The Arab Stake in America's Success

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | American military power changed the world with two rapid victories in the war against global terrorism. But it is not yet certain that sustained American engagement based on those victories will change Iraq and Afghanistan into the stable and friendly nations the Bush administration foresees.

At one level, the success of these campaigns is clear. Strategically, important U.S. goals already accomplished will not be undone. These include dismantling al Qaeda's Afghan terrorist bases, ridding the Middle East of Saddam Hussein's unquenchable thirst for aggression and cruelty and putting American forces in a better position to protect the nation as a whole against terror strikes from abroad.

But the campaigns have also given rise to a deadly guerrilla campaign against American soldiers in Iraq and to growing complaints in Afghanistan that the warlords and drug smugglers -- often the same people -- have resumed crime as usual under the Americans' noses. The mundane and muddled human factors that shape local attitudes toward the new American military presence in the Muslim world must also be kept in constant view.

"We now have to focus on the local population and not on the die-hard insurgents" and other terrorists attacking American troops, one U.S. officer serving in Iraq told me on my recent trip there. "If they are causing more damage to that population than our actions unintentionally do, then the local population will turn toward us." It can also go the other way, he added somberly.

His words underlined several of my impressions shaped by 30 years of reporting on and following events in that country as well as my recent visit. I left Iraq with some confidence that an effective national political leadership is emerging, almost in spite of rather than because of American and British efforts to micromanage it.

Another conclusion is that the American presence in at least part of Iraq will be for the long term, whatever happens in Baghdad. U.S. soldiers will help ensure that Kurds and Shiites are not again coerced into submitting to another bloody military dictatorship like the one run by Saddam's Baathists. America's new, enduring strategic stake in Iraq was put bluntly in a Baghdad briefing by Gen. John Abizaid, the theater commander, as he spoke about terrorism:

"The heart of the problem is in this particular region, and the heart of the region happens to be Iraq. . . . You can't separate the struggle against the Baathists from the struggle against global terrorism." Those are not words spoken by a man looking desperately for an exit strategy.

But a sizable segment of the Iraqi population seems not to have gotten that message of American resolve, or thought through the consequences of an American failure here. The Sunni Arabs who inhabit Iraq's middle geographic belt around Baghdad and who benefited most directly from Saddam's rule are not doing enough to protect themselves or their country from the scorched-earth future the die-hard insurgents threaten to bring down on them. Too many Sunnis seem unready to acknowledge that they have been decisively defeated and have lost control of the country.

The melting away of the Iraqi army in the center of the country in April has turned out to be an American dilemma in disguise. Combat tactics that could have been used to destroy centers of resistance in conventional warfare are now out of bounds in confronting the guerrilla-like insurgency. That is one lesson learned from this conflict that is likely to be marked down, silently, by American commanders.

The grim cat-and-mouse killing contest that Sunni towns are tolerating can quickly deteriorate, and central Iraq can be turned into a free-fire zone that would in effect be detached from other regions where oil operations, counterterror missions and diplomatic strategies can be conducted.

Everyone has a stake in avoiding that disastrous outcome. That includes the Sunnis, who must now accept that they have a stake in American and British occupation rapidly becoming a successful nation-building exercise. And that includes Iraq's Arab neighbors, who have still not committed themselves either to American success in Iraq or to the establishment of a representative government not dominated by Sunni Arabs.

The consequences of an American failure in Baghdad are horrible to contemplate. But they must be thought about and in some form communicated to all Iraqis and to those in the region who are able to see beyond the self-defeating delusions of the past.

Those delusions made the creation of Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda possible and their defeat necessary. Combining success at the strategic and local levels is not an American task alone. Everyone has a stake in that happening.

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