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” All this while losing ONLY 4,500 troops.”
“And the wars are ONLY costing about 1% of GDP” (The cost is shrinking)
Good choice,Abe,quite remarkable
RCAR — Get a clue. Wars are expensive and people die in them. By historical standards the Iraq War has cost remarkably little blood and treasure.
You can argue against the war if you like, but your pretense that you have some higher moral or intellectual ground because you notice the deaths and expenses is a sham.
Typical neocon arrogance. Where is the notation that 1,000,000 Iraqis have died because of our “successful” invasion. Millions more in refugee status. Country completely devastated. Billions to reconstruct. Sectarian violence unleashed. Why don’t you ask the Iraqi Christians how they feel about our “success”? Why don’t you ask the Chaldeans? Ask the widows and orphans. In your arrogance you don’t even consider them in your equation. What the hell, those are funny-looking, funny-talking foreigners with a strange religion.
Yes, yes, very successful.
I believe it’s located in some phony “study” that leftists with pusling veins in their foreheads quote like gospel. Ask the Marsh Arabs, ask the political prisoners, ask the torture victims. In your arrogance you don’t consider them in your equations.
Explain what you believe a realistic alternative Iraq policy would have been, and we can compare theoretical body counts, if that’s what matters to you.
A lot’s gone wrong in Iraq. There’s nothing that’s gone wrong in Iraq that wouldn’t almost certainly have gone a lot wronger, sooner rather than later, under almost any other realistic scenario.
And that is?
There are neoconservatives, and then there are the rest of Americans — right, left and center. And the neocons are the only ones who are cognitively unable to process what is absolutely plainly obvious to everyone else: the Iraq war accomplished nothing.
I’m sure we are completely to talking past each other here, CK, so I’m really not meaning to be snide. But I don’t have any idea what argument you could possibly be making here.
A “realistic alternative Iraq policy”? Hows about the policy of not invading it?
Alejcaro (#3),
Typical leftist dishonesty.
25,000,000 people FREED from a filthy failing dictatorship.
1,000,000 dead? Try 100,000 – that’s a lot closer to the real number. And 95% of them killed by Al-Qaeda & Jaish al-Mahdi before WE figured out how to protect them.
Country completely devastated — by Saddam, Al-Qaeda, and Jaish-al Mahdi.
Millions in refugee status — who are coming home now that it’s been made safe by US from Saddam, Al-Qaeda & Jaish al-Mahdi.
Sectarian violence unleashed — and quelled by the world’s fastest-learning military.
Billions to reconstruct — from the richest country to one of the poorest.
Why don’t YOU ask the Iraqi Christians, Chaldeans, widows & orphans how they feel about their FREEDOM from outright butchery by Saddam, Al-Qaeda, & Jaish al-Mahdi?
In your arrogance you don’t even consider their FREEDOM in your equation. What the hell, those are funny-looking, funny-talking foreigners with a strange religion. — Who therefore don’t deserve freedom or a chance at the modern life YOU take for granted.
Yes, and if the war had been waged by a Democratic administration, that would be the universally accepted view.
That’s not a policy. That’s an option off the table.
You imagine – what? – “Saddam in the box” maintained or even strengthened for the last 5 years? Were we going to continue the inspection regime in the absence of cooperation, but just pretend we had completed it? Were we going to attempt to enforce our will through occasional punitive strikes? Was “regime change” going to remain our policy, or were we going to just forget about that? Were we going to maintain sanctions, tighten them, loosen them? Who would be running Iraq today, in your scenario? What would they be doing to enforce their rule? If, as now seems apparent, Iraq was already a failed state, and other forces (Iran, AQ, and others) began to meddle as the Saddam regime fell apart, would we just look the other way? If, on the other hand, we allowed or even helped Saddam to maintain his rule, would we just look the other way as he completed the genocide against the Marsh Arabs, put down internal opposition, restored his military and WMD programs, and resumed meddling in the affairs of his neighbors and Israel in his quest to be recognized as leader of the Arab world?
I don’t expect you to answer every one of my questions, but I do expect you or anyone else who hopes to be taken seriously to acknowledge that every policy option would have held high risks, uncertainties and human costs; and would have led to responses from other forces – US allies, adversaries, and non-committals. Furthermore, the forces that were, in the other commenter’s phrase, “unleashed” were already there. They either would have erupted in the context of the Baathists’ fall, or they would have had to have been brought under control amidst escalation of Saddam’s trademark methods of state terror – his “leash.”
History doesn’t just stand still, and we don’t have the option of just wishing away our entanglements. I believe a confrontation and indeed a major intervention were inevitable – were in fact already well under way when the US launched Operation Iraqi Freedom. Something would have happened in this most volatile and geostrategically important region of the world, if we had tried just to back off from Iraq. There is absolutely nothing in the recent history of the region going back generations to make one presume it would have been something good.
Islamofascists are a huge sleeper cell in this country and they blend in quite well. It is just a matter of time that this country is going to have to deal with them. When and how are we going to do it IF we do it?
There is no doubt that we have taken the war Islamofascists started and placed it squarely in their backyard. OsamaBinLadenpoopoo is living in a cave and cannot move freely at all. If he does, he is history and, he knows it. He wants his fools that follow him to die but he will not do what he calls upon his idiots to do.
George Bush will go down in history as one of the greatest Presidents this country has ever had. He has kept us safe in spite of ourselves. Recently, I read a sign in a restaurant in South Carolina when I was passing through on business. There was a picture of President Bush with his finger pointed at us while he was saying, ” I’m going to protect your ass whether you like it or not.” That just about says it all.
Allen Fulghum
Pinehurst, NC USA
Things are looking up in Iraq right now, but it ain’t over ’til it’s over.
As far as the decisionmaking, it was no more obtuse than that of Lincoln’s administration in denying repeating rifles to Union troops because of the cost of bullets, or of Roosevelt’s administration in allowing McArthur to be surprised by air strikes in the Phillipines hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, or in Truman letting McArthur advance to the Yalu unprepared for the Chinese invasion. Generals are stupid and Presidents are more stupid, much of the time, when seen in retrospect.
I’d like to suggest that it seems to be an unexamined “truth” that the aftermath of our remarkably successful 3-week (would have been 2, save for the unprecedanted dust storm) campaign to defeat Saddam was “mishandled” subsequently.
Compared to what?
The commenters Brent, Ck and others seem to me to have the facts and overall comparisons right – except for this assumption.
No military professional I know of believes that the insurgency that follows many victories is avoidable, or capable of prompt suppression by some plan well-wonked in advance.
My own service carried me through 8 years of the Clinton military, during which many of the blunders that framed the need to invade Iraq were made.
Worse, many capable leaders left the U.S. military in disgust; and, it appears, regrettably, that the remaining highest command during that era was, if not politiicized, significantly cowed in offering its judgment to civilian leadership.
Sec. Rumsfeld had to re-shape and shake up the military command structure, as a result.
Concurrently, an effective counterinsurgency strategy had to be developed that paralled counterterrorism efforts at home.
This seems to me to have delayed and complicated the flexiblity of response that Gen. Petraeus finally was able to bring to the Iraq campaign – and which is now being applied in the much more difficult theater of Afghanistan, as well.
Isn’t it still useful to remember that our troops remain in Germany and Japan, even today?
I wonder how many of the apoplectic-sounding critics of the Left have condescended to do a bit of military service, themselves, visited the relevant countries, talked there to average people, etc.
Sully,
Union troops had repeating rifles. Not a lot, not soon enough, but there were about 100,000 issued. McArthur knew about Pearl Harbor nine hours before the attack on Manila.
Michael David Rubin,
If there was any anticipation of an insurgency, I do not recall any government official warning of it. I remember cakewalk, welcomed as liberators, statue of Bush in Bagdad, etc.
Inaqua, I don’t remember cakewalk as referring to the whole war. There was jubilation at the defeat of Saddam’s regime because, as I remember, there were widespread estimates of many tens of thousands of American and allied dead from fighting Saddam’s army. What happened to that “expert” estimate from the left? Of course, it’s been conveniently forgotten.
The nature of the insurgency made it especially difficult to deal with. It was really several insurgencies. The most difficult to deal with were struggles for power among groups in Iraq who assumed that they needed to take territory and subdue rivals. Partly this was “business as usual,” partly it was motivated by the expectation that we would not protect them from each other and would not remain in control of Iraq long enough for a stable, mutually agreed on civil government to be established. The frenzied left’s opposition to the war, and the diagnoses of a full-fledged civil war and the calls for immediate withdrawal from so many of the “regular” Democrats, directly fed into this expectation on the part of Iraqis and made the insurgency part of the war far worse than it might have been for both Iraq and our troops.
I know it’s not to be expected that a nation like ours achieve much unity of effort at any time, but the role of those on the left who demagogued the war should be remembered. I don’t mean reasoned debate; I mean the ugly personal attacks on the President and the hysterical prognostications (including that 1,000,000 Iraqi dead estimate that refuses to die). These things strengthen our enemies and weaken our friends.
Thanks, Brent, for speaking truth to powerful stupidity. The one thing that can be said with assurance about anything that has become conventional wisdom over the last 8 years is that it is wrong.
There were three options available at the time (regardless of arguments about WMD, etc.).
Option one was continuing the sanctions regime and no-fly zones. If we trust the figures coming from the lefties, the sanctions were killing 100,000 Iraqis a month. If we trust conservatives, the sanctions regime was not effective. We know Saddam was enriching himself through the Oil-for-Food program and all the rest.
Option two was dismantling the sanctions regime and no-fly zones. This was the policy preference of the radical left but was not supported by most centrists or conservatives.
Option three was war. War should never be the first option, but given the other two I think it was the only choice we had.
The left’s strange memory lapses about the good reasons for the Iraq war I believe are caused by smoking fat joints.
How would an aftermath that wasn’t mishandled have played out? It’s a testament to the loyalty of the Iraqui army that their defense tactics consisted of emptying their rifles into the air and then removing their uniforms and joining the civilian population. The post-war turmoil is more the struggle between tribal and religious factions for supremacy than a concerted effort against the U.S. occupiers. Doesn’t any group that wants a share in the spoils have to demonstrate at least some power vis-a-vis its rivals, even if it means bloodshed? If there is one thing that the Arab sheiks and emirs in Iraq understand, it is relationships at the tribal level and relationships between tribal authority and central government. It is one more indictment of our media that they have failed to examine the incredibly complex and important role of tribal society in the Arab world.
Margo,
When Adelman said it would be a cakewalk, he did not limit himself to some initial phase of a conflct, excluding what you call “the whole war.” Nor did the commander-in-chief when he declared “major combat operations over” in 2003.
I agree with you that many on the Left make statements adverse to our national interest, and I deplore that.
