As expected, George W. Bush cast his veto of the Iraq spending bill, sending everyone back to the drawing board. However, it is very clear no one is on the same page, so the drawing board resembles one of those proverbial school blackboards on which two students are each writing away on entirely different topics.
What is clear is that the Democrats, for the first time, have the high ground. In order for anything to get done the president will finally have to agree to specific benchmarks, even if he will not sign anything with a specific date. For four years, the American people have grown increasingly restless with this war largely because they do not know when it will be over. By that I don’t mean they expect someone to say on the 28th of October we are done, but they do expect that the administration will tell them what the guidelines are that dictate that Iraq is now able to stand on its own feet.
As the longest war in American history continues, no one has any idea what the benchmarks are for our withdrawal. Obviously they cannot be a total cessation of all bombing attacks, since by those standards Israel is not even safe. Nor can it be an end to the sectarian infighting since in this country the Democrats and Republicans cannot even agree on much of anything. Nor can it be when Iraq’s infrastructure is fully restored because this government has not even restored the infrastructure of New Orleans, much less an entire country. Nor can it be when the Iraqi Army and police have control over the entire country since the most stable part of Iraq–that under control of the Kurds–has no intention of giving up its semi-independent status. So how will we know when it’s over?
Curiously in all the millions of words expended over Iraq few have written much about what the governments of the states surrounding Iraq think. If the United States withdraws from Iraq, they will be the ones who are sitting on the edge of the maelstrom. Clearly prudence, if nothing else, would dictate that none of these states have any interest in turning the Iraq War into a regional conflict. Nor would they stand for an Iraq controlled by, say, Iran or Syria.
The Bush administration has evoked an updated “domino theory” to partially justify our presence in Iraq, saying that if we were to pull out our troops Iraq would become a blood bath that would quickly draw in surrounding states. The Saudis would not stand for persecution of the Sunnis; the Iranians would not stand by and allow the Shiites to be persecuted. Other states like Jordan and Syria would also find themselves having to defend their borders against the increasingly unstable Iraq.
If you accept this scenario, then you would expect that the surrounding governments would be glad to have the United States stay in Iraq because it saves them the trouble of having to intervene. Unfortunately that is not the way they see it. In late March at the Arab summit, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told his fellow leaders:
In our beloved Iraq, we see the bloodshed among brothers in the light of an illegal foreign occupation. Whereas the very ugly sectarianism is threatening a country which used to live in prosperity.
That is the kind of feisty talk one might have expected from the Iranians or Syria, but not from Saudi Arabia, our longtime ally in the region, the state whose royal family has been in tight with the Bush family for years. Those ties have been through the Carlyle Group, the shadowy international investment bank that had Dubya’s father as a senior advisor. Back in 2001, The Boston Herald reported:
The Carlyle Group has also served as a paid adviser to the Saudi monarchy on the so-called “Economic Offset Program,” an arrangement that effectively requires U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to give back a portion of their revenues in the form of contracts to Saudi businesses, most of whom are connected to the royal family. A company spokesman said yesterday that arrangement was ended “a few months ago,” but said he did not know whether it was terminated before or after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Lately, however, relations between the United States and the Saudis have become more tenuous. Before the speech, King Abdullah abruptly canceled his appearance at an April White House dinner planned in his honor. He also invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–a persona non grata to the Bush administration–to visit Saudi Arabia.
So we have one former ally in the region who now condemns the Iraq War as an “illegal occupation.” Iran’s views, of course, are well known. Its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that
realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.
And what of other states? Given what the Bush Administration has said about Syria it is hard to believe they harbor any agreement with the United States over anything, including Iraq. In January in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice called Syria “extremist.” On January 10th President Bush lumped Syria and Iran together saying the two:
Are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.
Forget that Syria is Sunni and Iraq Shiite. The Bush people think they are both two sides of the same coin. And what of Jordan? In 2003 Jordan’s King Abdullah II described the war as an “invasion” and said:
Jordan is not and will never be a launchpad for strikes on brethren in Iraq and if our airspace was being used for that purpose we would not have allowed civil aviation to use it and would have closed it like other countries
have.
Since then the Jordanians have had to bear the burden of an increasing number of Iraqi refugees, refugees that not only stress various services but also threaten to destabilize the country.
In addition to the position various Arab governments have taken about Iraq is the Zogby poll that was issued at the end of March. The poll, which was conducted between Feb. 26 and March 10, 2007, surveyed 3,400 Arabs in five countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. The poll reported:
Arabs polled responded negatively regarding the U.S.’s role in Iraq – ranging from 68% in Saudi Arabia to 96% in Jordan.
Dr. James Zogby, who oversaw the poll, stated:
The Bush Administration finds itself in a bind of its own making, created by entering into this conflict without a clear understanding of its consequences. But this same bind has also placed our Arab allies in an equally difficult situation – one with even more troubling options.
If you couple all this with the stated views of Iraqi leaders that they would just as soon the United States pulled out, it leaves you shaking your head about Bush’s veto. If nobody in the region wants us in Iraq, why are we there? But the real point is what will focus the upcoming negotiations over the Iraq spending bill: please somebody in the White House give us some benchmarks so we can know if we are winning or losing or if we even need to be there anymore?
Vietnam had the notorious body count and strategic hamlets and all sorts of obscure McNamarian statistics, but this war seems to have no measures. The same president who constantly mouths accountability to schools and other institutions apparently has not told the American public what statistics this administration employs to gauge his accountability for this war. Perhaps we need the equivalent of No Child Left Behind for Iraq–complete with high stakes testing.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
