Rural Ruminations

[Originally published in the Valley News.]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently ordered the removal of U.S.-erected barriers around Sadr City. Those barriers were erected for the stated purpose of helping us find a missing U.S. soldier believed to have been held by his captors in Sadr City. Sadr City is a Shiite slum in Baghdad and the home base of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has often been at odds with U.S. goals and policies and who commands a potent militia known as the Mahdi Army.

This event is a clear example of the factionalism that has always plagued Iraq and has been made worse by our invasion. It is one of the most intransigent problems facing us in Iraq, one that could easily have been foreseen, and one that should have alerted architects of current Iraq policy about the folly of invasion.

Al-Sadr is one of the prime minister’s main political backers, having put his considerable weight behind al-Maliki during the selection process prior to the December 2005 elections. Both are Shiites and, in the absence of contrary evidence, it must be assumed that they have similar political goals, or at least that al-Maliki regards the backing of al-Sadr’s militia as critical to his continued political viability
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The Mahdi Army was formalized by al-Sadr in June 2003 and has grown into a force approaching 10,000 fighters. Its current activities include political intimidation, coercive influence on local government, infiltration of the police and army, and factional vigilante activities designed to terrorize Sunnis and their supporters.

Iraq is irrevocably divided among its factions. That is the elephant in the room — one well known to students of Iraq, yet one that administration policy makers seem somehow to have missed or ignored. Having never really been a country, but rather an agglomeration of factions whose “statehood” was convenient for the British as a counterbalance to the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, Iraq is no more viable today than it was then. It has never existed without repressive central governance.

Iraq has not changed much in the last 100 years, leaving the same mix of hostile factions that have always been there. Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Baathists, sectarians and nonsectarians ebb and flow in shifting coalitions formed around whatever issue is at hand. In the absence of controlling central authority, violence has been promoted by religious extremists who believe Islam should rule, by old Baathists who seek a return to power, and by Iraqi nationalists who are fighting against what they view as a foreign occupation. The only thing that unites them at any given moment is the presence of American troops.

We now want to exit Iraq gracefully. The Bush plan is to “stand up” the police and army to the point where we can “stand down.” Because Iraq is so divided, we appear to believe that we must “unite” the security organs. The Army and police will be made up of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis roughly in proportion to the total population: 60 percent Shiite, 20 percent Kurd and 15 percent Sunni.

In our own democratic way, we are insisting that all Iraqi factions be included in the new organs of national security. Do we believe that these new police and soldiers are going to drop their sectarian and ethnic loyalties when they join up? Fat chance! With our insistence on parity, we are ensuring that Iraqi strife will be built into the new security system, virtually guaranteeing that it will be impotent. What Shiite soldier will sign onto an operation to disarm the Mahdi Army? What Sunni soldier will agree to suppress insurgents in Fallujah? What Kurdish policeman will do anything to harm those who share his ethnicity in the northern part of the country? And yet the alternative — creating all-Shiite, all-Kurdish and all-Sunni units — won’t work because those segregated forces would be seen as the enemy when dispatched to a region where they weren’t among their own people.

And that’s the dilemma. When we invaded Iraq, the neoconservatives and their allies within the Bush administration who promoted the invasion either did not understand those realities or summarily dismissed them. In either case, since there was a healthy body of academic and governmental expertise that did have a better grasp of the situation, the administration’s promoters of the invasion are truly guilty of getting us into a mess that was predictable and could easily have been avoided.

The United States has permitted a small group of highly motivated, inexperienced ideologues with scant input from world realities to undertake a critical foreign policy gambit based almost entirely on ideology and wishful thinking. We are paying a steep price for this blunder, and it will dog us for decades to come.

Haviland Smith retired as a CIA station chief in 1980. He served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.

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[Originally published in the Valley News.]

If you are anything other than a jihadist or a supporter of violent Muslim fundamentalism, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has to have come as a welcome surprise. Zarqawi was a violent, virulent man who wanted only to create chaos in the name of his version of Islam. First and foremost, he was a murderer, not only of the unbelievers, but also of his own Muslim people. That is how he will be judged.

Some have tried to turn his death into an important turning point in the “global war on terrorism”. That is absurd. This argument is one of a long list of persistent if unsuccessful attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq as part of that effort.

