The famous ‘surge’ has proved a complete failure, says John C. Hulsman. Whatever Obama may say, nation-building is a luxury America can no longer afford
With Britain now withdrawn from Basra and American troops gone from the streets of Baghdad, Iraq is no longer front-page news. While there are still intermittent reports of carnage, and obscure stories written about political rumblings there, the problem seems manageable, far away, forgotten. Americans worry about the great recession, healthcare reform, and a little bit about Afghanistan. But Iraq has been conveniently forgotten.
This case of collective amnesia has been aided and abetted by a narrative that allows us to forget both Iraq’s frustrating intricacies and its horrors. The convenient narrative is this: that at the last possible moment the surge — the desperate build-up of American troops led by a dynamic American general, David Petraeus — snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, turning around the Bush administration’s grand exercise in nation-building. Sadly, and not for the first time, wishful thinking, rather than concrete reality, underlies this much-touted success.
For the simple truth remains that the surge, by its own professed political yardstick, has clearly failed. Iraq is, remains and will be a basket case; it certainly will not be sorted out a year from now, as President Obama has implied in announcing that the American combat mission will end on 31 August 2010. Perhaps the only bit of bleak good news is that any further significant American adventures in nation-building, following the doleful experiences in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, will prove difficult to justify politically at home.
In a sense, that is why the surge narrative is so important for the Washington elite, which continues to live in the never-never-land of American unipolar dominance that flowered so briefly with the end of the Cold War. For if Iraq is generally seen to be a failure, how can the favoured policy of nation- building/humanitarian intervention supported by a majority of foreign policy thinkers in both parties (be they Wilsonians in the Democratic party or neoconservatives in the Republican party) remain credible in a country increasingly aware that it urgently needs to set its own house in order? Success in Iraq is becoming a place-marker for a wider fight about the efficacy, morality and desirability of nation-building as a strategy writ large.
Modern policy-makers should spend some time reading Carl von Clausewitz. Echoing the great 19th-century Prussian military theorist, nation-building advocates must always keep in mind that military strategies are formulated to reach political outcomes, and not the other way around.
No one has ever doubted America’s ability temporarily to overwhelm other countries with its military might. But that is not the same as using US troops as part of a larger strategy to solve political problems. Fixing Iraq has always been more about politics than military matters, more about culture than wherewithal, and more about psychology than weaponry. Obviously, this central lesson was almost entirely forgotten by the Bush administration in the early days of the Iraq campaign.
But unlike the Bush decision-makers, General Petraeus and those who designed the surge did, initially, seem to have read their Clausewitz. The goals of the offensive were resolutely political, and could not have been stated more clearly. The military push was designed to give the local Iraqi political elites some breathing space to tackle their intractable problems, particularly related to dividing oil revenues between the regions and the central government, to make the minority Kurds and Sunnis stakeholders in a Shia-dominated governing system, and to disarm the ever-present militias, then making a mockery of Baghdad’s control over the country.
There is little doubt that the military did provide such a breathing space. Even better, an event wholly unconnected with the initial surge finally provided the hard-pressed Americans with a break. The Sunni Awakening Movement in the al-Qa’eda-dominated Western Anbar province, turned on the radical jihadists, as the formerly sympathetic Sunnis instead found tactical common cause with those they had so recently viewed as American invaders. Calculating, in the wake of brutal local al-Qa’eda rule, that the Americans were less of a problem than the mainly foreign al-Qa’eda elements, local chieftains rose on their own, intelligently and quickly supported by the Americans, and threw out their oppressors. General Petraeus, as well as being intelligent and driven, seems to possess that greatest quality that Napoleon identified as necessary in a great leader of men in war — he was lucky.
So far, so good. But what has the Iraqi government done with this precious time, which was the reason for the surge in the first place? It has failed equitably to divide oil revenue — always Iraq’s lifeblood — between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shia, the country’s three largest and most important ethno-religious groups. In fact, the Kurds have grown so disillusioned with the process that, bypassing the central government in Baghdad, they have begun dealing directly with foreign oil companies from their northern stronghold. Nor have the Kurds given up their ultimate dream of leaving Iraq to set up their own state.
