• Neither a failure nor a success  - Shlomo Avineri
The elections signify neither a clear victory for democracy--and the US vision--nor a descent into anarchy.

• Americans beginning to awake  - Ray Hanania
Most Americans realize that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda and that the Iraq war has instead created new opportunities for the group.

• Failure too tragic to contemplate  - Toby Harnden
Iraqis deserve better than to have their country treated continually as an intellectual or ideological playground for Left or Right.

• The abject bankruptcy of a colonial occupation  - Imad Khadduri
The Iraqi people can best take care of their tragedy by themselves, once the American occupation is ended and the Iraqis are left to tend to their own affairs.

• America's failure may lie in its own success  - Trita Parsi
Democracy in Iraq may enable Tehran to outmaneuver Washington without firing a single shot.

Neither a failure nor a success
 Shlomo Avineri

The January 30, 2005 elections in Iraq have shown how complex and multi-dimensional are the consequences of the toppling of Saddam's regime. To judge by the current post-election situation, it will take some time until the dust settles and the outcome of the US invasion can be adequately assessed.

On the one hand, the doomsayers were wrong: the elections were not the debacle predicted by many. Average voting participation was high, voting was more or less orderly, and violence on election day did not exceed that of any other day in recent months. Despite the proliferation of lists, the outcome brought about a coherent national assembly, not an endless proliferation of small parties. The Sunni-led insurgency did not succeed in scuttling the election process.

Yet by the same token, the virtually universal boycott by Sunni voters deprived the elected assembly of the claim to adequately represent the Iraqi people. In other words, the lopsided ethnic/religious participation in the elections was by itself a reflection of both the achievements and failures of American policy in Iraq. And the setting up of a coherent and stable government is still not assured.

Yet an historical turning point has been achieved: within the context of Iraqi history, the elections signified the end of the Sunni hegemony that characterized Iraqi politics since the 1920s. Shi'ites and Kurds followed their communal leaders and flocked to the polls not because of an abstract commitment to democracy, but because voting empowered them and their communities, and legitimized their claim not to be powerless anymore. In other words, the high turnout among Shi'ites and Kurds was basically not a reflection of democratic values, but a claim to power.

This, of course, was also the reason for the Arab Sunni boycott: just as the insurgency suggests that the more radical Sunnis are not ready to give up their historical hegemony, so the massive Sunni boycott proves that by and large this community has not yet accommodated itself to its loss of power and is not willing to endow this power shift with the democratic legitimization it will ultimately need.

Hence the jury is still out: the Shi'ite majority has been empowered, yet absent significant Sunni participation in the forthcoming rather complex process of putting together a government and drawing up a permanent constitution, it is not yet clear that the transformation process has been successful. Will the Shi'ite majority succeed in setting up a form of government that will give legitimate expression to its majority status while not marginalizing the Sunnis or totally alienating them from the new political structure? And can it do so while avoiding an Iranian-type theocracy?

Some of the statements of Shi'ite leaders are encouraging, but there are two stumbling blocks ahead: the total lack, in Iraqi and Arab politics, of a tradition of coalition-building as a way of achieving wider consensus and legitimacy; and the continuation of the Sunni insurrection, which will necessitate an extensive use of force based, to a large extent, on American firepower and manpower.

The other issue is, of course, the Kurdish question. The Kurds certainly feel empowered and vindicated, and they may initially be the powerbrokers, helping establish a Shi'ite-led government. But will the Shi'ites be capable of guaranteeing the Kurds the kind of wider autonomy without which it is inconceivable that they remain within the confines of a more or less coherent Iraqi polity?

None of these questions will in all probability be solved soon, and none elicits easy answers. Given the relative success of the elections, it is unlikely that the US will be under pressure to evacuate Iraq in the immediate future. Because the political process in Iraq will be drawn-out and inconclusive, the notion that a democratic Iraq poses--as such--a danger to the legitimacy of other Arab regimes, while attractive to some western observers, is unlikely to play out in the region itself. Yet the horror scenario of a massive American failure--with Iraq totally imploding, drawing Turkey and perhaps even Iran into a cauldron of an interminable free-for-all--is equally unlikely to happen.