Most of the war supporters here make the point that Saddam posed a danger that required an invasion and occupation. I disagree, and I think an objective consideration of the costs and benefits shows that the war was a mistake.
The opportunity to bring democracy to tribal Islamic societies with no history of freedom, equality, or effective public law is something I hope we resist in the future.
The opportunity to bring democracy to tribal Islamic societies with no history of freedom, equality, or effective public law is something I hope we resist in the future.
Wow, what a statement! We take two of the most war-like societies in world history (Germany & Japan) and turn them into pacifist democracies. Bad move, I guess. Probably had a little input into the current success of South Korea as well. Maybe even some positive influence in the Phillippines? The citizens of Taiwan and Israel might even begrudgingly admit that the U.S. has been just a small plus in their development. But that wouldn’t have any bearing on the Arabs. They just aren’t ready for freedom or equality under the law. Some people might think that you’re showing a racist mentality.
I would further suggest that Mr. Inagua’s comments, and the viewpoint it seems to represent about “tribal” societies, reeks of a subtle form of bigotry.
A bit of irony in a publication based on the modern thoughts of members of one our older tribal peoples, don’t you think?
All peoples began as hierarchical tribal societies; and then seem to have developed toward a culture of individual freedoms, in different ways and at a different pace.
The American colonies grew out of European monarchies, including the English, whose common law tradition so strongly influenced the formation of our own Constitution.
If I’m not mistaken, to this day the theory of English law still holds that the Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, actually owns everything and every person in Great Britain (Brits are “subjects” vs. citizens).
The Queen “allows” the Parliament, a temporary dictatorship, actually, to act on her behalf, in turn, allowing the subjects to express their humble opinions to it…
Their unwritten constitution helps them glide over this aspect of their tradition.
We might also note that no sovereignty has ever been established by any means other than a military conquest (the U.N., like the League of Nations, is just that: a voluntary group of sovereignties that convenes to talk, “resolve,” or whatever).
Today, there seems to be universal agreement, thankfully, that the worth of a sovereignty is moral, to the extent that it is rights-based.
A founding principle of American national culture has been to help or inspire subject peoples to achieve freedoms equal to our own.
Realpolitik calculations are not to be ignored, but they seem, historically, to give way repeatedly to an innate need of peoples to garner for themselves a very American sort of freedom.
As to isolating quotes from Ken Adelman or the President, “cakewalk” may or may not have indicated a total campaign-consider it, in any case, a stupid remark, if you like; and “major combat operations” in fact described a traditional land invasion and conquest by a conventional army and air force.
Deciding what “major combat operations” should constitute is still a matter of debate, or at least of transitional dialogue, within the Dept. of Defense as we speak.
Sec. Gates is a significant party to this debate, to the extent that he is seen as representing a shift in emphasis away from the older definition of m.c..ops to the new need for smaller, spec. forces ops against non-traditional enemies (at least, if we can discount traditional threats from China, Russia, Iran, India-Pakistan escalations, etc).
Falling back, as so many seem to do, on the mere personal opinion, that the Iraq campaign was unnecessary, is unpersuasive.
If Mr. Inagua disagrees that Saddam posed serious danger to us and to our allies (yes, petroleum is certainly a constituent issue), what facts would he adduce to support that opinion?
What “objective consideration” has he considered, or offered?
I assume that “objective” means fact-based.
Those of us who once did intelligence work were rather severly dissuaded from wasting commanders’ time with opinions.
Facts, descriptions, quantities, quantitative comparisons, analyses of historical patterns, and reasoned quantified projections were required.
Just a word of thanks to Mr. Nailhead, Ms. Margo, and others for their thoughts – and, not least to Sukey Tawdry!
Who would have thought that a spiritual daughter of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill would align her lovely self with us evil neocons?
Well, Inagua, you may be right, but I feel sure it is too early to tell. Despite the havoc wreaked by Saddam, Iraq is one of the more promising places to try for democracy, having a diverse and generally well-educated population and a source of independent wealth.
Our overall strategy for the war against Islamofascism can hardly be to destroy every society that harbors the terrorist minority. Into any vacuum we create that way will flow the well-funded Wahabbist ideology. Germany and Japan are good examples of what to do next after defeating a fanatical totalitarian enemy. So it seems to me that a strategy of trying to turn those societies that are most turnable toward legal democratic government is at the very least worth a try.
Adelman wasn’t a member of the Bush Administration. His language was still unfortunate, almost as unfortunate as his recent endorsement of Barack Obama, but, to be fair to him if you’re of a mind to be, he and others like him were clearly referring to the destruction of Saddam’s regime. He and many others like him indulged in wishful thinking about the aftermath of the war and about the “slam dunk” all-answering, all-justifying utility of the WMD argument. It distorted their judgment, but we all benefit, if that’s the right word, from 20/20 hindsight on that gross error.
They were over. He wrongly believed that the “war” was over, and that there would be no need for major combat operations. I put “war” in quotes because, as others have pointed out, the Iraq War consisted of several wars fought over the same territory. Similarly, major combat operations terminated in the “first” Gulf War when Schwarzkopf met the Iraqis, but he was, as he later admitted with unseemly gusto, “snookered.” Saddam was soon engaging in his own version of MCO against the Kurds and Shi’a, and terrain of future battle was set.
The Iraq War was in this and other ways a continuation of the Gulf War, and was, I repeat, unavoidable: Sooner or later, under any president or presidents, we would either have been returning in overwhelming military force to the region, or we would have faced unpredictable and potentially very dire consequences as others hostile to our and our allies’ interests seized or fought over a region economically and politically critical to the world. (I won’t try to explain here why the region is so critical: I’ll just say that no mature observer has been able to deny its fundamental and increasing geostrategic significance at least since the first oil wells were sunk – and in other ways it’s been critical since the dawn of civilization.)
True, that’s been a recent specialty of the Left. The Right does it, too, however, though in its own style – when holding power, for instance, it does so by putting its own credibility to the wrong test. “Cakewalk” isn’t the best example, but it’s typical. When out of power, some on the Right take inordinate pleasure in defying “political correctness,” in the process seeming to confirm the worst impressions others have of them.
I think an objective consideration of the history and the situation shows that war was inevitable. Furthermore, Saddam’s intentions and capacities were only one set of factors in a complex situation that remains dangerous, and will likely remain that way for the rest of our lives (that even goes for some of our apparently teenage visitors).
The expansion of the realm of freedom has been a fundamental American interest at least since our founding. The means we choose to pursue that interest will change, and sometimes our 3 steps forward will be followed by 2 or more steps back. Every confrontation or potential confrontation with adversaries has its own unique character: There is no Iraq but Iraq and no Afghanistan but Afghanistan, and neither of them is Vietnam or Korea or Japan or Germany. Over time, we will have to encourage many “tribal Islamic societies” and other holdouts as well to join the modern world socially, politically, and economically. You can see it as an opportunity to align our external relations with our values, or you can see it as survival necessity, but the world won’t let us simply bypass the challenge.
Mr. Rubin,
Thank you for the history lesson.
You say that ” tribal societies”… “developed”…” at a different pace.” I agree, and I suggest you consider using objective measures like literacy, rule of law, human rights, and freedom of expression to asertain what level of development the tribes of Iraq ever achieved on their own. Ditto for Afghanistan.
Here are some facts about societal development you may wish to consider. No society has ever developed from tribalism to democracy without first having rule of law, identity as citizens of a discrete political unit, some freedom of expression, and at least a literate political class. Neither Iraq or Afghanistan ever reached this level of development, which is why installing democracy from above as we have tried is like trying to teach a monkey to play Mozart. You call this bigotry. I call it reality.
You say that “A founding principle of American national culture has been to help or inspire subject peoples to achieve freedoms equal to our own.” Help and inspire by example, not invasion, occupation, and conversion. I challenge you to name one founder who ever espoused what you claim. As just gwo counter examples please consider what George Washington and John Adams said on the subject, “Friendly trade relations with all, entangling military alliances with none” and “America does not travel abroad in search of dragons to slay. If she did, she would quickly become Mistress of the world.”
You accuse me of not recognizing the seriousness of the threat that Saddam posed to America. I plead guilty. I do not think Saddam had the military capability to attack America, and the fact that we destroyed his military is a few weeks supports that opinion. That he might have had the capacity to arm, train, or otherwise encourage terrorists who might want to attack America, I acknowedge. I can also count several dozen other countries that fit that bill. Should we invade and occupy all of them?
If you are or were in the past a serving member of the military, I thank you for your service. If you are or were a policy wonk who contributed to this unfortunate policy I hope you will learn from this experience and consider more modest foreign policy goals in the future.
Naihead Tom,
To compare Iraq with Germany and Japan is absurd. Germany and Japan were advanced industrialized societies with homogenous populations that had unfortunately come under the rule of military expansionists that led their countries to total ruin.
Burden is not on me, of course, but I’m happy to answer these, CK.
No more “regime change” policy. Saddam still in power, perhaps “stronger,” perhaps not, don’t care. Sanctions tighter or looser or gone, don’t care.
In every case, America would be safer today had we never invaded.
Margo,
I would love to be wrong. I would love to see Arab societies evolve into stable peaceful democracies with rule of law and respect for individual liberties. I just don’t thnk we can do this by invasion and short term occupation. It would take several generations of enlightened colonial-type administration, and that sort of thing went out of political style a long time ago.
You are correct that Iraq offered the best opportunity for this experiment, and it may yet work, but I doubt it very much.
You are also correct that we cannot destroy every society that harbors a terrorist minority. Some problems do not have solutions, and the best we can do about this problem is to deliver retributive justice to those terrorists who do in fact attack us, particularly on our soil. We missed an opportunity for that with al Quaeda and the Taliban.
Wahhabism is a major problem. I wish I knew of a lawful way to ban it in America. The number of Saudi funded Wahhabi mosques in America is alarming.
In sum, you think the effort to “turn” Iraq is worth the effort and I don’t. That is probably our only substantive disagreement. Here’s hoping you’re right and I’m wrong.
CK,
Adelman was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board when he wrote his cakewalk piece and “indulged in wishful thinking about the aftermath of the war.” It is precisely that aftermath that causes many of us to judge the benefits unworthy of the cost. Do you realise how many Americans have been killed and wounded since Mission Accomplished? Do you think those deaths are worth what Iraq is today?
If I understand you correctly you assert that “The Iraq War was…unavoidable [because the]… region [is] economically and politically critical to the world”…”at least since the first oil wells were sunk.” Nonsense. The countries of the region have oil and want to sell it. Other countries, like us, want to buy the oil and are willing to pay for it. Precisely that has been going on for nearly a century. No war is necessary to accomplish that.