Nor have things improved with the Sunnis. The Shia-dominated Maliki government has failed to make the restive Sunnis stakeholders in the new Iraq, instead they look on the Sunni leaders of the Awakening Movement’s struggle against al-Qa’eda with great distrust. Instead, Maliki has elbowed other Shia leaders out of the way in an effort to become a pocket strongman.
As for militias being disarmed, the Peshmerga, the local Kurdish army that is the glue holding the northern Kurdish enclave of the country together, would find such a prospect rather laughable. So the surge has conspicuously failed to yield the political, economic and military rapprochement between the major Iraqi groups that was the focus of the whole endeavour. Without this, no military strategy, however clever, matters very much.
So what does the future hold for the ‘unlucky country’? Given that the neighbours, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey, do not want Iraq to become a black hole of instability, and given that the Kurdish leadership seems pragmatically aware that they have more freedom than at any time in their history (and that now is not the time to jeopardise their relative prosperity in an ill-judged lunge for independence) the probable answer is — nothing.
Iraq will not wholly fall apart, as that serves almost no one’s interests. However, neither will it emerge as the happy, democratic, free, open, prosperous, western-oriented, tolerant society that both George Bush and Tony Blair promised. Rather it will limp along, a sort of Lebanon lite, unstable, unhappy, with a weak, corrupt, chaotic central government, a lot of de facto local control by regional strongmen, and a tragic, sustained, constant, low level of violence. Its problems will not become exponentially worse, but neither will they evaporate. Rather, Iraq will most likely simmer along unhappily.
That will be enough for the Obama administration, which will declare victory and leave. Given the overwhelming domestic pressures on the White House, let alone the increasingly critical situation in Afghanistan — that other nation-building experiment of choice that the President has chosen to make his own — the Americans will not be back, come what may.
Will leaving Iraq with a whimper be enough to sustain nation-building as an American foreign policy tool of choice in the new multipolar era? After all, Iraq is just the latest example of the failure of post-Cold War nation-building.
In the 20th century, America intervened in Haiti over a dozen times; the country remains the second-poorest on the face of the earth. The Clinton administration left the chaos of Somalia after taking sides with one set of warlords over another. Somalia remains a black hole in the Horn of Africa, with an expanding al-Qa’eda presence. If free and fair elections were held in Bosnia today, two of the three ethnic groups (the Serbs and the Croats) would vote to secede from the country.
Kosovo remains a Catch-22. America and most of its western allies unilaterally accepted Kosovan independence; all the while real power there continues to be primarily exercised by the international community. While President Karzai of Afghanistan is finally more than just the ‘Mayor of Kabul’, his sway surely does not extend throughout the country, and the Taleban are regrouping.
Incredibly, given Washington’s fanciful if strangely unshaken belief in its powers to remake the world in America’s image, this might not be enough to change hearts and minds in the capital. But I suspect that another thing will, a thing which historians will come to see as the stake in the heart of the nation-building vampire: the huge economic problems confronting the country may make nation-building simply a luxury America can no longer afford, unless it is obviously in its national interests, as was the case in Germany and Japan after the second world war.
For the White House’s own future budget numbers, just released in the past few days, make for staggering, almost incomprehensible reading. Instead of a $7.1 trillion deficit in government spending projected over the next ten years, the White House now concedes that paying for the bank bailout, economic stimulus and an ageing population, and fighting two wars of choice will lead to a deficit of more like $9 trillion. This is more than the sum of all previous American deficits run up by the national government since the founding of the republic. Over this period of time, America’s national debt will snowball — reaching $18 trillion by the end of the next decade, accounting for 77 per cent of American GDP. This is unsustainable — America will have become continental Europe, without the safety net.
While these numbers may be beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals, their policy relevance for the future of nation-building could not be clearer. While on a recent book tour, one question I asked never failed to elicit a certain nervous laughter: I would say, ‘Regardless of your feelings about Iraq before the war, regardless of whether you supported President Bush or not, knowing what you know now, about both Iraq and the economic crisis, do you want your trillion dollars back to spend on something else?’ It is this argument, as much as the failure of the surge, that ought to spell the death knell of nation-building as a standard tool of American foreign policy.