Al-Zarqawi came to Iraq well after the American invasion. His purpose had nothing to do with Iraq or the Iraqi people; it was based on his desire to create as much trouble as he possibly could for the Americans. His goal was to disrupt American plans to install democracy in Iraq. For a hater of America and everything it represents, Iraq presented an irresistible, target-rich environment.

Al-Zarqawi was not even a part of al-Qaida when he arrived in Iraq. He was simply a talented ex-convict who had found religion and dedicated his life to fighting the evils he perceived in Western culture. In fact, he was not even acknowledged by Osama bin Laden until well after he started his violent insurrectionist activities there.

With the exception of a terrorist operation he ran against his homeland, Jordan, and which he later acknowledged to have been a tactical mistake, Al-Zarqawi was primarily an internal Iraqi phenomenon. As such, Al-Zarqawi’s death will disrupt the insurrection there. However, given our knowledge of al-Qaida’s modus operandi, it will almost certainly trigger an automatic and planned succession. He will be replaced.

It is possible that Al-Zarqawi’s fixation on fomenting civil war between Shiite and Sunni may give way to Iraqi insurgents sharpening their focus on American troops and Iraqi military and security forces — all the elements that might bring stability to Iraq. It is also possible that fewer foreign fighters will be attracted to Iraq and therefore there will be fewer of the suicide bombings they carried out. However, none of that is clear.

What is clear is that Al-Zarqawi’s death will have little if any effect on radical Muslim terrorism against the West and on our “war” against it. Al-Zarqawi was never a player in bin Laden’s organization. He became an “adoptee” after he showed he was prepared to cause problems for the Americans in Iraq, but he was never really a part of the organization. In fact, it is likely that bin Laden and his principal deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are pleased to have a martyr rather than a competitor on their hands.

In some respects, he characterizes the changes that have taken place in al-Qaida since 9/11. Instead of a carefully trained, documented and centrally controlled group of Saudis scheming to annihilate a number of America’s physical icons on 9/11, we have seen the franchising of the terrorism effort. Madrid, London, and now Toronto make it clear that the current incarnation of the terrorist threat is going to be characterized by wannabe Muslim copycats who believe they hate Western civilization. They see the 24 virgins in heaven as a far superior alternative to their lives as minorities in Western countries that never really seem to want to assimilate them.

These will be locally grown and nurtured terrorist groups that probably will have no substantive command contact with the al-Qaida leaders in their Middle East caves, but that wish to please the gods they all believe they are serving. As disturbing as the concept of disenfranchised, dangerous and disillusioned groups in our midst may seem to us, the intelligence-collection problem they present to Western counterterrorism should be far less difficult. Such groups, born, nurtured and matured in the West will be far easier to penetrate and neutralize than those based in and professionally directed from caves on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Al-Zarqawi’s death will probably not have an important, lasting effect on the problems we face in Iraq. It is not he, but the situation in Iraq that brings fighters to the insurrection. Unfortunately, his death represents only a small victory in our war on terrorism and has little potential to make that struggle easier. The changes in the nature of our terrorist enemy that have come as a result of its organizational evolution may prove to make our problems easier to deal with, but that will not be a result of Al-Zarqawi’s demise.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Europe and the Middle East, and was chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.

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[Originally published in the Valley News.]

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, have suggested a new approach to the growing and deteriorating situation in Iraq. In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, they propose that America drop its current policy of working to install democracy in Iraq and adopt one that encourages the formation of a loose federation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish states or republics with a capital in Baghdad.

There is little point in going over all the reasons why Bush administration policy is failing to achieve any of its goals in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. That has been done ad nauseum. We are where we are. Whether we should be there or not is really relevant only to historians.

Iraq is a creation of colonialism. There is nothing about it that stems from a natural political, tribal or religious experience or evolution. It is there because it suited someone else to create it, and it is highly unlikely that it will hold together except by dint of colonial or dictatorial force. It was not designed to function under any other circumstances.

The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that every component part of the internal Iraqi struggle for power has supporters and opponents outside the country who are likely to intervene to protect their own interests.

Does this appear like an impossible situation? Absent some as-yet-unidentified power prepared to impose peace on Iraq, it is. The religious and ethnic realities that existed before our invasion of Iraq have not been and cannot be changed by the power of prayer (or even rational discourse).