You seem to think it is America’s historic mission to expand freedom by invading and occupying countries that have not attacked us. If I have misinterpreted your last paragraph, I apologise. if I got it right, please give me a few examples.
To compare Iraq with Germany and Japan is absurd. Germany and Japan were advanced industrialized societies with homogenous populations that had unfortunately come under the rule of military expansionists that led their countries to total ruin.
Iraqui society is probably more homogenous than Germany was in 1938 and Japan as well. Baseball was a popular sport in Japan during the ’30s. They had converted in a large measure to western clothing among the upper classes. If the fact that Iraq lacks a booming semiconductor industry or isn’t a leader in pharmaceutical research, maybe they’re not an “advanced industrialized society.” But that means plenty of other people shouldn’t be living in freedom, either. I suppose that you could consider Saddam’s adventures with the Iranians and the Kuwaitis something other than military expansion but you’d be wrong. And he has led his country to what many seem to consider a form of ruin.
Hey, my comment got highlighted by Abe, cool.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t even especially defending the wars. I just think the Left’s attack on the wars as military disasters is laughably wrong from a historical perspective.
Personally I’m skeptical of the rebuilding and spreading democracy idea. I’m inclined to the “more rubble, less trouble” school of thought. Bush and Cheney took the high road and gambled on trying to rebuild Iraqi and Afghani society into something more compatible with modernity. It’s too early to tell if it will work. I hope it does.
I, on the other hand, favor dealing with enemies like Saddam with decapitation strikes. We could, perhaps, have taken out the Iraqi leadership and let the Iraqis fight it out. Eventually some new leader would emerge who was, hopefully, less antagonistic towards our interests. If not, rinse and repeat as necessary.
The trouble with the rebuilding idea is it takes many years. The public is fickle and the Obama Left is treacherous. Backstabbers like Pelosi and Obama have diligently worked to undermine our efforts for years.
So I favor short, quick wars with minimal rebuilding as more compatible with the flawed society we inhabit.
But regardless of what I think should have been … what the military has accomplished is remarkable by any historical standard. Especially given the amazingly restrictive rules of engagement our military operates under. Past insurgencies were typically put down with tremendous, and often indiscriminate, brutality. Our military has practiced a vastly more gentle approach that has worked to minimize civilian casualties every step of the way.
Sadly, we seem to get little credit for this more humane strategy – not from our own media and especially not from lying deceivers like Obama (who’s smart enough to know the historical record). The strategy we’ve employed requires people like Obama and Pelosi to show decency and honesty, which they lack. The reality is they used deceit and lies to undermine the war effort from day one and bolster their own political prospects. And their deceit has been rewarded with power.
Long wars are difficult when you have people like the morale-destroying Obama to contend with back home. I think the Bush-Cheney strategy of rebuilding is noble. I just think it requires a better class of people than America currently has to carry out. Obama being a prime example of the low moral character of the modern Left.
Oh, my – gettin’ a mite testy, ain’t we?
And on the Sabbath, no less; forgive my incitement to such desecration…
Well, this is “Contentions,” after all.
Mr. I., if it matters: 22 yrs. lowly & loyal servicemember, U.S. Navy & Reserves.
If a non-historian like my self, clearly, you might say, deficient in intellect, is needed to point out some of your daffier assertions, how might you fare against real scholarship?
Let’s try (and invite credentialed scholars into the chat – I’m happy to stand corrected, really):
Literacy – isn’t it commonly understood that Arab societies since the 7th c. are noted for high literacy rates?
Whether this is limited to rote memorization of Koranic texts may bear further study.
Rule of law, human rights, and freedom of expression – would a glance at Thucydides, vis-a-vis Athenian democracy be at all instructive?
Accounts of England during the gentle episodes of Mr. Cromwell and his Roundheads, and their Cavalier adversaries help?
A reminder that Terror(ism), as a theory of government, was invented by – France.
That Weimar Germany seemed to do little to prevent, perhaps incite, the sweet idealism of constitutionally elected Chancellor Hitler?
That the fractured government-by-factions of pre-WWII Japan actually included educated, pro-Western parliamentary advocates, delegates of which were actually cooling their heels, so to speak in FDR’s waiting room while Pearl Harbor was being prosecuted by a military faction that you reference (it came to power “unfortunately” – how, exactly?).
Not to speak for Ms. Margo, but your “substantive disagreement” still seems unsupported by
Top down – I had been acquainted with immigrants from Iraq since 1968, who were as educated as I (I’ve blundered my way through a couple of degrees from our Eastern universities, whose reputations seem still to be intact, if that’s any useful comparison – no additional claims for my IQ, though).
Far from being a “top-down” imposition, current developments, if nothing else, confirm,don’t they, that a simple love of democracy on the part of all Iraqis is spontaneous, and not to be denied?
I met one of my Iraqi acquaintances while he was talking on his mobile phone.
After apologizing for keeping me waiting, he explained (this was 2005) with tears in his eyes, that he’d been speaking to his mother in Baghdad: she could return to their house, and he was going back to visit them.
Isn’t it obvious that subjects (not “citizens,” please see above) of ugly dictatorships may actually need liberation to feel safe enough to express their rights and true wishes?
Not to speak for Ms. Margo, but your “substantive disagreement” seems still awfully short of substantive facts in this matter.
In any case, Shabbat shalom; honorable debate is good.
Inagua – “Union troops had repeating rifles. Not a lot, not soon enough, but there were about 100,000 issued. McArthur knew about Pearl Harbor nine hours before the attack on Manila.”
So you admit that Lincoln was as evil as Bush and Rumsfeld in failing to get repeating rifles to all union troops immediately when they were developed – fact, Lincoln presided over a war department which delayed repeating rifles for a significant period because of budget concerns that the troops would use too much ammunition – fact, some union commanders bought repeating rifles for their units with their own money, making their units multiple times more deadly than other units.
And you admit that Roosevelt was as evil at Bush in he failed to immediately cashier McArthur after such a failure as he presided over in letting his air force be destroyed on the ground after nine hours of warning that the Japanese were on the move.
My original comment was in context of the fact that a lot of commentators around here and moreso elsewhere seem to think executive and military decisionmaking was perfect before January 20, 2000.
Eric R:
I’m sorry, Eric, but I don’t consider “don’t care” a realistic or for that matter even a mature response. Choices have to be made. Your alternative amounts to blithe indifference and abject irresponsibility.
It’s possible, I suppose, to imagine the adoption of “don’t care” as national policy, though I doubt that it would last very long. In the real world, those who do care have a way of advancing all the way up to the limits of the don’t-care-ists’ endurance. It’s also rather absurd to imagine the US, with 9/11 a year or less in the past, suddenly reversing generations of care-a-lot, and withdrawing from Iraq’s environs along with all commitments. My position, I repeat, is that we were already heavily engaged, and that a major confrontation was inevitable.
If we assume, however, that one way or another that the US committed itself to maximal non-involvement, there are two major alternative scenarios to consider:
1. Saddam resurgent
We see Saddam & Sons in power, sanctions over, with free reign to re-consolidate Baathist power, restore the Iraqi military, and re-start the WMD program. Saddam’s prisons and torture chambers are full to the brim, new mass graves have been dug for the Kurds, Marsh Arabs, the others whose relative autonomy or survival had previously been sustained in part by US maintenance of the No-Fly Zones and an implicit threat of intervention. Having successfully forced the US to back down and retreat, Saddam is now hailed as the greatest leader in modern Middle Eastern and Islamic history: He’s a hero from Casablanca to Karachi and beyond. Under the new Eric R US policy of “don’t care,” he has assumed or is poised to assume the role of regional hegemon, and his agents are everywhere. The Persian Gulf is an Iraqi lake, and, even before his armies have crossed Iraq’s borders yet again – as so many times previously – he already has effective control over and can hold hostage 25% of the world’s oil reserves.
I personally don’t consider America or its allies safer in that predicament – even without beginning to consider what “don’t-care” would do to US interests beyond Iraq and the Gulf.
2. Saddam falls alone
The alternative is Saddam & Sons unable to hold on to power even in the absence of sanctions and international pressure – the presumption being that post-Gulf War disintegration of the Baathist state and Iraqi economy were already so far advanced by 2002-3 that restoring power would be impossible. Under this scenario, Iraq gradually falls to pieces, despite Saddam & Sons & Co’s best (and inexpressibly horrific) efforts to crack down. All of the forces “unleashed” in the real world over the last few years are unleashed under this scenario, too, with the main difference being that the US plays no role whatsoever as the war of all against all accelerates, and as Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and Jordan – just to name the front-line states – along with non-state actors like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah – to name just two – act to secure or advance their perceived interests. The resulting chaos and bloodshed make the ’03-’07 “civil war” look like a soccer riot, with all oil production and all trade through the Gulf endangered, violent emotions inflamed to undreamed of heights from Casablanca to Karachi and beyond, and the future of the region up for grabs.
I personally don’t consider America or its allies safer in that predicament- even without beginning to consider what “don’t-care” would do to US interests beyond Iraq and the Gulf.
Inagua:
As I understand it, the DPB wasn’t part of the Bush Administration, properly understood, but Adelman is immaterial. As for your questions, I reject your premise, which is that the objective of the war was merely to achieve one or another end state in Iraqi society. There is no “end state” for a living nation, and that Iraq today won’t be the same as Iraq in 25 years – so any such judgment would likely be premature. I’m willing to say that much has been achieved in Iraq, but, as I tried to illustrate with my two scenarios for Eric R’s delectation, a large part of the objective was to prevent worse alternatives from arising – in brief the resurgence of Saddam or the disintegration of Iraq, either or both in the context of an epochal retreat by the US from political and strategic commitments made over the course of two generations. Those who died in Iraq didn’t die for Nuri Al-Maliki, they died for the US. World War 2 and then the Cold War convinced us that our safety, our prosperity, and our values required our active participation and at times active intervention around the ever-shrinking globe.
Repeatedly over the course of the last century, control over the region’s resources has figured hugely in monumental decisions of war and peace. (Even before oil, the region frequently was critical in international trade and relations, but that’s a topic for another day.) Just to stay within recent memory, the politically motivated oil embargos of the ’70s hugely impacted the US and the world’s economies. The Iran-Iraq war interrupted and nearly shut down the Gulf, and likely would have if not for the relatively little-remarked US confrontations with Iran (Operations Prime Chance, Earnest Will, and Praying Mantis). The Gulf War was occasioned, of course, when Saddam took over Kuwait and put the rest of the Gulf under threat. Aside from the direct threats to commerce and trade, allowing Saddam or anyone else to consolidate such a position would have put him a position to embark on further adventures (see previous post, again).
