Leaving Iraq

March 2003, Baghdad, Iraq, Shock and Awe

By Alan Caruba

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)

Among some foreign policy analysts, the popular conclusion regarding the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is that the U.S. won the war…for Iran.

In practical terms, however, predicting anything about the future of the Middle East these days is likely to leave one looking foolish. Who thought Tunisians would toss out their dictator? Or that Egyptians would demand and get Mubarack to resign? Or that Syrians, after two generations of dictatorship, would turn on the Assad family? Revolution is in the air in the Middle East which is to say that change—rapid change—is the order of the day.

President Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops entirely from Iraq is ignorant of history and dismissive of reality. When the Axis was defeated in World War Two, the U.S. retained troops in Europe to ensure a transition to democracy. Same with Japan. And later, the same with South Korea.

President Obama, so reluctant to admit that the U.S. has ever done anything right and ill-inclined to let it happen, has led to the full-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops and, I suggest, set up a situation in which a newly emerging democracy—a distinct rarity in the Middle East—could be deprived of the time to be fully and securely established.

There were real reasons for invading Iraq twice in recent times; first to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and second to remove him as a dangerous, destabilizing force who threatened all the Gulf States.

Forgotten by most, Iraq under Saddam Hussein engaged Iran in war for eight years from 1979 to 1988. Inasmuch as Iran’s Islamic revolution had taken U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and held them for 444 days, the U.S. backed Saddam, though officially it took a neutral position.

U.S. policymakers in the administrations following the Carter years regarded Ayatollah Khomeini as a serious threat to the stability of the region and nothing has changed since them. His successors are nothing but trouble.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki found sanctuary in Iran to avoid being killed by Saddam. He is said to have strong ties to the current regime in Iran which is, after all, a very big neighbor with a long common border to the east of Iraq.

On the occasion of the official end of the war and the withdrawal of U.S. military, Maliki’s close ties to Iran were on display at the White House when he brought Iraqi Transportation Minister Hadi Farhan al-Amiri with him. Farhan had formerly been a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Guards are suspected by U.S. law enforcement of participating in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen billeted there.

Had the invasion of Iraq in 2003 been a limited mission, Saddam might have been toppled and the Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis would have been left to kill each other in the typical Arab fashion of resolving disputes. Also in the mix would have been the Kurds in northern Iraq whom Saddam persecuted and killed throughout his regime.

Eight years later, the tendency of the media has been to focus on U.S. and Iraqi war dead, but there is little mention of the earlier Iraq-Iran conflict with estimates between 500,000 and a million war dead, 1-2 million wounded, and more than 80,000 prisoners. In one 1985 battle alone when Iran launched an offensive to cut the main highway between Baghdad and Basra, it is estimated that the combined total of dead numbered 40,000.

The U.S. still does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, a situation in place since 1979. Iran has declared the U.S. to be its biggest enemy and makes no secret of its intention to destroy Israel. Much of the world is wondering when Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. The failure of the U.S. to support this would be a strategic mistake on the order of the British PM, Neville Chamberlain’s claim to have achieved “peace in our time” after negotiations with Adolf Hitler.

Obama’s “diplomatic” efforts with Iran have been a total failure. The latest embarrassment was his “request” for the return of the drone spycraft that the Iranians brought down, apparently without firing a shot. Obama has worried out loud that U.S. diplomats would be targeted for assassination in Iraq…after bargaining away force protection.

It is no stretch to say that President Obama has been a global diplomatic disaster, routinely offending and insulting other nations out of pure ignorance and indifference. His successors will be mending fences in the Middle East and elsewhere for decades.

In the course of three years in office, Obama has only succeeded in fleeing what he regarded as a “dumb” war. He was elected largely on his opposition to it.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial warned that the failure of the Obama administration to consolidate an alliance with Iraq ignored the Middle East’s upheavals and, in particular, in Iran’s longtime ally, Syria. In the best of outcomes, Iraq could have become an outpost of stability in the Middle East, but Obama’s indifference may contribute to its falling “prey to Tehran’s encroachments.”

In an analysis by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, published in Beirut’s The Daily Star, he anticipates that most of the future violence in Iraq will be between “political factions, even those of the same ethnic and religious group.” The Sunnis are the predominant Islamic sect in most of the Middle East, but the Shiites are the largest sect in both Iraq and Iran.

Al-Maliki heads a loose confederation of many different political parties, but seems to have asserted a very strong level of control over government policies at this point. Ironically, both Saddam and now Al-Maliki must contend with a semi-autonomous Kurdish faction that is pushing for resolution of territorial boundaries, seeking to reverse changes made by Saddam in Arab-Kurdish areas.

