Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Lesson(s) of Iraq
Though the situation is still very fluid, there’s a real chance that our efforts at nation building in Iraq will soon come to naught. Given our investment of time, treasure, and blood in the country — to say nothing of the prospect of a wicked and hostile Islamic state taking its place — this is deeply depressing. It’s bad enough for those of us who are simply patriots. I can only imagine how those who fought there must feel.
On the assumption that things don’t turn around, it’s important that we figure out what led to this. As I see it, our failure is likely attributable to one of three causes: 1) That we left too early because we were insufficiently committed; 2) That our humanitarian scruples prevented us from fighting with sufficient violence; or 3) That Iraqis never had it in them to transition to a modern, small-l liberal state.
The first possibility has merit, especially in light of President Obama’s promise to leave as soon as soon as possible. At the very least, it made things worse. That said, this narrative is remarkably convenient for those of us who supported the war. Self-serving claims always warrant scrutiny, especially when they point blame at one’s political enemies. It might be true — or part of the truth — but it shouldn’t be accepted without considering other options.
The second possibility offers a much darker picture: that our gains in Iraq were always ephemeral due to our refusal to inflict the kind of damage necessary to meet our objectives. Leftist and hawkish propaganda aside, the war was neither particularly brutal nor bloody. The sad, disgusting reality may be that it should have been; i.e., that we can’t expect to remake a country without burning entire cities to the ground, civilians included. If this was the problem, the U.S. will either have to figure out how to cause that much damage in a world with a global media, or get out of the nation-building business altogether.
The third possibility is — if anything — even darker: that no amount of commitment or violence on our part could have turned Iraq around in a reasonable amount of time. For whatever combination of reasons, its people are simply not up to the task of creating a functioning society capable of playing by the rules of modern civilization — at least not now. If this is the case, then our nation-building was doomed before we even started. We would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and money by waging a merciless punitive war until someone with marginal authority surrendered. After receiving the necessary kowtows, we’d have told Iraq’s new leaders that they’re more than welcome to join the civilized world, but that we’d bring nukes if they gave us the kind of trouble Saddam used to. Then, we’d shake the dust of the place off our sandals and get back to living.
Figuring out which — if any — of these explantions led to our current situation is incredibly important. The U.S. is going to be the world’s superpower for a while yet … so we might as well get better at it.
Photo Credit: This image was originally posted to Flickr by DVIDSHUB at http://flickr.com/photos/28650594@N03/4557821521
Published in General
I do not remember that. I remember statements like “Five days or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last longer.”
It seems to me that we have spend more time, lives and money in Iraq than any suggestion made by President Bush or any of his senior people during the run-up to the war. Perhaps I am misremembering but I can’t find any quotes, and I have looked. Perhaps you can point me in the right direction?
As to whether the Bush administration downplayed the effort required, I have no good answer. I accepted their statements in good faith at the time and I see no reason to view them otherwise now. They were spectacularly wrong however, and the results have been just as underwhelming.
I’m willing to concede more time and/or ruthlessness was needed. I don’t see how such commitment could have been sold in 2002/2003.
I would point to the President’s speeches in Sept. 2001 to Congress, at te Naval Academy in 2005, and to the nation on the eve of the Iraq War. I would also say re: Rumsfeld, he was clearly referring to combat operations against the Iraq military.
The invasion of Iraq was a campaign in the overall war and cannot be completely divorced from it.
The speeches are consistent from year to year on the need for a long term commitment to the fight in general and Iraq when applicable.
There were clearly errors made in conducting the war, the same is true in every human endeavor. The size, scope, and intensity of the non-Ba’athist insurgency was not accounted for in the pre-war planning. Whether that should have been expected is an open question. But I know for certain the military planned for a long, decade or more stability and support effort.
The answer is # 3. The values held by Islam and the regional animosities between the different Islamic sects make it virtually impossible to instill western values such as liberty, democracy, equality under the law and a belief in natural law. It would require U.S. rule of Iraq for a very long time and constant indoctrination to slowly move them closer to our culture and values. If the Arab Spring is any indication, the Middle East is intent on moving further away from that and closer to Islamic theocracy.
