I started this blog on May 6th, 2003. For the previous few months, basically since I left Montreal, I had been working on a book at a maddeningly slow pace. The title was to be, “The End of the American Century,” and the premise was that in a hundred years or so, history students would have to memorize September 11th, 2001 as the exact date when America’s remarkable period of world dominance ended.

I was writing this around the time of the long march to war in Iraq. It wasn’t apparent to me during the war with Afghanistan that the American century was ending, even though I thought the war was a mistake. But when we declared that we were going into Iraq, I knew it was all over. Bush’s invasion singlehandedly destroyed any chance of a continued Pax Americana. It might be argued that our decline on the world stage was inevitable, that once you’re on top, there’s nowhere to go but down. Unfortunately, this is all idle speculation; we pooched it. We let George W. run this country into the ground just like every business he ever owned.

Elephant recently wrote on his blog (very kindly):

DJ, for the record, you were exactly right about the Iraq war and everyone else was wrong. Now what?

I guess what now is that I have to try to recall exactly what it was I said was going to happen.

I think I said something like,

• Iraq would become a Third World country with little hope of aspiring to return to the Second
• Al-Qaeda would be strengthened and the Arab street would be radicalized
• Arab and world opinion would forever be lost to us and no one would ever accept our diplomatic efforts ever again
• We would be there for a long time
• We would lose our dominance of world affairs
• Our military would be stretched too thin to be wielded as an effective deterrent
• Iran would get nuclear weapons and be emboldened by our failure, as would the rest of our enemies
• If Iraq had retained WMDs, they would hand these off to terrorists.

The conservative critics of the ISG report claim that the group endorses a ‘cut and run’ or ‘chat and run’ defeatism. They claim that above all, withdrawing from Iraq would signal a defeat, a defeat on the magnitude (and perhaps even greater than) the withdrawal from and defeat in Vietnam.

They are correct. But so is the ISG–staying the course only postpones the day of reckoning at ever greater cost. And that’s what the mujahideen are trying to get us to do.

Many people in America don’t understand the mythology of worldwide jihad. Point in case: Afghanistan. Mujahideen believe that it was the ten-year fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (a war often described as the USSR’s Vietnam) that defeated the atheistic Communists and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. I don’t think this is true at all, but it is an important part of their mythology and why they fight. More importantly, it is the reason they wish to continue their fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They believe that they can sap the military and financial strength of the Great Shaitan by keeping US forces in Iraq in their pointless mission. If we stay, we may end up proving them right. If we realize that our war was doomed from the start to devolve into this mess, cut our losses and withdraw, we still have a chance at regaining something.

The war mongerers like to argue that withdrawal from Iraq is a “PR victory” for Al-Qaeda. In fact, the war in Iraq has been nothing but since Day 1; invading a country who had not attacked us proved our mendacity to the world, and things have been going downhill from there.

The US has gotten itself into a situation where it loses by winning; the brutality of our conquest of Falluja and the psy-ops at Abu Ghraib might have constituted some kind of tactical victory for the U.S. forces, but in reality, they were PR victories for jihadism.

Clausewitz said, “No one starts a war–or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so–without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.” The fogginess of US strategy has placed us in an awful fix.

Consider: the cost of maintaining a single U. S. soldier in Iraq is about $13,333 per week ($2 billion / 150,000 troops). How much does an insurgent cost per week? It’s hard to figure, but the median household income in Iraq in 2004 was US$144 (down from US$255 in 2003). So if insurgents are funded by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or oil graft at a rate which provides a median income for their families, we would be spending roughly 1,111 times more per combatant than ‘they’ do.

Clausewitz also said, the best way to attack a powerful enemy is to attack the weakness in their greatest strength. The strength of the U. S. forces is that we have the best funded, best equipped, most advanced, deadliest military in the world. The inherent weakness in this strength is the extraordinary expense and hyper-efficiency of our forces is ill-suited to ‘peace-keeping’ or nation-building or whatever it is we claim to be doing there. On the other hand, the guerillas’ strength is that their costs are relatively low, and they are willing to die in order to cause chaos. Our killing power is worthless if the enemy is not only willing to die, but gains recruits when we kill people wholesale. It’s kind of like trying to peel an orange with a sledgehammer.

If our mission is to preserve order, then we must exert almost total control on the ground, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, particularly when American troops don’t speak Arabic. What you need to maintain that kind of order is a police force that is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the policed, which is the polar opposite of a foreign occupational force. This is the reason why the venture was doomed from the start; we’re using the wrong tools. On the other hand, all the insurgents have to do is cause chaos, which is extraordinarily simple, and cost-effective.

