| Just to clarify in light of . . . comments, I was not proposing an optimistic scenario, or, indeed, any scenario at all. I was simply saying that Saudi Arabia and Iran do not have to have a proxy war in Iraq if they don't want to have one, and that it is possible for them to take the prudent steps that would forestall it. Many commentators present the prospect of such a war as inevitable or as preventable only by a continued US military presence. The US presence, however, has made things worse every single one of the past three years, because it unwittingly removes the incentives to compromise from local Iraqi forces and helps to paralyze the neighbors from playing a prominent role. Remove the US military from the equation, I am arguing, and it is far more likely that all parties concerned will begin behaving more responsibly. I cannot guarantee that outcome. I can say that the past 3 years do not make me sanguine that things will get better with a continued US dominance. |
Perhaps it might have been better to come back with the famous one-liner "Doctor Hawkswoop refuses to understand me" than to expostulate like that. "Never apologize, never explain" might do also.
Our sympathy should be extended to poor Hawkswoop, Mr. Bones, especially considering that we too failed to notice what JC claims to have been simply saying. If in fact he had said "Saudi Arabia and Iran do not have to have a proxy war in Iraq if they don't want to have one, " we should undoubtedly have noticed it. Nevertheless, our rule is not to impugn anybody's subjective sincerity except at gunpoint, so let us stipulate that he really thinks he simply said it. In any case, it has now been clearly said, and it does to some extent clarify the latest Colean scenario. Of course he then takes back more than he bestowed by rarning that he does not condescend to deal in scenarios, a remark that seems clear and simple enough, but leaves one wondering what word they use in Michigan to describe that cast-of-thousands screenplay published by The Nation. Does "scenario" mean what he expects to happen, as opposed to what he daydreams of making happen? If so, would he complete the reversal of our own usage and call the latest Cole Plan a "forecast"? Yet it is also possible that Don Juan says "scenario" where we should say "situation report," and is reminding Dr. Hawkswoop, correctly, that he plunged straight into prescribing for his patients without setting forth his diagnosis of their ailments as a preliminary step. For all I know, at Ann Arbor everybody is worried about a proxy war between Riyadh and Qom when she speaks of the neo-Iraqi troubles and there is no need to spell it out. In broader circles, however, there are still a few folks like Hawkswoop and us who don't immediately think of the invasionites' many and various problems of success in exactly that light.
It would be interesting to know exactly what was objected to the latest Cole Plan by these objectors I personify as "Dr. Hawkswoop." It seems plain they are even less eager to rush irresponsibly out of the GOP's neo-Iraq than even Prof. Cole. In the abstract, I they might have objected that they are not optimistic that the scheme proposed will allow them to prolong the occupation adequately, but that is an unlikely reading. If Hawkswoop had simply said that, we should almost certainly have had some protestations that an eventual withdrawal was not meant to be precluded altogether. Perhaps it was Dr. H. who brought the proxy war script into the light of day and maintained that that is what the latest Cole Plan would likely lead to? That analysis would be rather unfair to the proud author, who certainly did not write any lines of that sort for the statesmen of Sa‘údiyya and Iran to utter on his stage. However almost any student of the Cole Plan is likely to worry that it contains so many moving parts whose motions must be precisely produced and directed that the whole thing could quite conceivably go haywire. That was one of our own reservations about it, and "avid student" in the Ann Arbour peanut gallery has come to the same conclusion independently. Dr. H. may been troubled that if the central problem is this hypothetical proxy war, the most strikingly new ingredient in the potion prescribed seems a bit off the mark. First we have local elections and then a responsible and respectable and moderate and representative Arab Sunni political class suddenly emerges out of nowhere. That seems to be the chief gimmick, and who would object if it -- very improbably -- happened? But if we suppose that it does, would that suffice to insure that there shall be no such proxy war? Prof. Cole may perhaps be simply not-saying that in that event, M. Bin Sa‘úd could stay home in his palace and have no need to hasten to assist his oppressed connational coreligionists against Safavids at home and in the East. Except that that cannot be right, since the latest Cole Plan specifically includes lines for M. Bin Sa‘úd to utter that will keep poor M. al-Málikí and the U.I.A. gang from overreaching. To quote the pertinent passage again,
| Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has credibility with Iraq's Sunnis, especially now that he has denounced the US occupation as illegitimate. They could trust his representations . . . . |
That makes no sense at all if we imagine M. Bin Sa‘úd refraining from all meddling in the native politics of neo-Iraq. However, once we imagine him meddling, it is difficult not to imagine countermeddling from the direction of Tehran. Perhaps Prof. Cole's imagination works differently than our own, however.
He's written a few lines for his stage Persians to speak as well:
| The Shiites will have to demobilize the Mahdi Army and Badr Organization as well, and Iran will have to commit to working with the Maliki government to make that happen. |
Whatever the merits of the proposal, it positively demands that there be meddling. So then, the latest Cole Plan has both M. Bin Sa‘úd and the Rev. Khamene’í up to their necks in the domestic affairs of New Baghdad. If Dr. Hawkswoop is alarmed that this arrangement might provoke rather than avoid a proxy war, perhaps he has a certain amount of reason to think so.
Turning to the scriptwriter's rebuttal, he seems to think that his "Taif II" would work better if pretty well everybody is allowed to dabble in neo-Iraqi politics except the US Republicans. On the other hand, they cannot just go away and leave the rest to go to it. The Colean imagination seems to picture the militant invasionites as suddenly converted into something like Bismarck's "honest broker" from the Congress of Berlin. That is very imaginative indeed, at least in the sense of being remote from reality as it appears to most people primâ facie. Are we seriously to expect a strict impartiality from Crawford as regards the meddlings and countermeddlings of Iran and Sa‘údiyya? If JC has given up on influencing the Bushies altogether, are we to expect such impartiality from some Democratic President beginning in January 2009? For that matter, does he seriously believe in it himself? And even if he does, may he not be in some danger of confusing the Form of impartiality (letting all the dabblers dabble equally) with the Matter of impartiality (making sure each dabbler gets only what she deserves)? Prince Bismarck was clear-headed about the distinction -- "Austria had as much right to resist our demands as we had to make them" -- and so his sort of honest broker might do the trick. The Ann Arbour sort, I am not so confident about, let alone the Rancho Crawford sort.
