A Turtle's Lament
I've already given my general impressions of George's book, discussed something I thought missing in it, and commented on some of the prewar antiwar arguments. Now I'd like to turn to new questions that the book raises.
Basically, The Assassins' Gate is a story about how the Bush administration botched the planning for transforming Iraq's domestic structures after the war and how the situation on the ground spun out of control once the fighting stopped. If one finds the book's narrative compelling--and I do--three questions immediately present themselves:
- Was the train wreck that occurred--the insurgency, increased communal tensions, an all-too-possible future slide into open civil war or state failure--an inevitable result of the invasion itself, or could it have been avoided through a different handling of the occupation?
- If it could have been avoided, was there any reason to believe at the time that the Bush administration would handle things better than it did?
- If there was, then why did the administration bungle things so badly?
As for the first question, the book argues that things could have gone much better had the Bush administration approached and executed the occupation differently. Some of George's critics think this is rubbish, and that the problems his book records (or something like them) would have emerged no matter what.
I agree with George, but I recognize that at this point our case is on somewhat shaky ground, since we're reduced to arguing a counterfactual. That said, if you look at some of the administration's key bungles and imagine different choices, I don't think it's all that hard to construct a plausible scenario that leads to a much brighter picture:
--the administration recognizes the need for a smooth transition between the end of the fighting and the start of the postwar era, plans and issues instructions accordingly, and moves swiftly to establish order.
--the administration recognizes that there is no need to do the job alone, and many costs and risks if it does, so it mends fences with its European allies and others, turning the occupation into a joint enterprise in which many players contribute resources, lend their legitimacy to the project, and feel a substantial stake in its success.
--the administration executes the occupation according the "best practices" in the field developed over many previous years and experiences, flooding the country with troops (to ensure that Iraqis feel safe and opposition is discouraged) and moving quickly to provide benefits and basic services (so that ordinary Iraqis associate the occupation with a better life).
--the administration takes care not to fuel unnecessary opposition on the ground and avoids moves (such as extreme debaathification and the disbanding of the Iraqi army) that create a pool of disgruntled but capable foes.
Had the administration done these things, I seriously doubt whether the prospects of the new Iraq would look as bleak today as they do now. Yes, no one likes to be occupied and many people would be impatient for outsiders to leave, and yes, Iraq would still be a divided and traumatized country with many problems, but I think there's a good chance that the new Iraq would now be reasonably stable and that significant majorities--in Iraq, in the United States, in the world at large--would consider it a major improvement on the previous regime. (Whether this alone would have justified the war, of course, is another question for another day.)
"Fine," the remaining critics might say. "I'm still dubious, but for the sake of argument let's grant you that if such a course had been followed, things would be much better now. But there was never any chance that such a course would be followed, so it's ridiculous to feel betrayed. People like you were the administration's duped fellow travelers, and your anger at them is just displaced guilt over your own naivete and irresponsibility."
To me, this charge stings the hardest, because it obviously contains some truth. And yet, and yet...I don't accept it completely, and not just (I think) from denial. I believed then, and believe now, that it was indeed possible to envision the Bush administration following a different approach. Why? Ironically, because of Ahmed Chalabi.
During the late 1990s, dissatisfaction in Washington with the Clinton administration and its Iraq policies coalesced around a classic "free lunch" solution: "regime change" via the efforts of the Iraqi opposition, personified in the Iraqi National Congress headed by Chalabi. Almost all serious national security professionals knew this was a silly idea, likely to result in a "Bay of Goats" disaster if ever tried, and yet it was touted widely in Congress and among Republicans because it seemed to offer a way around the substantial costs and risks associated with other Iraq policies.
Because they were not totally crazy, neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration prior to 9/11 ever really tried to put the idea into practice. And when the Bush team did decide to go to war with Iraq, it ended up doing so not by using a ragtag gang of exiles but the U.S. military itself, helped by Britain. Even an administration supposedly run by neoconservatives hanging on Chalabi's every word, that is, rejected the obviously misguided Chalabi plans for fighting the war and embraced a serious professional approach when it decided that the job actually had to be done. (The debate over Rumsfeld's thinning out of the invasion force, one should recall, was a separate issue, and much less important than his decision to fight the war directly rather than indirectly, as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, among others, had long argued.)
