Gwynne Dyer, Contributor AS THE Bush administration often says, "failure is not an option" in Iraq. It is an accomplished fact. The initial U.S. goals in invading the country are now completely unattainable, and the remaining uncertainties are mostly to do with the timing of the American pull-out and the extent of U.S. humiliation. But is it possible that the Bush administration has understood this, and is planning to declare a victory and leave within the next six months?
A window of opportunity is about to open for an early American withdrawal from Iraq. It would involve a handover to an elected Iraqi government that will refuse to serve any of Washington's aims in the region, but will not insist on publicly humiliating the Bush administration on the way out. Will they have the wit to take the exit?
The window of opportunity is the election of January 30. The winner, barring a last-minute cancellation or massive fraud, will be the United Iraqi Alliance, a candidates' list sponsored by Grand Ayatollah Alial-Sistani that includes all the strongest Shia parties and groups. Since 60 percent of Iraq's people are Shia Arabs and many of the 15-20 percent Sunni Arab minority will not vote, this alliance will almost certainly win a majority in the 275-member national assembly and choose the new government.
The biggest members of the alliance are the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Dawa Party, Shia revolutionary groups that sat out Saddam's rule in exile in Iran. There's also the Iraqi National Congress, a secular Shia party founded by former Pentagon favourite Ahmad Chalabi, who has now broken decisively with Washington, and the powerful Shammar tribal confederacy, which includes both Shias and Sunnis.
You could see this coming right from the start. The first U.S. proconsul in Iraq, General Jay Garner, was fired after a month in the job because he wanted to hold early elections -- elections that Washington rightly feared would be won by Iraqi politicians who would demand a prompt U.S. withdrawal. There was then a direct confrontation between Garner's successor, Paul Bremer, and Sistani last January over the latter's demand for early elections.
FRANTIC PRESSURE
Washington persuaded Sistani to let the United Nations decide if Iraq was 'ready' for elections. But the U.S. then exerted frantic pressure on the U.N. to say that Iraq wasn't ready, and the U.N. representative shamefully complied. Sistani had to settle for the promise of elections this January.
The trick gave the U.S. another ten months to come up with some politicians who could (a) win and (b) ask the U.S. to stay. At the least, it postponed an Iraqi electoral disaster past the U.S. presidential election in November. But ten months have passed, and Washington has not found supporters who could win the election. As the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies said in September: "It is highly likely that the single unifying theme espoused by Iraq's politicians will be to invite the U.S. to leave Iraq once there is an elected Iraqi government in place."
The U.S. cannot now cancel or postpone this election without facing a massive Shia uprising, and although the Bush administration didn't plan his -- it hasn't had any strategic plan since its original hyper-optimistic assumptions collapsed in mid-2003 -- it does create an opportunity. When a Shia-run elected Iraqi government tells the U.S. to leave Iraq in March or April, just congratulate them on their democratic choice and go.
The administration would have to abandon the fourteen "enduring bases" now under construction in Iraq and its dreams of strategic dominance in the Gulf, but those things are already lost in practice. It could claim a kind of theoretical success for its democratic project even if the new Iraq ends up hostile to the U.S. and closely linked to Iran. Above all, it would get out of what threatens to turn into a new Vietnam with its credibility in the world greatly enhanced. It probably won't happen, in which case things will go from bad to worse. But it could.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