The Biden-Gelb proposal suggests that a group of surrounding nations and interested parties – Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia – get together and accept responsibility for guiding the successful march of the warring Iraqi components toward peace. This group, in turn, would be “encouraged” by Western governments in its trek toward peace.

A force of regional “interested parties” cannot succeed because in its inclusiveness it brings with it all the issues that create and maintain instability inside Iraq, and all of that on a grander and far more dangerous scale.

The last thing the Turks want is an autonomous Kurdish entity on their southeast border. They assume, probably correctly, that this would destabilize their own country, presenting the millions of Turkish Kurds with an alternative to their current second-class status in Turkey.

The Iranian government would likely view southern Iraq, the oil-rich section of the country where their co-religionists predominate, as a desirable acquisition in a chaotic post-American-withdrawal world. In addition, Iran has not forgotten the war waged against it by Saddam’s Iraq.

The Sunnis and their outside protectors would be tempted to play the role of spoilers, as the Iraqi Sunnis will have lost not only their long-time disproportionate political power in Iraq, but also their claim to most of Iraq’s oil.

In simple terms, the Biden-Gelb plan comes up against the same set of hard, immutable realities that made our poorly thought out invasion of Iraq so prone to failure. It has a less than equal chance for success.

So, where does all this leave us? Only a dictator or a 21st-century imperial power can solve this issue. As was the case in Vietnam, this war can be won, but not on a timetable that is likely to be politically acceptable here at home.

Considering that most of the rest of the world regards the situation in Iraq to be the result of our own arrogance and destructive policies, there is little chance that we ever will be able to find or create an entity to take on our role in moving Iraq in the direction so naively championed by the Bush administration. With our half-hearted troop commitments, we have lost our chance to find a constructive solution on our own. What is far more likely is a slow slide into civil war (if we are not already there), which could easily lead to a broader religious, ethnic and political armed conflict in the region.

When the U.S. electorate shows insufficient support for this first application of the Bush administration’s policy of pre-emptive unilateralism, it will be time to seriously consider a “cut and run” strategy. This is what we ultimately did in Vietnam. At that point, the American people can look upon this episode as a lesson given by the Republicans and George Bush on the exercise of American power in foreign affairs!

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Europe and the Middle East and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston, Vt.

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[Originally published in the Valley News.]

Three years after his invasion of Iraq, President Bush is well into his campaign to reestablish public support for his war in Iraq.  In his speeches and in his most recent press conference, he has been forceful and consistent in his stated conviction that everything is going well in Iraq and that we will win there.

For a number of reasons, there really isn’t much else he can do.  His nature does not make it easy for him to say that his plan for and execution of the Iraq war was anything more than ever so slightly flawed.  In the face of a string of obvious errors made after his declaration of victory, the president says that the required, minor course corrections have been made and we are now on track for victory.

Having solved all those problems, the Bush administration is left with the practical problem of getting out of Iraq. Whether or not the ongoing sectarian strife in Iraq constitutes “civil war”, the fact is that the basis for such conflict lies in age-old Iraqi animosities that have not changed for centuries and are highly unlikely to change simply because we want them to. Those Americans who want us out of Iraq today say that the presence of U.S. troops exacerbates the situation and that the situation will calm down once they are withdrawn. Others, Bush most emphatically included, believe that the simple presence of U.S. troops makes the outbreak of civil war less likely and that if we leave, Iraq will devolve into chaos. Who has the right crystal ball?

The final element in this situation is the likelihood that if Iraq slips into full civil war, that struggle will not be contained within Iraq.  Every fractious component in Iraq, Shia, Sunni, Kurd, secular and theocratic, has supporters outside the country.  If real civil war breaks out, it will be difficult if not impossible to keep those supporters out of the fray.  Thus, unchecked, civil war in Iraq could easily spread throughout the Middle East.

President Bush has essentially put all his eggs in one basket.  He says that success and our withdrawal from Iraq boil down to the creation of an efficient, trained and motivated Iraqi internal security apparatus – police and army – capable of controlling the country.  To do that, we have started training those cadres.  Because we understand the internal frictions that are an integral part of Iraq, we are making sure that all Iraq’s political, ethnic and religious elements are represented in these cadres.  That means that the police and army, by our own design, are made up of the same elements that are at the root of the broader national civil frictions.  What choice do we have?

