Radical steps needed to escape Iraq quagmire

By GWYNNE DYER

11/17/06 "Border Mail" -- --- “STAND back! No, further back, or you’ll be swept away by the shock and awe! We’re going to show you the full might and majesty of American military power. We’re going to...invade Iraq!!!”

The full panoply of American power was unleashed upon Iraq, and the results have been profoundly unimpressive.

This doesn’t just mean that the US loses in Iraq.

It means its leverage elsewhere is severely diminished as well.

But very few people in Washington seem to understand that yet.

American voters have spoken, Congress has changed hands, and Secretary of Defence Don Rumsfeld has been put out to pasture at last, but there is still no plan for getting the US out of the Iraq quagmire.

Certainly not from the Democrats, who are all over the shop.

Senator Hilary Clinton, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, doesn’t want a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

There is no Republican plan yet, either, but it is the job of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel co-chaired by James Baker, former secretary of state during Bush senior’s presidency, to come up with one.

Its recommendations will be acted on, too, because the new secretary of defence will be Robert Gates, another close friend of the family and a member of the Iraq Study Group.

Thanks to various “accidental” leaks, we even know broadly what the ISG will recommend.

It will urge a gradual reduction of American troops, with the last combat forces to be out of Iraq well before the 2008 elections.

And it will tell Mr Bush to seek cover for this process by talking to Iraq’s neighbours, Iran and Syria.

This will be very unwelcome advice for Bush.

But Bush will like it even less when he learns the price that Syria and Iran want for helping.

The problem is that the US is demonstrating every day in Iraq just how ineffective its military power is.

It looked so impressive before it was unleashed that the Iranian Government secretly offered Washington a general settlement of all the differences between the two countries, very much on America’s terms, just before the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.

The cocky neo-cons rejected that offer out of hand.

They know that the US armed forces regard an attack on Iran with such distaste that the Joint Chiefs of Staff might even resign rather than obey such an order.

So Iran’s price for co-operation would be high: an end to the 27-year US trade embargo, full diplomatic relations with Washington, an American commitment not to try to overthrow the Iranian regime and acceptance of Iran’s legal right to develop civil nuclear power under no more than the normal safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And Syria’s price? An end to the UN investigation into the Damascus regime’s role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri last year, US acceptance of a larger role for Hezbollah in the Lebanese Government, an American commitment not to try to overthrow the Syrian regime and serious US pressure on Israel to negotiate the return to Syria of the Golan Heights.

The Bush regime will probably baulk at paying these prices, which means that the notion of Syria and Iran assisting in a US withdrawal from Iraq is just a fantasy.

Besides, it is not at all clear that either Tehran or Damascus could deliver on any promises they made about Iraq.

It’s too far gone in blood and chaos for the usual tools of influence to deliver results.

© 2006 The Border Morning Mail Pty Ltd