America - a world unto itself

Whatever the outcome of the latest increase in US troop numbers in Iraq, the time has come for us to ask why the Americans are so bad at foreign policy. How come the world's most powerful country has failed so badly in Iraq?

The issue here is not America's awesome war machine. Let's remember that it only took three weeks of shock and awe to thoroughly defeat Saddam Hussein's ramshackle army. But here we are almost four years after that victory, and there is simply no end in sight to the horrendous conflict.

We all know that part of the problem was poor post-war planning: dismantling Saddam's army and security forces, refusing to employ former members of the Baathist party, and a lack of clear ideas on how to build democracy.

It also seems that US troops have forgotten what they had learned about counterinsurgency tactics (not least, how to win hearts and minds) in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

But the US is good, very good, at conventional war. It is poor, very poor, at counterinsurgency warfare and post-war reconstruction of a defeated country. As in the Vietnam War, too few US troops in Iraq speak the local language or bother to understand the local culture.

In Iraq as well as Vietnam, the governments the Americans tried to help proved inadequate. Neither the one in Baghdad nor the one in Saigon gained the legitimacy to inspire its troops. And this proved to be the fundamental problem in both wars.

People such as Condoleezza Rice proclaimed that bringing democracy to Iraq would be like bringing democracy to defeated Germany and Japan after World War II. But these two countries, unlike Iraq, are not artificial constructs whose borders were dreamed up by colonial powers. There was a strong sense of nationhood intact in Germany and Japan after the war.

That is not the case in Iraq, which faces the prospect of ending up torn apart into separate warring provinces, like the former Yugoslavia.

And where were the US State Department advisers and National Security Council staff when it came to warning George W. Bush that a weak and defeated Iraq would inevitably lead to Iran becoming the dominant power in the region?

President George H.W. Bush did not allow his victorious army to march into Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf war, not least because he did not want to see Iran become the strongest power in the Middle East.

And yet that is precisely what is happening. The US has exchanged a relatively stable Middle East, with a constrained Iraq, for a region that will be dominated by a nuclear-armed and ambitious Iran ruled by extremist Islamic clerics.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies has recently observed that the US and its allies were blinded by possibilities in Iraq, such as freeing the Iraqi people from a brutal regime, ensuring that a hostile dictator did not possess weapons of mass destruction and creating a democratic government in the Middle East.

These lofty aims have given way to a desperate effort to arrest a downward spiral towards chaos and disintegration. There are no really satisfying answers in Iraq. All of the remaining options are bad. A defeated US pulling out of Iraq would be disastrous for international order. Digging in with more troops and incurring opprobrium for a failed venture will only do further harm to the already gravely damaged reputation of the US. Who believes any longer that the US would ever invade North Korea or Iran? And if we do not believe that, we can surely guess what the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran think.

With North Korea, Washington has proven incapable of preventing an impoverished dictatorship from consistently endangering the peace and stability of the world's most economically dynamic region. What sort of message does that send?

But the US cannot simply wash its hands of Iraq and go home. As others have observed, the consequences of defeat in Iraq will be much more serious than those in Vietnam. Of course, the risks are different this time. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, but in Iraq no other great power is involved. In that sense, the risk is lower.

When North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam, there was widespread concern that the dominoes would fall in South-East Asia to communism. That did not occur.

But in the Middle East the risk is that with the balance of power destroyed between Iraq and Iran, Tehran will seek to intimidate neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Jordan.

As Nicholas Kristof said recently in The New York Times, instead of invading Iraq and creating a pro-American bulwark, the US fought Iraq and Iran won.

In the end, it is impossible to fathom exactly what the Bush team thought it was doing after the fall of Baghdad. Unlike Vietnam, Bush never had to worry that escalation in Iraq would bring an all-out global war. Instead, he seems to have been conned by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld into accepting that more troops were not needed.

Now, when it is probably far too late, he thinks another 21,500 troops will do the trick in downtown Baghdad. I doubt it. The US eventually had 540,000 troops in Vietnam (compared with barely a quarter of that number in Iraq), and still it failed.

The conclusion must be that Americans simply don't understand the world. Partly this is to do with the sheer size of US power. America is a world unto itself and tends to see everything as a reflection of itself. But at least another part of the problem, in Vietnam and Iraq, is cognitive dissonance: a serious lack of understanding of other cultures (and that occasionally includes Australia).

As president Theodore Roosevelt said more than 100 years ago: "The country that loses its capacity to hold its own in actual warfare will ultimately show that it has lost everything." That is certainly not what we, as allies of the US, want to see as the epitaph of contemporary US foreign policy.