Was Failure Inevitable?
Slate’s Jake Weisberg asks the question “was victory in Iraq ever possible?” and concludes that the answer is “maybe.” Weisberg is wary about throwing in his lot with those who would use the example of Iraq to disparage any future U.S. involvement in humanitarian intervention or reconstruction efforts:
Closer to the truth, it seems to me, is the broad middle ground
occupied by various supporters, opponents, and journalistic neutrals,
who, whatever their views on the war’s original merits, think that the
catastrophe in Iraq was contingent rather than foreordained. Reading
Thomas Rick’s Fiasco, or Larry Diamond’s Squandered Victory, or James Fallows’ Blind Into Baghdad, or George Packer’s Assassins’ Gate,
it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Bush and the Pentagon
made a series of avoidable, catastrophic errors in the run-up to the
war and the first year of the occupation. These errors were so
significant that they virtually guaranteed our defeat.
In the process, Weisberg links to an excellent analysis by Brookings’ Ken Pollack on the subject. Pollack is particularly critical of the emerging neoconservative line that the collapse of Iraq is primarily the fault of the Iraqis. Here’s the nut graf:
If Iraq does slide into all-out civil war, the Bush Administration will
have only itself to blame. It disregarded the advice of experts on
Iraq, on nation-building, and on military operations. It staged both
the invasion and the reconstruction on the cheap. It never learned from
its mistakes and never committed adequate resources to accomplish
either its original lofty aspirations or even its later, more modest
goals. It refused to believe intelligence that contradicted its own
views and doggedly insisted that reality conform to its wishes. In its
breathtaking hubris, the Administration engineered a Greek tragedy in
Iraq, the outcome of which may plague us for decades.
Please correct the typo (an extra “y”) in the first line of Professor Nixon’s post. It should read, “Was victory in Iraq ever possible?” (not “every”)
I think there were always only two choices in Iraq. The US could have certainly pacified the country had we conquered it like the Germans conquered Poland in WW 2, filling it with troops and police and brutally beating down any opposition. Or, we could have picked one faction and backed it against all the others. I think the second thing was are original intention, since it have become evident over time that the Pentagon wanted to put their house Shiite Chalabi on the throne at the time of the invasion. The problem was that Chalabi didn’t represent any faction that existed in Iraq itself (not to mention that he seems to have been some sort of Iranian agent). One he was no longer an option, the place went literally up for grabs. It then became a litter box full of short term GOP political theories and approaches more tailored to what the Party needed domestically than to what was going on on the ground in Iraq.
So yes, we could have secured Iraq and yes, we could have “won” in Iraq, had we backed the right faction (and dressed it up later in the trappings of rule of law) IF the faction we had supported also proved grateful for our help. But could we have invaded Iraq the way we did and “established” a secular democracy in the sense that ours is? No, never.
I think it’s important to stress the difference between “regime change” and “humanitarian intervention.” The latter proposes to prevent or stop a state from acting – something military force has a decent chance of accomplishing. Arguably, we’d already achieved this by imposing no-fly zones, which severly restricted the Hussein regime’s ability to act against the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south.
Regime change, though, is something force alone cannot accomplish. It may even hinder it. No one likes to be invaded, even by those with the best of intentions. Just as in personal life, I suspect that in international relations it holds true that “you can never change people, only people can change themselves.”
The idea that you can forcibly transform people is the conceptual flaw at the root of all the rest of the administration’s shortcomings in Iraq (and arguably the fundamental flaw of the administration as a whole, too).
Joe:
Correction made. Thanks for spotting it.
Oh, and by the way, unlike many of my compatriots here at DotC, I’m not a professor of anything…:-)
Of course we could have done things differently in Iraq and achieved a victory … and we could have changed the regime by invasion and the imposition of democracy at the point of a bayonet–that’s what we did when we overthrew the regime in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (and we would have done in fascist Italy if the Italians hadn’t already done it for us). We simply did not send in enough troops to secure the country, to prevent the chaos that emerged and which fueled the insurgency.In one sense, we were hampered by our own initial military success in iraq. As WW2 wound down in Europe, there were fears that the Nazis would launch an insurgency through guerilla groups called “Werewolves’, but it never happened. I believe one reason is that after 6 years of war and nealry 4 years of round-the-clock bombing, with their cities and homes in ruins, the Germans didn’t see anything to be gained by fighting on after their government collapsed and their armies surrendered … they were beat and they knew it. But the Iraqis went through a vastly different experience–yes, they had suffered under the sanctions, but our attempts at precision bombing meant that their cities and homes were largely intact. Their government functioned up until the day–the hour even–when it suddenly vanished. One day, Saddam and his men were in power, denying that the Americans were anywhere near Baghdad and the next day suddenly they were all gone and we were pulling down Saddam’s statue. Thus, the Iraqi people did not feel defeated–perhaps they felt betrayed, tricked, cheated, bewildered–but certainly not defeated. So when we made other mistakes, by disbanding the Iraqi army and tossing them all out into the streets, dismissing all Baathist party members (unlike Patton who made use of low-level nazis in occupied Germany because thet were the ones who knew how to run things, etc.), THAT is when our problems began and thinsg spun out of control. Had we used a half million troops to invade and occupy Iraq (as we did to push Iraq out of tiny Kuwait), had we sealed the borders and maintained order and discipline in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, the outcome could have been entirely different and much more in line with what we wanted. Instead of actually giving war a chance–all out, total war where we used our full military might to its advanbatage–we attempted some kind of crazy half-measures that have left us in the current mess.