Ultimately, everything in the Middle East involves who controls oil revenues.

Iraq’s 2005 constitution promised a hydrocarbon law that would settle issues related to who had the final say of various oil deals. No such law has been legislated to date and the Kurds have pretty much gone their own way. Al-Maliki’s government has declared Kurdish contracts with oil companies illegal, banning companies that have signed them from bidding on oil business in the rest of Iraq.

In the recent history of the Middle East, dating from the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, its nations have been ruled by dictators and monarchs. Such “democracy” as exists is mostly one in which the ruling regime stuffs the ballot boxes and the military determines the winner. Egypt’s recent turmoil is an example. Syria’s ruthless suppression of its people is another. Iran remains a prison state intent on imposing its hegemony over the region.

Can Iraq sustain its fledgling democracy? Nobody knows. If history is any guide the prospect is not good. Only a strong America could have played a role and Obama has chosen to leave.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Circle of Life

By Alan Caruba

Much that occurs in life is happenstance, being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time.

So it is with birth. This was on my mind today because yesterday, October 27th, around 7 P.M., Zachary Caruba, the new son of my nephew and his wife, came into this world. He has by early report ten fingers and ten toes. One presumes he has a healthy pair of lungs with which to demand food and other care.

This harks back to the earliest beginning of humankind when a baby’s cry could be heard from one end of the savanna to another. More recently, a baby in Turkey, trapped by an earthquake there, was heard among the rubble, was rescued and emerged to safety precisely because of this inherent human trait.

This morning I called my older brother, Zachary’s grandfather, to wish him happy birthday on the beginning of his 81st year. Young Zachary can now compete with him for the biggest slice of the cake. Zachary has, as well, an older sister of eight years and an aunt and cousins.

The birth reminds us that, even in bad times; in the midst of war and economic collapse, life goes on. Man, a hairless biped, unable to outrun most animals, but with a talent for tool-making, dominates the planet. He is a greedy creature, often never satisfied or happy even with great wealth or power. Much of his or her thoughts and pursuits will be devoted to copulation. A great number of men and women are beset with mental illness of one sort or another, foolish addictions, and all of the seven deadly sins.

We are a species that kills our own kind for almost any reason, often coming together for the purpose of killing others who either threaten us or who possess what we covet; land, sources of wealth, trinkets.

I had a university professor once tell me that the most dangerous creature on Earth is a teenager and history bears him out. As this is written, mostly teenagers and those in their early twenties are making a great nuisance of themselves, "occupying" some place to demand that others who work for a living “share” their wealth with them.

They demand "fairness" where fairness has never existed either now or in ancient times.

Allegedly they want jobs, but there are fewer jobs available because earlier generations have ransacked the national treasury in a futile effort to ensure that everyone can buy a home even if they cannot afford one or with programs the government tells us will protect us in illness and old age. There is no more money left and borrowing only increases the debt.

If Zachary Caruba is lucky he will learn at an early age that most of what the government and the mass media tell him is a pack of lies. He will learn that life is not fair and never was. If one is lucky to be born into wealth then he can inherit it. If not, he can acquire it by dint of work, investment or both, but there are legions of charlatans ready to fleece him. Some are called politicians. Others are merely thieves of every description.

By sheer happenstance, I came across a tape recording, a cassette made in 1982. It was my parents talking about our family history. Born here in 1901 and 1903, they spoke of how their parents fled Russia or immigrated from Italy to a still-young America in the late 1890s that offered the promise of freedom and opportunity.

The “old world”, locked into calcified class divisions, in nations ruled by monarchies or nascent democratic movements, could offer neither. Russia would forsake its czar for a Communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Italy would descend into fascism. I knew both sets of grandparents and not once did either speak of the homeland they left behind.

That is the difference between the “old world” and the new one that generations of Americans put together and fought to defend; a republic bequeathed to Zachary Caruba, if he can keep it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Looking for Democracy

By Alan Caruba

Every time I use the word “democracy” to describe the process by which Americans elect their representatives, someone leaps to their computer to inform me that America is a “republic” and not a democracy. I am well aware of this, but it does not change the process.

It got me thinking about Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip throughout America in 1831-1832. It resulted in his famed analysis, “Democracy in America.” By coincidence, I just read a new book by Leo Damrosch, “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America,” that chronicles his journey, accompanied by his friend Gustave de Beaumont.

At the time, Tocqueville was twenty-five years old. Born an aristocrat in France, his immediate family had escaped the horrors of its Revolution, though several relatives had been guillotined. France would undergo a number of “Republics” as politics roiled the nation.

At that time America was composed of 24 States and a population of approximately 13 million.

