I came, I saw, I withdrew from Iraq

I came, I saw, I withdrew from Iraq

by Lexington

IN A big speech today Barack Obama said that American combat operations in Iraq will end as promised at the end of this month, by when he will have brought home more than 90,000 troops since taking office. This is not likely to do the Democrats much good in the mid-term elections, since the war in Afghanistan has meantime grown more bloody and controversial, but it is a landmark worth noting. And it was a good speech, in that Mr Obama tried to make America's veterans feel good about their service there without retreating from his own well-known position that this was always a "dumb" war. He was right, too, to give warning that America could suffer more casualties in the coming year because it is leaving behind a transitional force till the end of 2011.

What has America achieved by its intervention, if anything? Such is the continuing rancour about the decision to invade Iraq in the first place that it is almost impossible to debate this question dispassionately. The Economist was a strong supporter of the invasion (see here, for example), not because we thought Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11 but because we were afraid that he was going to break out of the box that was built to contain him after the Gulf war of 1991, with hugely dangerous consequences for the region. But we were wrong about his WMD programmes. And we were terribly wrong about the human cost of the war. Had we foreseen that the country would collapse into such bloody mayhem after the invasion we would not have supported it.

All that said, where does Iraq stand now? Still a chaotic mess in most ways. The New York Times has an excellent, depressing story on how America and its allies have failed to provide something as simple and (especially in the scorching heat of Mesopotamia) vital as a decent supply of electricity for Baghdad since they took over the country the better part of a decade ago.

In politics, however, the picture is more mixed. Iraq has not yet replaced Saddam with another dictator, as many feared. And for the time being the country's politics is not riven violently along sectarian lines. A largely peaceful election took place last spring with a high turnout but failed to produce a clear majority, and since then drift and stalemate have been the order of the day. The election showed that, contrary to what many experts say from afar, Arabs have no difficulty in understanding what democracy is all about and would like it for themselves. The subsequent stalemate shows why they do not get it: incumbent rulers cling leech-like to power no matter what wishes the people express at the ballot box.

The interesting question about this particular moment is: can America use its remaining military, political and economic heft in Iraq to jolt its politicians into heeding the wishes of Iraq's voters? Should it even try? The prize is potentially huge: a peaceful election that actually succeeded in changing a government peacefully would be a signal achievement not just for Iraq but for the Arab world as a whole. The problem is that as America draws down its forces its ability to influence events diminishes, too. Besides, Iraq is supposedly sovereign now. So by what right can America meddle in its internal politics?

My guess is that Mr Obama's priority is to extricate American forces as smoothly as possible by the end of next year without doing anything that risks rocking the fragile boat. He has Afghanistan to focus on, not to mention his own re-election. And after all the miserable unintended consequences of George Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, discretion may indeed be the better part of valour: time to get out while the going is reasonably good. But how tragic, and tantalising, to have come so close to establishing a moderately accountable form of government in Iraq, only to slip away before the job is done.