We should, must, and will invade and occupy all other countries in positions relative to us similar to that of Iraq ca. 2002-3. Luckily enough, there are no other countries in positions relative to us similar to that of Iraq ca. 2002-3. I also do not accept your oversimplification of US-Iraqi relations when you imply that Iraq can be fairly summarized as a “country that has not attacked us.” I’m not going to attempt to recite the entire history of the ’90s and early ’00s up to and including the entire pre-invasion debate – I’ll just say that we were already engaged in Iraq, already had military forces operating over the skies of Iraq, already had solemn agreements with Iraq’s government implying recourse to military action in case of breach, and had already repeatedly resorted to military action under those agreements. Saddam Hussein was no virgin.
As to your main point, I believe it is America’s historic mission – and more than that, I believe it is in America’s and the world’s great interest – to expand the realm of freedom. Invasion of other countries, under any circumstances, is not, however, the main means by which it should pursue that mission – not even close, though in specific circumstances it may be unavoidable. Earlier, you challenged another commenter to “name a founder” who, in short, wasn’t an isolationist. Rather than look up the ample textual evidence that the Founders anticipated a future of “empire” for their new nation, regretted the weakness that prevented them from extending and defending their sphere of influence, and felt compelled at the time to resist “foreign entanglement,” I’d like to urge you to read Robert Kagan’s book-length essay OF PARADISE AND POWER, which discusses the history of America’s view of itself in the world in some depth (and is quite interesting in its own right for other reasons). Isolationism is an exception to the American historical rule, for good reason, notwithstanding the quotations from Washington and Adams that you, like many others, have in my view misappropriated and misapplied.
Sully,
You’ve now got it close enough to correct regarding the Spenser rifle. It was your use of the word “denied” that was the principal basis of my objection.
Roosevelt was not “evil” to keep McArthur in command after McArthur lost his air wing at Manila due to incompetence.
CK,
It is not my premise that you are disagreeing with when you challenge that “the objective of the war was merely to achieve one or another end state in Iraqi society.” It is the rationale now being used by Bush to justify his actions that you are challenging. Bush’s original core premise was WMDs, as Wolfowitz explained, “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason.”
But regardless of how Bush explains himself, it is what he did that you and I disagree about — whether or not what he did in Iraq was wise, justified, and benefical. You seem to be saying in effect, “Hey, it ain’t perfect, but it might get better with time.” If that is incorrect, I apologize. I, on the other hand, say it was a mistake that has not brought, and is very unlikely to bring, benefits to the US commensurate with the costs we paid in lives and treasure.
Rather than repeatedly apologize, Inagua, you might make a greater effort at comprehension.
You insist on seeing Iraq and in particular the Iraq war and occupation 2003-8, in complete isolation both from prior history and from the larger world. That is an elementary strategic error. Further, the historical decontextualization prevents you – or perhaps protects you – from understanding why one might conclude that a major confrontation was already under way in and around Iraq that sooner or later would have involved major use of force. The political decontextualization apparently prevents you from understanding why I argue that the negatives avoided are at least as important as whatever positives achieved (so far and perhaps going forward).
I also believe you misstate and oversimplify Bush’s self-justifications. It is unfair and unbecoming. You also appear to misunderstand Wolfowitz’s admission: He was clearly saying that there were multiple reasons for going to war, but that the WMD argument was settled on for pragmatic reasons. It was arguably a mistake, but not for the reasons you seem to presume.
CK,
I was only trying to translate your jibberish into English. Instead of feeding up pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness like “historical decontextualization,” why don’t you take a moment to reflect on what type of person seriously believes that “We should, must, and will invade and occupy all other countries in positions relative to us similar to that of Iraq ca. 2002-3.”
Why don’t you take a moment, Inagua, to consider what kind of person is incapable of reading two sentences in succession and drawing an obvious conclusion? That you resort to pointless, explicitly anti-intellectual insults suggests to me that you know you have not been able to make your argument.
“Historical decontextualization” is a perfectly good term for the game you play in order to avoid arguments you can’t answer. You play another version of the same game when you remove the sentence you quote from its context, and try to turn it into an object of derision. I have no trouble standing behind the statement, even if it stands de-contextualized in your disappointing post. Why don’t you try to tell me what’s wrong with it, with or without the context?
I could try another time to explain to you why it’s a mistake to view our engagement in Iraq without reference to our prior history there or without considering larger political and strategic contexts, but I tire of trying to make and re-make an argument that a high schooler should be able to comprehend, but that apparently lies beyond your non-pseudo-intellectual non-pretentious comfort zone.
CK,
Okay, why don’t you try telling me in plain English about threat Iraq posed to the United States in 2002? Please try to be specific, like citing types of weapons Saddam could use to attack America.
#42: A set of threats against vital US interests similar to those posed by the government and military forces of Baathist Iraq in 1990-1, which at that time was chiefly the “oil weapon,” secondarily the immediate danger to major U.S. allies and the challenge to the international system upon which our post-WW2 safety and prosperity depend. (The phrase “international system” does not refer specifically to the UN or to international law, though each plays a role in it.)
In addition, because the invasion of Iraq in ’03 was effectively the deferred completion of the Gulf War, and because the agreements that allowed for the cessation of hostilities in that war had been violated, all of the justifications for that intervention pertain – in some cases less immediately, in others more so, including but by no means limited to the presumption that Saddam possessed both the means and the will to deploy WMD and to perform other acts of aggression against the US and its interests. There were additional acts (mostly Gulf War-related in one way or another) that led the US to adopt regime change as national policy, but to my mind the US and other governments empowered during the Gulf War would have been justified in resuming hostilities at any time following the first of many violations of the peace agreements.
The situation is roughly similar to the situation that pertained in the Summer of 1945 between the US and Imperial Japan. Japan was at that moment no longer a direct threat to the United States. Its military was largely restricted to defensive operations. Its economy was devastated, and lacked the potential to re-arm. It still occupied some territories that didn’t rightly belong to it – like Manchuria and Korea – but Japanese occupation of Manchuria and Korea posed no “direct threat” to the US. So, by your implicit logic, we could and should have turned our fleet around, de-mobilized the Army and Marines, told the scientists at Los Alamos to take a vacation, and advised the Brits and others that they were on their own working things out with Stalin in Europe, since at the time the Russians, though they possessed a huge war machine, didn’t possess an ability to attack America or any immediate interest in doing so.
Instead, we took Pearl Harbor and Japanese behavior throughout the previous years as indications that we could not allow the Imperial Way to persist, and that only unconditional surrender – amounting to “regime change” – would be acceptable. We had other concerns as well, but that was the main issue. So we pressed the attack, preparing to invade the home islands if necessary, fire bombing Japanese cities, finally incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki – until finally the Japanese admitted defeat and gave in. We also took a very active role trying to organize the affairs of Europe and the rest of the world. We occupied Germany, in part to prevent the Russians from doing so. Neither Germany nor Russia was a threat to us at that time.
And we were both right and within our rights to act as we did in all of the above cases, even though no one at the moment was in a position to “attack America.”
Bravo, CK MacLeod
CK,
Your threshold for going to war is quite low. By your standards we should be at war right now with at least Iran and Russia.
Wars have indeed been started over lesser provocations than some recently offered by Iran and Russia, but the availability of a pretext or the existence of a threat or injury doesn’t obligate a threatened or injured party to act.
CK,
One of the unfortunate consequences of Bush’s experiment in Iraq is that it appears to have contributed to his unwillingness to do anything effective about Iran. I hope Israel has the resolve to do to Iran what it did to Iraq in 1981 and to Syria last September.
Your threshold for military action is quite low, Inagua. I will be surprised if Israel attempts to pre-empt the program – unless Israel happens to possess a key to stopping it simply and efficiently, maybe even quietly (in a way that wouldn’t compel Iran to retaliate). It’s possible that the only other thing that would adjust the cost/benefit calculation in Israel’s favor, from the point of view of Israeli decision-makers, would be action by Iran or more likely one or more of its proxies that enables Israel to counter-attack and escalate.
CK,
It is just another difference of opinion between us. I think using military force to prevent Iran from going nuclear is elementary planetary hygiene. I hope israel does what the US failed to do.
CK, as I assume you realize, your post in #35 attacks a straw man.
Eric R, I take your #50 as an admission that your own argument, in particular your pseudo-policy of “don’t care,” is desperately flimsy. An evasion of decision – a “straw man” – is all that you’re willing to offer. Your alternative is a “straw policy,” and you’re at least as guilty of wishful thinking as the hated “neo-cons” who publically underestimated the difficulties of Phase IV planning and put all their rhetorical chips on WMD. The difference is that their misjudgments were tested by reality. You retain the option of indulging in gross oversimplification and shallow fantasy, comparing all the costs of the actual policy compared against a cost- and risk-free, zero-body count straw ideal.
The two main scenarios I outlined would remain relevant even if a particular policy-maker happened to care more than you do about what resulted from whatever alternatives to the ’03 invasion were chosen.
No, CK.
Neither of the two absurd scenarios you outline are in any way even slightly relevant to a discussion of whether the 2003 decision to invade Iraq was a correct one.
You are perfectly entitled to believe that the only an isolationist would believe that it was a mistake, but know that your belief only reveals a profound ignorance of U.S. foreign policy.
Nowhere have I compared anything to a “zero-body count straw ideal,” nor would I need to.
Again, burden is on you here — as a defender of the worst millitary blunder in modern U.S. history — to explain the basis for your costly confidence that:
(a) the only way to avoid the very hypothetical possibility of a power vaccum in Iraq was to create one ourselves; and
(a) the only way to avoid the very hypothetical possibility of a non-dangerous Saddam becoming a dangerous Saddam was to fight this dumb war.
Merely recycling childishly inane rhetoric doesn’t advance your argument, Eric R, and I would find your reference to a “profound ignorance of US foreign policy” insulting if I didn’t find it laughable.
You criticize the invasion and its effects, but refuse to settle on a specific alternative that you’re willing to defend. You instead fantasize about an ostrich policy that you merely presume and assert, on no concrete basis, would have led to better results. That is your straw ideal. It’s so vague and wishful, that any real history with real results and real costs will compare negatively – so long as you’re content to live in a fantasy world.
“Don’t care” would be even worse than “profound ignorance”: It would represent a refusal even to pay attention, a determination to remain ignorant. It’s not surprising that someone committed to indifference to the facts would also remain indifferent to virtually every argument and item of evidence that I’ve offered to in my several posts on this thread. I await the appearance of a single good reason to take anything you say on this subject seriously.
Eric,
You questioned CK’s knowledge of history. CK gave a good example of his historical knowledge when he explained that the situation in Iraq in 2003 was “roughly similar to the situation that pertained in the Summer of 1945 between the US and Imperial Japan.”