The mixed results of the elections may signify that what lies ahead is more of the same: a continuous insurrection, probably winding down a bit but not totally exhausting itself, with a US-supported, Shi'ite-based Iraqi government enjoying legitimacy due to the elections, yet still lacking the kind of national consensus of which it was deprived by the Sunni boycott.

Ultimately the elections signify neither a clear victory for democracy--and the US vision--nor a descent into anarchy. Yet the end of Sunni hegemony in Iraq is a fact. The emergence of the first Shi'ite-dominated government in an Arab country will have far-reaching consequences for the self-image and cohesion of Arab nationalism; but this is still far down the road.- Published 17/3/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science at the Hebrew University and former director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, is the author, among others, of "The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx".

It was easy for Americans to pat themselves on the back and "claim" victory after soldiers tugging ropes from behind the scenes pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad watched by a small group of Iraqis and documented by embedded pro-American media.

Saddam Hussein's forces and government collapsed within days of the March 19 assault by an army consisting almost entirely of American forces and a small handful of other nations.

American soldiers then killed Hussein's two sons and grandson in an assault hailed by Americans but criticized by others as murder. Saddam himself was found hiding in a small trench-pit and captured, being held for what foes describe as a Nuremberg-like trial.

American soldiers easily occupied all of the major Iraqi cities and installed a new government. Elections were held. President George Bush, forced to run for re-election on his Iraq policy, easily won and has started talking about possible new wars against the other "axis of evil" nations he defined in his state of the union Address only a few weeks after Sept. 11 and with the belated inclusion now of Syria.

Yet, three years on from the invasion itself, why aren't Americans smiling? And why do many Palestinians see a potential silver lining in political skies that have remained gray and overcast since before Sept. 11?

Most Americans have come to realize that Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, the group led by Osama Bin Laden that perpetrated the Sept. 11 terrorism. Today, though, they know that the consequences of Iraq have created new opportunities for al-Qaeda to recruit and target Americans.

In fact, since the war began, more than 1,500 American soldiers have died and as many as 10,000 American soldiers whose conditions are not reported on have returned home seriously disabled. According to iraqbodycount.net, more than 16,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed making Abu Ghreib look like the tip of an iceberg of American brutality, hypocrisy and torture.

But that is only the human toll and touches most Americans only peripherally. The war has cast a pall over the entire nation economically and socially.

The United States national debt, which seemed under control and about to be erased, has returned in huge numbers that some believe easily exceeds seven trillion dollar. Oil prices remained stable until after the election; now, driven by uncertainty in the Middle East, the prices are beginning to climb significantly, faster than increases in Europe. Even the American dollar is faltering against the euro.

Although there is an effort to convince Americans that their democracy is spreading in the Middle East--thanks to the Iraq war, new policies toward Iran and Syria, and pressures on Arab governments traditionally friendly to the United States--the process is slow, uneasy and unsure.

Criticism of the war that once cost people their jobs, careers and public support has now resurfaced after two years of incubation. For example, the popular TV program "Politically Incorrect" was cancelled in the spring of 2002 after host Bill Maher told Americans, "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building--say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

Today, Maher has returned to late night television and his criticism of Iraq and President Bush leads his nightly rants. More and more, Americans are starting to question the truth of the Iraq war and America's Middle East policies.

The circle of events has led many Arab Americans to see hope. Although Arab Americans were among those protesting against the war in Iraq, and foremost among those being arrested in so-called anti-terrorism sweeps across the country, they are recognizing that the new American realities might push many to reassess their accepted beliefs.

Hamas may be a terrorist organization according to the United States government, but it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Stepping up Middle East peace may mean finally focusing on the Palestine-Israel question. In democratic elections, Palestinians have solidly chosen a successor to Yasser Arafat and that has prompted Americans to support reinvesting funds and moderating their sometimes unquestioned and unjustified support of Israel as the occupier and aggressor.

It is very possible, as things don't go as planned for Bush in Iraq and as oil prices continue to rise, that he will continue to invest more and more of his "election victory capital" on pushing Israel to withdraw from settlements, ease the Palestinian occupation and reinvigorate the peace negotiations.

