Ever since the election, our nation’s top leaders have adopted a mantra regarding the situation in Iraq: “a fresh approach”. Unfortunately, no one can determine just what that approach is. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker and his Iraq Study Group recommend easing our combat troops out while keeping some troops in Iraq to train and support the national army, together with urging Syria and Iran to do whatever they can to calm things down between the Sunnis and Shiites. OK, who else out there is old enough to remember the phrase “Vietnamization”? President Bush agrees that a fresh approach is needed, but disagrees with Baker. He doesn’t have any other ideas, though, so for now he’s continuing with the same old approach that has worked so poorly.

In my opinion, the main problem isn’t what the United States is or isn’t doing in Iraq. The heart of the problem is that there isn’t enough interest amidst the current occupants of Iraq in maintaining a unified nation. There doesn’t appear to be an Abraham Lincoln, inspiring the masses to suffer greatly for the cause of reunification; not even for a weak “federalized” version of nationhood. The center cannot hold.

There’s an article in todays NY Times by Roger Cohen entitled Iraq’s Biggest Failing: There Is No Iraq. I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Cohen basically agrees with what I just said. Mr. Cohen, however, ends his insightful article urging the United States to keep on trying to put a unified and viable Iraqi government in place. Otherwise, there could be a blood-bath in Baghdad, and the Sunnis would get stuck with a dirt-poor desert province that would make a wonderful headquarters and training site for Al Qaeda and other international jihad terror groups. Unfortunately, Mr. Cohen didn’t have any “fresh approach” suggestions as to how to accomplish this. I suppose that he agrees with Mr. Bush, i.e. stick it out, take your lumps, and hope to eventually get a lucky break.

Personally, I don’t see any hope of a lucky break in the offing right now. Civil war situations usually end only after a whole lot of destruction and bloodshed causes exhaustion on both sides. Hopefully, the exhaustion is of equal magnitude and both sides set up a compromise that prevents further warfare (although preventing growth and development for many decades). Examples: Yugoslavia and Cyprus. When one side wins decisively (as in the United States), the underlying issues may fester for the next century or so. Sometimes the break-up option is the best of a series of bad choices. It’s looking more and more like that in Iraq.

It seems to me, though, that there is a possibility to break Iraq up in a way that might avoid the worst of the downsides. The USA would have to be the dealmaker, and our hands would be dirty from it; but at this point, how can the USA come out with clean hands?

The deal is this: Let the Shiites have their own nation in the south east, and let them do what they will with Iran. All we could do about that would be to offer continued economic assistance, especially with regard to restoring their oil infrastructure. If they could feed their people and otherwise support themselves economically, they wouldn’t need to suck up to Iran. Although both Iran and Shia Mesopotamia share the same religious sect, there is still a strong line of cleavage, i.e. ethnicity. Arab Shia don’t necessarily want to be puppets of Persian Shia. With some quiet US assistance, perhaps they wouldn’t have to.

As to the Sunnis and the Kurds, here’s the deal. The Kurds would love to declare an independent Kurdistan and gain US recognition and continued support. They also have lots of oil and could get by economically. The USA would benefit from having another friend in the Islamic Middle East; perhaps over time, we could help secularize and modernize their ways. I.e. we could still set up the model Islamic democracy that we hoped Iraq overall would be, only a bit smaller. We’d hopefully get favorable treatment in buying their oil, and they’d probably let us keep some US troops there to support their national army. They’d probably let us keep some special forces active there, quietly carrying out pro-active anti-terrorist operations. Turkey would get nervous about a strong Kurdistan, but we have a door open with the Turks; with some old-fashioned diplomacy and economic assistance, I’m sure we could keep them in line. So overall, the USA would still come out with some real benefits from the whole Iraqi campaign.

But OK, then what about the Sunnis? They get the dirty end of the stick, out in the western provinces without oil. What keeps them from supporting terrorism against the new Kurdistan, and against the West in general (via Al Qaeda)? Well, here’s where the deal gets tough – but not impossible. Suppose we told the Kurds that we’d fully support their immediate independence, if they agreed to take in the Sunnis? I.e., if they agreed to some form of weak federalism with the Sunni province, mainly as a means to share their oil revenues with them? That would be our catch. The Kurds can have nationhood now; the USA would immediately drop its efforts to keep the zombie of federal Iraq alive. But the Kurds would have to share enough of their wealth to keep the Sunnis from going over to the dark side. The USA would obviously get stuck with part of that bill; the Kurds would demand assurances of long-term aid of the same magnitude that we now support Israel with. And the Turks would exact their price too. It would be expensive for us. But fighting a losing war in the Middle East is also expensive.

