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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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20 October 2009 By Bruce P. Cameron In weighing
a future course on the Afghan War, President Barack
Obama might want to ponder the lessons of two other
recent American interventions, “regime modification”
in Nicaragua at the end of the contra war and “regime
change” in Iraq achieved though a U.S. invasion and
occupation.
“Regime change” – the overthrow of a targeted
government and removal of its key institutions – may
offer the swaggering pleasure of total domination, but
“regime modification,” which seeks significant change
while accepting a continued role by former enemies,
may achieve U.S. national interests at a much lower
cost and ultimately be more sustainable.
Obama faces that kind of choice in Afghanistan,
either going all in militarily to defeat the Taliban –
the country’s former rulers who were ousted by the
U.S. invasion in 2001 – or accepting a more limited
end game that may envision a coalition government that
includes the Taliban, while insisting that al-Qaeda
terrorists be kept out.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush confronted a
similar decision regarding Afghanistan after Soviet
troops pulled out ending a decade-long occupation that
had been resisted by CIA-backed mujahedeen rebels. The
goal of the CIA’s semi-covert war had been to expel
Soviet forces from the country.
After the Soviet departure, Bush had the choice of
accepting a proposal from Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev to negotiate a coalition government that
would have included both the Soviet-backed communist
regime in Kabul and the mujahedeen – or of making the
new U.S. goal the complete destruction of the
communist government.
Urged on by hardliners in his administration, Bush
opted for full-scale regime change in Afghanistan,
with the expectation that the government headed by
communist leader Najibullah would fall quickly and
CIA-backed forces could then claim total victory.
However, Najibullah’s army managed to beat back a
mujahedeen offensive in 1990 and the communist
government didn’t collapse until 1992 – when the
Soviet Union no longer existed and new Russian
President Boris Yeltsin cut off support. By then,
however, the prospects for a negotiated end to the
Afghan conflict had faded.
Najibullah was replaced by one of the more moderate
mujahedeen commanders, Ahmad Shah Massoud, a member of
the Tajik minority. However, Massoud lacked a major
ally from the dominant Pashtun population and thus
made little progress in defeating more extreme
mujahedeen warlords and bringing order to Afghanistan.
Finally, a new Pashtun group found a winning
message: End the fighting, control the warlords, clean
up the corruption, hold elections and perhaps bring
the King back. This group was the Taliban, young
Islamic fundamentalists who had been organized from
refugee camps inside Pakistan by Pakistan’s
intelligence agency, the ISI.
When the ISI-backed Taliban drove Massoud from
Kabul in 1996 – and lynched Najibullah who had
remained behind – they began to show their true face.
Their idea of reform was to transform Afghanistan into
a medieval Pashtun village governed by repressive
Islamic law that denied education and other rights to
women.
The Taliban also provided sanctuary to Arab
extremists who had come to Afghanistan for the
anti-Soviet jihad and later formed an anti-Western
terrorist organization, al-Qaeda.
In the case of George H.W. Bush’s 1989 decision,
the insistence on “regime change,” rather than “regime
modification,” transformed what had been a significant
achievement for U.S. foreign policy – the ouster of
Soviet troops from Afghanistan – into what evolved
over the next two decades into a foreign policy
disaster.
- The Nicaraguan comparison
In contrast, one can examine how the Nicaraguan
conflict was resolved with “regime modification” based
on compromise and collaboration among former enemies.
The Nicaraguan story began with the 1979 victory of
leftist Sandinista rebels over longtime U.S. -backed
dictator Anastasio Somoza. When Ronald Reagan became
president in 1981, he viewed the Sandinista regime as
representing a Central American beachhead for the
Soviet Union’s “evil empire.” Reagan authorized the
CIA to give covert military aid to a contra rebel
force that conducted raids into Nicaraguan territory.
Reagan’s covert war always tip-toed along the line
of “regime change.” Officially the administration
insisted that it only wanted to modify Sandinista
behavior, like discouraging its friendly ties to Cuba
and the Soviet Union and in stopping its assistance to
other leftist movements in Central America.
Yet, by the mid-1980s, it was clear that the
administration’s goal was to see the contras march
into Managua and take power. Under the then-dominant
neoconservative ideology, it was considered an
indisputable truism that “communist” regimes could
only be removed by force.
That neocon view set up a confrontation between the
presidency and Congress, where Democrats favored a
less aggressive strategy and were alarmed by the
brutality of some contra units – as well as high-risk
CIA actions such as mining Nicaragua’s harbors.
To stop the excesses, Congress imposed restrictions
on CIA aid to the contras, first barring efforts to
overthrow the Nicaraguan government and then banning
military assistance outright.