So the solution to all this, as everyone admits, is an Iraqi police force. Now, the Iraqi government’s sustaining military forces are death squads and private armies, who maintain a certain order by targeting violence along ethnic and religious lines. In Clausewitzian terms, their line of attack and goals are narrow enough to be more successful than any U.S. strategy. It’s the same principle that allowed the Taliban to take over from the Afghan bandit kings in the early 1990’s: sure, there’s horrible violence. But it’s discriminate violence, violence that is clearly defined and operates according to a certain logic.

Consider the experience of Rory Stewart, who holds the dubious distinction of being the last British colonial viceroy governor of Iraq. He admits that since he turned over the governance of the southern provinces, relative order has been restored. The highways are safer, corruption is less, and there is a modicum of political instability. The U. S. would literally kill to have Baghdad be this safe.

But these gains are fleeting upon closer examination:

The new order in southern Iraq is, in short, hard to define. It is an improvement on the political exclusion and sadistic inhumanity of Saddam and has a great deal to teach the Sunni areas about prosperity, security and politics. But it is also reactionary, violent, intolerant towards women and religious minorities and uncooperative with the coalition. The new leaders have dark histories and dubious allies; they enforce a narrow social code and ignore the rural areas. Southern Iraq is a democracy but we should not assume that this or any of the other terms which we deploy frequently about Iraq—insurgency, civil society, civil war, police force or even political party— mean what they do in Britain. There have been elections, but the government is not responsive to or respectful of human rights. In many ways it resembles Iran, but it is not governed by clerics. Its militias are not infiltrators, they are an integral element of the elected parties. The new government is oppressive, but has a popular mandate; it is supported by illegal militias, but it has improved security.

This is not the kind of state the coalition had hoped to create. During 14 months of direct rule, until the middle of last year, we tried to prevent it from emerging. We refused to allow Shari’a law to be “the source of legislation” in the constitution. We invested in religious minorities and women’s centres; supported rural areas and tribal groups; funded NGOs and created “representative bodies” that were intended to reflect a vision of Iraq as a tolerant, modern society. We hoped that we had created the opportunity for civil society to flourish. This was a dream we shared with many Iraqis. We refused to deal with the Sadr militia and fought a long counter- insurgency campaign against them. Then we left, an election was held and the dream collapsed—the Islamist parties took almost all the seats provincially and nationally. The rural sheikhs, the “liberal” middle classes and the religious minorities mostly vanished from the government.

In fighting the supposed aspirants to a global caliphate, we have engendered “democratic Islamofascism” in Iraq in the mold of the Iranian revolution. Not that is merely the consequence of the latest Iraq war, mind you. Our whole foreign policy has been defined by propping up corrupt secular dictators or absolutist monarchies in the name of strategic thinking. In arming and supporting Saddam, the house of Saud, and the Egyptian pseudo-presidency, we made secular government synonymous with corruption and repression.

In Iraq as in Afghanistan, the people look for moral authority where there is a moral vacuum at the top. The Afghan people, for example, were never terribly religious until the invasion of the atheist USSR. The rise of Islamism in the Persian Gulf was aided by our decision to put our thumb on the scales of justice in favor of despots like Saddam or the Shah of Iran. Now the secular Iraqi middle class is fleeing, and I can’t blame them.

We have tragically lowered the standard for governance in Iraq. What may appear to the Iraqis as somewhat better than Saddam is worse for both Iraqis and Americans. I am not arguing that we put Saddam back into power, or stage a coup, or further intervene in Iraqi politics. We have no credibility in this. We are going to have to let Iraqis sort this out for themselves, the way we should have done before we started arming Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. The folly of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “double standard” is manifest, but somehow I don’t think the neo-conservatives will be able to admit it.

To me, it was always clear that our mission would be a colossal disaster on the scale of Vietnam or Afghanistan. Not only is the presence of our troops causing unrest, but they are not ina position to make anythin better. All they can do is shoot people, threaten to shoot people, or build things the Iraqis should be building (if not for the sake of their economy, then for the sake of national pride and institution-building). We could be giving Iraq money, but instead we’d rather give them flaming death, which is pretty expensive anyway.

Now the war hawks have decided that the best way to acknowledge our failure is to send more American troops to kill or be killed. The only option is for the Democrats to have the guts to cut this war budget off at the knees. Iraq is as lost to us as it ever was.