University of Denver international studies professor Jonathan Adelman didn’t need this week’s Iraq Study Group report to tell him what went wrong. In a June 2005 interview, Adelman described to me exactly what has occurred in Iraq in the ensuing 18 months.
Iraq, Adelman said in June 2005, could never be a nation in the sense that the Bush administration promised Americans. Religious animosity between Sunnis and Shiites, Muslim culture and the alienation of the Kurds forbade it, Adelman explained. That would be the case, he added, no matter how long we stayed, how much money we spent or how many soldiers we committed to Western-style nation-building.
The best we could get from invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein, Adelman insisted, was the emergence of three contiguous religious or ethnic regions willing to be America’s allies while leaving each other alone. But as long as our policy promoted a united, secular government, failure was inevitable.
Today, Iraqi casualties run roughly 4,000 a month. Another 100,000 refugees flee the country every 30 days. Still, as a bipartisan U.S. commission provides political cover for American withdrawal, Adelman feels less like a prophet than a history student.
A united post-Saddam Hussein Iraq was always going to be an “artificial nation,” said Adelman, who was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s Ph.D. adviser in her days at DU.
Adelman regularly travels to Washington to brief State Department players. He is scheduled to meet with Rice again in January to talk about the Middle East.
One wonders why the student didn’t listen more carefully to the teacher. And yet, said Adelman, selective hearing is not unique to this administration.
“Our core problem,” the professor reiterated Thursday, “is that we’re caught in isolationism.”
This is a simple way of saying Americans think everyone can and wants to live by a Western model because the U.S. is the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Ergo, said Adelman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfo witz “told us when we walked into Baghdad, it would be just like the Allied liberation of Paris in 1944.”
Adelman’s point Thursday was the same as it was in 2005, the same as it has been from the beginning of the Iraq adventure: Baghdad can never be Paris.
Muslim societies are closed in ways that defy Western values, Adelman said. Iraq, he said, has “an army split on ethnic lines. It doesn’t have an army that represents the state.”
The Iraq Study Group report does not bring new information, Adelman insisted. It merely details an inevitable fiasco. Now, no matter what we do, the professor noted, we face a “rerun of Vietnam.”
Majority Shiites have momentum over minority Sunnis in the civil war that American diplomats euphemistically refer to as “sectarian violence.”
At this point, it will be hard to persuade the Shiites to tolerate the Sunnis, said Adelman, because “the Shiites think they’re winning.”
The best realistic scenario – three coexisting ethnic regions – may already be forfeit. But the worst scenario remains a possibility.
“Iraq comes under the dominance of Iran and Islamic fundamentalists,” said Adelman. “There goes control of another 225,000 barrels of oil.”
A puppet Iraqi government manipulated by nuke-totin’ Iranian Shiite extremists willing to massacre Sunnis is as yet a nightmare. Maybe it won’t happen. We bailed out of a civil war in Vietnam, and communism never took over the rest of Southeast Asia as domino theorists predicted.
But as guys like Jonathan Adler have said for years, Baghdad can’t be Paris. So pretending the U.S. made things better trying to impose Western-style democracy is like saying the Iraq Study Group report offers an epiphany.
It’s all spin.
Spin that assures America will learn nothing about the cultural naiveté that made the current bloodbath wholly predictable.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
