America must secure stability in Iraq.
I was recently the recipient of a dangerous message. On the fifth anniversary of the War in Iraq a group calling itself Harvardnowar emailed me the following:
“Rally! Against The War, To End the Occupation, For Immediate Peace.
"Bring All The Troops Home Now!
"End All Funding for the Iraq War Now! Support Our Communities, Fund Human Needs! Stop the Attacks on Civil Liberties,
"Defend Human Rights!”
It was a message appealing to American values and the deepest insecurities Americans have about the war they are engaged in. Harvardnowar claims the violence in Iraq is of our making and would be ended with our absence. In other words America made this war; America can end it. Bring our boys and our bucks back and the violence stops. “End the occupation — For immediate peace.”
Seductive logic, but is it true? Since 2003 close to 4,000 American servicemen and between 80,000 and 600,000 Iraqis have been killed. America’s inability to achieve its democratizing mission and the enduring civil and terrorist violence obliges many to conclude that we have to get out — cut and run as soon as possible. But if American liberals believe this serves the interest of peace in Iraq, they only betray their ignorance.
Peace in Iraq is universally appealing.Pulling out now will produce the opposite outcome: greater bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, and international instability. Using peace in Iraq as the justification for withdrawal is as contrived as citing WMD’s as the prime rationale for invasion. If the welfare of Iraqis is our intent, liberals had better get used to the idea of pacifying, which for better or worse means troops on the ground. Selling withdrawal as returning Iraq to some “default state” of ethnic tranquility is contemptibly naive.
And yet the current liberal discourse on Iraq refuses to acknowledge such an obvious fact. Harvardnowar claims 60 percent of Americans think we should withdraw from Iraq. The Harvard Anti-War Coalition, Harvard Students for a Democratic Society, Harvard Students for Choice, Alliance for Justice in the Middle East, the Burma Action Movement, Radcliffe Union of Students, Student Labor Action Movement, and the Harvard College Democrats all endorsed Harvardnowar’s message of snap-freeze isolationism.
More disturbingly, the policies of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton toward Iraq unequivocally advocate withdrawal. An entire political hemisphere, and one which I would like to say I belong to, is either ignorant of or unconcerned by the effects of such a schizophrenic American foreign policy.
We should be greatly disturbed. Since 2003 Iraq has been beset by violence. The failure of Iraq’s new government to effectively reconcile and include Iraq’s ethnic constituents has come at a terrible cost. Iraqi civilians and the American and Iraqi soldiers who have taken on the task of defending the democratically elected government have born the cost. Behind all this is the persistent specter of al-Qaida detonating civilians of every sect and channeling extremists to the saddest and most tortured of nations.
But do the math. At most 600,000 civilians have been killed, an admittedly staggering number even if it is the highest imaginable estimate, but it could get so much worse. Iraq is a country of 27 million. There are 164,000 coalition troops in Iraq. Without these the terrible maelstrom of insurgent bombing and sectarian killing devastating the nation would be almost entirely unnopposed. Is it really credible to believe that in the absence of American troops Iraq’s dueling populations would go into pacific auto-pilot? If anything, the past five years illustrate the inability of these groups to negotiate — or at least that radical minorities can cause grievous, irreversible harm to any moderate consensus. Civil war would be likely, ethnic cleansing more so, and humanitarian suffering multiplied.
If you think this is far-fetched, a short diversion into the recent experience of Darfurian, Somali, or Eritrean refugees should convince you otherwise. Complicating things is the prospect of destabilizing arguably the most politically charged triumvirate of rivals: Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The growing scarcity and value of oil and water in the region provides every incentive for any one of these states to intervene in their own self-interest, not to mention security. The Sunni/Shii divide between Saudi Arabia and Iran as well as the Kurdish question exacerbate these fault lines. That is to say nothing of al-Qaida or the fundamentalist pathologies that would incubate and bloom in such a political no-mans land. We need not look even as far as the Taliban in Afghanistan to know the intrinsic inhumanity and aggression of such a political waste. To America’s failure to act in Rwanda in 1994, the E.U.’s appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic in Yuogoslavia could be added the American withdrawal of Iraq, leaving a civil conflict in perpetuity and Islamic fundamentalism in the ascent.
For this year’s Democratic hopefuls, promoting the fiction that evacuating Iraq would produce peace is worse than naïve; it is politically convenient and morally inexcusable. The war is unpopular, expensive, longer than anyone expected, and, as it turns out, a great way to get elected. The real question should not be how do we get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, but why Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton keep telling us we should? And on this question at least there should be agreement; to the Democratic contestants American votes matter more than Iraqi lives. We deserve greater wisdom from those seeking to helm American foreign policy, or our collective contempt.
Morgan Potts ’08 (dpotts@fas) believes in staying the course.