President Bush, in his August press conference, said, “The American people have got to understand the consequence of leaving Iraq.” I think he’s right. Before we can genuinely call for our troops to leave Iraq, we have to know what the end result of that process will look like. We have to know what failure means.

According to the President, failure in Iraq is…:

• A civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites
• Innocent civilians living their lives in fear
• The creation of “a safe-haven for terrorists”
• A message to reformers in the Middle East that the US has “abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror.”
• The first domino
• The creation of a more dangerous world
• Chaos in the region
• Telling our troops that they sacrificed for nothing
• A failure to secure our own country
• A sign that “we will have lost our soul as a nation”

Last week, we started looking into these descriptions of failure. This week, we’ll continue to do that. Today, we look at his fourth description.

Failure in Iraq tells reformers that we’ve given up on them

There was an interesting editorial by Afshin Molavi in the San Jose Mercury News recently, entitled, “`New Middle East’ based in boardrooms, not battles.” Mr. Molavi writes:

The “new Middle East” is forming in the board rooms of new and innovative businesses, in assertive private sectors demanding reform, in booming equity markets, cash-rich banks, state-owned investment houses and individual investors with global outlooks, and a new generation of entrepreneurs and businessmen (and women) creating real companies with real underlying values. [The twist, however, is that] the old centers of civilization — Persia (today’s Iran), Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), the Maghreb (northwest Africa), Syria and Egypt — are falling behind the more nimble and business-minded places such as Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Oman.

For Mr. Molavi, the economic reforms that are occuring in Egypt are the real “birth pangs of the Middle East,” which is a phrase that Secretary Rice used to describe the war in Lebanon. The economic reforms “could serve as the catalyst for reviving Egypt’s long-suffering middle class. And strong middle classes are the linchpin of sustainable democracies.”

That last line makes it clear that the “sustainable democracy” that the United States is hoping to create in Iraq is impossible with our troops on the ground. The presence of our troops creates instability in the region. We will never kill or capture all the rebels, nor we will we pacify them into some sort of compromise. Our presence provokes their violence.

And as reported in the NPR story I linked to last week, the violence is creating a mass exodus of the middle class. The people who can afford to leave Iraq either already have or are expecting to in the near future. In his Baghdad Diary, TIME’s Aparisim Ghosh writes, “For many Baghdad residents, the only hope for a decent life is to escape altogether…Those who can afford it are going abroad, mainly to Syria and Jordan. ‘The middle class is evaporating,’ says Iyad Allawi, who served as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister in 2004 and part of ‘05. ‘Every Middle Eastern country I go to, they tell me immigration from Iraq is rising fast.’”

Without the presence of the middle class, democracy has no hope in Iraq. But the middle class won’t return until the violence has stopped. And the violence will not stop as long as the United States has a military presence in the country. By staying in Iraq, we prevent the mission from ever being accomplished. By staying in Iraq, we prolong our already present failure.

Even further, the signal that our withdrawal will give to reformers is not that we have given up on them, but that their hope for a militarilly-enforced reform of the region is untenable. They will see that bullets will not effect the change they seek, and perhaps they will come to understand that books are now their only real hope. As many a West Wing episode has claimed, “Education is the magic bullet.”

Here are some statistics, as reported in “Knowledge Gap,” a Mother Jones article on a 2003 U.N. report on development in the Arab world:

• Only 53 newspapers are sold per 1,000 people in the Arab countries, compared with 285 in developed countries;
• Only 1.6 percent of the Arab population has Internet access; and there are just 18 computers per 1,000 people compared with global average of 78.3;
• Just 4.4 translated books per 1 million people were published between 1980 and 1985. The corresponding rate for Hungary was 519 books per 1 million people, and in Spain, 920 books.

It’s that last one that needs to change. Reading more newspaper would be good, and getting Internet access even better, but it is crucial for the region to get access to vast library that exist in the world’s literature. Just 4.4 books per million people! That is crazy. And unless that number can be vastly improved, that will be the number one reason why reform will never work in the region.

As Dr. Rima Khalaf, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the Regional Bureau for Arab States, said, “Knowledge increasingly defines the line between wealth and poverty, between capability and powerlessness and between human fulfilment and frustration.” Dr. Khalaf suggested “that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has only furthered Arab isolation from clusters of knowledge, because it has fostered rejection of the West.” The article also points out that, “The U.S. clampdown on visas to Arabs after 9/11 has prevented many Arabs from studying in U.S. universities. The report shows that the number of Arab students in the U.S. dropped by 30 percent between 1999 and 2002.”

If the United States doesn’t want reformers to think we have abandoned them, then perhaps we might want to start letting their children into our schools, where they can be presented with an alternative to blowing themselves up. In his Baghdad Diary, Ghosh writes, “In three and a half years of covering Iraq, I have not come across a single leader who has seemed able to rise above the petty political or sectarian interests. Never mind a Mandela; there’s not even an Iraqi Hamid Karzai.” Without an education system that opens the eyes of the younger generations, this will never change.

If failure in Iraq is a bad message for reformers, then our presence is an even worse one, for it gives them the hope that bullets will solve their problems, when that is simply not true.

Come back tomorrow to read “Failure Is Not An Option: Part 5.”