So...basically, I thought the same thing would happen with the postwar planning. Ken Pollack's book The Threatening Storm is now remembered for its arguments about why an invasion of Iraq was necessary, but it had two other components worth remembering--how the war should be fought and how the postwar era should be handled. The administration seemed to buy Pollack's arguments about the need for war, and buy his arguments about how to fight it, so why shouldn't one expect them to have bought his arguments about how to handle the occupation as well?
Compare Pollack's 2002 Foreign Affairs article and contemporaneous neoconservative commentary about how an Iraq campaign should be designed, then compare both with what actually happened in 2003. Pollack was either influential or prescient. Now look at what other serious observers wrote about the need to have US forces capable of maintaining order; the importance of providing adequate security to increase the odds of a successful democratic transformation; the likely postwar problems the administration would face; and the need to plan the new regime's political arrangements carefully. A different approach to postwar Iraq was indeed possible--and in fact, was pretty much conventional wisdom for a lot of folks in the field.
I thought that the same administration that had brushed aside Chalabi and his internal advocates when it came to the war planning would do the same when it came to the postwar era. As I wrote back then,
"The challenges of governing a post-Saddam Iraq will be huge and will include maintaining security across the country, reforming or establishing a new set of national political institutions, keeping intercommunal peace, and providing basic services to a large population while restarting a rundown and complicated economy. The notion that full responsibility for such matters can be quickly handed over to the INC without courting disaster is folly--and such obvious folly that it's likely the president will eventually step in to see that the hawks are overruled once again. George W. Bush might not care much for international institutions or the trans-Atlantic alliance, but he will care about how things go in Iraq, and sooner or later the INC's inability to handle matters there will become obvious. The real question is how much damage will be caused before the administration turns to non-INC options."
I was right about the scale of the problem and the INC's inability to handle it, but wrong that this would be recognized swiftly and that the magnitude of the stakes would induce the Bush administration to do the job right. They ended up giving complete control over the postwar planning to their own discredited extremists, handled the operation with what George's book rightly calls "criminal negligence," compounded their mistakes over time, and never reversed course enough to recover (if that was even possible following the early bungling, which I'm not entirely sure about).
This leads to the third and final question: why did they do things this way??? For all the explanations that have been offered by both supporters and critics, I still find this a major puzzle.
There's an old joke about a scorpion who asks a turtle to carry him across a river. "Are you crazy?" says the turtle. "You'll sting me when you get the chance." "That doesn't make any sense," replies the scorpion. "If I sting you we'll both drown, so why would I do that? C'mon, I really need to get across. Please, will you help?" Unable to find a flaw in this logic, the turtle eventually agrees, and the scorpion hops on its back. Sure enough, halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the turtle. "Why in the world did you do that?" cries the turtle. "Now we're both going to drown!" "Hey, what did you expect," says the scorpion, gurgling. "I'm a scorpion!"
That's basically where I've come to on this one--that the Bush administration was full of scorpions, people so devoted to their ideological (or other, still mysterious) agendas that they made self-defeating choices against all logic, drowning a lot of people in the process.
Ultimately, therefore, it probably does go back to the ideas that George dwells on and the structural conditions I mentioned in my first post. Far from being complicated, this actually ends up being one of the oldest and simplest stories in the book--a classic realist cautionary tale of unchecked power leading to hubris, then folly, then disaster.
OK, one more time:
One of the huge reasons so many of the Iraw war critics knew full well the Bush administration would not follow the pollyanna-ish path you describe is because we knew from exerience that they didn't handle these things properly. There's a little country 2 hops east, called Afghanistan. It's smaller, we had even fewer people to fight there, and we still screwed it up pretty miserably. In that case, since warlords ran it before, warlords ended up running it still. In Iraq, we went in to replace a strong central government with anarchy. How blind were people to not think that this would fail?
October 19, 2005 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
You seem to think Iraq would be easy to govern. You and Todd Gitlin were fooled by Kanan Makiya. It pains me to say this but though Saddam was *bad*, he turned out not to be *worse* than the USA at ruling Iraq. He was not unpopular enough that anything would be better. (On a moral level, he was not so bad that living under him was a fate worse than death -- a position which allows you to kill as many Iraqis as needed because their lives are worthless.)
I charge it here: Kanan Makiya and the humanitarianist exiles were as fraudulent as Chalabi and that guy Saddam's Bombmaker. Remember the human shredder that was supposed to be in Iraq? Remember the 100,000 Kurds who have not turned up in mass graves? A good deal of the rest of it was made up too. Not all of it, but the problem for you is that the stuff Saddam did may not add up to more than the USA did. This is why it hasn't been as easy as you make it sound to rule Iraq.
