YANKEE GO HOME
Jerry Harkins

Life is full of mysteries and I guess I should get used to it. At the moment, I’m wondering why the United States pursues a foreign policy that may or may not be consistent with its values but sure as hell is not at all consistent with its interests. This is going to turn into a piece about Iraq but maybe we should begin with something easier. Such as Korea. A half century ago, we sent 1,789,000 soldiers to save South Korea from being swallowed up by North Korea. Of these, 33,742 were killed and 92,134 were wounded. I know it’s not polite to mention it, but that’s a big investment. Since then, we have maintained enough soldiers there—currently around 37,000—to serve as an earnest of our commitment. They couldn’t possibly stop a new invasion. They would be overrun in a matter of hours. But their mere presence is supposed to remind the North Koreans that we are willing to double down on our blood investment. To me this has always seemed a questionable strategy, even while it kept on working for fifty years. North Korea is an insane Stalinist state unlikely to conform its actions to any standard known to the civilized world, including its own survival.

Anyway, the South Koreans no longer want our protection. They have adopted what they call a “sunshine policy” the gist of which is that the North is no longer a “main enemy” but is now a “friendly neighbor.” The dear leader does his best to render Seoul more realistic and cannot be faulted if they choose to ignore him. What the South seems to want is reunification with the North, and the North says it’s willing to talk about it on the condition they throw us out first. While we’re leaving, they also want us to participate in an aid package to bail them out of the chronic economic disaster they have created by choosing guns over butter.

The Southerners are rioting in the streets and their politicians are outdoing each other screaming to anyone who will listen, “Yankee go home.” Sub rosa, some of them want us to stay because, if we go, it will make international investors nervous and that would be bad for the likes of Samsung, Hyundai and Kia. Hyundai especially is playing both sides of the street. It is making a huge investment in the North. For one thing, it paid $500 million for the right to build all the civil engineering projects the North undertakes after it gets the necessary foreign aid—which is to say after hell freezes over. It is also building a huge multi-billion dollar manufacturing facility in the North. But it’s business plan is predicated on selling a good share of the projected output in the U.S. market which, given the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, is somewhat speculative. So there is no appetite in the executive suite for making investors any more antsy than they are given that the company is pouring trillions of Won into a black hole. They prefer that we stay, hoping that investors are stupid enough to think our presence will act as a deterrent to Mr. Kim. It’s the Korean stock exchange that drives what passes for policy among the tonier classes. Most folks though just want us gone. And if you ask me, that sounds like a plan.

The South Koreans aren’t the only ones who think our North Korean policy is inconvenient or ill conceived. After considerable saber rattling, the Northerners and the Southerners forced the U.S. to sit down with them in April, 2003. The meeting ended badly so the Chinese decided to get involved in a particularly inscrutable fashion. After intense diplomacy, they convened a six-way conference in August after which they announced a vague agreement to meet again. The dancing in the streets that might ordinarily greet such momentous happenings was subdued, however, when the North Koreans announced that they had already built six nuclear weapons and were reprocessing enough plutonium to make forty more. Still, the Chinese, preferring not to contemplate whom Honorable Kim planned to bomb, said the meeting had been a great success. The North Koreans, thinking perhaps China had not gotten the memo, said they saw no reason for further meetings until the U.S. meets all its demands—which is to say caves into extortion. One of the Japanese representatives chimed in with the view that the main stumbling block was the U.S. refusal to make the necessary concessions to said extortion. He didn’t say what the concessions were because, like everybody else, he has no idea what Kim Jong Il wants besides a library of porno flicks. All this is bonkers of course but it leads to the conclusion that the countries of the region are united in believing we are the bad guys. It’s the only thing that unites them and I have no stomach for bursting their bubble. I mean if it weren’t for the common enemy in Washington, the Koreans and the Chinese might come to blows over the volatile issue of the downfall of the Kingdom of Koguryo in 668 C.E. The Japanese and the Chinese might be at each other’s throats about whether the rape of Nanking was genocide or merely an excessively enthusiastic expression of Japanese eroticism. Barbarians like us, brought up in the straightjacket of Aristotelian logic, can never hope to understand the nuances of East Asian diplomacy. So here’s the policy: we declare the Korean War over, pack up and go home.

