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IRAQ: Bush Policies 'Fuel Violence', Say 500 U.S. Scholars
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 13, 2004 (IPS) - The Bush administration's failure to accept
advice on Iraq from its military and foreign service officers has led to
policies that have fuelled the insurgency against U.S.-led forces in the
occupied nation, says a letter signed by some 500 national-security
specialists.
Released Tuesday by a group called Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign
Policy (S3FP), the letter calls the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation
of Iraq the United States' "most misguided" policy since the Vietnam War.
"The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S.
interests," according to the group, which called for a "fundamental
reassessment" in both the U.S. strategy in Iraq and its implementation.
"We're advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to
stop digging," said Barry Posen, the Ford international professor of
political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one
of the organisers of S3FP, which includes some of the most eminent U.S.
experts on national-security policy and on the Middle East and the Arab world.
Among the signers are six of the last seven presidents of the American
Political Science Association (APSA) and professors who teach in more than
150 colleges and universities in 40 states.
Besides Posen, the main organisers included Stanley Kaufman of the
University of Delaware; Michael Brown, director of Security Studies at
Georgetown University; Michael Desch, who holds the Robert M Gates Chair in
Intelligence and National Security Decision-Making at the Bush School of
government at Texas A & M University; and Jessica Stern, at the Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University, who also served in a senior
counter-terrorism post in the National Security Council during the former
Clinton administration.
"I think it is telling that so many specialists on international relations,
who rarely agree on anything, are unified in their position on the high
costs that the U.S. is incurring from this war," said Robert Keohane of
Duke University in North Carolina.
Their critique mirrors an unprecedented statement released by 27 retired
top-ranking foreign service and military officials in June, many of whom
said they had voted for Bush in the 2000 election.
The 27, called Diplomats for Change, accused the administration of leading
the country "into an ill-planned and costly war from which exit is
uncertain." As their name suggested, they called for Bush to be defeated in
2004.
The new statement's signatories also includes a number of retired
government officials, some career military and foreign service officers,
and political appointees in Democratic and Republican administrations, who
are currently working at colleges and universities.
Much of their critique echoes arguments voiced by Democratic presidential
candidate John Kerry who, in recent weeks, has pounded away at alleged
failures in the way Bush has prosecuted the "war on terrorism,"
particularly with respect to Iraq.
"We judge that the current American policy centred around the war in Iraq
is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period, one which harms the
cause of the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorists," S3FP writes.
"One result has been a great distortion in the terms of public debate on
foreign and national security policy - an emphasis on speculation instead
of facts, on mythology instead of calculation and on misplaced moralising
over considerations of national interest."
The scholars applauded the Bush administration for its initial focus on
destroying Afghanistan bases of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, but charged
that its subsequent "failure to engage sufficient U.S. troops to capture or
kill the mass of al-Qaeda fighters in the later stages of that war was a
great blunder."
The letter noted that "many of the justifications" provided by the
administration for the Iraq war, including an operational relationship
between al-Qaeda and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his
programmes for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), have proven "untrue" and
that North Korea and Pakistan pose much greater risks of nuclear
proliferation to terrorists.
"Even on moral grounds, the case for war was dubious: the war itself has
killed over a thousand Americans and unknown thousands of Iraqis, and if
the threat of civil war becomes reality, ordinary Iraqis could be even
worse off than they were under Saddam Hussein," it argues.
Since the invasion, policy errors "have created a situation in Iraq worse
than it needed to be," adds the letter, which said the administration
ignored advice from the Army Chief of Staff on the need for many more U.S.
troops to provide security and from the State Department and other U.S.
agencies on how reconstruction could be carried out.
"As a result, Iraqi popular dismay at the lack of security, jobs or
reliable electric power fuels much of the violent opposition to the U.S.
military presence, while the war itself has drawn in terrorists from
outside Iraq."
While Hussein's removal was "desirable," according to the scholars, the
actual benefit to the United States was "small," particularly because Iraq
posed far less of a threat to the United States or its allies than the
administration had asserted.
Worse, the occupation's failures, such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib prison and elsewhere, have acted as a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda
and similar groups throughout the region, according to the letter.
(END)
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