Britain's Belfast lessons can help U.S. reshape Iraq
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published October 29, 2003
Remember April 9? Millions around the world were glued to the TV as jubilant Baghdad residents toppled a huge statue of Saddam Hussein and 30 years of brutal dictatorship came to an end.
But even as some Iraqis celebrated their country's "liberation," experts warned the situation remained far from stable.
"I think it could get worse before it gets better," Sir Timothy Garden, a former British general, told the St. Petersburg Times.
Six months later, Garden's comment seems remarkably prescient. If anything, a peaceful, democratic Iraq seems even more remote as the level of violence has increased in recent days with a string of deadly and apparently well-coordinated suicide bombings.
As the Bush administration has learned, stabilizing Iraq "is a very messy and complicated business," says Garden, now a professor at King's College in London.
Yet Garden thinks it is too early to say Iraq is becoming a Vietnam-style quagmire, as critics charge. The current U.S. death toll of 355 remains far short of the 58,000 killed in Vietnam. And the rate at which Americans are dying - about two a day - is far less than in Vietnam, World War II or the first Gulf War.
A better comparison to what America faces in Iraq, Garden says, is the British experience in Northern Ireland. For three decades, British troops engaged in low-level warfare with the Irish Republican Army, a Catholic paramilitary organization that used bombings and other violence in an effort to free the area from Protestant British rule.
"Iraq is a bit more like Northern Ireland in that the British military could only try to keep atrocities at a reasonably acceptable level while waiting for a political settlement," Garden says.
"In the same sense, all the militaries can do in Iraq is make life bearable for citizens long enough for them to agree on a plan for the future."
Iraq and Northern Ireland are similar, too, in that those opposed to foreign rule have seemingly boundless supplies of conventional weapons with which to wreak havoc. "We're still hunting around Ireland for weapons the IRA buried years ago," Garden says.
Of course there are sharp differences between Belfast and Baghdad. In Northern Ireland, all parties shared the same religion, language, culture and history. In Iraq, Americans have very little in common with the people they are trying to help.
"Iraq is probably more of a Northern Ireland situation if you talk about the military aspect," says Sandra Mackey, author of The Reckoning: Iraq and the Lesson of Saddam Hussein.
"If you talk about it from the standpoint of the United States injecting itself into a society which it absolutely does not understand and then not being able to formulate a painless exit, on that level it is like Vietnam."
Moreover, the British in Northern Ireland knew who the enemy was: Catholic paramilitaries. Americans in Iraq still aren't certain who's behind the attacks there - Hussein loyalists, foreign Islamic extremists or ordinary Iraqis who simply want the Americans out so they can run their own affairs.
"One of the big problems is that there isn't enough forensic police work going on to determine who's responsible," Garden says. "We all jump to conclusions - that if it's a suicide bombing it must be al-Qaida when in fact it might be somebody who just didn't get away fast enough."
Like many experts, Garden and Mackey thought the Bush administration started the war in Iraq without adequate planning for the aftermath. The administration, they say, underestimated the level of opposition to U.S. troops, the tension among Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, and the costs of repairing Iraq's oil wells and other decrepit infrastructure.
Still, they think it would be a huge mistake for the allies to pull out while the security situation remains so volatile.
"I'm concerned that the opposition to the war will shift to the point that we start planning how to get out of there without completing the job," Mackey says.
"The worst thing we could do at this point is to just totally get out because that would set Iraq up as a power vacuum and a failed state and no one can afford that in that area of the world."
The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority already made one big mistake, experts say, in disbanding the regular Iraqi army and in effect tossing 300,000 armed, angry men out on the streets with no way to support their families. The authority is building a new Iraqi army and police force, but it will need thousands of additional "boots on the ground" to restore peace and order.
Where to get those boots is proving difficult. The administration, eager to involve other Muslim nations, was cheered by Turkey's decision to send several thousand soldiers. But that plan appears dead due to Iraqi mistrust of the Turks, who ruled the region for centuries and are accused of brutally suppressing their own Kurdish minority.
India and Pakistan, both with large Muslim populations, have declined to provide troops so far. And Egypt is unlikely to help, although it is a close American ally and boasts the largest army in the Arab world.
The U.S. military presence in Iraq "is widely seen as a neo-colonial occupation and that is too much for the present (Egyptian) regime, which is already seen as toeing the U.S. line too often," says Steven A. Cook, a Mideast expert.
Through the ages, Baghdad and Cairo have vied for leadership of the Arab world. "Iraq is potentially a regional competitor to the Egyptians," Cook says, "so why should they contribute" to Iraq's resurgence?
For now, it appears America has two options when it comes to improving security in Iraq: It can increase U.S. troop strength or hope Europe realizes a stable Iraq is in its own best interest and worth helping militarily.
In general, experts say, the Bush administration needs to give the international community a bigger say in planning Iraq's future. And, they stress, the White House should renew efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which continues to inflame the Arab world and feed hostility toward American policies in Iraq and elsewhere.
Regardless of how else they feel about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, experts say he was right when he warned that rebuilding Iraq will be a "long, hard slog."
"Turning it into some sort of Western-oriented democracy is going to be quite difficult," says Garden, the former general. "We British tried in the '20s to impose our view of what Iraq should be like and indeed we made the country, so these things that are happening shouldn't be a surprise."