Not that anyone really expects peace talks with a still reticent Israel to lead anywhere. But for a while, it might create a welcome respite for Palestinians who probably have suffered more as a result of the post-Sept. 11 American policies than anyone else.- Published 17/3/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Ray Hanania is a nationally syndicated Palestinian American columnist based in Chicago. A veteran journalist, Hanania served as national president of the Palestinian American Congress and was a coordinator of the National Arab American Journalists Association. He is a humorist and author of several books including "The Moral Jihad."

THE most depressing thing about Iraq debates is that so few people are willing to move beyond the question of whether one was "for" or "against" the US-led invasion. The desire to justify one's 2003 stance, moreover, means that the debate is not only backward-looking but distorted, with told-you-so facts being traded by each side.

On the "anti" side, the prospect of American failure is so mouth-watering that people who should know better seem almost to be willing things to go wrong. The prevailing journalistic narrative of post-invasion Iraq--the term "war" to describe that period is now nonsensical because the real war began after Saddam Hussein fell--is a descent into chaos and inevitable civil war fostered by US arrogance and incompetence.

The weakness of this analysis is that it is as simplistic and flawed as the purported American policy it seeks to describe. Even more seriously, the desire for the US to be humiliated in Iraq is little short of obscene because any failure in the country will affect ordinary Iraqis--who are already dying in horrific numbers--much more directly than Americans or the Bush administration.

Iraqis deserve better than to have their country treated continually as an intellectual or ideological playground for Left or Right. Apart from those with a desire to establish another Baathist style state based on repression and Arab nationalism or, even worse, a radical fundamentalist Islamic state, then no sane person can wish for failure in Iraq.

A victory for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the other jihadists responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Iraq, whose victims overwhelmingly are innocent Iraqis, would threaten every Arab state as well as the West. An Iranian-style theocracy, too, would set back immeasurably the cause of Arab democracy and human rights--terms that we cannot allow to be appropriated by "neo-conservatives" or anyone else.

Further major American setbacks in Iraq make it less likely that the Israeli-Palestinian issue will be addressed seriously and could prompt a move toward US isolationism that would serve the interests of no one in the Middle East.

Civil war and the break-up of the country would leave countless Iraqis dead and also lead to greater regional instability. Of course, the invasion of Iraq has already caused much instability--some of it potentially good, disturbing what Paul Wolfowitz once described to me as the "stability of the graveyard", and much of it not. But there is little chance of Kurdistan or the Shiite south, let alone the Sunni triangle, becoming viable states.

The good news is that there appears to be some grounds for cautious optimism in Iraq and the Bush administration, for all its manifest failings over Iraq, at least seems prepared to stay the course. It is notable that September 11 appeared to banish from the American psyche the "body bag syndrome" that grew out of Vietnam and helped lead to such flawed policies as those pursued by Bill Clinton in the Balkans and Somalia. Despite the 1,500 plus American lives lost, there is no sign of a premature American exit.

While the American presence, of course, helps fuel parts of Iraq's insurgency, to pull out in mid-stream now would be disastrous. There will be a time, and hopefully it will be in a year or two rather than a decade, when American forces can be scaled down. But this cannot be done before Iraqi forces are ready to take the weight.

The January 31 elections in Iraq were clearly a positive development. The sheen has been taken off slightly by the politicking since and the delay in forming a government--but this is as much a portent of the developing of a healthy political culture as anything else. There are many, many challenges ahead but the effects of that vote within Iraq, not to mention more widely, should help put many of the errors of the past behind us. Shiite discipline in the face of murderous provocation has been impressive and militates against the civil war scenario.

What has been less noticed has been the recent military successes of the Americans, increasingly assisted by Iraqi forces. November's Fallujah operation was necessary (albeit made so by vacillating and ineffective tactics in April) and has seriously degraded Zarqawi's network. The rebuilding of Najaf has been a success story and Moqtada al-Sadr's Shiite fighters seem more likely to engage in politics than take up arms again.

There will be continued difficulties in Iraq and a degree of violence there for the foreseeable future. A neat success and "mission accomplished" reprise is unrealistic. The Bush administration was slow to let Iraqis begin to run their own affairs. They are doing that now and the consequences of failure would be so tragic for all of us that they can hardly be contemplated.- Published 17/3/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Toby Harnden is chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph of London.