The nine-month journey took the two young men throughout much of what was then America; Boston, New York, Philadelphia being the major cities of the time. Longing to see the “frontier” they journeyed by steamer, the only way to get around via navigable rivers other than by stagecoach or via horseback to areas served by neither. There were no trains and the Civil War was yet to be fought for another thirty years.

Ostensibly on a trip to study the American penal system for the French government, it was in fact a great adventure both men wanted to undertake in order to understand what the comparatively new American experiment in democracy was all about and what it was that distinguished Americans from their European cousins. The U.S. Constitution had been ratified a scant 43 years earlier.

Together they would journey as far south as New Orleans with stops in Memphis, Nashville, Cincinnati, Detroit, briefly in Washington, D.C., and other cities which at that time barely qualified to be so described.

Beyond the Mississippi and up into the Great Lakes area, the nation was still forested and wild. Reading Damrosch’s excellent account of the journey is to be transported back to a distant time, but one that lay the foundations for today’s America.

Damrosch notes that what Tocqueville produced was not an account of “Americans” as a unique national type, “but rather a structural explanation of some profound reasons why democracy, by its very nature, tends to produce certain characteristics in its citizens.”

By 1831, America already had class distinctions; all related either to wealth as opposed to aristocracy. The other distinction was the institution of slavery on which the South depended for its economy. It was bitterness itself to be black.

“In France,” Tocqueville noted, “even the most minor local decisions were made in Paris. In the United States, on the other hand, the federal government legislated for the whole country but left administration and enforcement to the states and localities.” Today, the States have largely forfeited their sovereignty as distinct republics.

Tocqueville noted that “Democracy doesn’t give people the most competent government, but it does what the most competent government is often powerless to do. It spreads throughout the entire social body a restless activity, a superabundant strength, an energy that never exists without it.”

An observer today might come to a very different conclusion as Americans now labor under a huge centralized government that intrudes into every aspect of their lives and into the commerce of the nation, as often as not creating obstacles and penalties to entrepreneurs and corporations alike.

Today’s government requires a virtual army of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to try to steer a ship of state that, under the present administration, is indifferent to the public will. It is one that is as close to despotism as America has ever come.

Prophetically, Tocqueville feared a huge, centralized government no matter where it occurred, warning that “It is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood.”

“It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment. It labors willingly for their happiness, but it wants to be the sole agent and arbiter of their happiness…The sovereign power doesn’t break their will, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action.”

“It doesn’t destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn’t tyrannize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restrains, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with government as their shepherd.”

This, written 180 years ago, is a description of communism and socialism. It is the antithesis of the Tea Party movement and the protest rallies currently being demonized by the news media and by the Democrat Party as it plots to retain control of Congress and over our lives.

Presciently, Tocqueville wrote, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has arrived.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

How Empires Die

By Alan Caruba

I recently read an interesting book by Christopher Kelly, “The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and The Fall of Rome.” Our popular image of Attila is that of a barbaric pagan, but Priscus of Panium set off to meet Attila in 449 AD and, as Kelly relates, “Attila turned out to be surprisingly civilized and a dangerously shrewd player of international politics.”

It’s always a good idea to review one’s assumptions about the world in which one lives, such as the current politically correct view that Islam is “a religion of peace” and that the barbarity of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Arab groups is an anomaly, the result of their incorrect interpretation of the Koran. Their interpretation, however, is quite accurate and the Koran is a call to arms and battle plan for the conquest of the world.

From America’s earliest years, it has had to deal with marauding Arabs and in modern times we have put our troops in harm’s way in the Middle East in Beirut in the 1980s and to drive Saddam Hussein's Iraq out of Kuwait in August 1990.

Following 9/11 we returned in 2001 to drive Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. They took refuge in the frontier provinces of Pakistan and have since returned to the killing fields of our choosing…if killing one’s sworn enemies can be called a choice.

On March 20, 2003, the Second Gulf War was launched against Iraq and we are now beginning to withdraw troops from Iraq’s cities. A large contingent of U.S. military will remain in Iraq. At the same time, there has been a buildup of troops in Afghanistan. Historically, no empire has ever successfully conquered or subdued the Afghani tribes and, in modern times, the most recent effort brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is generally agreed that the real threat to Mideast stability is Iran and that the shakiest nation in the region is Pakistan.

History teaches us that the emperors of the Roman Empire had to make choices about where they too would place their troops throughout the vast expanse under their control; it surrounded the Mediterranean which they called Mare Nostrum, our sea.

At the end of his book, Kelly asks “What makes great empires endure or collapse? How do governments defend their actions? What causes the breakup of a leviathan superstate? When is it right to go to war, or purchase peace, or pay off an enemy? These are issues of enduring importance.”