Those prohibitions, known collectively as the
Boland Amendments after their sponsor, Rep. Edward
Boland, angered administration hardliners, such as
Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative assistant
secretary of state for Latin America who emerged as a
leading voice for the contra cause.
Reagan administration officials bristled at
constraints on presidential power and, in defiance of
Congress, started off-the-books secret programs to
supply the contras with weapons and money. Those
operations gave rise to the Iran-Contra scandal in
late 1986.
Over the next year, as a congressional
investigation kept the Reagan administration on the
defensive, five Central American presidents got
together to seek peace. They met in Guatemala City in
August 1987 and endorsed a plan put forward by
President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, calling for free
elections in Nicaragua and demobilizing the contras.
Yet, it was doubtful that the Arias plan would have
stood much of a chance if House Majority Leader Jim
Wright had not intervened.
A Texas Democrat with longstanding personal
knowledge of Central America, Wright worked with Arias
to refine the plan's language and to pressure both the
Sandinistas and their political opposition to make
concessions.
However, the Arias plan still didn’t please Reagan
hardliners who believed that only more years of contra
warfare could force the Sandinistas to accept major
changes, including elimination of its revolutionary
government and its replacement by a regime acceptable
to Washington.
So, by late 1987, after the congressional
Iran-Contra investigation had run its course, the
Reagan administration tried to revive the contra war.
In particular, Abrams lobbied for a new contra aid
package by citing threats that the Sandinistas
supposedly posed to regional stability.
However, Wright and other supporters of a
negotiated settlement rejected those alarms as
exaggerated and pushed instead for U.S. acceptance of
the Arias plan. The decisive vote on contra support
came on Feb. 3, 1988, with Wright and other contra-aid
opponents carrying the day, 219-212.
Wright’s push for a negotiated solution also
maneuvered the Sandinistas into accepting an earlier
date for presidential elections, which pitted
incumbent Daniel Ortega against opposition leader
Violeta Chamorro. Her campaign enjoyed U.S. financial
backing and also benefitted from voters’ hopes that
her election would end both the brutal contra war and
a harsh American trade embargo.
When the election was over on Feb. 25, 1990,
Chamorro had won handily, garnering 55 percent of the
vote to Ortega’s 41 percent. The decisive victory put
Chamorro into the presidential palace but didn’t
entirely drive out the Sandinistas who retained key
posts in what amounted to a coalition government.
While happy about the Sandinista defeat, some of
the old Reagan crowd disapproved of the Sandinistas
holding any continued influence in the government. But
the new political equilibrium in Nicaragua contributed
to greater regional stability as civil wars in El
Salvador and Guatemala also were brought to negotiated
settlements.
In the end, U.S. policy – especially Wright’s
intervention in the late 1980s – had promoted “regime
modification,” rather than “regime change,” an ending
not to everyone’s liking but a result that stopped the
killing and restored at least a semblance of order to
Central America.
For their part, the Sandinistas largely accepted
their role as an opposition party and competed for
power in subsequent elections. (Ortega regained the
presidency by the ballot box in 2007, and critics say
his governance since then has exhibited some of his
old anti-democratic tendencies.)
Despite the largely successful outcome from “regime
modification” in Central America, the neoconservatives
never lost their hunger for more fundamental “regime
change.”
When the neocons returned to power in George W.
Bush’s administration – with Abrams holding a key
Middle East policy post on the National Security
Council staff – they pushed for full-blown “regime
change” in Iraq.
They got their chance after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks
on New York and Washington and after the U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan drove the Taliban from power by late
2001.
Under neocon urging, Bush turned his attention to
Iraq, diverting U.S. military and intelligence assets
from Afghanistan to the Iraq theater. The March 2003
invasion took only three weeks to topple the regime of
Saddam Hussein.
But the neocons were not satisfied with simply a
change at the top. They wanted to thoroughly
reconstruct Iraq as a kind of model government in the
Middle East that would be a reliable – or at least
acquiescent – friend of the United States and Israel.
In the first weeks of the US occupation, retired
Gen. Jay Garner ran the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq. He favored quickly
re-establishing the Iraqi bureaucracy and military
with many of its old officials back in place. There
also would be prompt elections and a rapid turnover of
power to the new Iraqi government. That, in his view,
would allow a speedy drawdown of U.S. military forces.
Garner listed his reasons for standing the Iraqi
army back up early, including the danger of having
300,000 to 400,000 unemployed soldiers roaming the
streets and the need to use the army for national
reconstruction.
Garner also worked with Iraqis in key posts at
various ministries even though they had been members
of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
But Garner had little staff in Iraq and less clout
in Washington. He was soon out-muscled by the
ascendant neocons at the Pentagon. He was done in
particularly by Douglas Feith, Under Secretary for
Policy in the Defense Department who was in charge of
day-to-day Pentagon activities in Iraq.