There you go again, Inagua – that’s yet another good example of what an insufferable fool you’re willing to be when you find yourself incapable of making a serious argument. I regret also that you happened to seize on a phrase in which I accidentally used the word “pertained” when I meant to say “obtained” – though I believe the intended meaning is still clear. At least you put me in good company, that of Washington and Adams, whose words you also have submitted to intellectual vivisection.
What I actually wrote was that the situation was “(very) roughly similar,” and any intelligent and fair-minded reader would recognize that I was drawing an admittedly imprecise analogy. Obviously, the point, like so much else, escaped you.
CK,
This is progress. You’re up to “imprecise analogy.” Now, try remembering this. Japan was an advanced industrialized nation with a population almost as large as ours and with an army and navy far larger than ours when it attacked both Pearl Harbor and our self-governing commonwealth of the Phillipines within hours of each other. Iraq is a place with a population less than a tenth of ours whose people are only a few generations from camels and mud huts. The threat of WMDs, ties to terrorists, or even non-complience with UN resolutions pale to insignificance compared to what Japan actually did. Japan killed tens of thousands of Americans, including the victims of the Bataan Death March and those worked to death as slave labor. Saddam had never done anything even remotely similar to any Americans. To compare Japan 1945 to Iraq 2003 as an adversary is obscene.
Alright, let me take a shot at de-escalating things here a bit, CK.
You actually never said that only an isolationist could see the 2003 decision as a mistake — it’s quite clear, in fact, that this is likely not your view at all. My reference in #52 was indeed unfair, and you have my apologies. (As a separate matter, it was also quite silly to propose, as I did, that such view — were anyone to hold it — could only arise out of foreign policy ignorance; just as people’s beliefs about the merits of the Iraq War may derive from many different sources [status as an isolationist being only one such possibility] people’s beliefs regarding the sources of other people’s such Iraq War beliefs may derive from many different sources, too [status as an ignoramus being only one such possibility].)
Guess that’s fair enough, CK.
But I think you’ve made too much of my “don’t care” in #28. My point was that I’d be willing to defend any plausible “alternative Iraq policy” as preferable to the 2003 choice to invade. Certainly did not intend to withhold the specifics of what my own preferred approach would be, and, naturally, wouldn’t resist defending the more narrow claim of its preferablity to the 2003 choice to invade.
So, yes, I will gladly set forth and discuss exactly such a specific approach in a stand-alone comment beneath this one.
First off, though, I believe you’ll want to drop what seems to be a motivating assumption for you in this thread: that the Iraq war was unavoidable. I’m, naturally, convinced the assumption is wrong — that invasion was and almost certainly would have continued to be, without question, completely avoidable, and that, further, you have not as yet presented any viable argument as to why anyone should think otherwise. But the more important point is that it assumes away any possibility that the substance of this discussion might matter.
So rather than your attempting to marshal such case and our engaging it, seems to me you should prefer to concede the point — that much more than my failure to specify what exactly happens to, say, Qusay Hussein, in my proposed alternate chain-of-events, such assumption — even if it were actually plausable — is an unjustified “evasion of decision” (and, given the stakes, some might even say cowardly).
Substantive discussion to follow.
So here’s what I would likely do instead of the 2003 invasion:
1) I imagine I’d maintain the no-fly zones, but revise the sanctions regime. Probably the goal down the line would be to try and flip Saddam back to a more cooperative, pro-U.S. stance, but this would likely fail miserably and would at best leave Saddam as an occasionally reliable Hafez al-Assad figure.
2) The inspections regime would be allowed to putter along in its same (perhaps totally farcical) manner; we know now that Saddam was convinced that we were convinced that he had WMDs, and I expect he’d continue to want to benefit from this perception without having to actually expend the resources to actually build any new WMDs.
3) As otherwise relates to Saddam’s brutal repression of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds and his cruel police state rule generally, we might make strides to do what we could to contain and minimize it, but painfully we would probably just have to largely live with it in the short-to-medium term – as we of course do in far too many corners of the world, from far too many supposed “friends” of America, indeed as we tolerate from our post-Anbar awakening allies and indeed from often still repressive Iraqi government itself.
4) Our military action would be limited to reprisal strikes as necessary; his military sphere of influence would remain sharply contained and heavy punitive strikes would follow any concrete attempt to push back on this or otherwise expand his strategic reach. But as matter of image, we probably won’t be able to avoid his Fidel-like crowing to all that might listen that two sets of Bushes (and two sets of Clintons?) weren’t able to get rid of him – and his crowing would really, really bother me and would certainly not be a good thing for U.S. interests.
That’s my scenario. There are risks here, and certainly none of this is at all pleasant (I don’t think “body count” is the relevant metric of comparison on this, but I can also certainly see how my scenario could definitely have lots of people dying who shouldn’t; still have trouble seeing how the body counts could possibly match up with what actually happened, but this is not my point here at all).
Why am I convinced that America would be safer in this case?
In #43 you mention “the challenge to the international system upon which our post-WW2 safety and prosperity depend” that Saddam Hussein represented, noting that “the phrase ‘international system’ does not refer specifically to the UN or to international law, though each plays a role in it.”
Back in 2003, this was for me the most salient argument in the confused case for war.
I believed and believe that the principle is an important one, and, my liberalist affection for international law and multilateral institutions notwithstanding, also agreed and agree with your distinction between the international system generally, and the role each of those plays in it.
That Saddam would be allowed to flaunt his defiance of the U.S. and of the Desert Storm coalition certainly was annoying in its own right, but the main reason to care seemed that it flagrantly called the bluff of supposed “soft power” underlying both the international order and U.S. participation and authority in such order.
What meaning can international orderliness and intuitionalism possibly have if not shown to be promptly and effectively back-able by relevant “hard power”?
This was definitely a negative, and it remains a longstanding negative of all rogue international behavior.
Far, far, far worse, however, than an implied military sanction being revealed as hesitant (something that actually happens to hegemons unavoidably all the time) is such threatened military sanction being revealed as ineffectual (given the relative rarity of war, far more infrequent and potentially damaging).
Said another way: the famed Powell Doctrine, beyond being (as is more commonly understood) a recognition of western democracies’ limited stomach for sustained military commitment, is also — and more importantly — a recognition of the limits of sustained military commitment as a tool to achieve the international objectives of western democracies and of the importance to international order of not exposing such limits.
Neocons have long been enthralled with the madman theory. That Bush showed himself crazy enough to attack Iraq was supposed to enhance American power by retying soft speech to a very big stick.
The result was a very similar effect to the massive strategic blunder that the 2006 Lebanon war represented for Israel – what happens when you let the madman run free, when you let the big stick swing widely, and he turns out to be much wimpier, and the stick much smaller, than anyone had previously imagined.
The lesson of the Iraq War to the world – the lesson that hopefully will not take to many long years to overcome – is that even with the craziest cowboy renegade and a loving, supportive American public, even some very, very tiny wars remain very hard to fight. That the U.S. military often overestimates its own effectiveness. That many of the implied threats underlying the international order might be to complex and demanding for our military to actually carry out if it needed to.
This is a much more dangerous result than little Saddam being allowed to talk big and tough, and the West lacking the resolve to do anything. This is U.S. – notably, without much of the rest of the West – having a tremendously hard time actually doing what it set out to do once it had actually put its proverbial money where its mouth was.
Perhaps even more than (a) the power vaccum created for Iran to fill and (b) the resources wasted that might have gone instead to resolving Afganistan/Pakistan, I believe this is a central reason why the Iraq war has diminished U.S. power, and — at least in the short to medium term — made the U.S. and its interests and allies significantly less safe.
Thank you, Eric R, for, as you put it, trying to de-escalate. Your willingness to re-consider your approach to our disagreements and to explore your thoughts in more detail has provided much food for thought, in addition to re-confirming you as one of the more accessibly reasonable among liberalish Contenders.
As an aside, it looks to me as though you were on the verge of confessing in the above that in, say, the Fall of 2002, you were at least flirting with support for Bush policy as you understood it, possibly coming from the political vicinity of H. Clinton, Biden, Edwards, Reid, Keller, Pollack, et al, possibly a notch further over to the left – or possibly resting securely in the recognition that since you, like most of the rest of us, didn’t have to record a vote, you could afford not to make up your mind entirely…
Even as a longtime supporter of the war, I don’t mind confessing that I felt severe misgivings in 2002 – even though I had been all along under the strong impression, originally reached by intuition on the morning of 9/11, that Saddam’s days were (and should be) numbered. I want to add that this impression had nothing to do with any belief that Saddam was directly responsible for 9/11, even if I would maintain the Iraq problem and the Al Qaeda problem were related by more than coincidence. I simply believed we would soon be at war in the Islamic world, and that the unfinished business in Iraq would not be tolerated by an America re-assessing and likely re-ordering its foreign policy and defense posture from top to bottom. I remain convinced that our relations with the Middle East – with the people of the entire Middle East – were so badly out of balance that an explosion of disruptive violence, centered in Iraq for various interrelated historical and geographical reasons, was nearly or virtually inevitable, and that our own and others’ interests were so heavily engaged that a large military component in attempts to cope with that violence and its actual or potential regional spillover was also inevitable.
I guess it’s just barely conceivable to me that, under your amended policy as outlined above, which I’ll call “Saddam in a patched-up box,” we might just have managed to achieve a (relatively) soft Iraqi landing some day, at some uncertain point between 2003 and 2050. I think, however, that what we’ve learned over the last five years about Iraq makes the achievement of an Iraqi soft landing on an extended glide path look less, not more likely. Even in the best of circumstances, Iraqis would be suffering under Saddam’s regime with no end in sight, and we would have to tolerate a high degree of uncertainty about Saddam’s intentions and capacities. If at any point containment failed, for whatever reasons, there can be little doubt that people would have looked back on 2002-3 and the failure of US resolve as a huge missed opportunity, perhaps as the greatest failure of resolves and greatest missed opportunity in (modern) American history…
That’s all I have for now – but I believe your post deserves some additional comments. I hope to be in a position to make them tomorrow.
As there are tangentially related issues and the subject has received much attention in this thread, some thoughts on Iraqi democracy promotion:
1. I wish for the Iraqi people, as I generally wish all people, a government that is as enlightened and representative as possible, just as I wish them, as I generally wish all people, a society, laws and communities as that are as diginity-preserving and opportunity-providing as possible.
2. As other pessimists in this thread likely agree, I don’t believe that the current relevant power bases in Iraq — either non-Iraqi or Iraqi — offer much reason to expect much progress toward fufilling my wishes in Item 1.
3. Unlike most of both the pessimists and the optimists in this thread, I don’t believe there’s almost any reason at all to evaluate “our success in Iraq” with respect to how far along Iraqis may or may not get in the coming decades toward Item 1 objectives.
