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August 22 Issue

Original Article (French)    

“Victory over the insurgency [in Iraq],” Henry Kissinger recently wrote, “is the only meaningful exit strategy." He doesn’t say “military victory” but victory alone, in other words political and military, both at once, but why this very martial wording, which is so surprising coming from him?

'The Pope'

The former Secretary of State believes that talk of reducing the troop-levels involved in this war is “virtually fatal.” He explains that when the United States undertook to replace its troops with Vietnamese contingents, “Saigon and the big urban centers were much more secure than the Iraqi cities are.” The Vietnamese army was, and is, united. The Iraqi forces are “mostly made up of Shiites,” so one might wonder whether “they obey the national government or the ayatollahs.”

The insurgency is “essentially Sunni.” And the “security in the Kurdish areas is provided by Kurdish militias.” Under these conditions, talking of withdrawing men, Henry Kissinger believes, can only trouble the United States’ Iraqi allies, causing the insurgents to allow a tactical pause to more effectively carry out their attacks later and, at the same time, create an irreversible political sequence in the United States.

The pope of American diplomacy shares what has been the Europeans’ fear from the beginning - a Vietnam-style retreat. This is the danger he denounces because he believes, like many governments, that an American failure in Baghdad would be “of much greater consequence” than that in Saigon.

“If a Taliban-type government or a fundamentalist radical state were to emerge in Baghdad or any part of Iraq,” he writes, “shock waves would ripple through the Islamic world. Radical forces in Islamic countries or Islamic minorities in non-Islamic states would be emboldened in their attacks on existing governments.”

We can only agree. That is what the stakes in Iraq have become, given the situation created by George W. Bush’s error. But, what to do? What else can be done to “beat the insurgency,” other than not adding to the worsening of this strategic blunder?

Kissinger responds that everything will depend on the “quality of information,” the evolution of American public opinion, the ability to form an “international framework into which the future of Iraq will fit” and, above all, the “inclusion of Sunni leaders in the political process.”

Certainly, but the CIA is in the middle of a crisis, polls show an increasing rejection of this war, Europe has not only broken down but also doesn’t want to be involved in this affair, Arab leaders no longer trust an America that encourages their opponents, and nothing is convincing the Sunnis that they can still be a part of this Iraq. “Victory” won’t come tomorrow.