The way out for you is to figure out a way to have a more serious test for your humanitarianism, which is admirable but too easy to play on.
October 19, 2005 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting post, but the question you ask doesn't go back far enough. It's not just a question of how the Bush Administration bungled the post war occupation, but how the Administration Bungled the preparations for the war:
The administration went to war with both flags flying ,l,,(>.<),,l, (i.e. telling the world to go f- itself if it didn't want war). All "attempts" at diplomacy were made tongue in check, with explicit insults of weakness or collaboration hurled at any who questioned the veracity of the WMD justification.
Plain hubris can explains why the administration mocked, or ignored experts from the State Department and CIA who provided consul on. And greed and cronyism explains why the post war occupation was administered by incompetents who were rewarded with their jobs for party loyalty.
In summary:
Hubris, greed, and simplicity are to blame for the failures in Iraq. A scorpion is a scorpion and GW is GW. And the turtle called Red America deserves the fate which has been heaped upon us all.
October 19, 2005 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wish I had something to say that had "intellectual gravitas" about Iraq and the differences of opinion good-minded people had regarding the whole war gig, but I don't.
That said, I'm deeply heartened by the dialogue here about this. Color me an optimist but posts like these clear the air in a way all the rancor and well-minded (and frequently vitriolic) arguments don't.
The only thing that still frustrates me to no end is that we're not really having the same conversations about Afghanistan. There was a golden opportunity to rebuild a shattered country AND get some truly bad guys and we botched both. And, frankly, that sucks.
But thanks to TPMCafe and it's participants for exploring the potential of "mea culpa" in a way that's actually constructive.
October 19, 2005 8:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
To answer the first question--was the train wreck that occurred an inevitable result of the invasion--I would have to answer, "Yes".
It was the invasion that destabilized and then destroyed the forces that kept a mutually antagonistic population under control.
The question was never whether or not the U.S. would prevail against Saddam's military forces. Our military victory was a foregone conclusion, particularly since Saddam did not have the WMD we purportedly invaded to destroy.
In securing the peace, however, we did not commit nor did we have the forces necessary. It's not just a matter of numbers, it's a matter of specialization.
Had we followed the tanks with regiments of police fluent in Arabic, there might have been some chance. And I am not convinced the Iraqi army, which we precipitously disbanded, would have been the magic bullet some claim.
As for the second question--was there any reason to believe that the Bush administration would handle things better--I don't see any reason to stretch my imagination that far.
I think it was impossible for the administration to do better because there were so many disparate goals hitched to a mission that was hardly rational to begin with.
Rummy wanted to pursue a neocon agenda while proving pet theories about military transformation.
Bush wanted a war to pave the way for a "successful" presidency. He also wanted the oil, the elusive profits, and to go one better than Poppy.
Rove wanted a war club with which to beat opponents over the head.
Cheney wanted the oil, the Halliburton profits, and the opportunity to advance the neocon agenda while cementing Republican political hegemony.
The neocons wanted to make their dreams come true of transformation in the Middle East and perfect security for Israel.
Everybody at the time bandied phrases like "cakewalk". It's clear their plotting and planning was never reality-based.
It is, I think, long past time for hawks from every part of the political spectrum to face reality and admit defeat. Stop trying to sugar-coat it. Stop trying to make excuses. Take responsibility for being wrong.
October 19, 2005 8:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mark Danner has said that he opposed this war because he did not think there was a prayer that the US (not the Bush administration, mind you) would commit to do what was necessary to establish a government in Iraq.
The argument he made is that to establish a government in a state that was run as described in Assassins as a totalitarian cult of personality, where there were no functioning intermediate institutions, and where the only source of authority was violence requires very strong measures.
The occupying authority must establish very stringent control of the territory, shutting down all possibility of insurgency with direct, clear action, and retain that control while the instruments of governance are built. Those instruments can't be facades; people have to inhabit them who get the idea behind them. Such ideas don't arise quickly or spontaneously. One of the themes I've read so far in Assassins is that this is not an inaccuarate characterization--that two generations of stalinist rule had left no sense of possible self-rule.
The standard method of establishing governance in a state in which civil order has been eliminated, and, imo, a stalinist state qualifies for that designation, is to build from local councils up. In context of a secured environment, give authority to local groups who are, in some way selected by their peers.
