For four years, supporters of the war have been dependent on a series of assumptions, all of which have been wrong. They assumed Saddam Hussein had WMD. They assumed the war would be quick and cheap. They assumed we’d be greeted as liberators. They assumed there would be no insurgency.
And now these same supporters assume that if U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq, the consequences would be catastrophic, which is to say, worse than the catastrophic status-quo. If we leave, they assume Iraq would become a failed state, a terrorist safe-haven, and a country with a full-blown civil war that would be worse than the one we already see.
As Bush said at his press conference this week, “I concluded that to step back from the fight in Baghdad would have disastrous consequences for people in America…. [T]he Iraqi government could collapse, chaos would spread, there would be a vacuum, into the vacuum would flow more extremists, more radicals, people who have stated intent to hurt our people.”
But Robert Dreyfuss notes in a fascinating Washington Monthly piece that while it’s certainly possible that a quick withdrawal could make conditions in Iraq worse, why should we accept war supporters’ assumptions now? “[I]f if it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it’s also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that undergird arguments for staying…. What if the doomsayers are wrong?”
To his credit, Dreyfuss takes on each of the major predictions associated with a quick withdrawal, and suggests the right’s assumptions may, once again, be misplaced.
I won’t repeat them all here, but I thought Dreyfuss’ take on al Qaeda, and the likelihood that the terrorist network would create a safe haven in Iraq, was particularly compelling.
The idea that al-Qaeda might take over Iraq is nonsensical. Numerous estimates show that the group called Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its foreign fighters comprise only 5 to 10 percent of the Sunni insurgents’ forces. Most Sunni insurgents are simply what Wayne White—who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005—calls POIs, or “pissed-off Iraqis,” who are fighting because “they don’t like the occupation.” But the foreign terrorist threat is frequently advanced by the Bush administration, often with an even more alarming variant—that al-Qaeda will use Iraq as a headquarters for the establishment of a global caliphate. In December 2005, Rear Admiral William D. Sullivan, vice director for strategic plans and policy within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered a briefing in which he warned that al-Qaeda hoped to “revive the caliphate,” with its capital in Baghdad. President Bush himself has warned darkly that after controlling Iraq, Islamic militants will “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”
The reality is far different. Even if AQI came to dominate the Sunni resistance, it would be utterly incapable of seizing Baghdad against the combined muscle of the Kurds and the Shiites, who make up four fifths of the country. (The Shiites, in particular, would see the battle against the Sunni extremist AQI—which regards the Shiites as a heretical, non-Muslim sect—as a life-or-death struggle.)
Nor is it likely that AQI would ever be allowed to use the Sunni areas of Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks on foreign targets. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda had a full-fledged partnership with the Taliban and helped finance the state. In Iraq, the secular Baathists and former Iraqi military officers who lead the main force of the resistance despise AQI, and many of the Sunni tribes in western Iraq are closely tied to Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which is bitterly opposed to al-Qaeda. AQI has, at best, a marriage of convenience with the rest of the Sunni-led resistance. Over the past two years, al-Qaeda-linked forces in Iraq have often waged pitched battles with the mainstream Iraqi resistance and Sunni tribal forces. Were U.S. troops to leave Iraq today, the Baathists, the military, and the tribal leaders would likely join forces to exterminate AQI in short order.
It’s also worth questioning whether the forces that call themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq have any real ties to whatever remains of Osama bin Laden’s weakened, Pakistan-based leadership. Such ties, if they exist, have always been murky at best, even under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With al-Zarqawi’s elimination in 2006 and his replacement by a collegial group, these ties are even muddier. Although it’s convenient for the Bush administration to claim that al-Qaeda is a Comintern-like international force, it is really a loose ideological movement, and its Iraq component is fed largely by jihadists who flock to the country because they see the war as a holy cause. Once the United States withdraws, Iraq will no longer be a magnet for that jihad.
Read the whole thing. I have to admit, some of the points Dreyfuss questioned are so ingrained in the conventional wisdom, I often find myself agreeing with them, even though I believe some of the most negative consequences of withdrawal are no worse than the status quo.
But Dreyfuss’s contribution to the war dialog is important. The worst-case scenarios may sound realistic, but they’re being touted by the same people whose assumptions have been wrong literally every step of the way, and there’s ample reason to be skeptical of the claims now.
Dreyfuss concludes that these worst-case scenarios are being used to “scare decision-makers and members of Congress into supporting a failed strategy.” It’s time to give these assumptions another look, and Dreyfuss’ piece is the place to start.