Responses to "What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable"

Web Exclusive (posted July 11, 2006)

by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.

"We have the wolf by the ears," wrote Thomas Jefferson "and can neither hold him nor safely let him go." He was writing about slavery, but one begins to know how he felt. My position on this differs from most contributors, in that I regard Iraq as an inherited American responsibility, not as one hastily or rashly acquired by the Bush administration. (Most of the constant revisiting of the flaws in the case for intervention appears to me as an attempt to evade this conclusion.) The United States appears to have played a part in Saddam's original accession to power: it certainly sided with him in his catastrophic war on Iran and provided him with the sinews of war that he was later to employ against his "own" people. After his eviction from Kuwait, it was successive administrations which decided to leave (i.e. confirm) him in power, subject his people to demoralizing and impoverishing sanctions and protect the Shiites and Kurds (who together constitute a majority) from a renewal of genocide. This is a weight of responsibility that makes it quite premature to talk about any "exit strategy." We did help break Iraq, and we do partly own it.

I would also want to stipulate that the distinction between "over there" and "over here" has become, since September of 2001, somewhat fungible. It isn't clear to me in what sense one can "withdraw" from anywhere, let alone Iraq. Too many people seem to adopt a quasi-Berkeleyean position, to the effect that if something crashes and we are not there to see it, it is not "really" happening. A crashed Iraq would not at any stage have posed the Bishop's soothing dilemma, any more than did (or would) a crashed and imploded Afghanistan. If there is still a "water's edge" in our politics, I am not sure where it is to be found.

We cannot consider departing from Iraq until we have (a) repaired the damage done to its industry by war and sanctions (b) made sure that the trial of Saddam Hussein and his associates for war crimes and crimes against humanity is completed and (c) inflicted a battlefield defeat on the combined forces of the Baath Party and al Qaeda. The lessons learned from the latter, and the skills acquired in achieving it, are essential things that we shall be requiring elsewhere and in the future.

Unfortunately, the chief aim of the insurgency (directly descended from Saddam Hussein's own practice of divide and rule) has already been partly accomplished. Though there are many Iraqis who do not think in tribal or confessional terms — and we owe something to these people too — the scene is now dominated by sectarians and by sectarianism. Peter Galbraith (whose excellent new book The End of Iraq will I hope be commented upon in our next round) has argued that we should accept the inevitable and help arrange an "amicable divorce" between the country's three factions. This in itself will be no small task. A divorce a la Czech and Slovak is very different from an Indo-Pakistan one. The general history of partition (especially in former British possessions) is not at all an encouraging one. And there is the danger that Iran and Saudi Arabia would be able to colonize any Shiites or Sunni condominium.

If we are, however, to exchange federalism for separatism, there is one further responsibility that we cannot ignore. One unarguable gain of regime change is the development and autonomy that it has brought to the people of Kurdistan. To these people, too, we have made promises and offered guarantees for many years. It must be made very plain that there is no going back on these promises and guarantees, and that self-determination for the Kurds, inside or outside Iraq, is a settled policy of the United States under this or any future administration. A statement along these lines from the current administration would be welcome, as would a response to it from those Democrats who are now attempting to discover what they think about the matter.