Happily, the US is blessed with some of its enemies being incompetent psychos. This meant that the MB were only able to restrain themselves from ending democracy for a very short period of time. If Morsi hadn’t been a moron, he’d have followed Erdogan’s model.
In Iraq, Maliki, while awful, is no worse than any of the plausible alternatives. Decades of Saddam’s genocides followed by the less bad, but still unpleasant and effective Al Qaeda efforts at sowing sectarian hatreds have not left Iraq a country that could be effectively governed lightly. Every Iraqi leader (literally, every one) has suffered tremendous trauma, and they’re mostly rabidly socialist. Maliki messed up my life, but he doesn’t represent a significant short or medium term sacrifice.
There will never be a better time to sell it than 2002-3, when the wounds of 9/11 were still fresh. If it couldn’t be sold then, it can never be sold, period.
I blame the Democrats and the progressives, they voted to authorize the war then almost immediately started organizing the public against it with such inane slogans as “no blood for oil” and “Bush lied, people died.” They relentlessly highlighted every setback, magnified the casualty figures out of all sense of proportion, and even went so far as to circulate insane “9/11 was an inside job” theories to undercut the whole basis of the GWOT.
They are perfidious traitors who wanted us to lose a war so they could win the 2008 election — and they got what they wanted on both counts.
Explanation #3 seems about right to me. US needs to eat some humble pie about what is achievable in some regions of the world. I would also add to the conversation that I don’t think it’s so much that Americans can’t stomach war in general, as it is that we can’t stomach getting involved in civil wars, especially when there’s no clear good guys whose side we can fight on. Which is precisely why nobody wants to get involved in Syria. The post-Saddam years of Iraq have felt like a simmering civil war for so long–as if civil war was inevitable. Maybe it wasn’t right for us to leave Iraq so soon, but I sure understand the sentiment of not wanting to the US to play policeman between two sides who’ve been itching for a fight with each other for so long.
On one side we have the legitimate, democratically-elected government of Iraq. On the other side we have a militia that wants to overthrow this government and replace it with a Sharia law theocracy. These are folks who posted videos online bragging about the fact that they conducted mass executions of unarmed prisoners.
Personally I have no trouble picking which side to root for in that fight.
It’s early days yet. Egypt could still go that way – how many times did the Turkish Army stage a coup and sack a Government for being too Islamic before the AKP found a formula that was sort of acceptable?
Though Turkey had some things going for it that Egypt does not. And it took Turkey a long long time. And Erdogan is still a bit iffy.
Erdogan is pretty terrible, but he’s possibly better than the Fascists who preceded him, or the Communists who provide the chief alternative to Fascists and Islamists in Turkey’s non-awesome political sphere, and certainly better than forcing a different choice. That said, I don’t think it’s bad for America that Morsi, who expressed surprised to Clinton (in her book) that terrrorists might oppose him, since he viewed himself as their candidate, destroyed the democracy that legitimized him.
I agree that it’s likely that Egypt will return to democracy, and hope for better luck this time; opposition parties have had more time to organize. While the Syrian/ Iraqi/ Turkish/Iranian/ Jordanian/ Lebanese conflict may radicalize some Egyptians, hopefully it will repel more away from radicalization, and intra-Islamist conflict will weaken their appeal.
It’s worth remembering that for most of the length of that, the civil war was pretty fictional; terrorist car bombs don’t make for a civil war by themselves. The media did the same thing in stronger terms with Northern Ireland for decades.
There had never been democracy in South or East Asia until the UK and US installed it. Now there are many democracies there, although it took decades of occupation to win over South Korea. If your point is about about the fiercely anti-western, reactionary, nature of the region, it’s worth recalling that that’s a very recent phenomenon, and not present everywhere.
Too many in the West took Zafar’s view and let Saddam inflict immeasurable trauma on Iraq for too long for their democracy to be comfortable, but it’s serviceable. Iraqis are irksomely socialist with poor leaders, but so is, eg., Ukraine. Few say that ethnic Poles (more or less Western Ukraine) are incapable of democracy.
One of the problems with this is that if we’d done it in 2003, when our enemies were Baathists, we’d have caused a lot of economic damage (those Baathists and their families provided a lot of the skills base when the economy took off again) and caused a lot of anger. It was important that most of them be persuaded that they couldn’t retake the country, but that was achieved with the actual levels of violence.
