The Deluded View of the Economist: An Example of Colonialist Argumentation Thought Extinct

American dilemma
U.S. voters should punish Bush, not Iraqis

Sat Oct 28 2006

The Economist

WHEN a great democracy such as the United States holds elections at a time of war, voters are torn between two instincts. One is to show grit and solidarity by rallying around the flag and the president. The other is to treat the election as a referendum on the war.

Ever since September 11, 2001, George Bush has milked the first instinct for all it is worth. But having gained so much from presenting himself as a war president, Bush can hardly complain now that the voters are moving in the other direction.

Many seem intent on using November's midterms to give their verdict on his handling of the war in Iraq. That is bad news for the Republicans. According to a Gallup poll this week, only 19 per cent of Americans still think that America is winning.

In Britain, America's chief ally in Iraq, the disenchantment is deeper. An ICM poll this week found that 45 per cent of Britons wanted their troops to leave at once, and a further 16 per cent wanted them out by the end of the year.

This loss of faith among the people of Britain and America is easy to understand. They have already shown a lot of patience. More than three years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has become progressively more violent. Some 2,200 American soldiers and 120 British ones have been killed, and the death toll among Iraqis may stretch into the hundreds of thousands.

Voters in the West would be steadier if they believed Iraq to be heading, however fitfully, in broadly the right direction. But that is not certain. Free elections have been held, but these have not yet brought effective government. A constitution has been written, but this has not resolved the big differences between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
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Especially since the bombing of the Shiites' Askariyah mosque in February, the violence has mutated from a low-level insurgency into a sectarian civil war, with ethnic cleansing already under way in some areas.

George Casey, America's top general in Iraq, did his best this week to express some cautious optimism. Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador in Baghdad, insisted that success was still possible. But plenty of other diplomats and generals (including the head of Britain's army) have taken a more somber view.

Iraq may have bottomed out, or the worst may be yet to come. The truth is that nobody knows for sure.

In recent weeks the combination of an election campaign in America with the lack of progress in Iraq has for the first time produced a vigorous, open debate about strategic alternatives. Yet the benefits of this debate may turn out to be more apparent than real. For none of the alternative ideas mooted so far, such as partition, installing a strongman or withdrawing American forces "over the horizon," looks more promising than the existing three-part strategy.

This, broadly, is to damp down the violence as much as possible while continuing to train Iraq's own soldiers and policemen and pressing Iraq's elected politicians to make a power- (and oil-) sharing deal that could end the civil war.

The real choice facing America and its allies in Iraq is whether to persevere with this strategy in the hope of eventual success, or admit failure now and start to head for the exit.

For the politicians (and newspapers, like ours) who argued strongly for the invasion of Iraq, it is no longer enough to accuse those who want to head for the exit of cutting and running, as if using a pejorative phrase settled the argument either way. Cutting your losses is sometimes the sensible thing to do, even for a superpower, and even after paying a heavy price in lost lives and wasted money.

If you genuinely believe, as many people now do, that the likeliest long-term outcome in Iraq is that America will end up cutting and running anyway, with no improvement to be expected even three or four years hence, why simply postpone the inevitable?
Because failure may not be inevitable. It is true that Iraq is not poised to become the exemplary democracy the American neocons dreamed of carving out in the heart of the Arab world. But that definition of success was always a peculiar one to apply to a war the United States launched primarily to secure its own interests.

A failure to turn Iraq into Switzerland means neither that Iraq is fated to collapse altogether nor that its people are doomed to perpetual fratricidal war. The question Americans need to ask is what impact their own staying or going is likely to have on the balance of probable outcomes.

And in answering this question, the case for staying becomes a good deal stronger. By persevering, America stands at least some chance of putting Iraq on a more stable trajectory. By leaving, it is almost certain to make things worse.

At a minimum, America's continuing presence in Iraq prevents the neighbours from joining in a civil war, as Lebanon's neighbours did in the 1970s with much less at stake. The Americans can still move into and establish some order in areas where the violence surges out of control. They can protect the elected government and put pressure on its members to make a political settlement. They can continue to train Iraq's own security forces and, if necessary, attack or dismantle some of the militias.

Once they leave they can do none of these things. Sen. John Warner spoke for many when he worried recently that the situation was "drifting sideways." But there are worse directions than sideways. Leaving now stands a fair chance of plunging Iraq into an enlarged war and a far bigger bloodbath than anything seen so far.

For Bush, the Iraq war has in one sense already been lost, whatever result the midterms bring. This president's legacy will forever be tainted by what he overpromised and how much he underperformed.

The voters of America are entitled to judge and punish his party as they see fit. But Americans would be wrong to extend this punishment to the people of Iraq, who have suffered so much already. Even if it was a mistake to blunder into Iraq, it would be a bigger mistake, bordering on a crime, for a nation that aspires to greatness to blunder out now, without first having exhausted every possible effort to put Iraq back together and avert a wider war.

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Original article posted here.