Even before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I had publicly stated my unequivocal conviction that "rivers of blood" will flow in Iraq, to the consternation of several American radio stations that curtailed the interview claiming I was threatening the sensitivities of the American listeners.

Back in August of 2002 Vice President Dick Cheney cited the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami (who is not Iraqi) predicting that after "liberation" the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans. When an American soldier was shown on television raising the American flag, just a few days after the invasion, on a building in Um Qasr port south of Basra, I turned to my friends and predicted that that gesture by itself will cost hundreds of dead American soldiers.

Unlike Ajami and Cheney, and for that matter their "Iraqi" chorus of Chalabi, Allawi, and their ilk, I am more attuned with the dignity, and the indignities, of my people.

The US has not won this war.

A report by the US Army official historian (Maj. Isaiah Wilson, published in WorldTribune.com on March 7, 2005) claims that the US military lost its dominance in Iraq shortly after its invasion in 2003.

"In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, US forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative gained over an off-balanced enemy," the report said. "The United States, its army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."

The failure to stabilize Iraq in 2003 was primarily due to the "failure of army planners to understand or accept the prospect that Iraqis would resist the US forces after the fall of the Saddam regime".

Pointedly, the Iraqi resistance (and here I exclude the five percent Salafis and the "terrorist" acts of foreign intelligence agencies, near and far) has also aimed at the Achilles heel of the neoconservative construct for occupying Iraq. More than 215 successful attacks on the Iraqi oil pipeline infrastructure have occurred over a period of one year and a half, and will continue unabated until the departure of the occupiers. And despite the illicit grab of the large income from the oil sector by Bremer's irregular monetary policies, Iraqi oil is not covering the US occupation costs, as wished by its planners, but is, instead, augmenting the tailspin dive of the US economy.

In a typically "managerial" attitude of waging a war, stripped from any moral considerations, the defeat in Iraq is forcing top Pentagon planners to rethink several key assumptions about the use of military power and has called into question the vision set out nearly four years ago that the armed forces can win wars and keep the peace with small numbers of fast-moving, lightly armed troops. The Pentagon, instead, became bogged down in an old-fashioned, costly and drawn-out war of occupation. As one senior Pentagon official was quoted as saying by the LA Times on March 11, 2005, "there are smarter, more efficient ways to do regime change and occupation.... One of those ways is to rely much more on our friends and allies to do the back-end work." This is the ultimate abject bankruptcy of a colonial occupation.

The above relates to the "totality" of the US defeat in attempting to occupy Iraq. What will unfurl on the ground is more probably several devastating attacks on large concentrations of occupiers' locations that will hasten their decision to withdraw from Iraq. The attack on the Jizani US military camp near Mosul on December 21, 2004 and the attack on the foreign mercenaries' al-Sadeer hotel on March 9, 2005 are but miniscule examples of that.

When it was becoming clear, by July-August 2003, that the resistance was spreading, several radio stations again called to ask for an opinion on what course of action is best for the Americans. My response, even then, was for the withdrawal of the occupation forces, adding that when wounded, the saliva applied by licking and cleaning the wound is the best medicine. In other words, the Iraqi people can best take care of their tragedy by themselves, once the American occupation is ended and the Iraqis are left to tend to their own affairs. The recent determination and dignity of the election turnout (and not its legitimacy), whether participating in or boycotting it, is a vindication of that. My faith in the Iraqi people and their core capability to surmount our present predicament, according to our own traditions, culture and history, is deep and wide. The Iraqi people will prevail.- Published 17/3/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Dr. Imad Khadduri worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission for nearly 30 years, from 1968 until 1998. He was able to escape from Iraq in late 1998 with his family. He recently published his autobiography: Iraq's Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions

Analysts have long argued that the interests of Iran and America largely coincide and that their poor relations have political rather than strategic roots. Many expected the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to bring these common interests to the forefront and end the US-Iran estrangement. Instead, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan deepened American penetration of Iran's security sphere and crystallized a rivalry between the two for preeminence in the Persian Gulf, with roots dating to the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi.