Like most of the Baathists, most of the Shia came to accept American presence because they saw that the troops in most Shia neighborhoods were there, in part, to protect those neighborhoods. Sunnis, similarly, eventually joined the Awakening. The Iraq War had low casualties because of this. Maybe adding some atrocities to the mix would have yielded lower casualties, but higher casualties seem just as likely, and less economic and democratic development seem certain.
To be honest I think the first Gulf War was a somewhat wasted opportunity. The South was rising against Saddam, if we had supported that (which they seemed to think that we would) things might have been different now. Hindsight, etc. – I guess it’s pointless.
(Re South Asian democracy – the Brits were in the subcontinent for at least 200 years, and in parts of South India for even longer than that. But the event that pushed the HMG to take a more direct role in running the country [hello Raj] was the Mutiny, which involved a popular though nondemocratic uprising against the thoroughly undemocratic East India Company. The Raj involved a more “intimate engagement” with India by many parts of British civil society as well, which was what led eventually to Indian democracy and to independence. Imo it was British civil society wot dun it, not HMG.)
One of the chief positive outcomes of the Gulf War was that it provided a counterpoint to Vietnam. The US fought a major war cleanly and successfully, accomplishing its goals with limited casualties. Had the US broken its pacts with participating nations, and continued to fight after the agreed aims had been achieved, it might have won and taken over peacefully, installing a legitimate democratic government. It might also have lost and withdrawn in hurried shame. There was a widespread belief that the Shia were likely to win anyway. I agree that they bet the wrong way, but I don’t think that it was nuts to do so.
Is it just that the Shia revolt had not yet been put down that makes you support an Iraq occupation then, but not later?
I think both played their parts, but I agree with you enough to see the ban on romance between Iraqis and Americans in Iraq as one of the chief mistakes of the war. If we had a bunch more Iraqi American kids, we’d have dramatically increased levels of informed investing, cross cultural education, counter terrorism intelligence gathering, and so on. We’d have, as we did with Europe, Japan and the Philippines, a connection that would last for centuries, to the enrichment of both sides. Instead, almost all the Americans (and coalition partners) who went out there, went home again.
Here’s what I don’t understand:
1 The US wanted Saddam removed.
2 Hence that whole economic sanctions against Iraq between the two Gulf Wars – at least in part to make life in Iraq so difficult that somebody would remove and replace Saddam.
3 That didn’t work – he kept building palaces while the people suffered.
4 It may have embittered them against him, but his control of the country was such that no internal revolt on the plains had a chance of getting off the ground.
5 Both typical of dictatorships under sanctions.
6 Sanctions also embittered the Iraqis against us & the West eventually went into Iraq anyway. (Both also typical. When has a third world dictator been successfully removed by sanctions alone? And how has the embargo of Gaza made the people feel about those who impose it on them vs how they now feel about Hamas?)
7 But pre-sanctions here was a real live indigenous Arab anti-Saddam revolt. It seems mad not to have supported it.
HMG did genuine good in India when, and only when, enough of British civil society demanded it.
South Africa and North Korea were then the only example of an area to have sanctions on the scale of Iraq, but since then Burma looks like an example. The sanctions were also intended to delay him getting a nuke beyond his time in office, at which they were successful.
Does it seem mad to have built the coalition with countries that opposed it, or does it seem mad to have abided by the terms of the pact? There were Shia who helped in 2003, and it is my understanding that you view the invasion as a clear mistake. How many Shia does it take to turn invading Iraq from “mad to do it” to “mad not to do it”?
I apologize if I incorrectly gave the impression that I denied that Britain was a democracy. Obviously, the birth of conservatism (Burke’s impeachment campaign against Hastings) was required for democracy to show its full potential.
Except that part wasn’t true at the time of the first Gulf War, he had been our SOB, we supported him during the Iran-Iraq war. President Bush put together the coalition and got U.N. backing to liberate Kuwait, not to invade Iraq or remove Saddam.
Regime change became U.S. policy under the Clinton administration, after Saddam repeatedly violated the terms of the cease fire and kicked the U.N. weapons inspectors out of the country. The sanctions were meant to force him to comply with the treaty and destroy his stockpile of chemical weapons.
