When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed last month that “the trajectory we’re on is a good one,” he was speaking for the Iraqis, as American officials are wont to do, and probably from an Iraqi point of view he was right. Compared to the horrors of Saddam Hussein, or the privations brought on by 13 years of sanctions, or the chaos created by the ill-planned American occupation, the situation was bound to improve a little bit, at least for a little while. Every poll released in the past month shows the majority of Iraqis are essentially optimistic about the future. “I think you’ll see a completely different Iraq by the end of next year,” my Iraqi friend, Mr. Feelgood, tells me.
But as a glimmer of light flickers at the end of the tunnel, the danger grows that we’ll all be blindsided by some horrific event, and there’s nothing more demoralizing than a sudden setback just when things seem to be going well. We should have learned that in Vietnam, when the communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive dashed American hopes for a way out of the quagmire in Southeast Asia. The bombing of the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut in October 1983 was a similar shock, just as the situation there seemed to be looking up. The tragic deaths of American troops in Mogadishu’s “Black Hawk Down” incident came as Americans had forgotten Somalia. Guerrillas and terrorists would love to strike a similar blow in Iraq, just at that moment when the public starts to think the worst is over.
But it’s not only our obvious enemies we need to worry about, it’s our friends, our clients and ourselves. Throughout this adventure, Washington has mistaken myopic policies for visionary planning and wishful thinking for grand designs. As a result, we’ve stumbled from one enormously costly mistake to another–and we’re about to do that again on a couple of different fronts.
One looming disaster is the Turkish Army, which Washington has been desperate to draw into the fray since before the shooting started. From the banks of the Potomac, the notion that Ankara might send a whole division, 10,000 troops, looks brilliant. They’re part of NATO, so they understand us. Right? They’re Muslims, so they understand the Iraqis. Right? But the problem is, they’re Turks, and their history in Arab and Kurdish Iraq–as Ottoman occupiers until 1917, and as occasional invaders in the last decade, is not a happy one. In fact, they’re all wrong for this job.
Many members of the Iraqi Governing Council and the Iraqi cabinet have the sense to see this, and so do many members of the Turkish parliament, who stalled for months before finally approving deployment, in principle, last week. But the United States just won’t listen. “I think [the Americans] are making a major mistake, even a fatal mistake,” says my friend Mr. Feelgood, whose general optimism does not make him naive. “This will have not only national but regional implications.”
The Turks are Sunni Muslims, but they’re expected to help fight the Sunni Muslim Arabs who are rebelling against the American occupation. At the same time, as Sunnis, they are not welcome by the Shiites. And as a force deeply hostile to Kurdish national aspirations inside Turkey itself, they’re feared and loathed by the Kurds in Iraq, who are probably America’s best friends there. The only folks that really want them are the small Turkmen minority in Iraq–and members of the Bush administration anxious to prove they’re not alone in this risky venture.
If one neighboring country sends its troops into Iraq, then every neighboring country, overtly or covertly, will feel compelled to increase its presence. “The regional powers cannot be impartial inside Iraq. They have to take sides,” says Mr. Feelgood. “What happens if the Shrine of Imam Ali [the holiest Shiite site] comes down with a huge explosion? That would encourage the Iranians to come in, because they will say the Americans have not been able to protect it.”
Never mind. The spin machine in Washington is putting out word that with Turkey in the coalition of willing occupiers, the Bush administration may just turn its back on the United Nations once again. Washington is likely to withdraw a resolution that might have won, after considerable negotiation, broader international support for a provisional government in Iraq.
Which brings us to another major threat to Iraq’s incipient era of good feelings: the way the Bush administration handles money. “I used to think the problem was ideology,” another friend told me after a stint with one of the few international organizations functioning in Baghdad. “But up close, you know what you see? Fat pockets and empty ideas. I’m afraid this really is about money.”
Suspicions certainly are growing that something’s grossly wasteful, if not downright corrupt, about the way tens of billions of dollars are being channeled through the Iraqi morass. Such accusations now erupt regularly on Capitol Hill, they’re surfacing among the U.S. public, and they’re just conventional wisdom in Europe, which sees less and less reason to help underwrite the American occupation.
Why were U.N. weapons inspectors able to do their job at a cost of $60 million a year–and pretty effectively, as we now know–while the American inspectors say they have to spend $1 billion? Why did U.S. engineers estimate it would cost $15 million to get a cement plant in northern Iraq back into operations, when local Iraqis were able to do the job for just $80,000? Why is it, asks Rep. Henry Waxman (yes, a Democrat from California) that “despite a recommendation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allow public scrutiny of a no-bid sole-source oilfield contract with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Defense Department continues to classify the details of the contract as a national-security secret”? Such questions help explain why some 75 countries and international organizations gathering in Madrid this month for a vital “donors’ conference” are expected to pledge only a small fraction of the $35 billion that had been hoped for in Iraq.
Worse, the Iraqis themselves are starting to feel cheated. They hear President Bush talk about supplemental spending of $87 billion, and they understand what many Americans do not: only about $20 billion of that is actually for reconstruction in Iraq. Then they wonder how much of that fraction they’ll actually see. Like the character in the movie “Jerry Maguire,” they’re saying, in effect, “Show me the money!”
No single leader in the country is more vital to the success or failure of the U.S. occupation than Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, the most respected religious figure among Iraq’s Shiite majority. His edicts are taken as law by many in the community. Sistani tacitly supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and he’s tolerated the U.S. occupation. But he’s plainly wary of the way the Americans are spending money. “The very first issue that Sistani raised with us was the issue of contracts,” says a United Nations intermediary who met with him last summer. “Our answer was that this was American money and the Americans can do with it what they want. And he said, yes, but there is a moral debt if they say, ‘We gave you $20 billion,’ even if it was badly spent. ‘When they start to spend Iraqi money,’ Sistani told us, ‘I am going to cancel any contract they have made and re-examine it.’”
By bringing in Turkish troops, and by leaving Iraqis with the sense they’re being cheated, the Bush administration could end an era of good feelings even before it’s really begun. If America’s enemies also manage to carry off a calamitous attack, just when the U.S. public thought things were getting better, then you could see a completely different Iraq by the end of next year, one that’s even more costly, dangerous and demoralizing for Americans than it is today.