Let me spell out, one more time, the benefits to the USA of such a deal, however expensive: We get another friendly Islamic nation, one that might be willing to be tutored in the ways of modern Western values. We get another friendly Middle Eastern oil seller. We get to keep some troops in the region, though not in a combat role; this keeps Iran and Syria just a little bit nervous, which is good. We give the Sunnis a line of cash flow, in return for their not sponsoring a jihadist carnival in Anbar. And we quietly keep special force troops active in their backyard, to make sure that they don’t.

OK, but as to Baghdad – that’s still a time bomb that needs to be defused. In the end, I think we want to draw the borders such that Baghdad could be split, half to the Shia nation, half to the Kurd-Sunni federation. Families would need to migrate to the correct sides of the dividing line (which they are already doing). But over the next few years, troops would admittedly be needed there to avoid massive violence. They should be international troops, working under a UN mandate. I say that we go back to the UN and arm-twist the French and Germans and Russians and Arab states to support a Baghdad stabilization mission as part of our end-game. Yes, we’d have to eat some crow and go back to good old fashioned diplomacy, as was practiced before the current Mr. Bush (he could check in with his father about that). But if it were done right, I think that everybody would come out with something. For example, the French and Germans would be allowed to keep their smug “I told you so” attitude.

I’m not imagining that this deal would be perfect. There would still be plenty of violence and set backs. But it seems to me to be the one scenario that gives the USA a real chance of gaining half a loaf. If we stay the current course (despite a few so-called “fresh approaches”) and try to gain the whole loaf of a stabilized, united Iraq, the chances seem very good of losing everything; and not so good for gaining anything.

That’s my two cents. The window for such a deal is probably short. The Bush administration would have to swallow a lot of pride. But it might save the historical remembrance of Mr. Bush’s presidency from the disaster category.

The other night I watched that show on PBS about Dick Cheney and how he jockeyed the American response to 9-11, thru Afghanistan and into Iraq (i.e., The Dark Side). The show was extremely powerful and compelling. The people doing the talking were the people who were there at the CIA and State Department. Bottom line: had we stayed out of Iraq and continued going after al Qaeda following our initial successes in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein might still be in power in Iraq right now, but he’d probably be no closer to having the bomb. His nuclear program was in shambles after the 1992 Iraqi War and never got going again due to the UN economic sanctions (despite their being criticized for their ineffectiveness). On the other side of the coin, al Qaeda would arguably have been mostly deflated by this time. We would have impressed any and all would-be terrorists of the future that messing with the big Eagle is a fatal enterprise.

But instead, thanks to Mr. Cheney, we are bogged down in a civil war in Iraq; Iran is hell-bent on getting the bomb because of all those American flags on its border (and unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran has the economy and infrastructure to support a nuclear program); and al Qaeda and its figurehead (Osama Bin Laden) are injured but still very much alive and intent on further mayhem. But to be fair: yes, Saddam Hussein is finally facing justice; and we did get a Bin Laden wanna-be (al Zarqari) recently, a guy who was making big trouble for the moderate government in Jordan (in addition to all the harm he was doing in Iraq). Nevertheless, there’s a compelling argument that America would be safer right now had Mr. Bush listened to the CIA and not to Cheney and his friends.

What if that’s the way the historical picture really develops? What if, in 20 years or so, historians look back on the 2001-2006 period and conclude, based on the way that things turn out, that the Bush Administration made a bad choice in focusing its anti-terrorism energy on Iraq after stomping (but not completely eradicating) the Taliban in Afghanistan? How do we judge Mr. Cheney? Was there an argument for his view that Iraq was the biggest long-term threat to the west in the post-911 world? Or was he on a power trip that distorted his mind? Was it reasonable to believe that Saddam Hussein still had the bomb within his reach, and would have given it to al Qaeda or whomever had succeeded them as the number 1 snake-in-the-grass? Or did Chaney figure that George W Bush, on top of being a rube, had an exploitable psychological vulnerability about Iraq given that his father didn’t finish the job in 1992? Was Cheney’s mind ultimately creating its own rationalizations to allow him to become (de facto) the most powerful man in the USA, arguably the world?

