The U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf
area looks a lot like the buildup that preceded
the first Gulf War, but there will be one vast
difference between this war and the previous one: American troops were quickly withdrawn at the end of
Desert Storm. This time, they will stay right where they are —
possibly for a very long time.
The reason for this difference lies in the contrasting
aims of the first President Bush and the second. In 1991,
Bush the elder sought to expel Iraqi forces in Kuwait and
eliminate the threat to Saudi Arabia. Once that goal was
accomplished, American troops were free to return home —
which they did with remarkable dispatch.
But this President Bush has a much larger and more
demanding agenda: to eradicate Saddam’s regime; to put
top Iraqis on trial for war crimes; to disarm Iraq of all
major weapons systems; to reconstruct the Iraqi government
and military along U.S.-approved lines; to rebuild the Iraqi
oil industry; to keep all of Iraq under one multi-ethnic
roof; and to spread the blessings of democracy to the
greater Middle East. All of this, and a whole lot more, is
encapsulated in the administration’s long-stated goal of
“regime change.”
No doubt some Iraqis will welcome the U.S. effort
to disassemble their country and rebuild it. But others can
be expected to resist this effort. The Kurds will fight any
plan that gives Turkey a presence in the country or leaves
the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul under non-Kurdish
rule. The Shiites will contest any government headed by
Sunnis (and vice versa). Finally, officeholders in the old regime
will resist being replaced by exiles brought in by the United
States. The list of would-be dissenters is a long one.
It is to contain this internal disorder that U.S.
military authorities anticipate the need for a large, long-term
military presence in Iraq. Asked in February how many
troops would be required for this purpose, the Army’s chief of
staff, General Eric K. Shinseki, was unequivocal: “I would
say that what’s been mobilized to this point, something on
the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.”
General Shinseki’s estimate was later disputed by top
civilian officers at the Department of Defense, who say
the job can be done with fewer U.S. troops. But experts at
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a
Washington public-policy organization, estimate that at
least 150,000 U.S. soldiers will be needed in Iraq until some
degree of order is established — a task that will take
many months and probably years to achieve (and at a cost of
hundreds of billions of dollars).
American troops will be needed not just to maintain
order but to also deal with the inevitable Muslim
backlash. There will be an upsurge of anger throughout the
Muslim world, where age-old resentment of colonialism and
growing anti-Americanism constitute an explosive mix. There
will be the inevitable massive demonstrations against the
U.S. occupation in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and a
half-dozen other countries, possibly accompanied by angry
riots and violence against American embassies, consulates,
and businesses.
These riots could prove so persistent and violent as
to threaten the survival of key pro-U.S. governments, such
as that of General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and the
royal family of Saudi Arabia. Under these circumstances, it is
not unlikely that the United States will send forces to these
countries, either to protect the oil fields (in Saudi Arabia and
the other Gulf kingdoms) or to prevent the takeover of a
friendly state by anti-American regimes.
Where this strategy will lead is anyone’s guess, but
we can expect a large American military presence to
remain in the region for a long time to come. It is the
open-ended occupation of Iraq, and not the impending
war, that is likely to prove most costly and dangerous over
the long run.
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and
world-security studies at Hampshire College and the author of
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.
This article first appeared on AlterNet.
