March 24 Letters to the Editor

Williford expands on Iraq issue

ToThe Editor:

During my interview with Rae Kruger for her interesting article on the Iraq war, published in Saturday’s Independent, we joked that the issues involved in the conflict are so complex that her five thousand-word article would soon become 10- or20-thousand words! So I can understand why some of my statements were printed without certain qualifications.

First, I do believe, as Ms. Kruger wrote, that in the long term “some form of U.S. presence will be needed in Iraq,” mainly because the decision of the U.S. government to invade Iraq has led to the ongoing violence there, and that U.S. citizens now have an ethical obligation to make amends for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and for the millions of Iraqis displaced from their homes. However, I do not believe that the U.S. presence necessarily needs to be a military presence…or, indeed, that any physical U.S. presence is what is needed. Ideally, Iraqis need to rebuild Iraq, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill—an indirect “U.S. presence,” but a U.S. presence nonetheless. This would probably be more efficient and create more good will than the current system in which U.S. taxpayers pay for exorbitant contracts with U.S. companies like Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater, who have a proven knack for deepening the money pit which they have already constructed for themselves in Iraq, with little benefit to the U.S. taxpayers, let alone to the citizens of Iraq.

Ms. Kruger also wrote that I said that in 2003, “it was expected a troop presence would be needed in Iraq for five or more years”—but that was my own expectation, and certainly not that of the Bush administration, which thought that the troops would be home by Christmas, and Iraq would be rebuilt in six months. It was obvious to me in March 2003 that Iraq would be divided into Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish factions, and that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Turkey would be extremely interested in the denouement of the conflict between these factions. In 1991, the administration of George H.W. Bush was fully aware of this, which is why Saddam Hussein was not toppled during the Gulf War—specifically, it did not serve the interests of the U.S.-allied Saudi government, which preferred seeing fellow Arab Sunni Saddam Hussein firmly in charge of Iraq rather than having a pro-Iraqi Shi’ite government installed there; since the 1980s, the Saudi and the Iranian governments have played out their own regional power struggle in the Persian Gulf through proxy wars involving Iraq.

Because of all of this, I felt in March 2003 that the U.S. military would have to occupy Iraq for at least 10 years in order to fulfill George W. Bush’s stated plan for establishing a stable democracy, a “model for the region.” All empires and superpowers, from ancient Greece and Rome through Europe and the U.S. in the 19th and 20th century, rule with varying degrees of arrogance and ignorance in the nations that they are occupying; however, the Bush administration was exceptional in this regard in its actions in Iraq, while adding an unprecedented amount of incompetence.

How can we as U.S. citizens change the current situation in Iraq? In our interview, Ms. Kruger and I discussed extensively which of the current presidential candidates would be most likely to rebuild Iraq and bring the troops home—I can understand that for reasons of brevity, this discussion was not included in her article. I believe that the U.S. should not be alone in helping to rebuild Iraq, and that it is necessary to bring other countries and international organizations into the process.

As I expressed to Ms. Kruger, a President Kerry would have been in a much better position to bring in European allies and the U.N. into rebuilding Iraq so that the U.S. was not acting alone — but he was not elected in 2004, so voters again need to seriously take this issue into consideration in 2008 when choosing the next president. I disagree with Republican candidate John McCain’s unwavering support of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq; still, I was surprised last week when he claimed on several occasions that the Iranian government was funding Al Qaeda in Iraq. This was more than a gaffe: it represented the kind of ignorance of the situation in that region that got the United States into Iraq in 2003—Osama bin Laden, a Sunni, despises the Iranians as Shi’ite heretics (which explains why in late 2001, the Iranian government allowed U.S. bombers to fly through its air space on the way to bombing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan). Al Qaeda is no more an ally of the Iranian government than the Bush administration! Voters should remember McCain’s ignorance in November—our next president should be fully aware of the actors and their interests in this volatile region in order for the United States government to play a more positive role in Middle East and Persian Gulf diplomacy.Sincerely,

Dr. Thomas J. Williford

Assistant Professor of History

Southwest Minnesota State University