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Sinking deeper into the swamp of Iraq

BY MICHAEL MANN

Now that American policy has unraveled and we are up to our necks in the Iraqi swamp, we are in danger of sinking even deeper by failing to understand where we went wrong. Criticism has pointed to particular mistakes — not enough U.S. troops or troops of the wrong type, failure to understand Iraqi society or anticipate looting, etc. But our failure is more profound.

America’s new imperialism is collapsing because we lack the ideological, economic, military and political powers to implement it. Senior Bush administration figures all said the United States had the power to remake Iraq, restructure the whole Middle East and eliminate terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) across the world. But the new imperialists focused on only one part of military power: offensive warfare.

They saw that the “revolution in military affairs” of the 1990s enabled them to defeat almost any enemy on the battlefield. Hi-tech firepower at a distance would achieve swift victory with few American or civilian losses. But empires do not only win battles, they pacify and rule afterward. Previous empires knew that pacification needed at least two-and-one-half times the soldiers required by battlefield victory. At least 250,000 combat soldiers would be needed in Iraq.

More importantly, the United States lacks political allies. Empires always needed local allies for pacification, mobilizing native troops and police. The unilateral blunder of the United States was less to ignore the United Nations and the Europeans than to invade a country without local allies on the ground — except for Kurds in the north. So only the north now looks moderately stable.

Iraq is a fragile, divided nation-state. There is distrust between Shi’a and Sunni, among secularists, conservatives and Islamists, and between tribes and cities. But Iraqis distrust the alien occupiers even more. And the Iraqis’ own experience refutes American claims of bringing peace, stability and democracy to the Middle East. We have probably killed over 15,000 Iraqis in six months. Frightened U.S. troops still brandish lethal weapons and kill and maim daily.

The situation is unlikely to improve much. Some reconstruction is occurring, but our troops are too few and too besieged to prevent more destruction. We are on our own since the world knows it is our mess. They will provide fine words, a billion or two dollars and training facilities safe in their own countries. Despite our economic power, we are not committing enough to reconstruction; $21 billion for Iraq in 2003-04 is less than half what is needed. Congress is grumbling already that Iraqis should pay for their own reconstruction. With what? Shall we take their oil in payment, justifying their worst fears of us? Then the emperor would be without any clothes at all.

This is an incoherent empire. Incoherence also spreads elsewhere. New terrorists flood into Iraq. Iran and North Korea see that Saddam was invaded because he lacked WMDs, so they rush to acquire them while we are bogged down in Iraq. It is hard to think in recent times of a foreign policy that is so counter-productive. I doubt this “American empire” will last past November 2004, though whether it will be killed by Iraqi fighters or American voters is an open question.

Mann is a professor of sociology and author of a new book, “Incoherent Empire.”