The combination of these two approaches would have taken unthinkably long and required an unthinkable commitment of resources. Simply introducing the requirements for troops to not impose the security regime necessary to begin nation-building, but just to secure the victory was declared out of order.
It was not declared out of order, as Packer makes clear, because it was thought to be wrong. It was declared out of order because it would have required troops that the US did not have.
There's a reason republicans oppose nation-building. It's a thankless, time-consuming task that often fails. It requires a commitment of resources that the US public simply would not have stood for.
I still do not understand what the people in the administration were thinking.
You cite yourself:
"The challenges of governing a post-Saddam Iraq will be huge and will include maintaining security across the country, reforming or establishing a new set of national political institutions, keeping intercommunal peace, and providing basic services to a large population while restarting a rundown and complicated economy. The notion that full responsibility for such matters can be quickly handed over to the INC without courting disaster is folly--and such obvious folly that it's likely the president will eventually step in to see that the hawks are overruled once again. George W. Bush might not care much for international institutions or the trans-Atlantic alliance, but he will care about how things go in Iraq, and sooner or later the INC's inability to handle matters there will become obvious. The real question is how much damage will be caused before the administration turns to non-INC options."
I hope you'll forgive me when I say this is Foreign Affairs-style twaddle. Of course all this is true. Where in heavens name did you think the half million troops were coming from? Who did you think would be placed in command of shoorting looters and killing insurgents? It's easy to say this stuff. Doing it is something else entirely. Doing it in the face of active opposition--which had to be planned for--of the people who were previously in power takes more than noting that it's folly to do so without help.
Leave aside the acrimony created by the administration. Suppose you had the cooperation of the UN. Where did you think you were going to get the forces? Who did you think was going to run this? What's your model here? Mozambique? Rwanda? Kosovo?
Having picked your model, multiply by about 6. There was never a prayer of this working. Not even if you'd been in charge.
October 19, 2005 8:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
BettyCrw, doesn't it look though like the warlords and guys with guns pre-US have been allowed to come back in now? That's why Afghanistan is relatively more peaceful. It's like letting the Baathists come back and take over, minus Saddam.
If we were as gungho in Afghanistan, I'd bet we'd have a war with all the warlords and drug dealers, and 2000 dead there too. Everyone accepts that A will be a wild no-man's land, and just gave up on the liberalizing.
October 19, 2005 8:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hrm, let's see... NBC reported tonight that some of our soldiers in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Talibani (which is apparently offensive to Muslims) in an attempt to enrage more Talibani. If NBC is reporting that we're burning the bodies of Taliban soldiers IN Afghanistan, then, um, perhaps things aren't going quite so smoothly, no?
And from what I can tell, the warlords are still active.
Afghanistan is still a mess. And I'd love to see a dialogue about it that talks about reconstructing the country and not just "Yeah, we didn't get Bin Laden! And Bush sucks!"
How 'bout Ahmed Rashid as a week long author discussion-thingie?
At any rate, my primary point still remains: the kind of dialogue that is going on here is kick-ass.
October 19, 2005 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
I fail to see any way that Bush/Iraq differs substantially from the Bay of Goats plan of Chalabi. For one thing, an Iraqi refugee operation would have the distinct advantage of speaking the languages of their countrymen, something American troops couldn't do.
Seriously, Gideon, it just might have worked so I'm surprised to hear you baselessly dismiss Bay of Goats as a silly idea. You clearly don't understand that foreign affairs are filled with uncertainty.
We owed it to the Iraqis to at least try. There is a small but distinct possibility that, had Chalabi been heeded, Iraq right now would be a land flowing with milk and honey instead of the blood and spattered brains of dead children.
(Note to rightwingers and other cognitively-challenged types: The above was sarcastic.)
October 19, 2005 9:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sentence missing. First paragraph should read:
I fail to see any way that Bush/Iraq differs substantially from the Bay of Goats plan of Chalabi. In fact, in some ways, it's more sensible. For one thing, an Iraqi refugee operation would have the distinct advantage of speaking the languages of thei countrymen, something American troops couldn't do.
October 19, 2005 9:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Google hits:
scorpion turtle river: 237,000
scorpion frog river: 393,000
The smart money says it was a frog.
October 19, 2005 9:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think many of the above objections people are raising or good. But again, they are more focused on the American side of the equation.
