WHAT IT MEANS TO LOSE
By Gwynne Dyer

AZG Armenian Daily
22/11/2006

"Stand back! No, further back, or you’ll be swept away by the shock
and awe! We’re going to show you the full might and majesty of American
military power. We’re going to…INVADE IRAQ!!!"

It’s a bit like one of those backyard scenes where the hapless dad
lights the enormous firecracker and retires — and after a long wait,
it just goes fzzzt.

The full panoply of American power was unleashed upon Iraq, and the
results have been profoundly unimpressive. This doesn’t just mean
that the United States loses in Iraq. It means that its leverage
elsewhere is severely diminished as well. But very few people in
Washington seem to understand that yet.

American voters have spoken, Congress has changed hands, and Secretary
of Defense Don Rumsfeld has been put out to pasture at last, but
there is still no plan for getting the United States out of the Iraq
quagmire. Certainly not from the Democrats, who are all over the map
on the issue.

Senator Hilary Clinton, the leading contender for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 2008, doesn’t want a timetable for
withdrawal from Iraq. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate
last time, wants a firm deadline for withdrawal.. Senator Joe Biden,
the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks
dividing Iraq in three is the answer. And Congressman John Murtha,
who will control the House committee that authorises the cash for
the war, wants an immediate pull-out. So no plan there.

There is no Republican plan yet, either, but it is the job of the Iraq
Study Group, a bipartisan panel co-chaired by James Baker, former
secretary of state during Bush senior’s presidency and long-serving
confidant of the Bush family, to come up with one. Its recommendations
will be acted on, too, because the new secretary of defence will
be Robert Gates, another close friend of the family and currently a
member of the Iraq Study Group. Thanks to various "accidental" leaks,
we even know broadly what the ISG will recommend.

It will urge a gradual reduction of American troops, with the last
combat forces to be out of Iraq in eighteen months or so, well before
the 2008 elections.

And it will tell President Bush to seek cover for this process by
talking to Iraq’s neighbours, Iran and Syria.

This will be very unwelcome advice for Mr Bush, whose spokesman
Tony Snow was only two weeks ago warning those two countries to
leave Lebanon alone: "We are…concerned by mounting evidence that
the Syrian and Iranian governments, Hizbollah and their Lebanese
allies are preparing plans to topple Lebanon’s democratically elected
government…. We’re making it clear…that there ought to be hands
off the [Lebanese] government…." But Bush will like it even less
when he learns the price that Syria and Iran want for helping.

The problem is that the United State is demonstrating every day in Iraq
just how ineffective its military power is. It looked so impressive
before it was unleashed that the Iranian government secretly offered
Washington a general settlement of all the differences between the two
countries, very much on America’s terms, just before the US invasion
of Iraq in March, 2003. The cocky neo-cons rejected that offer out of
hand — and now leading Iranians just smile when warned that the US
might strike them too. They know that the US armed forces now regard
an attack on Iran with such distaste that the Joint Chiefs of Staff
might even resign rather than obey such an order.

So Iran’s price for cooperation would be high: an end to the 27-year
US trade embargo, full diplomatic relations with Washington, an
American commitment not to try to overthrow the Iranian regime —
and acceptance of Iran’s legal right to develop civil nuclear power
under no more than the normal safeguards of the International Atomic
Energy Agency. Would that mean that Iran becomes a "threshold" nuclear
weapons power, able to build actual bombs on very short notice? Yes
it would. Pay up or shut up.

And Syria’s price? An end to the United Nations investigation into the
Damascus regime’s role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri last year, US acceptance of a larger role for
Hezbollah in the Lebanese government, an American commitment not to
try to overthrow the Syrian regime — and really serious US pressure
on Israel to negotiate the return to Syria of the Golan Heights,
occupied by Israel for the past 39 years. Don’t want to pay that
price? Then find your own way out of Iraq.

The Bush administration will probably baulk at paying these prices,
which means that the notion of Syria and Iran assisting in a US
withdrawal from Iraq is just a fantasy. Besides, it is not at all
clear that either Tehran or Damascus could deliver on any promises
they made about Iraq. It’s too far gone in blood and chaos for the
usual tools of influence to deliver predictable, reliable results.

Donald Rumsfeld used to have a framed cartoon on his office wall
showing him driving in an open car filled with child-like journalists
eagerly asking "When do we get to the quagmire, Daddy?" Well, we’re
there now, Rummy. And the US will probably have to find its own
way out.