Juan Cole on George Bush's Iraq (part one)

Throwing Grenades in the Global Economic Cockpit
An Interview with Juan Cole (Part 2)

By MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

On September 23nd, we published a piece by Michael Schwartz, Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense, which ended:

"American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous possibilities for future violence. The either/or of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is likely to get -- for the U.S. and for the Iraqis."

The next day, at his Informed Comment website, Juan Cole posted a response in which he wrote, "I just cannot understand this sort of argument," and then laid out the nature of his disagreement with it in some detail. This started several days of debate among various experts, scholars, and bloggers at his site (and elsewhere) which resulted in Cole rethinking his position somewhat and issuing an eloquent call for American ground troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. (If you haven't read it, you should!)

This debate and discussion provides the basis for the second half of Tomdispatch's interview with Cole. My own thoughts on withdrawal can be found at Withdrawal on the Agenda, a June 2005 updating of a piece, Time of Withdrawal, I wrote six months after the fall of Baghdad. You should also know that I consider the "nightmare scenario" Cole lays out below but one (frightening) possibility in Iraq's future. Based on memories of the Vietnam era, I'm wary of all predictions about the horrors that are bound to occur if the United States were to withdraw, or withdraw too quickly, as well as fears of a "bloodbath-to-come." This is a complex issue I hope to take up in a dispatch later in the week. Meanwhile, onward.

Tomdispatch: Now I want to turn to the issue of withdrawal. I've been particularly impressed that, at your site, you post your own intellectual development, so to speak -- and that includes putting up letters and essays by people who take you on. This is unbelievably rare. The reader can actually see a brain at work, regularly reassessing a changing situation. It's been especially true on the question of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Having gone back recently to read your site's earliest months, it's obvious that you've become fiercer and angrier as time has gone on in relation to the Bush administration. You recently wrote a piece saying that U.S. ground troops must come out now, "for the good of Iraq, for the good of America." Would you discuss the development of your thoughts on this? Where are you now on the issue of withdrawal and how it might happen?

Juan Cole: The first thing I should say is I'm not under any illusion that it matters a great deal what I think on the subject.

TD: [Laughs.] Neither of us is exactly capable of withdrawing American troops from Iraq. I'm endlessly aware of this when people call for one plan or another. I think, wait a minute…

JC: [Laughs.] When you're talking about the debates I hold with my readers and the way I put up critiques of my position, what academic life has to offer is open debate and being honest about your sources, about how you come to a conclusion. The whole point of my blog is to attempt to represent the life of the mind in a public forum. I view what I do as different from politics where you want to stay on message, stay on point. You want to put out an image, a position and stick to it. You make fun of your opponent for waffling or being indecisive. But what serious thinker hasn't gone back and forth? You'd have to be crazy if you didn't consider other options than the one you initially started out with or if, over time, experience didn't sometimes cause you to take a different position.

You know, Whitman said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." That's the American spirit, so I'm happy to debate these things, reveal my thinking, and let the world see how one intellectual concerned with the Middle East deals with the array of information that's coming at us over time.

Well, I'm now really worried about what the outcome in Iraq might mean for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the world. I'm really, really worried and I can think up some nightmare scenarios…

TD: Give me one…

JC: Say the U.S. and its allies draw down their troops -- and it's very clear, the allies are pfffft! Everybody's announced that, after the December 15th election, they're going to draw down. But if a withdrawal is done in the wrong way, or unwisely, here's what could happen:

You've already got this low-intensity sectarian war going on in a province like Babel. Twenty-two guys'll show up dead in the morning, bullets behind their ears, mafia-style. They'll be Shiites or they'll be Sunnis. So you know the two sides -- at night, when the U.S. can't see them so well -- are already fighting it out with each other. And it's over land. Babel province was traditionally heavily Shiite. Saddam expelled Shiites and brought in Sunnis. It was part of his planting of Sunnis.

TD: As in Kirkuk…

JC: That was Arabization, this was Sunnitization. So let's say the U.S. is not around much anymore, what's going to happen if you have a whole brigade of Sunni fighters come down from Mahmudiyah and attack Hila? That sort of thing happened in Lebanon during the civil war. These neighborhood militias can become armies and leave their areas to wage war against other neighborhood militias that become armies. Now, if that started happening, and if the Sunni Arabs started to win, it's inevitable that the Revolutionary Guards will come across the border from Iran to help the Shiites. Iran's not going to sit by and allow Iraq's Shiites to be massacred. If that happened, the Saudis, the Jordanians, and the Syrian Sunnis are not going to stand by either and let Iranian Revolutionary Guards massacre Sunni Arabs in reprisal. They're going to come in. You could simultaneously be having Kurdish massacres of Turkmen which would bring Turkey in. So you could end up with a regional low-intensity war. Think of the Spanish Civil War.

Back in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein and Khomeini fought a war with one another for eight years, but on the whole they avoided hitting each other's oil facilities. Both understood that doing that would reduce their countries to fourth-world states. So there was a kind of mutually-assured-destruction doctrine between them, which is possible between states. But in the guerrilla war in Iraq, the Sunni guerrillas have already pioneered using pipeline sabotage and oil sabotage…

TD: I'm actually surprised that such sabotage has yet to make it to the Caspian pipelines or elsewhere.

JC: Well, it could still spread. In August of 2004, when the Marines were fighting the Muqtada al-Sadr people in Najaf, the Sadrists in Basra did make threats to start pipeline sabotage in the south, which really would have crippled Iraq. In a regional guerrilla war, there would be a lot of impetus for Sunni guerrillas to hit the Iranian pipelines, and there are some Sunni tribes in the oil-producing areas of Iran who might be enlisted for this purpose. If the Saudis got involved, then the radical Shiites have an impetus to hit the Saudi pipelines, and the Saudi petroleum facilities are in a heavily Shiite area. Basically, what we've learned from Iraq is that petroleum is produced in a human-security environment in which powerful local forces want it to be produced. If some significant proportion of the local forces doesn't want it to be produced, they can spoil it.

TD: As in Nigeria…

JC: We have seen this all over the world. We focus on states, but states can't provide security for hundreds of miles of pipeline. It's literally impossible. So think what you're talking about here. Something on the order of 80-84 million barrels of petroleum are produced every day in the world. Saudi Arabia produces 9 of that reliably, sometimes more. Iran produces 4. On a good day, Iraq used to produce almost 3. Now it's down to somewhere around 1.8 million. If you took all of that off the market, that's about a fifth of world petroleum production. Do you know what that's going to do to prices!

If you don't like three-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, you're going to really hate this kind of world I'm painting. I think the price shock would reduce economic growth globally, plunging some countries into recession or even depression. This would be a world-class catastrophe. And it's also not clear, once it starts, how you stop it.