A couple of new ideas seem to be forming inside the debate on the Iraq debacle.

The shift in public perspective on troop withdrawal from an abstract concept to its practical considerations is just beginning, it would seem. Jamie Kenny is following this one via this article from the American Jewish weekly, Forward (which was also discussed in the Guardian yesterday.)

When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.

Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all.

I wonder if many people have thought about just how you remove 150,000 troops (in a phased withdrawal, one would imagine) from a country. The “Troops Out” lobby seem to have offered little solution, which is typical of the anti-war crew (of which I’m a member), I suppose. It’s all “do this” and “don’t do that” but no “do it like this” and “don’t do that, do this”.

You’d think the troops were going to be beamed out of Iraq, Star Trek fashion. But with practical considerations now entering the calculation, and with only one apparent escape route, any withdrawal has a good chance of becoming a bloodbath. Every yahoo able to hold a rocket-propelled grenade launcher or fashion an Improvised Explosive Device will be lining the road between Baghdad and the Kuwaiti border.

The second idea is that any US troop withdrawals will be replaced by a ramping up of the air war in support of Iraqi troops on the ground. Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker, reports that:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

Students of recent “humanitarian interventions” can tell you of countless cases where “smart” weaponry has been anything but. If Hersh is right then the current US military tacticians haven’t learned much from the improvisatory and adaptable qualities of the Iraqi insurgency. Are roadside bombers attackable from the air? Are they going to obediently stand in an open space so you can strafe them? Not to mention that civilian hearts and minds are also harder to win from 35,000 feet.

There’s also a chilling political aspect that needs to be considered now that it’s been established that many within the fledgling Iraqi military establishment have divided loyalties. As Hersh says:

For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

It’s a neat and darkly humorous reversal of who exactly the chumps usually are in proxy wars but probably won’t do much for stability on the ground. The US air force could in effect end up as the hired muscle settling turf wars.

Where all this leaves the doctrine of humanitarian intervention is just about anybody’s guess. Writing in the New Statesman a week or two back (reproduced on the Channel 4 news website), Lindsey Hilsum said this:

Many on the left would say realpolitik isn’t dead, that all this talk of spreading democracy across the Middle East is a smokescreen for the real aim of securing Iraq’s oilfields, testing American weapons and asserting imperial power.

I disagree. I think they really do believe their own ideology and are determined that everyone else should, too. A recent visitor to Washington told me how a CIA operative he met said the agency had been given three “strategic tasks” - counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation and “bolstering the growth of democracy and forging relations with incipient democracies”.

…

[I]n these dangerous times I find that realpolitik has a certain appeal. Realpolitik would have meant leaving Saddam in power. My Iraqi friends, all of whom welcomed the war, now wonder if that might have been better - those that haven’t been kidnapped or murdered in the current chaos, that is.

As someone who gained much of his political outlook from reading about what the CIA got up to in Central America in the 80’s, for me, realpolitik has always been one of the four horseman of the political apocalypse, more often than not accompanied by his comrades in arms, Acceptable Losses, Illegal Bombing and Death Squad. If, as Hilsum (and the “pro-liberation” camp) suggests, Iraq wasn’t invaded for reasons of realpolitik (securing oil supplies) but according to a neoconservative/Humanitarian Intervention agenda (initiating a democratic domino effect in the Middle East), then we’re up shit creek. It seems that Realpolitik’s three mates have a conflict of interest and are now moonlighting for Humanitarian Intervention and, unless major lessons are learned from what’s happened in the last two years, it may be necessary to reject both positions and search for something else.

As Jamie Kenny says:

I think this war, and the conflicts it will trigger will shape politics going forward in a fairly profound way, rather than just add information proving or disproving existing political beliefs.

Yes, but what terrible bastard political creation might crawl from the wreckage?

There’s also more of this over at Jarndyce’s place. It’s treated with much more intellectual rigour than you’ll ever find here and the comments are a must as well. I find a lot to agree with in the piece which is surprising as Jarndyce supported the war, but as he says: “[S]imilar principles can take you either way on this depending on how you make a couple of close calls.”

Anyway. Am I presenting a false choice between realpolitik and humanitarian/neoconservative agendas when it comes to foreign policy? Is the conflation of so-called humanitarian intervention and neoconservatism valid? I’d argue it is in the case of Iraq but would it be the rule going forward? It’s been said on many occasions that the anti-war faction left themselves wide open to accusations of abandoning ordinary Iraqis and being comfortable in their purely oppositional stance, providing no alternatives to war and the doctrines on offer. It’s a trap to be avoided next time and ditching the ex-Stalinists and fundamentalists we allowed to lead us last time would be a start.

So what is the, ahem, Third Way, and would anybody with real power be interested in implementing it? Those with knowledge of Henry Kissinger’s time at the helm of world politics (as Hilsum points out) will know that that’s when Realpolitik got it’s filthy reputation. Vietnam, Central and South America. Death squads and Pinochet.

But I pretty much defy anyone to deny that the doctrine put into play in “liberating” Iraq has led to anywhere else but the same foetid, stinking destination we would have arrived at if we’d let Kissinger do the job. Torture, death squads, acceptable losses (”So sorry, but…”). It’s humanitarian intervention without the humanity.