The media have sporadically reported that individual groups in Iraq have purposefully set about to infiltrate the nascent army and police.  Often mentioned in this context is The Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, which has never played a peaceful role in Iraq.  One can be quite sure that all the other competing elements in Iraq are making sure they get their share of those jobs.  How else can they adequately represent their own narrow interests!

Add to this the fact that Al-Qaida in Iraq will do everything it can to create havoc and encourage civil war by constant attacks on all the various religious, ethnic and political elements in the country designed to set one against the other and the situation becomes even more complicated and problematical.

This situation points to the one flaw in President Bush’s final plan to extricate US troops from Iraq:  The security forces that he views as the key to Iraqi stability and to our withdrawal, are as factional and potentially fractious as the country at large.  It’s far from clear who commands the loyalty of those forces, the central government, which squabbles and shows little propensity to govern, or those actively hostile ethnic, religious and political elements that make up the country?  Just what will they do if a full-blown civil war really does break out?  History would say they probably will go back to their political, ethnic and religious roots, rather than the national government

The costs to America of this Iraq invasion and its aftermath have been monumental.  We have paid and continue to pay at an extraordinary rate in human casualties, national resources, internal political strife and international prestige and we are doing so based on what can only be called a gigantic gamble.

There has to be a reason for a rational country to undertake a venture like Iraq.  In the national interest, the plusses have to outweigh the minuses.  Yet, three years later, all the original causi belli have evaporated and we are left with this gigantic gamble. – for what?  We are certainly not improving our stance with radical Muslim terrorism.  Whatever happens in Iraq, will it outweigh what has been sacrificed?

The situation does not look promising.  Lacking sufficient original cause and relying on yet another questionable thesis – the oxymoron of a functioning Iraqi security force – the Bush administration faces extremely long odds. Only the most desperate gambler would put himself in such a position.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in Lebanon and Iran and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff.  He lives In Williston, Vermont.

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[Originally published in the Valley News.]

As the Iraqi insurgency has grown and U.S. casualties have risen, we have heard the president and his representatives say over and over again that we will stay in Iraq until the situation is stabilized and “democracy” is assured. In that light, Iraqi realities will dictate when this will happen, but we will hang in until the bitter end however long it takes. We will not be intimidated by “terrorists.”

How times change! We are now watching a White House that apparently has decided to withdraw American troops and the timetable has nothing to do with the objective conditions in Iraq. It has to do only with the election schedule in the United States.

In what appears to be a steady deterioration in the situation in Iraq, the Bush administration has done almost nothing to calm the concerns of the American

electorate on a wide variety of Iraq-related issues. To have done that would have been an implicit admission that it had made mistakes, something it is not inclined to do.  The civilian Pentagon leadership has been almost completely non-forthcoming on the issue of the training of Iraqi troops. We have no real idea how many have been “trained” or even what “trained” means. In short, we have nothing but the often-contradictory statements of the uniformed military and the administration on where this critical process stands.

The same is true of the size of the insurrection arrayed against us. How is it resupplied, who supports it and how do replacements arrive on the scene?  We are often told by the civilian leadership that we are getting the insurgency under control while military field commanders give a much different picture of where it stands, pointing to the increasing adaptability, creativity, cunning and effectiveness of their enemies.  No one in the administration is telling us why there have been such difficulties in the writing of the Iraqi constitution. There is a lot of good analysis in the media, but nothing from the administration. Is Iraq really on the brink of civil war? Are the Kurds ready to accept anything other than relative autonomy within the framework of a loose federation?  Will they prevail in their reported demands for hegemony over the oil wells in Kurdish Iraq? Are the Shia slowly radicalizing and turning against the British and the Americans? If so, why is that and how does that affect the chances of an American-friendly constitution? Or, is it true that the new Iraqi constitution will be based on the Koran and the Shariya? If that’s true, how does the administration see that as coming even remotely close to its original goals for Iraq? To what extent are the Syrians complicit in the Bathi-based insurrection and in the support of foreign fighters (the only real terrorists in Iraq)? Do we have enough troops on the ground adjacent to the Syrian border in Anbar Province to be able to pacify and eliminate this threat? Apparently we do not, but we never hear a word from the administration on this issue.

In short, according to the administration and despite the fact that this work is “hard,” everything is moving along in the right direction.  Interestingly enough, the only issue on which the administration has gone on record over and over again, has been on the absolute imperative that the Iraqis “stay on schedule” in the many areas where Iraqi efforts are Involved.

