US policy in Iraq stirs Muslim animosity

While Vice President Dick Cheney was saying, "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power in the Middle East," and while President Bush claimed the "desperation of resistance is proof we are winning," Rumsfeld was asking privately, "Is the current situation such that the harder we work the behinder we get?"

Rumsfeld said in his secret memo that we "lack the metrics to know whether we are winning or losing the global war on terror," but there are some obvious metrics to look at. Every survey shows that hatred for the United States is growing throughout the world, dangerously so in the Arab world, according to an official American study. What is surprising is that President Bush was surprised to learn during his Asia trip how much the Muslim world distrusts the United States.

In Iraq polls show that a majority of Iraqis now believe that the coalition forces are an occupying force, and the number of people who look upon the coalition as a liberating force is markedly down from six months ago. One can argue that polls in Iraq aren't as scientific as polls in the West, but the trend lines are clear. It is also becoming evident that what Iraqis want Iraq to be may not fit with America's plans for them. Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who has served as a consultant to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, told London's Daily Telegraph that "any democratically elected Iraqi government is unlikely to be secular, unlikely to be pro-Israel, and, frankly, moderately unlikely to be pro-American."

Iraq is not Vietnam, but as Senator John McCain said, there are parallels "in terms of the information that the administration is putting out versus the actual situation on the ground." I have no doubt that much of the resistance against US and international forces comes from diehard Saddam supporters who would like to return to power. And there is evidence that foreign jihadis are coming to Iraq to strike a blow against the West.

But there is also rising anti-American sentiment among the Shi'ites who, although suppressed by Saddam Hussein, are not happy with the United States either. The real danger will come from ordinary Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, who are increasingly coming to perceive the United States as an occupation force that must be resisted. It is they who will fall into the hands of Islamists or Saddam's loyalists -- for nationalistic reasons, not pro-Saddam or even religious reasons. Once the resistance succeeds in cloaking itself in the cloth of patriotism, the fight will be lost to us, and all the Iraqi leaders we put forward will seem as nothing more than American puppets, as was the case in Vietnam.

There comes a point when saying how the Bush administration misled the public, leaned on the intelligence community to cook the books, and grossly misunderstood and mismanaged what would happen when Iraq was theirs, becomes beside the point. The neoconservatives' radical dream of transforming the Middle East by American force of arms was never reasonable and I hope by now discredited. But the price of failure in Iraq is too great to pay. The American taxpayer has been handed the mother of all dysfunctional states -- a magnet for terrorism that is a real threat now, even if it wasn't before.

In order to get out of this mess, the United Nations has to put more authority in the hands of Iraqis just as soon as is possible and accept that what Iraqis want for their constitution and their future government may not be exactly what Washington wants. The United States should also resist the temptation to force a market economy upon Iraq too quickly, selling off the country's assets to private entrepreneurs and risking the economic chaos that happened in Russia when communism fell.

Iraq also needs to be internationalized as quickly as possible, which is still being resisted by a Bush administration that needs money from the international community but doesn't want to relinquish authority. There needs to be a United Nations mandate and a much broader coalition for Iraq's transitional authority. Attacks against international organizations will not cease, but occupation and reconstruction will be seen as the will of the world, not just an American imperialistic enterprise. The only hope for Iraq, and for that matter the war on terrorism, is for American power to be exercised in concert with allies and other countries that have an interest in peace and stability. Otherwise, no matter how hard we try the behinder we will get.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.