Iraq: Before the Spin
Come the Baker-Hamilton Commission Report on Wednesday, there will be spin enough to make the most sober-sided dizzy. That’s why it might be worth the effort to look at Anthony Cordesman’s briefing (CSIS, November 29, 2006) http://www.csis.org/images/stories/burke/061128_iraq_briefing_transcript.pdf and accompanying report.
This from the briefing: Cordesman: “I think this is going to be a real crisis for American society. If all we do is react to past failures by trying to find the easiest way out, or some simple option we can use as at least an excuse, then we necessarily will make things far worse.”
A few excerpts: “It is not, frankly, meaningful to try to blame the Iraqi government for the problems that exist today… ”The idea that when yoou send the bull into liberate a china shop, you blame the china shop for breaking the china is, shall we say, somewhat ingenuous…
“We need to understand how far this spills. It doesn’t just impact on the Gulf with the 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves; it impacts on the Arab-Israeli conflict and perceptions in Lebanon…. We have, at a minimum, to seek to constantly try to contain and ameliorate this, even if we fail to preserve this government, because, frankly, the odds are that things will get worse, not better. What we cannot do is withdraw and let things spiral out of control….”
Cordesman’s usual careful analysis and fact-gathering is in the November 30 report. http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,3621/type,1/
I don’t know much about Cordesman other than having heard his trenchant commentary during both Iraq wars. Cordesman’s 156-page report looks like a daunting read, but even his 11-page executive summary provides sobering comment. For example, “time and resources have been wasted that the US and Iraq did not have. The odds of success are less than even, and may be less than one in four.”
The day after Cordesman’s briefing, Timothy Noah had a piece in Slate saying that the idea Cordesman criticized – “blame the Iraqi government for the problems that exist today ” — will likely be the centerpiece of the “official” explanation of the fiasco in Iraq. Here are a few excerpts from Noah’s article, which can be found at http://www.slate.com/id/2154687/
“In a Nov. 29 Washington Post article, [Thomas] Ricks and Robin Wright report that a governmental consensus is emerging that nation-building failed in Iraq because the Iraqis just weren’t up to it.
“This growing belief apparently transcends ideology and political party. The Post story quoted Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., declaring at a recent congressional hearing, ‘We should put the responsibility for Iraq’s future squarely where it belongs—on the Iraqis.’ This was seconded that same day by Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C.: ‘If the Iraqis are determined and decide to destroy themselves and their country, I don’t know how in the world we’re going to stop them.’ A former Middle East expert for the CIA who’s advising Jim Baker’s Iraq Study Group wrote in an e-mail, ‘I’m tired of nit-picking over how we should bully the Iraqis into becoming better citizens of their own country.’
“Even neoconservative hawks, who till now have focused their criticism on the Bush administration’s unwillingness to commit sufficient troops, are cottoning to the blame-Iraqis line. ‘Ultimately, just like success rests with the Iraqis, so does failure,’ Thomas Donnelly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Post. This is the same Thomas Donnelly who three years ago wrote in the Weekly Standard, ‘We cannot afford to let Iraq fail.’ The Bush administration has yet to endorse this paradigm shift publicly, but a blame-Iraqis spirit certainly informed National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley’s eyes-only memo criticizing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki….
“No one’s actually saying this out loud—yet—but it’s widely implied. Iraq is ungovernable, this reasoning goes, because Iraqis turn out to be backward and pathologically unable to get along with one another. In the Dec. 1 Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes that the Maliki government’s failure ‘is rooted in an Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness.’ What’s remarkable is that the people now saying things like this are the same ones who, early on, criticized skeptics who fretted about post-Saddam instability for failing to recognize that Iraq had a stable middle and professional class and that these stout burghers would keep the country running smoothly after Saddam got the boot. Here’s Krauthammer in Sept. 2003: ‘With its oil, its urbanized middle class, its educated population, its essential modernity, Iraq has a future…. Once its political and industrial infrastructures are reestablished, Iraq’s potential for rebound, indeed for explosive growth, is unlimited.’ Well, which is it? Is Iraq a bourgeois nation, or a dysfunctionally tribal one? It can’t be both. More likely, it’s neither.”
The “blame the Iraqis” game is another manifestation that we in the United States are so often reluctant to engage in any real self-criticism. coupled with our military prowess and economic strength, this childish refusal to think that we are responsible for the consequences of our actions, whatever our professed motives, make us not only a poor ally, but also a political society that all too often adopts thoughtless policies and thus poses an obstacle to otherwise achievable cooperation in the settling of international conflicts.
At this point there are two serious competing views, or so it seems to me. Starting from the premise that we have made an awful mess–which only a fool could seriously deny–some will say that we cannot allow Iraq to fall apart and so must make a grand effort to achieve stability there, probably adding troops; others that we must not attempt what we cannot do and therefore we have no choice but to leave, hoping that our departure will diminish the forces of violence we have inleashed. Neither alternative is attractive.
The news Wednesday morning (before the report is published) offers a possible third way: the regional conference that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki calls for may have a good deal of support in the region–Saudis, Jordanians, Turkey, especially. If the region can enter the discussion and have a serious and responsible role in the U.S. “step down” if not withdrawal, they collectively may be able to avert the worst outcome–being drawn into the civil war through ethnic and religious ties to the Iraqi contenders. .
A conference is certainly worth trying, but I doubt there are any honest brokers. The Saudis don’t have any respect for Shiites, but there are quite a few of them in the part of Saudi Ariabia where much of the oil is. The Saudis do not want them to be empowered. The Turks don’t want to see an independent Kurdistan because it upsets them to be reminded that about 20% of the “Turks” are actually Kurds who have been there for a long time–Xenophon mentions them in the Anabasis. The Iranians would probably not mind an Iraq dominated by Shiites, but the Saudis and the Jordanians would not like to see their Sunni brethren discomfited. The Syrians would probably settle for Lebanon. What are the prospects here?
The Baker-Hamilton Commission acknowledges all of those points, and yet implicitly suggests that whatever the national interests of Saudia Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, etc., all may have a stronger and common interest in containing and reducing violence in Iraq.
Maybe the underlying question is: Does the U.S. have the diplomatic brains and stamina to carry out the wide-raninging efforts the Commission proposes?
If the past is any indication, there are no great reasons to be confident. But hope springs, and ought to spring, eternal.