Coming up we have the imminent deadline for the completion of the constitution, an October referendum and a December election.  Whose schedule is this, anyway? It certainly isn’t the Iraqis’, since they could easily use a decade or more to sort through the intractable religious and ethnic problems that are part of the process of trying to bring their “country” together in political agreement.

Clearly, the schedule is ours and just as clearly, it is arranged, like all other important decisions in America, on the basis of the perceived internal political needs of the party in power. What we are watching here is the administration preparing the country for pulling out of Iraq. This pullout will not be on the basis of what is needed in Iraq, but on the basis of what is needed politically in America. The schedule is clearly geared to the midterm elections in November 2006.  What has happened to the administration’s resolve to stick it out until “democracy is assured”?

Equally clearly, the administration has read a growing American consensus that we must disengage from an Iraq war that more and more Americans (now 57 percent) believe has done nothing to protect us from terrorism. The administration will have to be able to show the electorate that we are well on the way to getting out whether we are really winning or not. It will pull us out so it will not be made additionally vulnerable in the elections by a continuation of the current status quo in Iraq. How cynical is that and how can that conceivably be seen as in the interest of “Iraqi democracy”? This administration has junked past claims of weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi support of terrorism; why not toss helping the Iraqis and “building democracy” onto the trash heap as well?

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[Originally published in The Valley News.]

The first wish for Iraq has to be that the January election actually take place and that it be conducted in such a way as to make it clearly legitimate in the eyes of the world.  The second wish is that the election results lead to the formation of a government that avoids creating internal Iraqi instability and that is acceptable to all the Iraqis.

These wishes constitute our present exit strategy for Iraq.  This Administration, lacking any rational exit strategy at the onset of their invasion, has now gambled everything on the wildly optimistic premise that we can hold elections, see a “democratic” regime elected, get out and have democratic stability reign.  We plan to do this in a “country” that was not put together in the interest of its inhabitants in the first place and which today bears more resemblance to Yugoslavia than anyplace else.  It is not now and never was a country in our sense of the world.

The problem with these wishes is that there are so many daunting contradictions in them.  First, can we bring enough order to enough of Iraq to hold legitimate elections?  We are not going to get much help from the Iraqis we are training for the security job. They have proven themselves to be wildly unpredictable both in and out of battle.  We will have to go it alone.  Further, the actual elections will be a security nightmare. Consider the election opponents who have displayed beyond question their grisly willingness to blow up their own countrymen.  What will they do as the Iraqis queue up to vote?  That will certainly create a target-rich environment for insurgents of all stripes.

Even if we have an acceptable voting process, what possibility is there that Iraq, in its first-ever free election, will select a democratic government?   The Shia, who constitute the popular majority of about 60% in Iraq, hold the key to power.  They are numerically and probably politically capable of winning the election and then installing whatever kind of government they choose.  Is there anything going on the Middle East right now what would create optimism that after decades of ruthless and bloody domination by the Sunnis, the Shia will forgive and forget and treat the Sunnis according to the Golden Rule?  Unlikely, at best.

The Kurds are an even more complicated matter.  They have never wanted to be a minority in an Arab state.  They have always wanted to join in a Kurdish nation with their Kurdish brethren in Syria, Iran and Turkey.  For the dozen years since the first Gulf War, the Iraqi Kurds have functioned under UN and US protection as an independent state.  Prior to that, they were murdered, exiled and humiliated by Saddam and his Sunni cohorts.  They remain skeptical about the Arab Shia, as well.  They have not given up on their own Kurdistan.

Viewed on the basis of their diverse histories, there seems to be no combination of Iraqis (Shia, Sunni, Kurd), which would be likely to bring representative democracy to Iraq.   Quite the opposite, virtually every conceivable combination is likely to bring some sort of conflict.  This is not a new judgment.  It has always been true.

The Sunnis, used to wielding power, will not give it up willingly to a group of Shia, who are three times as large and whom they have historically mistreated and suppressed.  Hence their current insurgency.  Nor will they abdicate to the Kurds whom they murdered and humiliated for decades.  Any real internal peace will require some accommodations to the Sunnis.

There is nothing in a new Iraq to attract the minority Kurds, however democratic it might seem.  They want their city of Mosul, from which they were ejected and which was then occupied by Sunnis sent by Saddam, as well as their own country and the oil that goes with it.