You say we can’t trust the North Koreans. Ten minutes after we leave, they’ll issue an ultimatum and maybe drop a bomb or two on Seoul for good measure. Maybe. Probably not, but maybe. The Great Beloved Leader is hard to predict. I mean in your heart you know he’s a fruitcake. But it’s none of our business. The South Koreans are all grown up. A free, self-determining, highly successful nation. Maybe they got that way on our dime, but now they get to make these decisions all by themselves. It may be hard to see the kids fledge but there you have it. And if they fall out of the nest and die, well we tried. It’s a cruel world. Pack up, Yankee, and mustering as much dignity as possible, go home.

It seems so obvious you have to wonder what you’re missing. What are we worried about? Not Japan. What we do in Korea has absolutely no effect on Japan where we have another tripwire in place. A lot of Japanese don’t want us either so maybe they should hold a plebiscite and we agree to abide by the results. Like the Koreans, it’s sometimes hard to know just what the Japanese want us to do. At the moment, they’re working with us in an effort to develop an antimissile system that could intercept rockets fired from North Korea (or, for that matter, China). The Northerners do not approve of this and have announced that Japan’s cooperation with the United States, “would serve as a detonating fuse to turn Japan into a nuclear sea of fire.” Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi says there’s nothing to worry about. “The reports I’ve had say it is nothing to make a fuss about,” he opined. The South Korean deputy reunification minister, Lee Bong Jo, agrees. If a nuclear sea of fire doesn’t faze these guys, you have to wonder what would.

Surely we don’t have to worry about Hawaii, at least not for the present. The day North Korea poses a threat to Hawaii, we simply bomb it back into the Stone Age. Al Qaeda? I don’t know but, to the extent North Korea may be a player on the terrorism stage, or on the nuclear proliferation stage, our response has got to be serious which is to say independent of South Korea. Anyway, the 37,000 troops we have in South Korea are not in a position to contribute to the war on terrorism. If anything, they are hostages limiting our flexibility.

I can get pretty worked up about this. I’m thinking I may be wrong and the South Koreans really want us to stay. I mean, I don’t speak the language and I am fully aware of my limitations when it comes to diplomatic subtleties. Moreover, I am biased. I actually agree with a lot of what I see on the placards. George Bush as a demented vampire isn’t so far from the truth. George is, at minimum, a muscular Christian who scares the hell out of me. As far as he’s concerned this is not about North Korea or South Korea. It’s about domestic politics right here in the good old US of A. The Administration does not want to get involved in Korea, at least not yet. At the same time, it does not want to be seen as turning tail. So it has adopted an amazingly cynical program of its own: we won’t even talk to the bad guys until they agree to improve their human rights record. Our President would like people to believe he gives a damn about human rights which is hard to do in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. South Korea’s response to this bit of diplomatic theater is classic. The former Foreign Minister, a Mr. Ban, says that of course human rights should be honored everywhere but the “particular situation” in North Korea must be taken into account and the issue should not “have a negative effect” on negotiations. The “particular situation” seems to be the fact that Mr. Ban knows Mr. Kim is a sadistic bloodsucker who is not overly stable and there’s not a hell of a lot he can do about it. For pure cynicism, then, Seoul and Washington seem to be in a dead heat.

The evident flaw in all this policy posturing is that North Korea is much more of a problem than Iraq ever was, even if the problems it poses are or should be more salient to their neighbors than to us. But Mr. Bush is not ready to deal with North Korea, thank God because I’d hate to see a renewal of hostilities. What’s stopping him is Iraq where the war he did want is not going so well. The American priorities are informed not by a strategic vision, not by a noble goal, not even by our self interest. They are driven by a sort of malignant neglect. The key strategic value is winning elections and that will be determined, Karl Rove thinks, by how Iraq plays on the six o’clock news. We can’t fight two wars at the same time, a fact that seems to have come as a surprise to the geniuses running the Pentagon. We’d lose them both which is worse than losing only one. So Korea takes a back seat.

