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Thursday, January 04, 2007

Failure in Iraq was not inevitable

Failure in Iraq was not inevitable
By Jacob Weisberg
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: January 3 2007 22:35 | Last updated: January 3 2007 22:35


That the war in Iraq has been a vast mistake virtually everyone now agrees. But what, exactly, is the nature of that mistake? The isolationist left and the realist right – George McGovern and Brent Scowcroft – emphasise that the US’s error was intervening in the absence of overwhelming national interest. At the opposite end of the foreign policy continuum, the neo-conservatives contend that invading Iraq was a good idea undermined by incompetent implementation. In the space between are liberal hawks who originally supported the war and a variety of sceptics who did not. They now tend to agree that the war was a mistake in theory and a disaster in execution.

What makes this backward-looking conversation more than academic is its implications for American foreign policy beyond Iraq. The US defeat in Vietnam left a disinclination to use military force that lasted many years. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” President George H.W. Bush declared at the height of his apparent Gulf war triumph in 1991. “And I’ve brought it roaring back,” his son might well respond. But if the invasion of Iraq is mainly a case of bungled execution – a war that, whether justified or not in principle, could have left behind a peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost – then the isolationist/realist lesson is the wrong one to draw.

The easiest view to dismiss is the 20/20 hindsight of the neo-conservatives, who blame the Iraqi tragedy on President George W. Bush, former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the temporary viceroy Paul Bremer – on anyone, in short, other than themselves. In the January issue of Vanity Fair, several of the neo-cons patiently explain that incompetent Republicans spoiled their picnic by failing to rein in Mr Bremer, not trusting fully in Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi opposition leader, and so forth. Some believe the US did not send enough troops. Some believe it did not remove them quickly enough.

Blame-shifting aside, what is irritating in this exculpation is the continuing fantasy that war in Iraq could have dependably followed any preconceived plan. Mr Rumsfeld is right about one thing – stuff happens. Military decision-making demands improvisation and entails error. The problem in Iraq has not been too much military flexibility. It has been too little. It is absurd for the war’s neo-con architects to stand around now complaining that the builders rendered their masterpiece poorly. Their idealised conception, in which Mr Chalabi would have been installed, remained a blueprint for good reason. It might well have produced an Iranian super-state or a quicker plunge into anarchy and ethnic cleansing. There is little basis for thinking it would have produced a better outcome.

Yet the arguments at the other extreme – that no occupation could have been successful because Iraq is an artificial country, or because we do not understand it, or because the ethnic and religious factions there prefer war to peace – are also unpersuasive. Much criticism of the war sees US intervention as a kind of original sin. Born arrogant, it cannot help screwing up other countries when it tries to fix them. Yes, blaming incompetence can be a way for those of us who endorsed the war to dodge responsibility. But nothing that went wrong in Iraq, including the Sunni-Shia civil conflict, was fated or inevitable. The difference between Kosovo and Iraq is not between a country that was ready for peace and one that was not. It was a matter of better management and better luck.

Closer to the truth, it seems to me, is the broad middle ground occupied by various supporters, opponents and journalistic neutrals, who – whatever their views on the war’s original merits – think that the catastrophe in Iraq was contingent rather than preordained. Reading Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco, Larry Diamond’s Squandered Victory, James Fallows’ Blind into Baghdad or George Packer’s Assassins’ Gate, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mr Bush and the Pentagon made a series of avoidable, catastrophic errors in the run-up to the war and the first year of the occupation. These errors were so significant that they virtually ensured the US’s defeat.

The litany of failure has become familiar. Mr Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and Dick Cheney’s White House simply rejected the notion of planning for a hostile occupation. They disregarded basic counter-insurgency and stabilisation theory, which suggests that you need to send 20 troops for every 1,000 civilians and that they need to operate with a light hand. The US sent approximately one-third the appropriate number with no counter-insurgency strategy to speak of. Mr Bremer’s early decisions to disband the Iraqi army and security forces and proceed with radical de-Ba’athification alienated the Sunni minority and fuelled the insurgency. As Iraq descended into mayhem, a disengaged US president continued to declaim the absurd goal of establishing liberal democracy in a catastrophically damaged country where it had no root.

There is, of course, no way to know what might have happened if the US had not made these mistakes and others. Defeat would still have been possible with better planning, sufficient troops, realistic goals and sound strategy. But even in this mistakenly chosen war, America’s failure was not inevitable. It is the product of Mr Bush’s blunders along the way – and the blunders he is making still.

The writer is editor of Slate.com

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