Never reinforce a failure

It’s come to this: Iraq is falling apart in a sectarian insurgency launched by the same nut-job Sunni fundamentalists trying to overthrow Assad’s Syrian regime – the very same guys the United States helped to foster in its haste to get rid of Assad. Talk about an own goal.

So now the line-up now is, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), backed by long-time US ally, fundamentalist Sunni Saudi Arabia, versus the Shiite-majority Maliki regime backed by long-time US enemy Iran.

The Yanks are going to have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Iran if they want to stop ISIS’s push for an expansionist Islamic “caliphate” stretching from Syria to Iran. The eerie cackling noise you can hear – that noise like a far-off out-of-tune radio – is Saddam Hussein laughing in his grave.

And here’s our idiot-child prime minister, fortuitously in Washington, pledging whatever happens, he’ll go all the way with Barak Obama. A few months back, when it never entered his head this might come to pass, he went on record to say the Afghanistan and Iraq adventures were probably dumb, in hindsight.

Now here he is writing a blank cheque for another round of dumbness. No doubt he’s hoping to weasel out of any meaningful contribution to an American re-entry into the conflict by trying John Howard’s trick. When George W Bush asked John to answer the call, John told the US President each of our special forces troops were worth 10 of anybody else’s and he’d send both of them.

As Obama noted, we sent a risible 1500 troops; if we’d have matched the US effort, we’d have sent 20,000. Actually the president’s maths were a bit out. If we’d have matched the US per-capita, we would have sent 12,000, but he had the right idea.

In the least-worst scenario, Obama will decide to help the Iraqi regime by launching a few drone strikes and our less-than-token contribution will be to send a destroyer to the Gulf, but who knows?

The trouble with the drone option, is when an insurgency becomes widespread, drone strikes picking off small handfuls of militants are useless. The best you can do is to kill a leader here and there, and unless your intelligence is very good indeed, you probably won’t even do that, and needless to say, the further the insurgency spreads its influence, the less reliable the US’s intelligence will become. Which brings you back to carpet-bombing insurgent-held towns, or putting boots on the ground, or both, in other words, to a large scale military reoccupation.

The Maliki regime can probably – with Iran’s help, mostly – hold Baghdad and the south of the country – in other words, the Shiite majority areas. Even if they recapture Mosul it will likely be held as an isolated pocket. The north and west of Iraq will remain effectively in the control of ISIS, just as large swathes of Afghanistan have remained in control of the Taliban, or the Haqqani network.

All this has long-term implications for the price of petrol. Iran is no longer an oil exporter, Iraq is, and so is ISIS-backer, Saudi Arabia. If Iraq goes into decline, or goes offline altogether, the price of crude will head north even faster than it is at the moment. The big winner, geo-politically speaking, will be Russia, which has passed Saudi Arabia as the biggest global producer and will remain so for some years.

The criminal folly of George W Bush, Tony Blair, and the neoconservatives was to believe they could grab Iraq’s oil in a financially self-supporting war and turn the country into a free market “democracy” dominated by American corporations. We destabilised a stable country which was about as close to democracy as the laws of historical development would allow and left it a smoking ruin, ripe for Balkanisation.

Nothing remains of that monstrous bit of hubris and in decades to come, the residents of Iraq (or whatever state or states replace it) will look back on the years of the Saddam Hussein regime as the golden age of peace and plenty – in spite of the Iran-Iraq war, Gulf War I, and all the rest of it.

There’s an old military saying – drummed into the heads of tyro infantry leaders – you should never reinforce a failure. There’s another which says the best possible plan isn’t the best possible plan, it’s a good plan carried out quickly. In the circumstances, that would be bringing about the fall of the Abbott regime and ending the US alliance.