The Shia, for their part, given their numerical superiority simply have to sit back and wait.  They are the only group in Iraq which wholeheartedly supports January elections and their numbers tell you why.  They will win.  The big question is what will happen when the Shia win.  A cursory look at the real estate argues strongly that such a result would seriously jeopardize stability in Iraq.  The Sunnis would feel threatened and defensive.  They would not want a new constitution which would codify Shia power.  The Kurds would be no more likely to want it.

We really are facing a Hobson’s choice here, simply because no one in the Administration listened to the experts who said from the start this invasion was a bad idea.  Having gotten to this point, there seem to be no good choices available to us primarily because democracy in Iraq appears to be the oxymoron of the moment.  All we can hope is that Iraq avoids internal conflict and disintegrates relatively peacefully into its component parts, perhaps in a federation. Even that seems unlikely if not impossible.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in Beirut and Tehran and as Chief of Counterterrorism.

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[Originally published in The Valley News.]

The Bush Administration, having effectively dropped its claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, now says that its primary goal is to see Iraq through to free elections leading to democracy. It insists that all is well in Iraq, and that we are marching not only toward democracy there, but toward democracy in the rest of the Arab world as well. Democratizing Iraq is certainly a worthy goal, but the real question is whether it is a reasonable one.

The key short-term issue here is bringing enough stability and security to Iraq to permit an election process that will be viewed as fair by all the participants in Iraq and interested parties around the globe. Having completely missed the opportunity to bring stability to Iraq from the start by not committing sufficient numbers of troops, the Administration now has only two options. It can send the additional 300,000 to 400,000 troops that should have been committed at the onset and hope it’s not too late. Or, as appears to be the case, it can try to eliminate the insurgency with the troops already in Iraq.

The Iraq insurgency is composed of unconventional fighters fighting an asymmetrical war. While we use tanks, planes and artillery, they use rifles, machine guns, mortars and car/suicide bombers. These are all highly portable weapons that, unlike ours, do not require fixed bases of operation and elaborate support mechanisms. The advantage that these insurgents have over our conventional forces is that they hit and run. They don’t have to engage us in prolonged conventional battles. Why then, since their war is going so well for them, would they want to open themselves to massive defeat in Fallujah by fighting our kind of war? The Vietcong didn’t fight our kind of war and defeated us. Every insurgency in the world looks at Vietnam as the premier lesson in how to fight conventional troops.

It would seem much more likely that as our troops storm Fallujah, the insurgents will simply fade away and regroup elsewhere in that vast country to fight us their way again. If they do it right, they will survive as a fighting force. We will demolish a city and, in so doing, push other Iraqis into the insurgent ranks.

In his first post-election news conference, President Bush said that he does not accept the premise that democracy can’t be brought to undemocratic states. All well and good, but has he considered a state that has a built-in belief system that is not familiar to most Americans or to him? The President says that he honors belief systems. Does that mean that he honors those Muslims whose Koran tells them exactly how to run their lives, including a description of what kind of system of governance they must have? And how will the president react if Muslims create a government that is not democratic in conventional American terms?

Doesn’t that mean that in order for many Muslims to accept our notion of democracy, they have to drop their belief in the Koran? If they do not accept our goals, does that mean that we will have to invade them as we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and thus force them to accept our democracy? Is this how we are going to bring democracy to the world?

Let’s stipulate that we will create enough stability in Iraq to have an election. If majority rules, we will then see a government dominated by Shiites, who compose 60 percent of the population.

It will almost certainly be a theocratic government, since its leaders are all devout believers in the Koran. That raises the possibility of creating a government similar to the one established by the Taliban, which supported and facilitated al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

What would the Bush Administration do about that? Is it going to say that it is unacceptable, or renege on its statement that it needed a democratic government in Iraq? That is now the only remaining rationale for our invasion.

There are far too many things that can go wrong with Iraq. In the run-up to the war, this Administration ignored real intelligence, preferring to act on carefully selected information that supported the policy it had already decided on. It was wrong in its belief that we would be welcomed there. It clearly resisted real planning for what it would do after toppling Saddam Hussein. The Administration’s own plans have proven to be out of touch with objective reality. Can we logically expect that Iraq will turn into anything but a tar baby for the Administration and a disaster for America?

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief  who served in Lebanon and Iran and as chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston.

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