4. There are two ways in which the cause of “Iraqi democracy promotion” is seen to be linked to how we might think about the Iraq war: (A) as a rhetorical justification for the war as part of a general American commitment to “the cause of freedom over tyranny” (comparable to much cold war democracy-promotion messanging); and (B) as a tactical justification for the war as linked to the War on Terror by way of the supposedly key effect on terrorism eradication of democracy-building in the Middle East (Sharansky’s agenda). Both are completely unconvincing.
A) More democracy and less tyranny is certainly noble as an abstract goal, but no one credible could or has ever argued that the U.S. has ever picked its millitary engagements by anything approximating a strict adherence to this objective. We have no idea whether or not Saddam’s regime happened to be the least democratic or even the most brutal regime in the world, as of March 2003 (personally, I doubt it but would be tough to say even with ample data) — what’s clear is that no one serious would believe the question to have been made relevant, or even considered at all, in the decision to attack Saddam.
B) As far as Sharansky’s spiel on democracy promotion as part of the War on Terror, there are two problems: one minor and one major.
i) The minor problem is that no plausable transmission mechanism has ever been posited for democratic contagion in the Middle East. Were Iraq to somehow become a model of Skandinavian social democracy, how exactly does this “transform the Middle East”? (A big reason was just a “minor problem” for neocons early on: they envisioned sucessions of subsequent invasions of Middle East countries.)
ii) The major problem relates to the transmission mechanism by which Middle Eastern democracy is supposed to reduce terrorism.
–Basically, the theory is that Middle Eastern tyrants quell domestic dissent and divert attention away from client-state-like relationships with the United States by hyping anti-American and anti-Israel protest. The “street” internalizes the propaganda while still associating the corruption and repression of the regime with the tyrant’s American support.
All fine and good, but on its own terms, the mechanism consists of using to Middle East democracy so as to inspire Middle Eastern populations to hate America and Israel less. Exactly these same neocon advocates of Middle East democracy as anti-terror mechanism are categorically uninterested in all other possible message avenues by which to encourage such hatred reduction. (Most obvious and significantly, said “democracy promotion” is being carried out by a spectacularly unpopular invasion and occupation — no one alive can possibly imagine the Iraq war having caused — certainly as of today, but even as of three or five or fifteen years from now — on a net basis, more America love by way of “yay, we’re going to the ballots” happy voting excitment, than America hate by way of absolutely everything else; yet, for the doctrinaire Abe Greenwald-style neocon the former “yay, we’re going to the ballots” stuff is always a Prominent and Important Step Against Terrorism and cause for great optimism, while the all the latter stuff simply does not exist, or, further, is to be actively scoffed at as a liberal “root-causism” preoccupation that insufficiently appreciates primal evil and ruthlessness of terrorist forces; as always, that neocon brilliance just does not stop).
–Further, at a socioeconomic level, Middle East democracy is also seen to foment reduced terrorism by fomenting a growth in middle classes. Here, AQ’s successes recrutting amongst middle class, and the popularity of anti-Americanism and anti-Israel messages with same, would seem to cut against this, too.
–Naturallly, it need not be noted that, as with the 1979 referendum establishing clerical rule in Iran, 1991 elections in Algeria, and Hamas’s 2006 election win, participatory democracy certainly does not always lead to the kind of outcomes neocons are likely to celebrate.
Eric R – no fair adding notes, however well-considered, before your previous posts have been answered in full – I’m still planning on getting to that later.
I’d urge you to read Kenneth Pollack’s recent book A PATH OUT OF THE DESERT, as he answers or strives to answer many of your arguments regarding democracy promotion and a US policy toward the Middle East that aligns with our values. As I’ve said here before, I think that, given Pollack’s past influence, his closeness to Clinton era diplomats, and not incidentally the thoughtfulness and rigor of his arguments, there’s a good chance that US policy going forward will track his proposed “grand strategy,” and will in any event be illuminated by an understanding of it.
CK, in posting my last comment in #60 last night, I see that I somehow failed to notice your response in #59. Thank you for your kind words there.
Will definitely get a hold of the Pollack book. Think you’re right that he’s likely to have a receptive audience with many in the new administration.
I look forward to the rest of your responses.
…if you have the patience, Eric, I may need a little while to finish a serviceable reply – Xmas rush was a little busier for me than I anticipated it would be. If you like you can drop me your e-mail address as an alternative, since I doubt there’s anyone else reading this thread other than you and I. You can use any e-mail the author link at my blog (via the link above) or, if you’re unafraid of spam or harassment or whatever other infections might afflict this message board, you can leave your address. Otherwise, I’ll post to this thread.
CK,
I still read this thread. One never knows when you might share another pearl of wisdom like this:
“We should, must, and will invade and occupy all other countries in positions relative to us similar to that of Iraq ca. 2002-3.”
Yes, CK, let’s go ahead and keep the discussion in this thread.
CK,
Your position on Iraq is essentially this: “We had to go in and it doesn’t matter whether anything is better because it would have been worse if we had stayed out.” Did the same hold true in Vietnam? Or should we have not gone in? Or gotten out earlier? Or stayed for victory? Or any other alternative you may describe, such as “win it faster with more troops and deadlier weapons.”
For those neocon jerks who can’t accept reality, and who deny that Iraqis are suffering as a result of our invasion, specially Christians, seeTom Paine, #7, check this out from CNN:
Christians in Iraq face a “bleak future,” said Kassab, executive director of the Chaldean Federation of America, a nonprofit group that helps Iraqi Christians.
“We are heading for a demise,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where it might be an ethnic cleansing in the future.” A recent U.S. government report focused on the plight of Iraq’s Christian minority. U.S. diplomats and legislators are worried, too. “I think the Christians are caught in the middle of a horrible situation,” said U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat of Assyrian and Armenian ancestry. She said Iraqi Christians are suffering as a result of “religious cleansing,” and she has urged more help for minorities who have fled their homes in Iraq. The Iraqi government has worked to be inclusive and accepting toward Christians, but daily intimidation has cowed the Christian community, with crosses removed from churches, priests afraid to wear their clerical garb, the faithful reluctant to attend church, and churches hiring private security guards. Iraq’s Christian population has fallen from as many as 1.4 million in 2003 to between 500,000 and 700,000 more recently, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. A recent commission report outlined chilling abuse that Christians suffer in Muslim-dominated Iraq. It sounded an alarm about the treatment of minorities such as Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, an ancient people who embraced the Christian faith in its early years and still speak a form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Read some of report’s examples of violence against Iraqi Christians
The community has endured displacement, killings and kidnappings, with churches being attacked and occupied.
Nothing like the truth to ruin your entire day.
Thanks, ALEJCARO.
Here is a link to the story to the CNN story ALEJCARO quotes:
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/24/iraq.christians/?iref=mpstoryview
OK, Eric – I’ll reply here rather than privately, as per your request – sorry about the delay.
First on the side issues: What exactly are you thanking Alejcaro for? Another impertinent submission on this blog for which he’ll take no responsibility? A typically insulting post with no apparent purpose other than venting spleen and, as he puts it, ruining someone’s day (in his dreams)?
As for Iraqi Christians specifically, there’s been a spate of Christmas season reports in the last few days – the one you link along with one regarding recognition of Christmas as a national holiday in Iraq, calls from Iraqi Christian leaders to refugees to come back alongside claims that the situation has improved, and so on. The Chaldean Christians were hardly the only sect to be persecuted by extremist thugs. As far as I can tell, the likes of Alejcaro, and as far as I know yourself, have had no better solution than to leave the former to the latter as soon as possible. Otherwise, if Iraqi Christians were depending on Saddam’s protection in perpetuity, that was a bad bet for a number of reasons.
Anyway, my guess would be that Alejcaro and his comrades never gave two sh*ts about Iraqi Christians, or Christians persecuted anywhere, until about two days ago, just as he probably never and certainly now doesn’t give two sh*ts about the Marsh Arabs (a community of 500,000 reduced to a few 1000s under Saddam, their villages burnt out, their wetlands largely desertified) – for one simple reason: Their dire predicament under the pre-invasion state of things doesn’t serve his polemical purposes.
Like Alejcaro, Inagua seems more interested in scoring imaginary emotional victories on fantasy rhetorical toteboards than in pursuing useful dialogue. By way of transition back to our main discussion, however, I’ll repeat that I have no trouble at all standing behind my now twice-quoted “pearl of wisdom” regarding the invasion of Iraq, even without the context intended to illuminate precisely what I meant: When and if we ever again find ourselves with the means and multiple justifications to finish a war against a brutal regime at relatively small cost to ourselves, in a politically and strategically extremely important region, where we have forces already in place engaged in ongoing confrontations, where the costs of backing down include potential catastrophe, we should, must, and will act. Of course, this rare situation may never be re-produced again.
I’ll also repeat, by way of summary, my view of your alternative, which still stands unanswered: Even in the best of circumstances, Iraqis would be suffering under Saddam’s regime with no end in sight, and we would have to tolerate a high degree of uncertainty about Saddam’s intentions and capacities. If at any point containment failed, for whatever reasons, there can be little doubt that people would have looked back on 2002-3 and the failure of US resolve as a huge missed opportunity, perhaps as the greatest failure of resolves and greatest missed opportunity in (modern) American history…
For the rest of this post, I’m going to try to confine myself to glossing your arguments, my intention being to stress where I think your alternative – “Saddam’s New Box” – is subject to more or less catastrophic failure.
58-1: “but this would likely fail miserably and would at best leave Saddam as an occasionally reliable Hafez al-Assad figure” I don’t see why we should be that Saddam would ever be even as responsible as Assad was. Nor do I see what opening there would ever be for us to trust Saddam. Assad never stood on substantial oil reserves with a port on the Persian Gulf, borders with Saudi Arabia and Iran, in easy range of the world’s most important refining complexes. Furthermore, to whatever extent we were seen as capitulating in the face of Saddam’s defiance, we’d be legitimating the worst kind of Middle East leader and reversing a generation of policy – with the broadly accepted explanation being a failure of will and resolve.
58-2: “I expect he’d continue to want to benefit from this perception without having to actually expend the resources to actually build any new WMDs.” That’s quite an assumption. If we’re letting him “mature” into an Assad-like figure, and have already backed off from a failed sanctions-inspections policy and credible enforcement, then why wouldn’t he do what he’d already done – develop, deploy, and finally utilize WMD – for all the same and additional reasons?
58-3: “painfully we would probably just have to largely live with [Saddam's repression] in the short-to-medium term – as we of course do in far too many corners of the world, from far too many supposed ‘friends’ of America, indeed as we tolerate from our post-Anbar awakening allies and indeed from often still repressive Iraqi government itself.” You’re really fudging here. Do you really believe that anything in Iraqi governance at present compares with the “Republic of Fear”? Call me when Nuri al-Maliki or the Anbaris start heaping thousands of corpses into huge pits, annihilating entire ancient cultures, torturing soccer players who miss penalty kicks, and feeding recalcitrant citizens to zoo lions.