I'd also like to point out some of the fairly major misunderstandings of Iraqi society, trends in Islam, and the nature of post-colonial states more generally. Simply put, I think a lot of people that supported this war on what I would consider "good faith" reasons didn't understand much of the above. I'm not going to pretend that I am - and I didn't have the opportunity to hear people like Kenan Makiya speak - but just at a kind of intuitive level, I've felt for a long time that people were trying to apply Cold War/World War II analogies - indeed, the term Stalinism is an example - to a situation where they aren't applicable. In other words, I think a lot of the liberals who backed this war - as well as many conservatives - thought we were invading Czechoslavakia when in reality we invaded Nigeria. The bottom line is that people projected assumptions about Iraqi people's hisotrical and cultural subjectivities based on no real knowledge of the region, or on what very westernized Iraqis ex-pats - who perhaps hadn't lived in the country for decades - told them.
October 19, 2005 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
While you have an unassailable point in principle, the link between stalin and saddam is one that saddam seems to pursued diligently.
That is, Stalin the Cold War. The establishment of a state that is run with essentially no hierarchy and driven by a cult of personality is not merely a Cold War construct.
The bottom line is that people projected assumptions about Iraqi people's hisotrical and cultural subjectivities based on no real knowledge of the region, or on what very westernized Iraqis ex-pats - who perhaps hadn't lived in the country for decades - told them.
Packer makes this point very clearly in the book.
October 19, 2005 11:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, I'm not critiquing Packer here. Unlike some, I think Packer's thinking on the issue was complex and done in good faith.
As to the Stalin point, fair enough. Many dictators in Africa have made similar connections - not to Stalin per se, but to other authoritarian-type leaders from history. Nevertheless, this doesn't make the nature of the society, thus, like, say the Eastern Bloc, which I'm sure you'd agree.
October 20, 2005 12:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
we're reduced to arguing a counterfactual
I've been thinking about this remark for way longer than I should have.
I still cannot work out a set of facts that would make this argument hold water.
You can say, for example, that the US shouldn't have alienated Europe and worked through the international community--that if that had been the set of facts, the war would have gone better, or even well. But that's not so, because if you'd worked your way through the international community, they would have insisted on assessing the risk and need for precipate action and would have found there wasn't any need for a war. That's why the US pulled the resolution off the table declaring Iraq in violation of the inspection protocols.
You could also say, for example, what if Saddam did pose a legitimate threat to the region, that if he had a reasonable chance of acquiring nukes and supplying them to terrorists? On that one, I can't really guess that well, but countries that have acquired such a threat have not been attacked. It seems unlikely that the US would have attacked a country that actually had acquired a nuclear capacity.
You could say, for example, what if the administration had been staffed differently? What if the administration had included prudent people who looked at the world realistically, rather than idealistically or naively? Well, we know about that scenario. Those were the staffs that had looked at the neo-con Iraq program and taken it off the table, in at least two and perhaps three administrations.
You could say, for example, what if the Pentagon's realists had been listened to? Suppose that the resource requirements for the occupation had been accurately estimated? I think it's pretty clear that this very politically astute administration's decision to suppress those accurate assessment concurs with the other post I made on this topic--that the american people would not have supported such a resource commitment.
The need the administration saw for duplicity (wrt to both American citizens and UN allies) in making this case argues against any particular collection of facts that would have led to a repetition of this invasion followed by the establishment of a stable representative government that respected a broad set of rights.
In fact, I'd claim that the positions that Gideon came to and is defending now, was a result of his having been, to some degree, taken in by this duplicity. To some degree, to believe in this policy course you had to believe in the flowers and sweets scenario. Trying to construct a counterfactual case that would have led to both a war and a good outcome illustrates this.
(BTW, this argument is essentially the same as tristero's. If you had constructed the Bayesian decision tree for the juncture points in the march to war and the establishment of a functional Iraq, when you assessed the probabilities at the last nodes, the numbers associated with what we would call "successful outcomes" were low numbers, not even on the order of 5-10%. Tristero's point (if I'm misstating it, I hope he'll correct me) is that if you take a sequence of four or five consecutive junction points with reasonable looking probabilities of success (say 40%) you end up with a disaster at the end (four straight successful 40-60 bets has a probability of 1%).)