On a narrower front,
| I also wrote to an email discussion group: With regard to the fate of the Iraqi Kurds if the US withdraws: I don't believe that the US troops are doing the Kurds of Iraq any good. There are very few US troops in the north. Are there any at all in the KRG? There are some near Kirkuk. Some 3000 GIs were recently withdrawn from Mosul and sent to Baghdad as part of the current security plan. The Kurdistan Regional Government is stable and relatively secure because over 60,000 well-armed and well-trained Peshmerga provide security. The Peshmerga are recognized by the Iraqi constitution as the legitimate security forces of Kurdistan, so there is no reason that the US cannot go on supplying and training them. I don't believe there is any evidence that they need US ground troops in order to survive. The Peshmerga are the best and most committed indigenous military force in Iraq and virtually the only part of the Iraqi army (where they have been detailed to it) that have consistently stood their ground in firefights. The Kurds needed protection when Saddam was in power and had 4,000 remaining tanks with which to menace them. That situation has changed. As for the politics of the situation, the same thing applies here as elswhere. The Kurdish political leadership under Massoud Barzani has been remarkably inflexible with regard to key demands of the Sunni Arabs, and I believe that this inflexibility derives in some large part from a conviction that US troops will protect the Kurds and so they need not negotiate with the Sunni Arabs as equals. Remove the US from the equation, and I expect everyone will be more flexible. |
That is a good deal less imaginative and more reality-based. Unfortunately it is rather beside the point, since Free Kurdistan is not occupied in the first place, and for that matter, it is only nominally part of "Iraq" at all.
So much from our own point of view. As regards the "Taif II" script and its science-fictional Lebanonisation of the former "Iraq," it would seem to be an objection that the Free Kurds would have nobody external to dabble for them, but Turkey and Iran and perhaps even Syria to dabble against them. In the worst case, one might even have a contest between the local clients of M. Bin Sa‘úd and those of the Rev. Khamene’í to decide which party shall snatch Kirkuk and the oil away from them. To revert to Aristotle, Prof. Cole considers materialiter that the Free Kurds should not have Kirkuk, but formaliter he does not give them an altogether level playing field when it comes to trying to grab it. Or so it appears to me. He may consider his hypothetical brokerage honest enough either way, as far as I am concerned, but nevertheless they are not the same way. (If I was a Free Kurd myself, I should not trust Juan Cole an inch, though., and it is almost the same when I imagine myself a Twelver under the Crawford occupation.) A really dedicated Lebanonizer might reply with some cogency that the Druze don't have anybody external to dabble for them and yet seem to be doing no worse than the rest. But then, there is nothing as valuable as Kirkuk for the Beirut pols and their patrons abroad to squabble over.
What the presence or absence of Republican Party military forces in the remainder of "Iraq" has to do with the Free Kurds is not very obvious, as indeed Prof. Cole says. The status quo ought to suit him well enough. Nowadays the defensive is so much more effective militarily than the aggressive that the peshmerga ought to suffice to let them keep what they have, and if they can't annex more, well, what foreign hearts would that break? If Dr. Hawkswoop maintains that the Occupying Power can't possibly go away because of Kurdistan, he must be feeling rather unaccountably desperate. There are lots of arguments for the irresponsibility of any serious withdrawal of forces available without the occupation fan being reduced to that. "Proxy war" is not a very good one, me judice, but it is much more plausible than anything to do with the Free Kurds.
The GOP extremists could even withdraw their forces to Free Kurdistan, although their military hired hands do not much like the idea for logistical reasons, finding Kuwait, with its port facilities, much more suitable for their purposes. However, if they can be persuaded to adopt the latest Ann Arbour script -- which they cannot, but let's fantasize! -- a small garrison might be maintained there more for reasons of diplomacy than of strategy. Kurdistan as a Crawford Party protectorate would in many ways be an admirable model, except that unfortunately it could not be imitated colony-wide. The Iranians could do much the same for neo-Iraqi Twelvers, but they would probably be lured into overstepping the bounds of moderation. What wrecks this agreeable daydream is that there is nobody available to do anything of the sort for the Arab Sunnis. A five-way Turkey-Syria-Jordan-Sa‘udiyya-Kuwait condominium would be ridiculous. Any subset of it would be not much better, and supersets of it on behalf of the Sunni International as a whole are even sillier. If such a chimaera could actually exist, it would of course overreach quite as badly on behalf of its neo-Iraqi clients as the "Safavids" would on behalf of theirs. Only the Republicans would reliably make sure that their clients behaved themselves, and that only for the rather dubious reason that they don't actually give a hoot about the Free Kurds.
Oh, well . . . .
But let us not be lured into scenariomongering ourselves, Mr. Bones. At least not at any lofty Colean "What I'd do if I was Weltherrscher" level. We humble may decently go as far as deciding who we'd vote for, had we the misfortune to be neo-Iraqi subjects, for after all, it would not be impossible for us to emigrate to neo-Iraq if we suddenly went bonkers. Beyond that, we had better stick to guessing what is going on now and what might happen tomorrow, and perhaps on occasion trying to play some of the real statespersons' cards for them as a diversion for ourselves rather than anything that we expect them to take notice of.
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