John Rapley, Contributor
IT IS probably safe to say that when the invasion of Iraq began just over a year ago, nobody in the United States of America administration would have expected things to be going the way they are today. Among the many vices or virtues, depending on where you stand of the Bush administration is a persistent optimism, a conviction that things will go well for the U.S. because, well, because they always do. At the time of the invasion, White House officials spoke of being welcomed with open arms by a liberated people, of returning most American troops home in a matter of months, of Iraq's vast oil wealth covering the cost of her reconstruction.
What a difference a year makes. Many Iraqis, who welcomed the Americans and cheered the fall of Saddam, have now taken up arms against their liberators. U.S. commanders in Iraq have called for an increase in troops to help deal with the uprising, putting paid to their soldiers' hopes of early trips home. And while oil output has finally returned to pre-war levels, it remains well shy of the rosy projections on which White House financial estimates were based.
Put simply, this war is costing the U.S. more than it had budgeted. It is costing more lives, it is costing more money and it is stretching the country's military resources at a time when the U.S. would rather have something of a cushion back home.
Images of an all-powerful behemoth aside, the U.S. is now militarily near its limits. When one adds the Iraqi campaign to troop deployments elsewhere in the war on terror, and then places that on top of already-existing military commitments (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, South Korea), the U.S. army is now operating pretty close to its capacity. This is forcing commanders to extend tours of duty and summon their remaining reserve forces.
Given that the U.S. has no major enemies threatening its land, it does not have to worry about being caught off guard by a foreign invasion. Nonetheless, her freedom of manoeuvre has been greatly constrained by the unanticipated costs of the Iraq war. All the talk of who's next will it be Iran? Syria? North Korea? Who in the axis of evil will the U.S. go after now? is just that, talk. The U.S. will remain so bogged down in Iraq for the foreseeable future that the hawks in the administration, who gave the impression they had a list of dictators they wanted to topple, will just have to dream of happier times.
SUPPORT FLAGGING
The sight of body bags and wheelchairs returning home certainly grinds on American morale, and support for the war has been flagging. Some suggest that an unpopular war will ultimately do in George W. Bush in the November election. This, however, is less than obvious. Polls repeatedly show that the American stomach for military casualties is quite a bit higher than either politicians or military commanders suppose. Despite the obvious comparisons to Vietnam and it took years before American sentiment turned decidedly against Vietnam Iraq is a long way from reaching the scale in American life which that war cost.
However, the economic cost of this war is another matter. Contrary to popular depictions, wars are not always good for an economy. Surges in military demand can kick-start moribund economies, as World War II did to the U.S. However, over the long term, military expenditure has a smaller multiplier effect than other forms of government spending. Moreover, wartime spending replaces innovation with replacement, which can eventually slow the rate of technical innovation in an economy like the U.S. It is worth remembering that while the Vietnam War did produce a boom in the 1960s, by the 1970s the U.S. economy was in the doldrums.
Such is likely to occur again if this war persists indefinitely. Given a confluence of unfavour-able factors a persistent trade imbalance, a looming deficit in Social Security and Medicare, a chronically low saving rate the US economy is ill-positioned to absorb a long-term fiscal deficit. Were the deficit to continue for several years on the back of a costly war, the cost of borrowing in the country would surge and the dollar would likely decline in value. This would almost certainly tip the economy back into a recession, and it would quite likely be a tenacious one.
OPTIMISTIC
The Bush administration is optimistic that the fiscal deficit will prove to be short-lived. However, given that it is this sort of optimism that got the U.S. here in the first place, it may be prudent to discard it and work with some more pessimistic let's call them realistic scenarios.
Therefore, what needs to be determined is whether this war will, in fact, go on for years rather than months. To answer that question, we need to figure out how things came to this pass, in order to judge how easy it will be for the Americans to avoid sinking into a quagmire.
JUSTIFICATION FOR THE WAR
Why the US went to war in Iraq is still a mystery to me, as all the conventional explanations terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, oil -- strike me as implausible. Few of us believed the Americans when they said Saddam Hussein was sponsoring terrorists and accumulating weapons of mass destruction, and our suspicions have been vindicated. But neither am I persuaded this war was about oil (unlike the previous Gulf War): Saddam no longer had the ability to threaten his neighbours' exports. If he wanted to drive up the world price of oil, his only remaining option was to cut Iraq's output. Only Iraq would suffer from this, as Saudi Arabia would almost have certainly picked up the slack.
Some discern in U.S. actions a plan to go after enemies who were trying to shift the world away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. Others suggest that the Bush administration was largely doing the bidding of its Israeli ally, by making the Middle East safer for her. Whatever the explanation, what does seem clear is this: the Bush administration launched this war supremely confident of its own abilities to resolve it quickly, cheaply and relatively painlessly.
It was wrong on all counts, and one can argue that the war turned against it precisely because of the White House's careless optimism. During the build-up to the war last year, military commanders were pressing the Government for a greater troop deployment than the White House allowed.
They were over-ruled by the civilian leaders at the Pentagon Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz who dismissed them for being old-fashioned. A new, leaner and flexible fighting-force, the generals were told, would do the trick.
In the weeks leading up to President Bush's triumphal declaration of victory aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, when U.S. forces quickly overran their enemies, such arrogance seemed justified. However, the U.S. military's lightning-quick advance on Baghdad obscured some problems on the ground. By charging quickly rather than capturing and holding land, which would have been the old-fashioned way of doing things, the army left masses of enemy soldiers behind its front lines, where they blended into the background.
Compounding this was the early decision to disband the Iraqi army and start a new one from scratch. This decision, which squared neatly with the Bush administration's confident assessment of its nation-building abilities, sent hundreds of thousands of disgruntled, armed men onto the unemployment rolls. Guess where they ended up?
It also appears that the White House ignored warning signs which were abundant at the time of the invasion that a Shi'ite welcome could prove short-lived. Because they had suffered particular repression under the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Shi'ite majority was particularly receptive to the U.S. invasion. But from the early days, their leaders were saying that while they welcomed an American liberation, their hospitality would not extend to an American occupation. Now that some of the Shi'ite leadership has turned on the Americans, the latter are finding it ever harder to secure friends.
REBELLIONS
As things stand, therefore, the Americans face rebellions on two fronts: Saddamite loyalists among the Sunni population who are putting up a fierce resistance, and now a Shi'ite rebellion among the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr. In the short term, it would appear that a combination of diplomacy and low-intensity warfare could tame the Shi'ite rebellion, at least for a while. The Sunni rebellion looks more tenacious. More ominously, there are signs of emerging co-ordination between the two rebellions, which bodes ill for the future of the U.S. occupation.
What is clear is that anger is abundant, and resistance is growing. Maybe things will just work out for the U.S. But the prudent thing for the White House would probably be to dispense with the optimism and face the hard fact that its plan for Iraq has gone awry. Only a bit of hard-headed realism is likely to get the U.S. out of this mess.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