58-4: “his military sphere of influence would remain sharply contained and heavy punitive strikes would follow any concrete attempt to push back on this or otherwise expand his strategic reach” This policy implies continued, indefinite relatively heavy military engagement, from politically precarious bases, with Iraqis still held hostage under harsh and comprehensive, open-ended sanctions. It is merely an assumption that this predicament would be less harmful to our long-term interests, including our safety against direct attack, over however many years or decades it had to be sustained, than the current situation.
You devote much of the rest of your post #58 to a peculiar and interesting, but to me unpersuasive explication of the costs of our present “failure” – the idea being that the difficulties in Iraq have exposed as a kind of fiction the US pose of bad cop vs. the typically European pose of good cop.
I would argue that our initial success at deposing Saddam, on the heels of quickly deposing the Taliban, confirmed our willingness and our ability to take down an enemy regime. The doubt that has been re-confirmed isn’t in the willingness of America to act, but in the old problem of democratic staying power. It certainly wasn’t invented by George W Bush. Indeed, with the help of David Petraeus and our armed forces, we have at worst produced a typical exception to the general rule delivered as catechism to our enemies since well before World War 2, that the western democracies are unwilling to sustain casualties or even retain much focus.
The Powell Doctrine tended to support rather than refute that rule – with the Gulf War being a prime example of the application of overwhelming military force to achieve a limited objective, in that case the expulsion of Saddam’s army from Kuwait. We achieved that very limited objective, but left a humanitarian and political catastrophe and a heap of unfinished business behind, and eventually (10 years of Saudi bases and no-fly zones and oil-for-food and several hundred thousand eliminated or ruined Iraqi lives later) we were again forced to confront the tin can of hard choices that Powell and fellow “realists” kicked down the road for us all.
Before the success of the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq (calling it a military success isn’t the same as claiming that it was cheap and easy, or that its achievements are irreversible), it was thought that the bad lesson of Iraq would be to reinforce the Powell Doctrine in its most cowardly and inhumane formulation – “more rubble, less trouble.” The supposition was that “next time,” once we decided to fight, we might not even pretend to care about the aftermath. If bad guys re-occupied a struck area and re-constituted a threat – we’d just blast ‘em again, harder if necessary. If the chaos spilled over to a neighboring country – re-target, repeat, and escalate. Sooner or later, that’s the logical progression of a strict reliance on “heavy punitive strikes.” Even in the unlikely event it turned out to be more politically sustainable than, and as equally effective as, occupation and democracy promotion, it would amount to a national policy of open-ended counter-terror and mass murder, likely accompanied by tacit acceptance and outright support for unpopular authoritarian regimes.
To review, your “new box” approximates my alternative (“absurd” scenario) #1 – Saddam Resurgent – but attempts to surround it and Saddam with just the right amount of control – enough to reign in his ambitions, but not enough to make him incapable of governing. My own view is that we’ve never shown the ability to shape the evolution of another country remotely, with any high degree of predictability. We have a hard enough time when we’re on scene, in force.
Further, it now appears clear that in many ways we were wrong about what we were dealing with in Iraq – not just WMDs. It seems that, contrary to pre-war perceptions (note: amended as a result of the war itself), Saddam’s Iraq was much closer to collapse than we realized. In addition to making it seem even more unlikely that, in our ignorance, we’d build the box effectively, the evidence also leads me to believe that scenario #2, Saddam falling on his own, would have been more likely – leading to civil strife and war and external intervention, in a predicament always closer to the verge of cataclysm, while calling forth exertions far beyond even the Republic of Fear’s normal horrors for however long Saddam & Co were to retain their grip on power.
I don’t expect you to try to answer all of my arguments here, and I certainly don’t presume that I’ve given the last or even an adequate word on the subject of Iraq and its alternatives, but, looking forward to future discussion, the last thing I’ll do is ask you to refrain from attacking “neocon” positions that appear to have been made up out of whole cloth. You write, for instance, as follows:
Can you cite one speech, interview, or essay where some “neocon” ever stated anything of the kind? I don’t recall anything like that in WORLD WAR IV. I don’t recall Bill Kristol trumpeting Bush’s successful demonstration of fearsome insanity. I don’t see Robert Kagan giving such a theory, at least as you outline it, more than a dismissive footnote. I think there’s a tendency on your side of the debate to use “neocon” in the same way that leftists used to use the term “fascist” – meaning “anything we hate or despise.” The tendency isn’t conducive to… much of anything other than misunderstanding and recriminations. I’d also set aside phrases like “greatest military blunder in modern American history” (which I was of course referring to in my boldfaced summary statement). I’m not sure which I find more ridiculous – the judgment itself or the idea that you or I would be in a position to reach it. Either way, in my opinion it’s just empty rhetoric.
CK’s defense of invasion and occupation continues to underwhelm.
1. In response to Alejcaro’s link about the current plight of Christians, CK points out that Saddam also persecuted minorites, that Alejcaro really doesn’t care about Christians, and that he is only raising the issue to score polemical points. Can you count the logical fallacies?
2. CK repeatedly expresses concern about our ability to “contain” Saddam’s Iraq. Why we would fail to contain Iraq after succeding in containing the Soviet Union for 40 years is never explained.
3. CK observes that “Saddam’s Iraq was much closer to collapse than we realized,” and that the fall of Saddam would likely lead “to civil strife and war and external intervention.” So we intervened, started a war, and unleashed civil strife to avoid “civil strife and war and external intervention.” Orwell and the Red Queen together couldn’t have said it better.
Inagua’s lack of reading comprehension continues to qualify as annoying. Again, instead of engaging the actual arguments, he replies to imaginary straw men.
1. I pointed out that Saddam did not merely “persecute minorities,” but wiped them out. In the case of the Marsh Arabs, for instance, he and his engineers pioneered a unique form of ecological genocide, desertifying the wetlands they had lived in for centuries. I also pointed out that there’s more to the plight of Christians in Iraq, and to their future prospects, than expressed in one article. How the Christians would have fared in Saddam’s Iraq under non-invasion scenarios is anyone’s guess, but, if his regime fell apart, they would have been more, not less, exposed to sectarian and jihadist violence. Finally, reliance on Saddam was a bad bet for all concerned, but if you’re going to make it, on behalf of the Chaldeans or anyone else, then you also carry the burden of all of the evils of Saddam’s government.
2. The confrontation with the Soviet Union does not compare to the one with Iraq. Saddam had already demonstrated a penchant for high-risk adventurism, but, even if we succeeded in walling off Saddam from the region and preventing him from taking its resources hostage and threatening our allies, the human cost to the Iraqis, and the political and moral cost to ourselves, would have remained extremely high. The concept of containment in the case of Iraq would also include containing spillover if and when Saddam’s government finally broke down and other external forces sought to intervene, as well as the political spillover caused by the containment policy itself, which already featured heavily in jihadist and anti-American propaganda prior to the invasion, and would almost certainly have loomed larger, presuming that the policy didn’t prove unsustainable and break down completely after we backed down from enforcing its main features, and as sanctions and other efforts broke down, as they were already in the process of doing.
3. Again, Inagua is either willfully misreading or revealing his intellectual incapacities. Our objective was never to cause a catastrophic collapse of Saddam’s Iraq: Regime change is not the same thing as destruction. If we had wanted simply to destroy Iraq, we could have left after three weeks. We probably could have destroyed Iraq as a functioning state merely through intensive bombardment. Indeed, we were already well on the way to destroying Iraq without ever invading at all, but our objective wasn’t to punish 24 million people and create a failed state in the center of the Middle East.
Inagua yet again fails to acknowledge that we had already intervened and were still in the process of enforcing, imperfectly, the terms of our intervention. As for the particulars of the argument on this thread, Inagua also seems unable to process the simple concept of a comparison of alternatives. My point has been and remains that civil strife, war, and external intervention were apparently already in the cards whether or not we invaded. Inagua thinks he’s pointing to a contradiction. Instead, he’s merely conceding my argument. By invading, we gave ourselves a chance to influence events in our favor and to prevent a true catastrophe that would have been much more costly to the people of the region and to the world, and likely would have led to major US military intervention on much worse terms.
Inagua, I’ve come to learn to let the likes of Ck McLeod rant away and ignore them. They can’t come to grips with the fact that there are people out there that disagree with their self-important feeling of knowing what’s right for others. Unfortunately, when people like McLeod act out their fantasies in real life, other people get hurt in real life. We needed to destroy Iraq in order to save it for the Iraqis, don’t you see. In fact, we will invade Iraq, and we will be greeted as liberators with gratitude and gifts and flowers, and statues will be put up for Bush and Cheney, and holidays proclaimed, and the Iraqis will gladly hand over swaths of Iraqi territory to Bush so that he can build military bases, and the Iraqis will thank us for that as well. That was the expectation wasn’t it?
Witness the article I quoted in which Iraqi Christians are suffering, and McLeod turns it around as a vindication of Christian resurgence in Iraq! What can you do with such people? Just ignore them, but don’t stop saying your piece.
Impertinent indeed.
Indeed, ALEJCARO, your commitment to ignorance shines through in every post you make! You and Inagua deserve each other: A perfect pair of right and left head-in-the-sand bookends.
CK,
I like your latest summation best: “By invading, we gave ourselves a chance to influence events in our favor and to prevent a true catastrophe that would have been much more costly to the people of the region and to the world, and likely would have led to major US military intervention on much worse terms.”
A chance to influence events in our favor. And how has that gone? I say by any objective measure, not well and nowhere near commensurate with the costs. You cannot refute this, so you always fall back on, “Saddam was worse.”
Alejcaro,
I understand what you say about CK. I have no excuse for engaging him. But it did lead to seeing your interesting link about Christian persucation in Iraq, which I was unaware of, so it isn’t all wasted time.
Better than in some alternatives, not as well as if we had perfectly understood the situation and had made perfect calls all along the way. That rarely happens in life. Our decisionmaking under the alternative scenarios (that you remain unwilling or unable to address) would also presumably have been less than perfect.
You’re welcome to “say” whatever you like, no matter how empty and foolish, of course. There are no “objective measures.” History does not reveal its alternatives for you to analyze and compare “objectively.” You can fantasize to your hearts content about cost- and risk-free alternatives, but they exist only in your mind. In your case, they tend to be detail-, substance-, and analysis-free as well as cost-free.
