Feature
Dyer predictions
by Matt Nippert
The last western soldier will leave Iraq late next year, predicts a long-time observer, leaving behind carnage, division and dislocation.
The Middle East is heading for a boom, Gwynne Dyer reckons, and he’s not talking about soaring crude oil prices. The man who taught military history at Sandhurst writes that “down the road, sooner or later, lies Armageddon”.
Speaking from the Sydney Writers’ Festival where he is promoting his latest book, The Mess They Made*, Dyer acknowledges that his views might be considered pessimistic. He says the US faces defeat and humiliation in a “broken” Iraq and will withdraw from a region that is entering “partial meltdown”.
Add to that mix the freezing of relations between Israel and a Palestine divided into what is now known as Hamastan and Fatahstine, and chaos surely lies ahead. And, says Dyer, there’s nothing the United Nations, the US or New Zealand can or should do about it.
Dyer, a syndicated Canadian columnist on international affairs whose work appears in a number of New Zealand newspapers, says that four decades of stasis in the Middle East can’t persist. (There have only been two substantive changes in government since 1967: the Iranian Revolution and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.)
Although terrorism has become the foreign-policy justification du jour, Dyer notes that terrorist attacks peaked between 1985 and 1988 and have been declining since. And forget the rhetoric about bringing the West to its knees. He argues that Islamic terrorism is mostly “a revolutionary movement whose primary goal is to overthrow Arab governments”.
“The West may not like some of the regimes that emerge,” he writes, “but it’s still none of our business.”
But why, out of the many Middle East pundits, should we listen to him? After all, forecasting is hardly an exact science. In 1982, Dyer wrote and presented the TV documentary series War, and although one episode was nominated for a best-documentary Oscar, his central prediction on the Cold War was the inevitability of thermonuclear Armageddon.
“Well, it could have ended that way,” he says. The collapse of the Soviet Union acted as an unforeseen circuit-breaker and threw established world views into chaos.
“History doesn’t run on rails, there are branching contingencies. No forecasts more than 25 minutes into the future are guaranteed, but if you deal in probabilities and you know the region, you’re generally more often right than wrong.”
Fortunately, given the main focus of The Mess They Made, Dyer’s recent record on Iraq is considerably better. In early 2003, just after the invasion began, he spoke to this magazine of the inevitability of the US public losing their stomach for war. He was even so bold as to talk numbers.
Making reference to the events depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down that precipitated the 1993 withdrawal of US forces from Somalia, Dyer said: “I suspect that you start to find out where the Mogadishu Line is at around 500 dead.”
On January 17, 2004, three US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb, pushing the US fatality count past 500. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Centre quiz Americans on their opinion of President George Bush’s handling of Iraq. In mid-January 2004, approval stood at 59 percent. Three months later, that figure had slid to 40 percent.
Informed of his accuracy, Dyer laughs, saying, “I’m gratified about that”, but he quickly checks himself. “Well, gratified is perhaps the wrong word when you’re talking about casualty figures.” (This solemnity comes from the man who began War with the quote: “If you cannot take a joke, you should not have a defence budget.”)
Dyer’s short-term forecast for Iraq is that the last western soldier will depart just before President Bush formally leaves office on January 20, 2009. The declining level of approval for the war and low support for the President who initiated it are “practically indistinguishable, and rightly so”, he says.
“Add to that another 18 months of casualties – not huge numbers by Vietnam standards, but enough to fill tele‑vision screens – and tell me what number will support the war in November 2008? I don’t think I’m out on a limb here.”
Despite the sagacity of his “Mogadishu Line” estimate, the most accurate prophecy regarding modern Iraq isn’t Dyer’s at all – but he does quote it in his book:
For us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular, along the lines of the Baath party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have US military forces accept casualties and accept [the] responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. It makes no sense at all.
That soothsayer? Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, speaking in the wake of the first Gulf war.
One observer who concurs with Dyer is Reza Aslan. He says withdrawal is “inevitable”. An Iranian-American, Aslan penned the well-received No god but God and was the first to graduate from Harvard’s Divinity School with a masters degree focusing on Islam.
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