A shift of vocabulary can be the harbinger of a new understanding. The notable increase in recent weeks in the use of the term ‘civil war†to describe what is happening in Iraq — which has included powerful statements from Kofi Annan and King Abdullah of Jordan — may prove significant.
October 2006’s civilian death toll of 3 709 lends support to such pessimism. The figure — drawn from the Iraqi health ministry, hospitals and other sources — exceeds the calculation for July, itself the highest since the war began in March 2003.
The routine acceptance of the term ‘civil war†(rather than, say, an ‘insurgencyâ€) has become close to a necessary tactical adjustment for the United States leadership, as significant parts of the US media now use a phrase that has long been taboo for the White House. At the same time, it might be thought to offer some crude political advantage — for it allows the violence to be blamed on internal Iraqi dynamics rather than resisters fighting a foreign occupation by American forces.
In this sense, ‘civil war†works to displace responsibility on to the Iraqis and away from the US itself — even if, under the terms of the Geneva Convention, an occupying power is responsible for maintaining security.
The George W Bush administration has its response ready: Iraq is now an independent state. The reality, however, is of a government with a writ that scarcely extends beyond Baghdad, is dependent on US forces for its survival and is closely managed by US staff working from the world’s largest embassy now nearing completion in Baghdad.
The experience of these three months confirms a long-term trend: that if there are major US troop movements undertaken to enforce control of one part of central Iraq, the insurgency simply intensifies elsewhere. This trend, moreover, is exacerbated by two other problems.
The first is that the insurgency itself has become financially self-sustaining. As much as $100-million may come from oil smuggling, over $30-million from ransoms paid for kidnap victims and many millions more from counterfeiting, corruption and the activities of ‘charitiesâ€. A figure of $200-million a year would still be less than the cost of the war to the US every day. Pentagon expenditure is of the order of $96-billion in 2006; this suggests that a robust insurgency that pins down over 100 000 US troops is able to operate at a tiny fraction of the cost it is obliging the US to spend.
The second problem stems from increasing evidence that the US programme to train Iraqi security and police forces has proven to be seriously defective. At the root of the issue are four interconnected factors: inadequate training, inadequate numbers of American instructors, a conspicuous lack of interpreters and an expectation that the Iraqis being trained would be effectively ‘clean slateâ€, with little or no likelihood of linking up with militias.
The overall impact of these factors is that there remain major problems of reliability across the police, army and numerous security units. This is so much the case that, where US, British or other coalition troops have withdrawn from particular areas, there has been little evidence of any central Iraqi government control in their place.
If these developments are put together, what emerges is a bitter combination of a sustainable insurgency and deepening sectarian violence, without any indication that the US military can cope. If the political factor of the Bush administration’s major electoral defeat in the mid-term elections of November 7 is added, the question arises: will there now be a major change in US policy?
President Bush’s reiteration of the firm, familiar statement that the US would ‘stay the course†(delivered at the start of the Nato Summit in Riga, Latvia) would suggest otherwise. The stance is supported by Pentagon plans to maintain troop levels in Iraq at current numbers for another four years.
Beyond the official administration position, though, it is instructive to examine what the neo-conservative commentators and analysts are saying. Some prominent figures, including Richard Perle, are rounding on the president and his advisers; others are directing their arguments in different directions, three of which are notable (see ‘Neo Culpaâ€, Vanity Fair, November 3).
The first is a clear tendency to blame the US media for accentuating the bad news and stirring up domestic public opposition to the war. This is reminiscent of the argument of the 1970s onwards that the US military would have won in Vietnam if it had not been betrayed by pernicious media defeatists back home.
The prominence in the media of some very pro-war voices (on, for example, Fox News and the numerous radio talk-shows) makes this seem an extraordinary claim. Yet it is indeed being made with some force, almost as if intellectually preparing the way for a fundamental excuse, should a full withdrawal from Iraq ever be required.
A second argument is that a comprehensive withdrawal from Iraq would be an utter disaster for the US and a clear sellout of the so-called ‘realistsâ€, who are little more than appeasers. As the latest Weekly Standard editorial puts it:
‘So let’s add up the ‘realist’ proposals: We must retreat from Iraq, and thus abandon all those Iraqis — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd and others — who have depended on the US for safety and the promise of a better future. We must abandon our allies in Lebanon and the very idea of an independent Lebanon in order to win Syria’s support for our retreat from Iraq. We must abandon our opposition to Iran’s nuclear programme in order to convince Iran to help us abandon Iraq. And we must pressure our ally, Israel, to accommodate a violent Hamas in order to gain radical Arab support for our retreat from Iraq.†(See Robert Kagan and William Kristol, ‘Surrender as ‘realism’†December 4.)
It is nothing less than a cry of dismay, if not anguish and a salutary indicator of the changing mood in the US.
The third argument is the oft-repeated one that the real mistake has been to have too few forces in Iraq — what is required is an increase in the US troop presence in Iraq and tougher counter-insurgency operations backed up by a rapid expansion in the size of the US army.
These neocon responses together signal a degree of disarray in the ranks of the more hawkish elements around the Bush administration. The extraordinary flailing between demands for armed reinforcement and preparations for failure on the basis of ‘blame someone else†indicate the confusion.
But beyond this is a core strategic reality: the massive fossil-fuel reserves in the Persian Gulf region make this the most important part of the world for Washington outside the continental US; and Iraq really is a cornerstone of US security policy in the region.
This suggests an answer to the question posed above about a change in policy. A complete military withdrawal from Iraq remains highly unlikely and, if it did ever happen, it would be a foreign-policy disaster for the US of historic proportions — far more so than Vietnam.
Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University and international security editor for Open-Democracy.net, where this article first appeared