Given all these uncertainties, I want to be very careful. Maybe we should stay in Korea after all. Why? How does it advance the interests of the United States to station 37,000 warriors in Korea? I have no idea but that may simply be a failure of imagination. Korea is not like the Middle East where, at least, we do have a strategic interest in the oil. Which brings us, at last, to the point of this essay.

We do need Middle Eastern oil but to think our entire misbegotten policy in the region is about oil is myopic. If it were, we would have kissed off Israel decades ago. One of the great myths is that our policy toward that woebegone country is based on some sort of high moral commitment. Sadly it is not, even though it may once have been. It would be more accurate to say that it is based on the high moral commitment of American Jews who, not incidentally, tend to vote their convictions. A lot of King George’s fundamentalist friends agree with them because they think that Armageddon cannot start until the Jews are secure in Israel. The Jews, of course, are not about to dissuade them even though they know the fundamentalists don’t have both oars in the water. I hope this isn’t news to you. A very similar calculus informs our Cuba policy which is driven by a bunch of aging refugees with grandiose ideas. But unlike Israel and Cuba, neither Iraq nor the Arabs have much of a constituency in the U.S. outside the oil companies. So our leaders were free to orchestrate the Iraqi war anyway they pleased. It was, however, a bargain with the devil. Once we invaded, there was never going to be a realistic exit strategy that would not be seen as turning tail. The worst part of that is it gives Jacques Chirac gloating rights and sets the United Nations down on the moral high ground. Damn!

Whenever the subject turns to Iraq (as you see it has), you get a lot of heated arguments. There is however one thing everybody except the Iraqis and I agree on: whatever else we do, we have to be sure to preserve the “territorial integrity” of Iraq. The thinking class believes it would be a disaster should the country descend into ethnic or regional chaos because it could spill over and destabilize or otherwise discommode the neighbors. The only problem, as it so often is, is reality: we are living in an era of religious and ethnic fragmentation. The Basques want to separate from Spain and France, the Kashmiris want to get out from under the heel of Hindu India, the Kurds want their own state carved out of Iraq, Iran and Turkey, Nigeria is coming apart at the seams, the Sudanese Muslims are slaughtering the Sudanese Christians, Bangladesh split off from Pakistan not too long ago and the Sikhs of India would like to follow suit, the Muslims of southern Thailand are fighting a nasty little rebellion against the Buddhists, there is no more Czechoslovakia, Quebec is sporadically unhappy being part of Canada, the only thing holding Syria together is a brutal dictatorship, and Central Asia is a witch’s brew of nationalities seeking nationhood. Think Chechnya. There is a word for this process. It is called Balkanization in honor of a thousand years of religious and ethnic hatreds among the brotherhood of Southern Slavs. You could just as easily call it Caucasianization in honor of the ethnic and religious fissions going on in Georgia and elsewhere. Georgia is a nation with just a hair more than five million souls—a tad smaller than Rio de Janeiro—who are waging four revolutions simultaneously (Abkhazia, Ajaria, South Ossetia and Mengrelia) requiring the attention of peacekeepers from Russia and the UN. In Africa, tribal war affects practically every country south of the Sahara and religious war is being waged in every other country. The fact that a lot of these people are starving does nothing to lessen their enthusiasm for slaughter. It must be admitted that many of the problems are the result of former colonial powers trying to impose European or, in the case of Georgia, Stalinist geopolitical logic on vast swaths of the globe that were perfectly happy with their own cultural logic which, often enough, involved mutual slaughter.

