The U.S. war in Iraq is over. Who won?
The end of America’s combat mission, after seven and a half costly years, has raised questions that will provide fodder for argument for a long time to come: Was it worth it? And who, if anyone, won?
It’s too early to answer the first question, according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a man of sober judgment. “It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run … How it all weighs in the balance over time remains to be seen.”
For a sizeable group of Middle East experts, the second question is easier to answer than the first. “So, who won the war in Iraq? Iran,” says the headline over an analysis by scholar Mohammed Bazzi for the Council on Foreign relations, a New York-based think-tank. His argument: “The U.S. ousted Tehran’s sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shi’ite government for the first time in Iraq’s modern history.
“As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq’s Shi’ite factions.” As a consequence, U.S. influence has been waning, Iran’s has been rising, and there are predictions that Iran will fill the vacuum created by the drawdown of U.S. troops to 50,000 who will “advise and assist” the Iraqis.
When President Barack Obama announced the completion of the drawdown in a somber speech on August 31, he made no reference to Iran – a curious omission – but said that “in an age without surrender ceremonies, we must earn victory through the success of our partners.” In the case of Iraq, only optimists find it easy to see shining success.
Six months after national elections, there is still no Iraqi government, with Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds unable to agree on how to share power and, as importantly, the country’s enormous oil wealth. A squabbling, deadlocked parliament is not much to show for more than 4,000 American, up to 100,000 Iraqi deaths and $1 trillion in war spending.
Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, and the neoconservative war hawks who agitated for an attack on Iraq, predicted that the country would become a model of democracy that would inspire the rest of the Arab world, largely run by autocratic regimes, to follow suit. That proved a pipedream. Instead, in the words of Wathiq al-Hashemi, a political analyst in Baghdad, Iraq has become a theatre for settling foreign disputes.
U.S. military giant, diplomatic dwarf?
— Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own —
The U.S. armed forces, the world’s most powerful, outnumber the country’s diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?
The ratio applies to people in uniform (or pin-striped suits). In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison. The 2010 defense budget now before Congress totals $534 billion, not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. China’s defense budget is $70 billion, Russia’s around $50 billion.
Is the huge imbalance between the size of the U.S. armed forces and the civilian agencies that make up “soft power” — chiefly the foreign service and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — destined to remain a permanent fixture in the political landscape?
The gap is not likely to shrink dramatically, despite a growing internal debate over how to balance the instruments of power. Ironically, the man who has provided some of the most memorable statistics illustrating the hard power-soft power gap is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the only holdover from the cabinet of George W. Bush and President Barack Obama’s most inspired choice.
One of Gates’ favorite examples: The 6,600 foreign service professionals of the State Department equal the number of personnel of one (out of 11) aircraft carrier strike group.
The Pentagon spends slightly more on health care for the military than the State Department spends on looking after foreign affairs. And the United States employs more military musicians than professional diplomats.
The saddest thing about all this is we still have wide open borders and essentially zero security there despite the daily drug war shootouts 10 miles away.
America’s long, long Afghan war
–Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–
Twenty years ago this month, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan after a disastrous war that lasted nine years, seven weeks and three days. Barring military and political miracles, the United States will stay longer in Afghanistan than the Soviets did. Considerably longer.
Present U.S. plans to reinforce troops fighting a war that is, by most accounts, going badly, provide for up to 30,000 additional soldiers to be deployed over the next 12 to 18 months. By that time, the U.S. presence will almost have matched the Soviets’ stay and will exceed it by the end of 2010.
And if U.S. history is any guide, politicians running for the 2012 presidential election will describe the Afghan war as Barack Obama’s war because he switched emphasis and carried out a campaign pledge to draw down troops in Iraq and bolster U.S. forces in Afghanistan, now 36,000 strong.
Obama critics will complain about the Afghan war’s cost — probably around $70 billion a year — and demand an accounting on what it has achieved and when it will end. So far, nobody is venturing forecasts beyond “it will be long.”
General David Petraeus, the man credited with turning the tide of the war in Iraq, has spoken of Afghanistan as “the longest campaign of the long war.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates predicts “a long and difficult fight.”
By an ironic twist of history, Gates was instrumental in getting Soviet troops out of Afghanistan when he was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. supplied anti-Soviet fighters with cash, weapons and intelligence.
I’m starting to think that we need to be more aware of the overlapping issues that carry across the area from Egypt to India. The good news is that every strategic success will have positive knock-on effect. The bad news is that blunders will have similar negative reverberations. Now if we could just have a clear strategic success…
our goals were met. therefore the United States of America, NATO, and the International Security Assistance Force have meta victory in the no man’s land out there in the east. Israel is sure happy about all the dead iraqis. iran is surely happy about all of the dead americans. so desicevly the US wo. get over it, liberals.