Frontline did point out that Cheney had reason to be suspicious of the CIA’s doubts about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity and its connections to al Qaeda. In 1992, the CIA failed to identify a fairly significant Iraqi nuclear development facility, and thus our forces ironically left it alone during Desert Storm. So, when the CIA again claimed not to see anything indicating that a Saddam bomb was imminent, Cheney was perhaps entitled to his reservations. (And I suppose that he never trusted the UN weapons inspectors, even after they finally took a closer look in 2003; I can’t imagine Dick Cheney ever having a nice thing to say about Hans Blix.) The Clinton Administration pretty clearly did become too easy about Iraq by 1998 or so. So yea, perhaps in his heart of hearts, Cheney did believe he was like Churchill in 1939, swimming valiantly against the tide of pacifist denial, with the fate of civilization dependent upon on his contrarian nature.

But back to that “fate of civilization” thing. Yes, Churchill used it to good advantage against Hitler and against the Neville Chamberland crowd, i.e. those Englishmen who wishfully thought that the Nazis could be accommodated. Churchill was certainly vindicated by placing the fate of the world on his shoulders. But still, you have to be careful; that can do funny things to your mind, especially if you are in the position to do something about it. Recall that Churchill, unlike Cheney, was not in a politically advantageous position in 1939. It would be another year or so until Hitler had clearly proved himself unstoppable (invading Poland and then France and Russia), and Churchill’s eventual ascent was clearly a public affirmation of his hawkish stance.

Cheney’s suspicions about Iraq were not put to public referendum and were not affirmed by definitive events (although Condi did have a good point about the undesirability of finding about Iraq’s capacity through a mushroom cloud). And Cheney’s words weren’t all that different in nature from the self-sustaining rationales that Lyndon Johnson built up around the Vietnam situation, the anti-Communist rationales that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans to almost no advantage in the late 60s and early 70s. In the passions of 9-11, our nation totally forgot that lesson.

So, how do we stop reasonable doubt on the part of our leaders from becoming a self-defining, power-grabbing monomania? I hope that those historians of the year 2026 have a good answer to that.

Kevin Phillips has a new book out called “American Theocracy”. If you’re a fan of current affairs and foreign policy, this is old news to you. American Theocracy is quite a hit amidst the wonk crowd. I haven’t read it yet, but I did see a couple of good book reviews. So I know that Phillips has three major themes in his book. One theme is that the true reason behind President G.W. Bush’s Iraqi campaign is OIL, and our continuing dependence upon it.

Well, that would help to explain Mr. Bush’s recent statements that our troops are gonna be in Iraq for a long, long, long time. (We shall see how well the American public likes that idea this fall, in the mid-term Congressional elections.) It seems quite clear to me that Iraq is now having a civil war, and there’s not much our troops can do to stop it. About all we can do is to continue training the Iraqi military and police forces, and pray that they will act as referees and not as combatants. After that, it’s up to the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis of greater Mesopotamia whether they want to share a nation or not. In my opinion, our troops should be out of there by year’s end, other than a few training brigades. OR, we should leave it at the United Nations’ doorstep; let’s see if they want to organize a truly multi-national peacekeeping mission in Iraq. (I know that France and Germany and Russia may well cop out on this; but until we ask, we can’t complain about their hypocracy).

But if oil is the thing, as Mr. Phillips argues, then you can see why our President wants to keep our guys billeted in Iraq indefinitely. As one oil analyst said, think of it as a US military base over a huge oil reserve. World oil prices continue to creep upward past $60 per barrel, despite the energy optimists’ predictions that expanded exploration and production inspired by high prices would soon have us drowning in “Texas tea” (anyone remember the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies?).

So I agree with Mr. Phillips that Mr. Bush was never serious about weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda ties as a rationale for going to war in Iraq. It was quite convenient, but not really all that relevant, that Saddam Hussein was a bona-fide bad guy; but you can find plenty of similar bad guys in places like Sudan and the Congo. Mr. Bush has no intention of sending our troops over there (except perhaps Nigeria, where there is a lot of oil). Our bottom line in Iraq was and still is OIL, the oil that we crave like junkies crave heroin. We’re running out of affordable fixes, and Iraq is the last big score. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman has urged Mr. Bush to make energy independence the theme of his second presidential term; but GWB appears to have no intention of putting the American energy junkie into rehab. Junkies can be so difficult to deal with. Just get them another fix, it’s so much easier (in the short run).

Just to crow a bit, I said pretty much what Mr. Phillips is now saying about three years ago. Here’s the PROOF.