(BTW II. I don't mean to say that Gideon was taken in, personally. I mean that the group of people writing and talking in Washington got collectively sucked in to a world view that made it seem not all that unreasonable to think that Iraq could be knocked off. Made it seem not at all unreasonable that Scott Ritter was not only wrong, but was some kind of 21st century version of a fifth columnist.)
October 20, 2005 12:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jay Ackroyd,
Yes, that is exactly my point. I don't expect or want credit for it. You've obviously worked it out as I did. The only thing I want is for those who were snookered by the Administration to understand where their error lay: they took a totally crazy idea seriously.This was all the marketing leverage the administration needed to cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war. With predictably catastrophic results.
Had Bush/Iraq been relentlessly ridiculed and pilloried, as Bush/Social Security has been, there would have been no Iraq War. I can't prove this obviously, but it seems very likely to me.
October 20, 2005 6:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks.
Let me add one more thing.
I don't think there is really any benefit to "winning" this argument--in making whoever who label or who has labeled him or herself a "liberal hawk" engage in some series of mea culpas, or, otoh, construct elaborate retrospective defenses of their views.
Assassins takes a different, and more productive approach. As far as I have read, it's trying to figure out how intelligent, well-informed people came to believe that this war was a good idea. In many ways, it's a cautionary tale about wishful thinking, and about fooling yourself.
I'm happy to see that the Wilkerson speech is drawing interest, because that speech is about the same issue. Tne institutions that we currently have in place in have been hijacked in pursuit of a chimerical, terribly costly war (and I am not just talking about cost to the US; the Iraqi cost has been enormously larger). Wilkerson argues that this is not an aberration, that the system is not designed to protect itself from this kind of institutional self-deception*.
It may irk people who want to get some of their own back, who want to see these people punished for what they did. I remember when I firmly cancelled my Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy subscriptions after the Wall fell, when the same people who had been absolutely, completely 180 degrees wrong about the single most important foreign policy issue of the previous two generations kept their gigs and kept right going as if nothing had happened.
At this point, I don't expect or even hope for those who were wrong to get their just desserts. I only want them to do what Packer has done in this book, assess those mistakes and work to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again.
----------------------
*At best. Wilkerson's treatment supports a more cynical idea of what was going on. In that reading, the cabal (Rumsfeld/Cheney) were playing the neo-cons internally, and cynically, to get the president on board and to block out countervailing evidence from State and the CIA. If you read what's made its way out into public about how Cheney worked, this more cynical reading is quite plausible. See Laura Rozen at War and Piece for more on this.
October 20, 2005 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Last week we had Roger Pielke arguing that, because good science doesn't necessarily lead to bad decisions then it must follow that bad science won't necessarily lead to bad decisions. It is the same thing in Iraq - because good preparations will not guarantee success then let's not worry about preparing - if the ideology is pure then good results will follow. The only surprising thing is that anyone is still surprised by this sad reality.
October 20, 2005 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
General Shinseki testified that it would take "several hundred thousand" troops to successfully occupy Iraq. Based on standard rules of thumb about occupation and the actual result he was correct. We didn't have the occupation Army we needed and given Rumsfield's desire to field a smaller, swifter, lighter more lethal Army we were not going to get it.
And so to answer your question 1) Yes it was a predictable disaster. To avoid it we would have had to make hard and expensive choices on force levels. Which would have led to serious delays as forces were in fact ramped up to the levels career military professionals insisted would be needed.
Rummy famously said "You don't go to war with the Army, you want, you go to war with the Army you got". Well in large part the "Army you got" had the size and shape it had because Rummy was actively downsizing and transforming it. We bungled because we had a force designed for a different mission that was inadequate in size to overcome that disadvantage. All predictable, because predicted. In some quarters.
October 20, 2005 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think a democratic government is possible now, though if it happens it will be in spite of us instead of because of us. This could have gone much better if handled differently. It could have had more troops if we had earnestly sought international cooperation. It could have not been a disaster, but at the same time, the decision was a bad one. Iraq did not need to be overthrown. Containment and international sanctions worked far beyond anyon's wildest expectations - Hussein had disarmed, and not because he wanted to, but because he was forced to.
October 20, 2005 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
... Had the administration done these things, I seriously doubt whether the prospects of the new Iraq would look as bleak today as they do now.
I haven't followed the conversation all week, but it seems like this evades a fundamental question: Why was it not obvious to you by March 2003 that the administration had no intention of doing those things?