There is nothing to refute. There is no substance to your counterargument, just your repetitive, empty assertions. There is no “Saddam was worse” to fall back on. The alternative is a “would have been,” not a “was.” The question is what might have transpired, or be on the verge of transpiring now, had we backed down in 2002-3 from a situation that was already incurring high costs, and likely to incur higher ones, regardless of what we did. The evils of Saddam’s regime are relevant in that they give indications of what we and the Iraqis might have been expected to deal with. They are relevant because they represent what you and Alejcaro choose to defend.
Christians in Iraq face a “bleak future,” said Kassab, executive director of the Chaldean Federation of America, a nonprofit group that helps Iraqi Christians.
“We are heading for a demise,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where it might be an ethnic cleansing in the future.” A recent U.S. government report focused on the plight of Iraq’s Christian minority. U.S. diplomats and legislators are worried, too. “I think the Christians are caught in the middle of a horrible situation,” said U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat of Assyrian and Armenian ancestry. She said Iraqi Christians are suffering as a result of “religious cleansing,” and she has urged more help for minorities who have fled their homes in Iraq. The Iraqi government has worked to be inclusive and accepting toward Christians, but daily intimidation has cowed the Christian community, with crosses removed from churches, priests afraid to wear their clerical garb, the faithful reluctant to attend church, and churches hiring private security guards. Iraq’s Christian population has fallen from as many as 1.4 million in 2003 to between 500,000 and 700,000 more recently, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. A recent commission report outlined chilling abuse that Christians suffer in Muslim-dominated Iraq. It sounded an alarm about the treatment of minorities such as Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, an ancient people who embraced the Christian faith in its early years and still speak a form of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Read some of report’s examples of violence against Iraqi Christians
The community has endured displacement, killings and kidnappings, with churches being attacked and occupied. (CNN)
CK,
You don’t even read your own stuff when I quote it back to you. Again, here is what you said, “a chance to influence events in our favor.” That chance didn’t pan out. We went in hoping to set up Clalabi and a pro-Western government that would act as an example of effective, secular government in the Middle East, that would let us have bases (remember Saudi Arabia?), and maybe even establish normal ties with Israel. We now have a Shia-dominated government operating under Islamic law and establishing close relations with Shia Iran. That’s why the operation failed. The new government is worse for our geopolitical interests than the old government.
I realize that this is a difficult concept for you to grasp, Inagua, but the only meaningful comparisons are relative and not absolute. The issue isn’t whether or not Iraq has become a perfect and permanent ally with a social and political system that should make it eligible for induction into the Union as the 51st State. Even less is the question whether the current situation suits your personal and arbitrary standards for US interests. The issue is whether the current state of affairs, among realistic alternatives, is closer or further from something we can work with and build upon than we might reasonably have expected otherwise.
If we hadn’t invaded, and Iraq had fallen apart, then the Shi’a, who represent around 60% of the population, would very likely sooner or later have come to dominate. The only other alternative would be continued rule by a dictator resorting to state terror to secure control – THAT is your alternative, and it’s typical of an old supposed “realism” that could never provide a long-term solution to instability in the Middle East.
You engage in the same facile thinking of many on the left when you presume that excluding the Shi’a – that is leaving them permanently under the domination of the Sunni Baathists – could ever have been a viable long-term strategy, or one that aligned with our values or interests. Any representative republic in Iraq would inevitably have been an Islamic republic, and would have embodied aspects of Sharia, if that’s what you mean by “Islamic law.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, whatever the anti-Muslim types may have told you, since Sharia is a complex and evolving tradition, not a single set of wrist-chopping punishments. The result in many places, including Iraq today, a step up from Saddamite thugocracy or the brands of Islamism practiced in Iran or operating where extremist Sunnis have temporarily gained power.
As for the Chalabi alternative briefly put forward by one group of theorists and policymakers, I believe it was abandoned well before the Saddam regime was ousted, and certainly before Saddam himself was finally caught. Anyway, it’s absurd to suggest that Chalabi’s status is a critical test of the larger policy. And I never heard anyone putting forth establishment of normal ties with Israel by the successor government as a war aim. Bases? We have bases in Iraq now. We’ll see whether the Iraqis decide it’s in their interest to keep us there. I’m guessing they will, but it’s too early to say, and that was never a primary war aim either.
I frankly don’t know where you get a lot of this stuff, and how you prioritize it. Can you point to some definitive speech or policy statement, or are you just winging it?
We have in Iraq the basis for a democratic government, under the influence of a quietist rather than a revolutionary Shi’ism, with security forces trained by, supplied by, and dependent upon us for the foreseeable future. We appear to have routed the extremists most closely aligned with the current rulers of Iran. Totally extirpating Iranian influence would never, on the other hand, have been a realistic goal. Indeed, a peaceful, civil, and cooperative Iranian-Iraqi relationship is in our interest over the long term, especially since, over time, Iraq and its alternative example may prove a greater influence on Iran, and on other coutries in the region desperately in need of reform (not perfection, reform), than Iran or anyone else presently is or is likely to be on Iraq.
Handled reasonably well, the situation that Bush, Petraeus, and the forces they led have left behind can be part of a much better future both for ourselves and the people of the Middle East than anything produced by the “realist” school, by isolationists, or by the European “good cops.” That alternative offered nothing but unending misery and injustice, with eruptions of violence increasingly aimed against us, and the increasing likelihood of systemic and cataclysmic breakdown – even setting aside the secondary consequences of our backing down on commitments to enforce pre-existing agreements and positions. We’re hardly out of the woods, but we’re closer than we were in, say, 2001-3, and than we would have been under the alternatives.
Of course, I just have to guess what you would have preferred we do. Unlike Eric R, you haven’t bothered to explain what alternative policy you would have supported. Total retreat from all political and security commitments in the region? Is that your idea of a rational policy?
“The issue is whether the current state of affairs, among realistic alternatives, is closer or further from something we can work with and build upon than we might reasonably have expected otherwise.”
CK-speak for, “was it worth it?” Answer, No.
—————————————-
“If we hadn’t invaded, and Iraq had fallen apart, then the Shi’a, who represent around 60% of the population, would very likely sooner or later have come to dominate.”
CK seems unaware that the Sunni minority had run the place since Gertrude Bell put in the first Hashemite king nearly ninety years ago. But he is sure that the Shia would very likely come to dominate. Just as he is sure of so many other unknowns.
—————————————–
“The only other alternative would be continued rule by a dictator resorting to state terror to secure control.”
Right. It had been going on in Iraq for about ninety years. And it goes on in a lot of other places as well. Want to invade Zimbabwe? North Korea? Cuba? Syria?
—————————————
“Any representative republic in Iraq would inevitably have been an Islamic republic, and would have embodied aspects of Sharia, if that’s what you mean by “Islamic law.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, whatever the anti-Muslim types may have told you, since Sharia is a complex and evolving tradition, not a single set of wrist-chopping punishments.”
Sharia as an evolving tradition. Next you will be agreeing with pathetic Patty Murray’s praise of the Taliban day care centers.
You don’t advance any argument at all, Inagua. You’re still apparently afraid to state your own position. Instead, you stick to trivial carping and pointless, smugly ignorant and self-superior sarcasm. Not interesting.
The argument is very simple: Iraq wasn’t worth the cost. You probably understand the proposition, but your inability to refute it with facts or logic causes you roll out pseudo-intellectual nonsense about imagined future fantasies of an Iraq that could have threatened America sufficiently to require invasion and occupation. The reality is very different: Iraq never posed a serious threat to America and is very unlikely to do so in the future. It is regrettable that our intervention resulted in a Shia-led Islamic Republic which is developing close ties with a perhaps soon to be nuclear armed Iran led by a group of seriously mad Ayatollahs. It is also regrettable that our intervention has helped to weaken the Republican party and to help elect Obama.
I’d call your argument a fantasy, Inagua, except it’s not even as concrete as a fantasy. It’s certainly not a policy or a grown-up analysis – it’s a facile and self-serving game of “let’s pretend”: Let’s pretend that everything was just fine in 2002 when Bush and the evil neocons got it in their heads, out of the blue, to attack quiet, peace-loving Iraq, a faraway country of which we knew nothing. It’s an option off the table joined to a rhetorical position that allows you to count every actual or supposed negative outcome of the invasion and occupation without having to consider the options that were available at the time and their negatives.
We’re back where we started 80 posts ago. You don’t offer a serious position, either a serious alternative or a serious strategy. You don’t even stand by your occasional beginnings of an argument – as when you seemed to suggest, if ludicrously, that Chalabi + bases + Iraqi relations with Israel were war aims that might have justified the effort. All you have is an attitude and a set of reflexes. All you need now is a pink dress and a government official to scream at.
Inagua;
I rest my case. McLeod speaks from a pretentionsness that is common among his ilk. He feels that if he insults enough, you’ll come around to his point of view.
For example, his type are those that discount how people in other countries judged our actions in Iraq, and found them appalling. The French and Germans were opposed—but they’re French and German so it doesn’t mean anything. You see Inagua, the only intellingent people regarding this issue are CK McLeod and his neocon club. The Europeans? They’re cowards, surrender monkeys, as they say. Spineless people those Europeans. They are not allowed to opine. Yet, they saw the same things we saw, and refrained from waging unprovoked war. How can that be? To be sure, there was a Coalition of the Coerced to join Bush in his war.
Bush’s war was nothing more than an attempt at a huge, geopolitical land grab, in which to establish permanent military bases. They couldn’t wage was on those pretenses and sell it to the American people, so they forcused on the threat of WMD, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. AFter they found no WMD, they switched to Iraqi Liberation, of which they all now speak. Now ‘Iraqi Freedom’ is the pablum that is fed to the American people, so that we can stay calm about our purpose there.
There is a special level of Dante’s hell reserved for Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Perle, Kristol, et. al.
Alejcaro,
CK is pretentious, illogical, and silly, but he is reasonably knowledgable and not totally devoid of wit. I liked the bit about the pink dress and a government official to yell at.
You have raised the “Why did they do it question,” and I don’t think we will know the complete answer for a long time. I do not share your belief that the motives were evil. We know the rough backround from the Clean Break Report of 1996 to Codi Rice’s “structural response” to 9/11. The goal was understandable. And if it had been possible to achieve it would have been worth considerable risk. But it was fantasy, as anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about the people and history of the region would have known. My best guess is that the neocons knew it was a longshot, but figured why not try it, as nothing else has worked so far. And Bush was simply stupid enough and vain enough to fall for it.
Others have made worse mistakes. Chamberlain fell for Hitler’s lies at Munich; Dean Acheson excluded South Korea from a list of positions the United States would directly defend against attack; John Kennedy fell for replacing the defeated French in Vietnam; and Johnson refused to be the first American President to lose a war. History is full of mistakes, and Bush has made his contribution to the recent list.