Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp270
Peter W Galbraith is a former American ambassador, senate staffer and academic who did much to highlight Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds back in the 1980s, and has been in and out of Iraq ever since. In other words, he knows more than most westerners about the country, and maybe five million percent more than any member of the Bush administration.
Galbraith reminds us of some of its members’ more striking pronouncements. Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the insurgents as “former regime dead-enders”. The president himself said in July 2003: “There are some who feel like — that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring ’em on.” Condoleezza Rice, once hailed as the brains of the administration, said in August 2004: “What has been impressive to me so far is that Iraqis — whether Kurds or Shia or the main other ethnic groups in Iraq — have demonstrated that they really want to live as one in a unified Iraq. And I think particularly the Kurds have shown a propensity to want to bridge differences.”
This book seeks to demolish such myths, as the author perceives them, and to argue that coalition policy founded upon sustaining Iraq as a unitary state is doomed. Galbraith is a passionate advocate for the Kurds. He notes that Winston Churchill in later life acknowledged that Britain did a great injustice by including a large Kurdish minority within the borders of the new state of Iraq back in 1921.
The book asserts that there are no circumstances in which Kurds will in the future accept Baghdad’s hegemony, and that decades of persecution by successive Iraqi governments have earned them a right to statehood. Galbraith urges a new strategy based on what he calls “the reality of Iraq”, which means Kurdish separation, and loose federation between Sunni and Shi’ite regions. The British in the south do not escape his strictures. He says that we have allowed the Shi’ite clergy and religious parties to gain power, shutting down music shops and liquor stores, running their own court system, enforcing dress codes on women, allowing militias to proliferate. If the south is relatively secure, he suggests, it is secure in the hands of people who have no interest in supporting government partnership with the Sunnis.
“Iraq’s civil war,” he says, “is the messy end of a country that never worked as a voluntary union and that brought misery to most of its people most of the time . . . It is a tragedy, and it is unsatisfying to admit that there is little that can be done about it. But it is so. No purpose is served by a prolonged American presence anywhere in Arab Iraq.” The only beneficiaries of Washington’s current policy are Al Qaeda, the Iranians and their ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.
Many thoughtful American soldiers have been saying privately for at least the past 18 months that they do not think Iraq is sustainable as a unitary state, and, therefore, that they are fighting for an unattainable objective. It is ironic, is it not, that the last great American quagmire, in Vietnam, was brought about by an attempt to prevent nationalists uniting a divided country, whereas today American soldiers are dying to hold together a deeply fissured society?
Most of Galbraith’s account of the recent history of Iraq is common ground among critics of the American and British engagement. The weakness of his book is that most of it has been said before. The rehearsal of western blunders in the region from the state’s creation through support for Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war — failure to finish the 1991 Gulf war in a convincing fashion; fantastic policy errors by the Bush administration from 2001 onwards — are familiar stuff.
Today, it seems far more profitable to debate where we go from here than to continue to rummage among the ruins of the neoconservative vision. Everybody outside the White House knows we are in a mess, and that in the eyes of history Iraq will represent the political legacy of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Yet the only issue that counts is how the West can best get out of it.
Galbraith’s answer is that American and British soldiers should come home — as quickly as possible. He says that the so-called Iraqi government in Baghdad does little governing, not least because it is physically too dangerous for ministers even to go to work at their ministries: “If one or more of Iraq’s peoples want out, we should facilitate an amicable divorce . . . The continued presence of American and British military forces in Iraq’s south can only aggravate relations with the Shi’ite authorities without any corresponding gain.”
He believes there is no chance of achieving security or harmony in the Baghdad area, where Sunnis and Shi’ites live cheek by jowl. Neither trusts the national security forces, or will. Vastly more troops than are available are required for western armies to impose control. The author sees no alternative save for the coalition to leave the warring factions to resolve the future of Baghdad by force of arms. He is uncertain whether the Sunnis and Shi’ites will ever reach an accommodation that enables them to preserve a two-society federated Arab Iraq, with the Kurds formally divorced, but thinks that they are best left to get on with finding out for themselves.
This is a brutal analysis and prescription written, of course, by an American Democrat suffused with scorn for everything the Bush administration professes to stand for. Nobody, including Galbraith, suggests that early military withdrawal would represent a happy outcome. Yet many old imperial powers did as much all over the world in the quarter-century after 1945, because they could not think of a better way.
We are left to address a simple question: are there reasons to suppose that keeping coalition forces in Iraq is helping make things better? If the answer is negative, which it probably is, then the sooner we quit the better, both for us and for the Iraqi people. What follows will be horrible and bloody — but it is horrible and bloody now.
Galbraith believes, as many of us do, that Bush’s adventure in Iraq, with Blair’s enthusiastic and still impenitent support, has inflicted a catastrophe on western foreign policy in the Islamic world: “The war’s architects believed they could change the Middle East. And so they did.” For decades to come, while the two great statesmen enjoy richly upholstered retirements, the rest of us will have to live with the consequences of their folly and cultural conceit.
STRATEGIC ERROR
Galbraith is scathing about Bush’s Iraq strategy: “The Iraq war,” he explains, “has failed to serve a single major US foreign policy objective. It has not made the United States safer; it has not advanced the war on terror; it has not made Iraq a stable state; it has not spread democracy to the Middle East; and it has not enhanced US access to oil.”
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