Of course we could have done things differently in Iraq and achieved a victory … and we could have changed the regime by invasion and the imposition of democracy at the point of a bayonet–that’s what we did when we overthrew the regime in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (and we would have done in fascist Italy if the Italians hadn’t already done it for us). We simply did not send in enough troops to secure the country, to prevent the chaos that emerged and which fueled the insurgency.In one sense, we were hampered by our own initial military success in iraq. As WW2 wound down in Europe, there were fears that the Nazis would launch an insurgency through guerilla groups called “Werewolves’, but it never happened. I believe one reason is that after 6 years of war and nealry 4 years of round-the-clock bombing, with their cities and homes in ruins, the Germans didn’t see anything to be gained by fighting on after their government collapsed and their armies surrendered … they were beat and they knew it. But the Iraqis went through a vastly different experience–yes, they had suffered under the sanctions, but our attempts at precision bombing meant that their cities and homes were largely intact. Their government functioned up until the day–the hour even–when it suddenly vanished. One day, Saddam and his men were in power, denying that the Americans were anywhere near Baghdad and the next day suddenly they were all gone and we were pulling down Saddam’s statue. Thus, the Iraqi people did not feel defeated–perhaps they felt betrayed, tricked, cheated, bewildered–but certainly not defeated. So when we made other mistakes, by disbanding the Iraqi army and tossing them all out into the streets, dismissing all Baathist party members (unlike Patton who made use of low-level nazis in occupied Germany because thet were the ones who knew how to run things, etc.), THAT is when our problems began and thinsg spun out of control. Had we used a half million troops to invade and occupy Iraq (as we did to push Iraq out of tiny Kuwait), had we sealed the borders and maintained order and discipline in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, the outcome could have been entirely different and much more in line with what we wanted. Instead of actually giving war a chance–all out, total war where we used our full military might to its advantage–we attempted some kind of crazy half-measures that have left us in the current mess.
Sorry–my attempt to fix a typo resent the entire post
Joe:
Our avowed goal in Iraq was not the defeat of the Iraqi people but the overthrow of the regime under whose yoke the people suffered.
Having destroyed the regime, we then betrayed those we putatively set out to liberate by appearing to sanction the subsequent anarchy. The possibility of a stable democracy appearing in the wake of anarchy is. of course, zero.
No, Robert, Germany and Japan were both integrated industrialized economies with strong central governments and well established histories of democratic party politics going back several generations. There was never any risk that either country would fragment in the way that Iraq has and this is the real difference between them; not that we didn’t hit Iraq hard enough.
On the other hand, if you are saying that we could have “won” in Iraq by conquering the country like we were Nazis conquering Poland and setting up a puppet government, then yes, you are completely correct.
The jury is in. Bush and Chaney are colossal failures who went against the best traditions of the Republican and Democratic parties. The problem is that they have the presidential forum for two more years and that makes impeachment palatable if not inevitable.
How clear can it get when more level heads in the Repbublican party are clamoring for a change in foreign policy.
There is even a movement among religious conservatives to remove the theocons. How high must the clamor rise?These blunderers refuse to go quietly into the night.
Even if Japan and Germany had not been peaceful democracies prior to WWII, the chance that they would have emerged as such was fairly strong: they are linguistically and culturally and socially homogenous societies (especially Japan) that had overcome any serious internal division long before WWII — in the case of Germany, that would have been religious division between Catholic and Protestant, largely overcome by the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, the trend in Europe as a whole was clearly in favor of democracy, slow and halting as it was in the 19th century. In that light, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was the aberration — the societies that it occupied had been well on the way to representative democracy if they had not already achieved it. None of this is true of the modern Middle East. In that sense, there is no parallel for what neocons posited: that a strong and democratic “oasis” nation in the Middle East would serve as a beacon and spur democracy in the rest of the region — Perhaps Japan served as a beacon to the rest of Asia, but I doubt it, given the incredible antipathy that is still present in many Asian countries for Japan, but Germany was simply joining (or rejoining, really) the trend towards liberal democracy in Europe, not creating it. And if you want further analogies: why is it that democracy in the U.S. did not spur democracy in Latin America? There is no perfect analogy, but the point is, understanding the success of Japan and Germany after WWII should make you realize how unlikely a repeat of that success would have been in Iraq. I would never say never could our venture been successful, but building on Iraqi civil society would have had to have been its primary purpose with a fully funded and well thought out plan in place to make that happen. We are only kidding ourselves if we think either of those conditions was in place in March 2003.