Many other liberal hawks (such as Messrs. Drum and Marshall) abandoned their support for the war just before it began for precisely this reason -- given the actions the Bush administration was taking, it was no longer possible to maintain the illusion that they were serious about fostering a better Iraq.
This realization didn't require a pre-existing hatred of Bush, just the ability to scan the front pages of a newspaper: Afghanistan had already fallen into a state of neglect, our European allies had been overtly frozen out of the postwar process, and we were clearly going in with far less manpower than needed to "flood the country with troops."
What was the staff of Foreign Affairs magazine reading instead, comic books? Your choice of a turtle as a metaphor for yourself seems more apt than you realize.
October 20, 2005 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
In other words, the U.S. would've had to become Saddam in order to rule Iraq. Kind of negates the idealistic case for the war.
October 20, 2005 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Was the train wreck that occurred--the insurgency, increased communal tensions, an all-too-possible future slide into open civil war or state failure--an inevitable result of the invasion itself, or could it have been avoided through a different handling of the occupation?"
IMO, the train wreck was part of the plan.
But you've heard my posts before which are not the popular viewpoint around here so I won't expound any further.
I suppose my viewpoing doesn't help win the next elections, another reason why I won't expound any further.
Part of me though wonders how many swing voters hold the same opinion I do, and that is of course why I have proposed caution as far as Democrats flip flopping on their original support of the war.
Perhaps the general public, the majority of swing voters, would never analyze the war as I have and thus I should just keep my viewpoint out of the way.
At any rate, I'm still a Democrat for all the other dozen or so reasons.
October 20, 2005 8:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know you mean that to be a killer comment, but it does lie at the heart of the problem.
To respond to your literal remark, no, of course an extended period of martial law, as in post-war Japan, need not be a totalitarian regime modeled on Stalin. And, in fact, it's surprising that martial law was not declared by American forces in Baghdad immediately following the occupation.
In fact, a disciplined period of martial law under normal military law, conforming to the universal code of military justice and the Geneva Convention would have been considerably less like Saddam's regime than in fact has taken place. (This is part of the liberal hawk bad implementation argument.)
Looking at the real point you're making here, rather than the rhetorical reference to Saddam, constructing a polity in a place that has been ruled by a cult of personality is very difficult. If you've read Packer's book, you've read repeated instances of a debilitating phenomenon--after decades of initiative being punished, nobody wants to take any. The predominant reaction by Iraqi citizens is fear and a search for authority when any kind of decision point arises.
Danner's point is that you need to provide the authority that is being sought by people who are suddenly in a vacuum, and you have to deal very harshly with elements that would try to re-establish the old regime. You have to make it very clear that there is a new authority, and that it is here to stay.
Then you can go about the process of establishing a system of governance. As I said, the standard model is building from local councils up.
The trouble is that all this takes both time and a long-term commitment to effective government and an immediately secure and functional society. For a state as large as Iraq, as riven by conflict and so long under the heel of a ruthless totalitarian, this is a very difficult task. It can certainly be done, but it requires more resource for less return than politicians are willing to ask for,and taxpayers are willing to give. It also necessarily entails the use of force to suppress opposition.
Last night, I caught the end of Packer on Charlie Rose. The last question Rose asked was whether this war was worth it. Packer said that, in the event, it has not been worth it for the US--the price in treasure, life and the polarization of US society has not been justified by what the US has gained.
He then said that for the Iraqis, the answer is still unclear. Five years out, things may be better than they would have been without the war. Maybe that's good enough. Maybe taking down a dictator and then letting what happens happen is a model for improving people's lives.
I do think he's correct when he says that if the American people were asked if they would commit what has been committed for what the US has gained, the answer would be "no."
I think the Kurds are clearly better off; a great deal of uncertainty about their future has been eliminated. A longstanding pattern of betrayal of their cause has been reversed--not least because of their longstanding unity (they remind me of the Poles, sometimes).
Iran is clearly better off. That certainly was not a US policy goal; the geopolitical goal was to make them worse off. A threat (saddam) has been removed entirely, and another threat (the US) has been substantially weakened. They have a good chance of acquiring effective control of the politics of Southern Iraq.
In point of fact it may turn out that the US is better off, too, in that 5 to 10 year frame. A less fearful Iran may be an Iran that either permits reform, or cannot stifle it with chimerical fear-mongering.