By May 11, 2003, barely a month after U.S. forces
had taken Baghdad, Garner was removed by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replaced by ex-diplomat
and neocon favorite Paul “Jerry” Bremer. This time,
the neocons weren’t going to be satisfied with just a
change of faces at the top.
After arriving in Iraq on May 16, 2003, Bremer made
two decisions in the next eight days that changed the
whole tenor of the occupation and undid all of
Garner’s work.
Bremer banned members of the top four ranks of the
Baath Party from government employment. He also
discharged the personnel in the Army, the Navy,
Military Intelligence, the Interior Ministry, and the
Defense Ministry.
Feith’s office was responsible for drafting the
executive order that reversed the administration’s
earlier thinking that stressed the value of showing
leniency. Feith argued that dissolution of the Iraqi
armed forces was inevitable and the U.S. should
embrace it.
What Bremer’s extreme de-Baathification did was to
remove from the civil service between 30,000 and
50,000 people who were the brains and the backbone of
the government ministries.
Then, Bremer’s order dissolving the armed forces
cashiered 386,000 military personnel, who were out on
the streets along with 285,000 ex-officials of the
Interior Ministry.
In one week, Bremer had purged from the government
more than 500,000 people, many of them carrying
weapons and some with the organizing skills that would
prove crucial for putting together an insurgency.
The most aggrieved were Sunnis who had occupied
most of the higher jobs in government and comprised
most of the army officers. Their potential for
restoring order after Saddam Hussein’s ouster was
transformed into a means to create mayhem and
rebellion.
But that was not the expectation of the neocons who
saw Iraq as a chance to test out their theories of
“regime change” during an era of American military
supremacy.
Young neocons and Republican activists were soon
flooding into Iraq with ideas for reorganizing the
entire Iraqi political structure into some idealized
democracy, equipped with mini-versions of commissions
to regulate securities and oversee elections.
Ideology had won out over practicality. Hubris was
the prevailing sentiment. It apparently never occurred
to the neocons that their decisions would provoke a
stubborn insurgency. Nor did they seem to understand
the value of having an indigenous bureaucracy to help
carry out an occupation.
The neocons were shooting at bigger fish. They had
a vision of an Iraqi democracy as a base for a
“democratic tsunami” that would sweep the Middle East
and extend as far as China, according to neocon
theorist Joshua Muravchik.
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer eyed
Lebanon and Syria as the next two countries that would
undergo democratization in this neoconservative
moment. That, in turn, would protect Israel from
attack, since it was central to neocon theories that
democracies don’t attack other democracies.
However, these theories ignored the realities of
the Middle East, where true democracy – representing
the opinions of the populace – might just as easily
reflect the strong anti-American and anti-Israeli
sentiments of the Arab “street,” as was seen with
Hamas’ electoral victory in the Palestinian
territories in 2007.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, many Sunnis felt
disenfranchised and disempowered. They chose to rise
in rebellion against their Shiite rivals and the
Americans. Sunni insurgents even collaborated with
elements of al-Qaeda that had opened up an affiliated
organization in Iraq under the brutal leadership of
Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The American occupation of Iraq might have gone
quite differently – and quite a bit better – if the
original Garner plan had been implemented, restoring
the old bureaucracy and army, though under new
management, and then withdrawing U.S. troops as
quickly as possible.
That, however, would have represented a form of
“regime modification” like House Majority Leader
Wright helped mid-wife in Nicaragua. That required
compromise and a willingness to share power with old
enemies.
The neocons, who were unwilling to budge on their
ideological certainties, preferred the more sweeping
“regime change,” wiping the old government slate clean
and starting with a tabula rasa that would allow the
sketching of an entirely new government.
[For the most comprehensive report on these
events, see Rajiv Chandrasekaram’s Imperial Life in
the Emerald City.]
The results of that neocon political experiment in
Iraq have included an estimated price tag of $1
trillion-plus, and more than 4,300 American soldiers
dead along with uncounted thousands and thousands of
dead Iraqis.
In deciding what course to follow in Afghanistan
now, the United States ironically finds itself back at
a moment similar to the one that faced President
George H.W. Bush in 1989 – whether to compromise and
take half a loaf or to reach for the whole loaf even
if that means fighting for years into the future.
In making that choice, President Obama might want
to gauge the relative costs and benefits between
all-or-nothing “regime change” versus the
give-and-take of “regime modification.”
-- Bruce P. Cameron has served as a Washington
lobbyist for various governments over the past several
decades, including Nicaragua, Mozambique, Portugal and
East Timor. He is the author of My Life in the Time of
the Contras.
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