When Congress commissioned the Iraq Study Group (ISG), President Bush had little choice but to accept the initiative, albeit reluctantly. As it turned out, the 160 pages and 79 policy recommendations of the ISG’s report not only criticized the President’s justification and conduct of the war, it also asked for course changes he had stubbornly refused to make: considering a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. forces and recognizing the need to end the hostility toward U.S. policies, not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. The ISG urged the President to ask Iraq’s neighbors, Syria and Iran, for their collaboration toward ending the insurgency and to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the root cause of Arab indignation.
The ISG’s review of the debacle in Iraq not only echoed the chorus of devastating critics at home and abroad, it also rejected the neoconservative unilateralism espoused by President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Yet, their neoconservative friends continue to call for military action against Iran and Syria, rather than direct talks with them. The ISG does not even mention the President's dream to spread his view of democracy to Arab societies. Overall, the ISG strongly suggests that the administration failed diplomatically even more than militarily.
Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert was quick to reject the ISG’s demand that the United States deal “directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.” After forty years of Israeli failure to end the occupation of the Palestinian lands, Olmert angrily insists that “No one needs to encourage Israel to move forward with a peace initiative.” A Syrian official, however, expressed himself “pleased that the report ties the situation in Iraq with the rest of the region.”
Iraq’s President Talabani, a Kurd and hitherto a supporter of U.S. policies, accused the ISG of “not respecting the desire of the Iraqi people to control its army and to be able to rearm and train Iraqi forces under the leadership of the Iraqi government.” Experts familiar with popular sentiments throughout the Middle East have long known that Arabs, Kurds, and Iranians are sick and tired of being dominated, exploited, and condescendingly lectured by British and French overlords and now by American invaders. That is why Talabani feels so strongly that some of the ISG’s recommendations would further undermine Iraqi sovereignty. He calls them “an insult to the people of Iraq.”
The conclusion for U.S. policies toward Arab societies is clear: They want us out, sooner rather than later. They oppose our open-ended plans to control the whole Middle East with dozens of military bases. As societies, they want an end to colonialism and become as free as Americans and Europeans to determine their own destiny.
In Saudi Arabia, I once was asked what Americans would do if Arabs established military bases on our shores. My answer was prompt: Americans would throw them out as resolutely as their ancestors had evicted the British two centuries ago. The ISG wisely advised the President to “state that the United States does not seek permanent military bases in Iraq.”
Yet, the ISG’s recommendations do not ask for a complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq or the Gulf region--ever. Historically, many Americans have condemned colonialism as an evil perpetrated mostly by European powers. That attitude made the United States the shining hope of all the oppressed nations around the world.
"No peace can last, or ought to last," President Wilson warned, "which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed. ... Peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their own peril."
Do the President and Congress no longer wish to uphold this principle?