree upon.
Some in Washington saw an Iraq without Saddam Hussein as a potential friend to Israel. There were others who longed to control Iraq’s oil. And there were the neoconservative romantics who saw a democratic Baghdad as a light unto others, a city on a hill that would spread democracy throughout the Middle East.
None of the above came to pass, and if there is democracy budding in the Arab world today, it is despite America’s invasion and occupation, not because of them.
It has been a hard lesson to learn, but Iraq and the Arab Spring have shown that the Arab world will ultimately make its own decisions on how it should be governed without neo- imperialists in the West deciding for them.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 10, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Stop Dithering in Iraq.
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