When an empire gets too large for its military and financial resources to maintain, it becomes highly vulnerable. An empire, too, depends on its alliances. When they go bad, the empire—any empire—is in trouble.

The Roman Empire fell for many reasons, but chief among them was the relentless arithmetic of demography, the movement of populations of people.

The Romans regarded the Goths and Vandals as “barbarians”, but the Goth tribes were people who were just as challenged by the Huns as the Romans and they were on the move to find more land for their growing population. In doing so, they crossed the Danube to trespass on Roman lands in France, in Spain, and down into Northern Africa.

By contrast, “the Huns seemingly offered no moral or religious justification, however thin or unconvincing. They sought neither to find a new homeland on Roman territory nor to glorify themselves as heroic freedom fighters warring down a harsh imperial regime.”

“The Huns appear more brutal precisely because they had no known motive for their raids beyond the acquisition of booty and captives.” This last observation is particularly important because the rise of Islam can be traced directly to the same purpose. It was, however, masked by Mohammed’s promise of paradise for anyone who fell in battle and servitude for those conquered.

Here’s where the similarities between America and the ancient Romans get really interesting. At the same time the nation engages Islamic terrorism, our national sovereignty—the integrity of our borders—is being challenged as not just thousands, but millions have invaded to take up residence among us. This repeats the pattern that brought down the Roman Empire.

Having forsaken universal conscription, the U.S. depends on an all-voluntary military to project our power. The Romans, toward the end, often allied with the Goths to fight the Huns and, on occasion, allied with the Huns as well. With the exception of the British, Canadians and Australians, our military allies are mostly for show.

Not only is our financial stability at risk, but since the 1960s, the level of decadence in our society has risen, reflected in popular culture and media. Our primary and secondary educational system has become an abject failure.

Recently, while in Russia, President Obama said, “The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground.”

This ignores the entire history of civilization. It is criminally naïve. The future, just as in the past, will belong to whoever has the greatest military with the financial power and the willingness to use it.

Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And as John Adams warned, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

"A Date that will live in Infamy"

By Alan Caruba

December 7, 1941, “A date that will live infamy” is a fading memory for those alive at the time and most certainly for those born since that day. For most Americans I suspect it is just a date they may have read about in a high school history book or seen dramatized in documentaries or films.

It was, if you are still trying to recall its significance, the day the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor. It was the date that Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to in his speech to Congress calling for a Declaration of War against, not only Japan, but the Nazi regime and its Axis partner, Italy. It was the date when the term World War took on a whole new meaning beyond the WWI trenches in France.

In Hawaii, when I rode out to visit the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, the thing I noticed was that I was sharing the ferry with dozens of Japanese tourists. It had never occurred to me that it was, of course, part of their history as well. I recall their pausing before the wall with the names of the sailors still entombed below to offer prayers for them. That is what peace is all about.

The cliché is that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. It is a cliché because it is true.

To be a child in America from 1941 to 1945 was to know that America was at war. If you did not know exactly what that meant, you understood it was important. For me, it was the memory of trains filled with young men in uniform as I and my Mother made the trip to visit my grandparents who lived on the drowsy Shrewsbury River in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Years later I would be one of those young men leaving Fort Dix in uniform.

From the end of World War II until 1991 the Cold War continued as the United States and its allies stood firm against the Soviet Union. We extended our protection in the Pacific to Taiwan, waged hot war in Korea and Vietnam, and waited until communist China concluded that capitalism was a good idea, as least in terms of building a viable economy, if not in terms of human rights.

To grow up during World War II was to know that there was absolute evil in the world, the likes of which would be revealed in the Nuremberg trails and similar military trials for the leaders of Japan’s military solution to problems that have since yielded to the pursuit of profit. Today, it is in part Japan’s (and China’s) purchase of our treasury bonds that helps prop up our profligate government.

There is, however, still absolute evil in the world. On 9/11, another sneak attack reminded America of that fact. The evil is called Islamism or Islamofascism and all who support it either openly or covertly, eagerly or passively. It is a fever loose in the world that will kill a lot of people before it is destroyed. Neither communism, fascism, nor have dictators disappeared.

The good news is that, since the end of World War II in the lifetimes of many Americans and others, democracy has been gaining in nations around the world. Winston Churchill, of course, said it best. “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

I suspect that few Americans living today have any idea of the significance of December 7, 1941. It literally changed the world and catapulted America from a Depression wracked nation into its current superpower status.

It also produced one of the all-time worst ideas, the United Nations.

Generations since those times live with the legacies of December 7, 1941. We need to rededicate ourselves to its best ideas; freedom, justice, tolerance, democracy, and human rights that individual nations pledge themselves to honor and uphold.