Other than that, all bets are off. If there is any consensus on Iraq that I have heard, it is one I've heard from Juan Cole, Packer, Danner, Wilkerson, Rice. If the US leaves, a conflagration will ensue. In particular, in the absence of US air power, outright civil war is said to be unavoidable.
It seems to me that this is an unavoidable consequence of the decision to invade. I do agree that greater competence would have left the situation in a better state now, but I don't see any way that the US would not be committed to an extended period of occupation with subtantial forces, at the very least armored and air, and a large military police element. That the US is still there with a very large infantry commitment is testament to implementation failure. That the US is still there in large force is a testament to the nature of the task.
So, my point is, that without the element of fantasy that drove this whole deal, it would not have happened. Presenting to the American people or to their elected representatives a realistic plan to occupy Iraq for 5 to 10 years while insurrection was suppressed and while government was established would not have been seen as an effective use of the American military or American tax dollars.
Frankly, I am still at a loss as to why this war took place. There are only two hypotheses. Either Cheney and Rumsfeld are really stupid, inexperienced people, or this war was conducted for very cynical, very venal reasons. There's no evidence that Cheney or Rumsfeld are stupid, inexperienced people.
October 21, 2005 9:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
My point about becoming Saddam was a smaller one. To truly defeat the insurgency -- an insurgency foreseen in the mid-Nineties by both George H.W. Bush and James A. Baker III -- ruthless, genocidal methods would be necessary. Things would have to be done akin to what Saddam did to the Kurds and Shia. Torture, summary execution, a vast gulag, tens of thousands killed, mass graves.
Some of this has already happened. My first awareness of Saddam as evil came via the Progressive Magazine in the early 'eighties, when the Progressive reported that Iraq was torturing children in front of their parents to get the parents to talk. This was shocking to me. But Seymore Hersh reports that this was done by U.S. troops at Abu Ghriab. Falluja was shocking even to Iraqis used to Saddam and what happened at Falluja sounds a lot like the horror stories told about what Syria did to the Moslem Brotherhood in Hama.
Let's be clear: when Britain ruled Iraq it had to use poison gas and terror bombardment of civilians in order to put down an insurgency. Perhaps it was Winston Churchill that Saddam had to become in order to rule Iraq.
The U.S. hasn't been as ruthless, direct or as clear in its motives as Saddam (or Churchill) was. It hasn't been as successful as he was at putting down political opposition in Iraq either. But that doesn't mean the U.S. hasn't come close. And it's only because the U.S. is the U.S. (and not what LBJ would call "some pissant country") that our leadership isn't on its way to join Milosovec in the Hague.
Mathew Yglesias has a recent piece in the American Standard that criticizes the liberal hawk notion that the reason the war failed was that it was executed by the wrong people. Mr. Yglesias makes the point that this argument begs the question as to whether the war could be effectively prosecuted by anyone. The U.S. did not have the troops to pacify Iraq and never would have had them absent a politically impossible draft.
Those who favored the war for humanitarian reasons also gloss over the inhumanitarian things the U.S. has already done in Iraq. Let's not forget that the Lancet estimated a year ago that the war had already killed 100,000 Iraqis. How many more have died since? How many Iraqis was Saddam responsible for killing over almost twenty years (not counting those who died in the Iran War)? How does that stack up to the number the U.S. has killed in only two and a half? How many Iraqis did Saddam torture as opposed to the number the U.S. has already tortured? How many Iraqis were in Saddam's gulags as opposed to how many the U.S. has slammed into gulags? How many cities did Saddam ruthlessly destroy as opposed to the number the U.S. has already destroyed?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but anyone making the case for a humanitarian war of choice should address them and should be looking very hard at the brutal, illegal, inhumane methods our government is using in our name. In my book, the burden is on them -- as the proponents of the war -- to establish that what the inhumane methods the U.S. is using in Iraq are actually justifiable on humanitarian grounds.
As for the what ifs: One can imagine that if the U.S. had made it palatable for France and Germany to join the post-war police action, or if the U.S. hadn't fired the whole Iraqi Army, or if Bremmer hadn't comitted himself to deep and broad debaathification, then the intractable Sunni insurgency wouldn't have arisen. It's also possible that Saddam could've been brought around via sanctions and diplomatic initiative to being a more liberal and humanitarian ruler. Certainly his treatment of women -- as a class -- was already better than women are likely to be treated in a free democratic U.S.-sponsored "Iran-lite" Iraq.
October 21, 2005 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink