No, it is not easy to wrap one's mind around. Nonetheless it has been observed again and again that there seemed to be no strategy, or none that was followed. To me it is a mystery, as well.

Slate's National Security columnist, Fred Kaplan wrote about this. Before the invasion, he wrote that the Bush administration had revealed itself to be (in a column on March 5, 2003) "in no shape—diplomatically, politically, or intellectually to wage [this war] or at least to settle its aftermath."

For me, the tipping point came on March 3, with a New York Times Magazine story by George Packer, reporting on a meeting a couple of months earlier between Bush and three Iraqi exiles (including Kanan Makiya). The exiles warned the president that, after Saddam was toppled, the American-led coalition would need to take great care to contain age-old Sunni-Shiite tensions that were sure to flare up once again. Bush seemed puzzled; it was clear that he didn't know what the exiles were talking about. (There were two types of Iraqi Arabs? Wouldn't Saddam's ouster uncork the geyser of freedom and democracy?)

War, as Clausewitz wrote, is politics by other means. That is, a war is not won until its political objectives have been secured. It seemed clear, with Packer's article, that Bush—and, as we now know, many of his top aides—had no idea what securing those objectives, and thus winning the war, would entail. It's not that we lacked an "exit strategy" (an overrated concept); it's that, beyond the battlefield phase, we lacked a war strategy or any kind of strategy at all.

As far as I know, no one has explained this.

Posted at March 23, 2008 7:39 PM in response to "It's Astonishing How Little Thought Was Given."

Ellen: Your explanation...

Now, if the above wasn't true, then, Iraq was a Lebanon waiting to happen and would require huge numbers of troops to stabilize it after the invasion. But since the U.S. didn't have the necessary troops, that line of thinking couldn't be pursued, because then, you couldn't have the war you wanted.

Ergo; no reason to plan for an eventuality which, if admitted upfront as a reasonable possibility, would deny you the possibility of going to the war you desired -- a simple Catch-22.

... tracks with my explanation.

Andrew: You might be interested in my post from several years ago, The Retreat from Empiricism and Ron Suskind's Scoop.

In Without a Doubt (subtitled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”) Suskind was not talking about an age old conflict between realists and idealists, the sort of story line that can be re-cycled for every administration. It wasn’t the ideologues against the pragmatists, either. He was telling us that reality-based policy-making—and the mechanisms for it—had gotten dumped. A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.”

Also, I got this note from Christopher Lydon, former NY Times reporter, and radio host in Boston:

We are encouraged not to remember that in fact any number of smart, certified grown-ups in the international-relations field -- at Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Ohio State and UCLA, among others -- told us precisely the trouble that Bush and Co. were taking us into well before the invasion of Iraq. I note especially an ad in the New York Times of September 26, 2002, in which 33 scholars warned, for example: "Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state." The signers paid for the ad themselves because the Times declined to run their views as an Op-Ed.

One would love to think that these are the few brave voices that the Times and others would be seeking out anew -- instead of recycling the crocodile tears of the many happy warriors still trying to justify their catastrophic misjudgments.

In a series of Open Source podcasts under the heading "They Got It Right," I have interviewed a number of these foresighted folk. The honor roll includes Robert J. Art of Brandeis, Michael Desch of the University of Texas, Barry Posen and Steve Van Evera of MIT, Peter Liberman of Queens College and Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. See also my conversation with Kanan Makiya, who got it stunningly wrong.

It remains one of the confounding features of policy-making and punditry that for the most part only those who were wrong from the start on Iraq -- and are still wrong about fundamentals -- are held up as qualified to comment expertly

Posted at March 22, 2008 10:07 AM in response to "It's Astonishing How Little Thought Was Given."

Bloggers are trying to disrupt a dysfunctional social system, aren't they? It's no surprise, then that the elites and elite-wannabees are acting so dismissive of the "Dirty Fucking Hippies" (with their crude, non-elite language) on the Internet.

Yes. That is a factor. The dirty fucking hippies, as Atrios often calls them, are the people in the dark (and the street.) These are very similar notions.

It's not that editorial writers don't agree with them; rather, they don't wish to associate themselves and their ideas with the DFH. They like a nice distance between the information classes, the insiders and the outsiders, because that preserves the distinctions that founded their style, which as you note is also a social system and therefore quite stable.

The bloggers are more disruptive of this system than any I can think of in journalism.

Posted at March 20, 2008 1:19 PM in response to The People in the Know and the People in the Dark

No exit: Judith Miller committed multiple sins. It might be said she had too much imagination, as you suggest.

But to discuss the run-up to the war for a moment, one reason that skeptical accounts got buried on A17 is that editors and producers literally could not imagine that so many official sources, high up sources, and sources closes to the White House could be wrong, or have bad information. In general, the closer your sources were to the White House--to the decision-makers. to the inside--the more likely your coverage was to be off.

By imagination I mean what Anthony Cordesman said in the New York Times op ed forum Sunday, "the most serious surprise was that what appeared to be the American A-Team in national security ignored years of planning and months of interagency activity before the war, and the United States had no meaningful plan for stability operations and nation building after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's armed forces."

It's a shock, because you never imagined it... Wait a minute, there was planning but they didn't use it, they substituted their own, but that didn't really exist so they went with nothing...? It kinda boggles.

Switching to the war on terror, by imagination I also mean things like Andrew Sullivan is getting at in this post, which is called "Imaginationland" and this one, related. He's speculating, not reporting; and his outrage fuels his speculation, which is permissible in blogging but not in news reporting.

But it's hard to be right in covering the Bush Administration without taking a few leaps.

Posted at March 19, 2008 4:05 PM in response to Where’s the Tough New Benchmark Journalism From the Elite Providers?

Judith Miller committed multiple sins. It might be said she had too much imagination, as you suggest.

But to discuss the run-up to the war for a moment, one reason that skeptical accounts got buried on A17 is that editors and producers literally could not imagine that so many official sources, high up sources, and sources closes to the White House could be wrong, or have bad information. In general, the closer your sources were to the White House--to the decision-makers. to the inside--the more likely your coverage was to be off.

By imagination I mean what Anthony Cordesman said in the New York Times op ed forum Sunday, "the most serious surprise was that what appeared to be the American A-Team in national security ignored years of planning and months of interagency activity before the war, and the United States had no meaningful plan for stability operations and nation building after the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s armed forces."

It's a shock, because you never imagined it... Wait a minute, there was planning but they didn't use it, they substituted their own, but that didn't really exist so they went with nothing...? It kinda boggles.

Switching to the war on terror, by imagination I also mean things like Andrew Sullivan is getting at in this post, which is called "Imaginationland" and this one, related. He's speculating, not reporting; and his outrage fuels his speculation, which is permissible in blogging but not in news reporting.

But it's hard to be right in covering the Bush Administration without taking a few leaps.

Posted at March 18, 2008 9:24 PM in response to Where’s the Tough New Benchmark Journalism From the Elite Providers?

Bob: Very good post.

General Petraeus is not afraid of the media.

I loved your explanation for why General P. gets good press. It's really the best I have seen.

I think a similar thing applies to the press and McCain. Not that I am comparing the General and the Senator, except in this one way. They (the press corps) like him because he's not afraid of them, or their questions. He doesn't think he will come away from a press encounter with greater risk for disaster.

He thinks he will come out ahead. For many reporters he's the only pol they ever covered where they ran out of questions for the guy, or didn't want any more access because they had all they could ask for. That doesn't happen often. With McCain it did. A method of getting good press that takes great confidence.

Thanks for your post.

JR

Posted at March 18, 2008 7:02 PM in response to Reports and Analysis

@ greg and graves: I respect Burns as a reporter and journalist. I think he's a man with a conscience, and a morally serious person. I don't think he thought failure and fiasco on this scale possible, and that's what you could read in his retrospective.

Burns reported on Iraq under Saddam, and felt it to be in a category of bad by itself. In 2004 he said, "For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone."

I don't think of the Burns article as any dramatic coming clean or anything like that. It's very measured, and not fault finding or confessional. But it does have an emotional center. This part:

American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

This started to tell him he had miscalculated. The suffering to come could actually be greater, which meant that both the WMD and the human rights cases were in doubt. I think over time, with events, he saw that.

Posted at March 18, 2008 6:36 PM in response to Where’s the Tough New Benchmark Journalism From the Elite Providers?

No exit: I am not trying to excuse failure in the press corps where we have seen it, but to diversify our sense of it. A failure to imagine, and to re-imagine in light of new evidence, can be a failure to do your job. Isn't that we mean what we say, for example... "no one connected the dots"...?

Ellen: I think you're right to be cautious about expecting from the press what ought properly to be expected from the political opposition. A lot of stories that appear to be missing, the work of negligent or slanted press, can get into the news by normal reporting on what the opposition is doing. I acknowledge there's truth in that.

I don't think I am expecting the press to fight my political battles for me, but I recognize it as a danger.

My point is somewhat different. I think the Bush project, including Iraq, is a radical project for the American presidency. On many different fronts, though not all, it has operated on different principles than presidencies Republican and Democrat before. It pushed the boundaries of the executive, and the "thinkable." This happened in a whole host of ways that others have chronicled.

In my view the news machinery in general underplayed, understated, mishandled and smoothed out these differences. It didn't tell Democrats or Republicans how different this presidency was because it didn't know how to break that story. This isn't a problem in opposition, it's a problem in description.

That's kinda where I'm coming from.

I also think there's been a lot of great reporting from Iraq, and I wouldn't characterize the press there now as insufficiently skeptical.

Posted at March 18, 2008 6:02 PM in response to Where’s the Tough New Benchmark Journalism From the Elite Providers?