The Shah aptly recognized that Iran's rise as a regional power necessitated greater control over its expanding security sphere. The presence of British troops in the Persian Gulf hindered the Iranian monarch's ambitions. When the British withdrew in 1971, the Shah intensified his efforts to convince Washington that the security of the region should be left to regional powers who shared an interest in upholding stability. This approach, the Shah argued, would leave the regional powers more content with US global leadership while creating a more sustainable foundation for regional security.

With the US preoccupied in Vietnam, Washington had no choice but to accept the Shah's offer. Once the Persian Gulf was under his domination, the Shah's primary objective was to sustain Pax Iranica by preventing the great powers from finding a pretext to reenter the waters.

The reinvention of Iran as an Islamic state did not change Iranian interests in the Persian Gulf. Tehran viewed the first Persian Gulf War as a means for the US to reestablish itself in the region. Throughout the 1990s, Iran repeatedly called for America's withdrawal, repeating the argument put forward by the Shah, that the security of the region should be guaranteed by regional powers and not by foreign troops.

Through the 2003 Iraq invasion, Washington invited itself further into the heart of the region with the aim of setting up permanent military bases in Iraq. In Germany, Japan, and South Korea, US bases served to balance a threat or a potential challenge to America's hegemony, from the Soviet Union, China and North Korea respectively. In the Middle East, the bases will serve to balance the local challenger to American dominion--Iran--and to "ensure [America's] domination of key strategic resources" in the Persian Gulf, in the words of Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute. The Iraq invasion would, wrote the Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, "project sufficient power to enforce Pax Americana." Tehran's ambitions to revive Pax Iranica had to be deferred to the future.

The invasion was seen as necessary since instability in the Arab sheikhdoms had made the continuation of American military bases there uncertain and insufficient; the 27,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf were dwarfed by those in Germany (100,000), South Korea (37,000) and Japan (47,000). Due to political tensions with Riyadh, bases in Saudi Arabia were abandoned in 2003. Furthermore, military bases in Kuwait and Qatar could not substitute for the kind of strategic depth and flexibility offered by bases identified by the Pentagon in Iraq. These included the Baghdad international airport; the Talil Air Base near Nasariyah; a base in the desert near Syria; and Bashur air field in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Washington and Tehran's inability to come to terms with each other made the US feel that its only option was to assume domination over the "key strategic resources" of the Persian Gulf itself, an imperative that became increasingly important as America sought to temper the unipolar world's inevitable transition toward multipolarity. Since the American challenge of the 21st century is to prevent China from assuming the role of a global power, Washington's domination over the strategic resources of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea is critical in pacing China's growth and restricting Beijing's power to regional dimensions.

However, this is where America's failure may lie in its own success. There is little evidence that a democratic Iraq would agree with the Pentagon's plans. Roughly 80 percent of Iraqis oppose a permanent US military presence in their country, according to polls conducted by the Coalition Provisional Authority in June 2004. Moreover, unlike Japan, South Korea and Germany, a democratic Iraq may not feel the need for US military protection since threats to Iraq's security that could justify a permanent American military presence are not prominent. Just as Iraq's neighbors fear Iraq's disintegration more than they fear Iraq itself, few regional states can threaten Iraq to the extent that Baghdad would need to turn to Washington for protection.

As the January 2005 elections already have indicated, a democratic Iraq's interests are unlikely to match Washington's goals in the region, leaving no basis for alliance. Rather, US military bases in Iraq may constitute a point of contention between Iraq and its neighbors, particularly Iran, with dangerous consequences for Baghdad.

As a result, failure in Iraq from the American perspective may not lie only in the continuation of the insurgency or Iraq's disintegration, but also in an unexpectedly successful democracy where public rejection of permanent American military presence is translated into actual policy.

Contrary to the expectations of the neo-conservatives, democracy in Iraq may enable Tehran to outmaneuver Washington without firing a single shot. Though Pax Iranica isn't likely to be resurrected any time soon, and though Pax America is yet to take its last breath, the success of Iraq's democracy may undo America's plan to check mate its Iranian rival.- Published 17/3/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance--The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US and a silver medal recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award.