Gabriel Kolko: Cold War revisionist says US will lose the Iraq War no matter what it does

In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, American military historian Gabriel Kolko argues that the situation in Iraq is worse than ever and that the artificial nation, created after World War I, is breaking up. The "surge," he says, is also failing.

SPIEGEL: The long awaited results of the "surge" are now in. Has the surge succeeded? Is there reason for optimism in Iraq?

KOLKO: Both United States General David H. Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will deliver "progress" reports to Congress on Monday, but the skeptics far outnumber those who believe Bush's strategy in Iraq is succeeding. They will say that Shiite attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad have fallen but they will not add that Baghdad has been largely purged in many areas of Sunni inhabitants and their flight much earlier -- and not the increase in Americans -- is the reason "success" can be reported to Congress. Indeed, most of the administration's statistics have been met with a wave a skepticism.

The Iraq military but especially the political 'benchmarks' that this administration thought so crucial -- and used to justify its 'surge' of 28,500 additional troops -- have, in the opinion of Congress' Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued at the end of August, not been attained (there are now 168,000 American troops in Iraq, plus roughly half as many civilians). In its unexpurgated, original form, the GAO claimed that only three of the 18 Congressionally mandated "benchmarks" had been reached: violence was as high as ever; reconstruction was plagued by corruption on both the Iraqi and American sides; the Shiites and Sunnis were as disunited as ever, murdering each other; crucial laws, especially on oil, have not been enacted yet; and probably many political changes will never occur, and the like. Of its nine security goals, only two had been met. White House and Pentagon efforts to soften GAO criticisms failed....

SPIEGEL: What went wrong? Was the war doomed from the very beginning? How can the US military and the US government which is spending $3 billion per week in Iraq be losing the war?

KOLKO: The US is losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the very same reasons it lost all of its earlier conflicts. It has the manpower and firepower advantage, as always, but these are ultimately irrelevant in the medium- and long-run. They were irrelevant in many contexts in which the US was not involved, and they explain the outcome of many armed struggles over the past century regardless of who was in them, for they are usually decided by the socio-economic and political strength of the various sides -- China after 1947 and Vietnam after 1972 are two examples but scarcely the only ones. Wars are more determined by socio-economic and political factors than any other, and this was true long before the US attempted to regulate the world's affairs. Political conflicts are not solved by military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with the spread of weapons technology. Washington refuses to heed this lesson of modern history.