Results Not Just Resolve
This is my first posting here, so let me start with a confession: I am a Yankees fan. I know that’ll upset and offend some of my America Abroad compadres. But I’ve been very happy about Joe Torre saying that he’s finally seeing grit in this team, that sense of resolve that is crucial to seeing things through. But grit and resolve won’t be enough if they also don’t hit, pitch and do what they need to do to win.
And so too with foreign policy. At Fort Bragg and after London, President Bush has stayed on message about the need to show resolve. Resolve in Iraq, resolve in the GWOT. But the issue can’t be just the will to stay the course --- it also has to be whether the policies we are staying with are sound enough and solid enough to win in our arenas.
On Iraq the latest argument is that public support will hold as long as the public thinks we’re winning. That comes especially from my friend and Duke colleague Peter Feaver, based on his scholarly research and now in his capacity of having just joined the Bush NSC Staff. The research comes from a two-year project that Peter and I have been directing together. And we’ve had this debate before, as scholars as well as policy wonks-partisans. He’s right that success makes the political heart stay fonder. But the public is not infinitely spinnable. They don’t think we’re succeeding in Iraq because we’re not. I’ll come back to public opinion another time in more detail, but the basic pattern is that public support is greatest when force is used to restrain aggression and least when it is trying to remake governments. That’s a key reason why support was so high for the war itself --- Saddam was an aggressor, he was said to have WMD, to be linked to al Qaeda. But since that “mission accomplished", it’s been about the more fundamentally political task of remaking the government, and the basic instincts of our “pretty prudent public” are to doubt that force works very well for this objective. The facts on the ground are reinforcing this disposition, and unless those facts change no speech, no framing, not even a Bush version of Reagan’s “I’m a contra too” t-shirt (which also didn’t win over public opinion) is going to convince the public that we’re winning. Only a policy that genuinely does better at the reality of winning and not just the image of winning has a chance of doing that.
In this regard Dan Benjamin is right that in terms of terrorism Iraq has left us worse off. Let’s hold the administration to the very metric Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set almost two years ago: “Every day,” Rumsfeld said, we need to ask ourselves “are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists than the radical clerics and madrassas are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Sure, deposing Saddam, ending his horrific rule and some other achievements go in the credits column. But the training ground that’s been provided for terrorists, the motivations that have been fed, the people that have been killed (Americans and as Anne-Marie Slaughter stresses also other foreign nationals and especially Iraqis), and the draining of our own resources (military, fiscal, diplomatic political capital) and squandering of our own power put vastly much more in the debits column.
Two ideas, one internal to Iraq and one international, to put into the mix of alternative policies. One concerns the Iraqi troops and security forces that must be trained and made capable to both work with us and then replace us. Why are we struggling so to get these numbers up while agreeing that the Shiite and Kurdish militias, already pretty robust in numbers and capabilities, are to be kept as separate sectarian armed forces outside the formal structure of this new Iraqi state? Even if the Iraqi central forces were strong and numerous enough, this still would be its own ticking time bomb --- one of the cardinal principles for any state, going back to Max Weber, is that it have authoritative control of the means of legitimate violence in its society. I’ve heard the arguments about pushing the Kurds and Shiites on this being more than the political traffic will bear. But where is the example of a state that stayed stable, peaceful and just while allowing private armies to roam and ruin in the name of their own subgroups? This could be a positive twofer, strengthening the Iraqi state today and avoiding undermining it tomorrow.
The other is to make a real effort to get more international support. The London terrorism does reinforce the sense that we all lose if Iraq goes further south than it already has. Some anti-Americans may still be willing to pay this price to put thumbs in our face, but there’s plenty of consensus to work with in Europe, at the UN and elsewhere internationally on the need to avoid an anarchic Iraq as even more of a feeder of global terrorism. It’s way too late to get other countries to commit troops. But it’s not too late to strengthen a political consensus and to get more support for key political, economic and security aspects of Iraqi state-building. President Bush has forfeited one opportunity after another to do anything more than say work with us on our terms within our strategy with us calling all the shots. It’s high time to be more open to making common cause, to developing joint strategies that tap others’ comparative advantages, and yes to saying “we need your help”. I know, I know, George Bush won’t even admit a mistake at his own press conference, let alone internationally. But no one is asking for true confessions or getting on the therapy couch, just for a little pragmatism.
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Welcome aboard Bruce, but sorry to hear you are a fan of "The Evil Empire". GO RED SOX, lol!!!
The other is to make a real effort to get more international support. The London terrorism does reinforce the sense that we all lose if Iraq goes further south than it already has. Some anti-Americans may still be willing to pay this price to put thumbs in our face, but there’s plenty of consensus to work with in Europe, at the UN and elsewhere internationally on the need to avoid an anarchic Iraq as even more of a feeder of global terrorism.
Our Iraq policy has already had a detrimental effect on the GWOT. The London bombings underscore the problem. By invading Iraq we have provided the extremists an opportunity to reach out to disillusioned young Muslims worldwide. We had a chance after the fall of Baghdad to gain the hearts and minds of the Sunnis and we missed our opportunity. Then by pushing elections when it was clear the Sunnis weren't going to participate, we marganilzed them even more. I would love to see the UN more involved in Iraq. The problem is getting both the US and the UN to agree to greater cooperation. Sadly, all I feel we've done in Iraq is get ourselves bogged down in a centuries old Iraqi sectarian war where there isn't a good exit strategy. The best we can hope for is that we can bring the Sunnis in from the cold, get them involved with the government, and hopefully the violence will subside long enough for us to get out. Once we are gone, if the violence resumes anew hopefully then the world community will be the ones to step in.
July 13, 2005 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I appreciate your analysis. It has the unfortunate attribute of being rational and pragmatic when none of the key actors are that, or willing to be it.
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I wouldn't know this first hand, but my impression from everything told about fundamental political realities in Iraq is that a Shia/Sunni civil war is what the Iraqi players who matter consider then necessary next step in Iraq's political evolution after such long and bitter oppression of the Shia by the Sunni. The settlement of such scores- of lifetimes- is perhaps unavoidable. This is fatal to any attempt at a successful government continuous with the present American occupation, if true. And if so, the inescapable American action will need to be withdrawal from the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad to portions of Iraq outside the sharpest Shia/Sunni overlap areas and fighting, areas turned into protectorates for civilians. Amusingly enough, they would be roughly coincident with the northern (Kirkuk) and southern (Chaldaean) oil fields.
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Secondly, you have expectations of the Bush Administration being able to champion a rational and pragmatic politics. This is to misunderstand the political cause and coalition these people head. The element that ties their coalition together is a set of ideas that desire can overwhelm reality, i.e. magic. The result is a Party that behaves as a diffuse occultism and its actions parse into assertions of the axioms of the occult identified by Constant. Right now the Bush people have used up two of the axioms- which amount in this matter to assertions of Utopia possible in Iraq by obedience to ideology, and the Manichaeanish assertion of the Americans as salvation and Hussein as damnation- with their Believers and are down to assertion of the third as what will conform Iraq to their design.
This third axiom is the omnipotence of the will of the Truly Initiated, and that is why we keep on hearing talk of "resolve" and "determination" of particular people and groups of people leading to Victory, yet no detailed explanation of how, exactly, these qualities are efficacious in detail or why exactly the people to whom we are asked to give our trust will be the agents of this turnaround.
There is no actual strategic plan for the War On Terror or one for Iraq adhered to by the Administration because any such plan is a denial of the power of the will and (occult) wisdom of the people- the High Priests/Mages- put in charge of these things. Submitting to reality would mean all of their efforts to deny and escape trend- submission to the Modern condition- are in vain, and that cannot be admitted in a political alliance that proposes to defeat Modernity. Faith must always be held to be a higher power than Reality. Look at the whole track record of this Administration, what people like Woodward and DeIulio and O'Neill tell, who and what Bush is and roleplays, what the true material/substance (such as it is) of the '00 and '02 and '04 Republican campaigns was.
July 13, 2005 8:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran
Hamstrung by the Iraq debacle, all Bush can do is gnash his teeth as the hated mullahs in Iran cozy up to their co-religionists in Iraq.
By Juan Cole
July 21, 2005 9:53 AM | Reply | Permalink