An inconvenient truth for the anti-war lobby

November 16, 2007

Good news in Iraq is bad news for the anti-war lobby

IN April, US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq lost, saying the the extreme violence in the country proved the surge was accomplishing nothing. This week Senator Reid is still engaged in the vain attempt to block funding for the war in the US Senate, refusing to acknowledge the extraordinary success of the surge.

Against all the defeatist expectations of the so-called "anti-war" lobby, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki this week reported that terrorist attacks, including car bombings, in Baghdad had dropped by 77 per cent since last year's peak. The dramatic improvement is directly attributed to the surge of 30,000 US troops, their effective counter-insurgency strategy and to the fact that locals are fed up with al-Qa'ida and other extremists. The good news is not just limited to Baghdad. Anbar, once an al-Qa'ida stronghold, is relatively peaceful thanks to the joint efforts of Sunni sheiks and marines. In the south, those willing Iraq to defeat were gloomily predicting that the withdrawal of British troops from Basra would lead to a brutal domination of the city by Iranian-backed terrorists. That hasn't happened.

On the political front, there are also signs of progress. In September, Iraqi Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, met with top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In October, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of one of the most important Shia leaders, the late Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, met Sunni sheiks in Ramadi, declaring, "Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen. Today we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis." Baghdad Anglican canon Andrew White has organised meetings of Christian, Sunni and Shia clerics calling for nationwide reconciliation.

It is far too early to declare victory but you would think that all Americans and Australians, regardless of whether they supported the war in Iraq or not, would want to stick with a strategy that is delivering peace and security to a people who have suffered not just 4 1/2 years of a brutal insurgency but also three decades of tyranny and war. Yet some Democrats in the US, as with some on the Left in Australia, are still determined to lose the war if possible by withdrawing troops, even when success is starting to appear to be within reach. Undaunted by the fact that there has been an improvement in Iraq, Democratic staffers on Congress's Joint Economic Committee are trying to generate more bad headlines by focusing on the cost of the war, which they calculated would reach $US3.5 trillion by 2017. To arrive at such a massive total, the committee threw in everything they could think of, including their best guesses at the Iraq war's impact on oil prices and other economic factors.

In Australia, despite the fact that its actual policy differences with the Howard Government are small, Labor panders to the anti-war lobby, maintaining that its troops-out-of-Iraq policy is a principled stand against an illegal war. It is determined to maintain the fiction that the Baker Hamilton report, which President George W.Bush rejected when he adopted the surge strategy, got it right. It justifies its policy of a phased withdrawal of troops on that basis. Yet the surge is demonstrably working, and both the British and the Americans are withdrawing their troops not according to a pre-determined timetable, as Baker Hamilton recommended, but in response to the situation on the ground.

The sad fact is that for most of the anti-war Left, the only thing that matters is delivering a defeat to the Bush administration, and in achieving that end the Iraqi people are expendable. John Pilger said in January 2004 that while he didn't like the "terrible civilian atrocities" committed by what he called "the resistance", "the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for the rest of the world" and that only a defeat in Iraq of the US "military machine" and the Bush administration would make our world secure. As Christopher Hitchens wrote despairingly in 2005 of his erstwhile friends on the Left, while there is plenty of support for debt relief and making poverty history in Africa, there isn't a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq.

The anti-war, anti-American Left should be ashamed, but precisely for this reason they continue to look away when Iraq doesn't fail in the way they wish. The success of the surge has become their inconvenient truth.