Can this teach us something about Iraq? Probably not, but the word Iraq derives from the medieval Arabic name for the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of Baghdad that was later called Al-Jazirah meaning The Island. From 1534 to 1918 this piece of modern Iraq was known variously as Baghdad or Mesopotamia (meaning between the rivers) and was a province (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire. It was home to numerous Arabic-speaking tribes belonging mostly to the Suni branch of Islam. In 1922, the British cobbled it together with Al Basrah, the province in the south inhabited primarily by Shiite Muslims and Ma’dan or Marsh Arabs. Mosul, the adjacent province in the north populated largely by Kurds and other non-Arabs, was added by treaty with Turkey in 1926. This was a big mistake given all the oil but (a) Turkey had been on the losing side in World War I, and (b) Turkey already had enough trouble with its own Kurds. But the important thing to take from history is that the so-called Iraqis have been engaged in tribal warfare with each other and their neighbors since the beginning of recorded history. They invented war more than five thousand years ago along with cuneiform writing, banking, despotism, imperialism and many of the other accouterments of what we like to think of as civilization. During the Ottoman era, this area was the eastern frontier and there was rarely a day of peace between the Suni Arabs and the Shiite Persians.

Thus, what is shown on today’s maps as Iraq is not a nation or a state but a federation yoked together recently by outside colonialists against the will of all the native parties and their neighbors. There is not now nor has there ever been equilibrium of any sort and any notion that order can be imposed is nothing but wishful thinking. “A democratic Iraq” is a contradiction in terms; “at peace with its neighbors” is delusional. In the absence of a brutal dictatorship, the only force that could possibly hold the parties together is oil to which all three have some reasonable claim. But these are not reasonable people given to cooperation and compromise. To Iraqis, freedom means the freedom to riot, pillage and kill each other and everyone else. The vision of the United States Marine Corps—which has known and successfully dealt with fanaticism before—negotiating with what appears to be a ragtag militia that has fought it to a standstill is revealing. As a nation, the United States is simply not willing to use the overwhelming force that would be needed to subdue its tormentors. If it wouldn’t do it in Vietnam after wasting 50,000 lives, it will not do it in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Even the Soviets were not willing to do it in Afghanistan. Their half-hearted attempt to do so contributed mightily to their downfall when the comrade citizens got sick of the bloodshed. (Note to Karl Rove: you might want to fact check this.)

So where are we? Well, in a few short years, America has alienated pretty much the whole world. It wasn’t easy. The war was just the last straw and it is making everything worse every hour we spend there. Why don’t we leave? It seems to me that our mission in Iraq has, as our own beloved leader has said, been accomplished. The Great Evildoer is in our custody. Neither he nor his successors will threaten anyone with weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future for reasons too embarrassing to mention. The only thing left is nation building which Dear Leader denounced in his 2000 campaign.

Anyway, there is no nation. Get used to it. The good folk who live there don’t want us to build one for them. In this non-desire, they are joined by like-minded colleagues imported from Al Qaeda and Hamas. They do not want democracy. They want a dictatorship, some preferring one or another Islamic model, others a Baathist one. Anyway, it seems to me, the idea of imposing democracy is another sort of contradiction in terms. So why are we working so hard to convince ourselves that we are, in Mr. Bush’s words, “doing God’s work?” What are they saying? Is God pissed off at Iraq the way he once was at Sodom? Are smart bombs his modern version of fire and brimstone? If that’s what they think…well, that’s blasphemy. That describes a God who is either stupid or sociopathic or both.

It is basically impossible to extricate yourself from a quagmire while retaining even a shred of dignity. But if you’ve ever been trapped in one, you know that your only other option is to drown. You are already wet, filthy and invested with bugs you don’t want to know about. It is just not worth trying to preserve what little dignity you have left. Every fiber of your being is shouting, “Get the hell out of here!” But, you say, abandoning Iraq now will have dire consequences. Yes, it will. The Arabs will be very mad at us and oil futures will go through the roof in anticipation of another embargo. The right wing will be in full voice demanding to know “Who lost Iraq?” The question, of course, will be moot because Iraq will no longer exist. They wouldn’t like the answer anyway because it would mean Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush would have to fall on their swords.

Withdrawing from Iraq will be calamitous in ways we can’t begin to imagine but, even so, staying there is a fool’s game. The President is forever giving speeches in front of what Madison Avenue calls scrims that bear the motto of the day. For the forthcoming concession speech, the scrim should say, “About face.” But, given the administration’s penchant for the big lie, it will probably say, “Advancing to the rear.”