That said, I agree we should have done more to support the Shia revolt, at the very least imposed a no-fly zone.
Iraq is defeated in Kuwait, the army is in disarray and flees back to Baghdad.
The South rises – but is put down brutally by Saddam – at least in part because the West doesn’t support their uprising.
The West places sanctions on Iraq – in part to remove Saddam.
Saddam sticks on, the people suffer.
Ten years later the West invades and occupies Iraq, including a by now somewhat embittered South.
Is it so odd to wonder whether we wouldn’t have done better to support their revolt against Saddam in the first place instead of failing to support them and then putting in place a decade of sanctions to remove Saddam?
Yes – I get that there were reasons for the West to act as it did – but they aren’t above being questioned. If we could have done better (and I think we could have) it’s worth asking why we didn’t do better the first time round.
If something similar happened today what, if anything, would we do differently and why?
Regime change wasn’t the policy at the time, but I think that Zafar has that bit right. There’s a lot of voices on the left that urge us to treat the 1% of Saddam’s arsenal that was American as evidence that he was our puppet, but the “it’s a shame they can’t both lose” line wasn’t said about a buddy. I don’t think I recall any of the principals denying that they wanted him gone; they just goofed on their predictions of how much support was needed. Saddam’s Shia soldiers using “tomorrow there will be no more Shia” as a slogan was surprising even to experts.
I don’t know if we’d have done better if we’d toppled Saddam in 1990. I’m pretty sure that the US would have turned tail pretty swiftly (see Somalia and Lebanon), at the very least doing so shortly after Clinton took government in a bigger landslide than he already did (since the Gulf War’s success was a major plus for Bush, and the “loss”/ “Vietnam” after changing military objectives would have been a major negative). Shia/ Sunni tensions would have been a lot lower, but a democratic and stable government with a future seems extremely unlikely, every bridge in the region would have been burned, funding for terrorism (and safe havens) gone through the roof, and the US would have maintained its post-Korea run of defeats, rendering future threats worthless. No Iranian sanctions or Libyan nuclear abandonment would have been possible.
I’m not surprised that you think the first war would have been a better time (a lot of people do, and maybe it’s true). I’m just surprised that “better” to you means “mad not to”. Your earlier arguments against civilian casualties and such seemed much more emphatic and less nuanced than that.
I think that we showed how good our (bipartisan) judgment is about striking when the fight would have been cheap, easy, ethical, and effective in Syria.
If minimising civilian casualties was a major issue it’s hard to see how not supporting the uprising in the South was expected to contribute to that. Surely we didn’t expect their conflict with Saddam to result in fewer if we didn’t help them?
I do get that there were other geopolitical issues at play, but they weren’t about minimising civilian casualties in Iraq.
The planned invasion, if it did happen, was estimated to be pretty horrible, both in terms of casualties caused and news footage of those casualties, and might easily have led to more casualties than a swift coup. Of course, there turned out not to be a swift coup, but by the time that that was clear it would have been much more difficult to get everyone back on a combat footing. It’s very important not just to avoid hindsight from decades after the decisions were made, but also from hours or days after the decisions were made.
He wasn’t a buddy, and if he were truly our puppet he would never have invaded Kuwait. We had given him arms and aid to check the power of Iran and the influence of the Soviets, but with the end of the Cold War he had outlived his usefulness and with Kuwait he had gone off his leash and started digging up the neighbor’s flowers.
I agree the Bush administration would have been happy to see him overthrown, but at the same time I think they and our allies in the region were very nervous about what would replace him. If the Shia revolt had succeeded would they have put in place a pro-Western democracy, or a theocratic puppet state run by Iran? Plus Turkey was dead-set against an independent Kurdistan on their borders.
In short I think the creed of “stability” won out.
The problem was we had the Wimp as commander-in-chief for the Gulf War.
It’s worth remembering that the Soviets supplied the overwhelming bulk of his equipment and political funding and that the Baath Party was formally socialist. He was never our ally against the Soviets, merely a more tolerable Soviet ally than some others, and an enemy of a greater enemy than himself (the Iranians having worked harder to force themselves into the American consciousness).
Bush won some pretty impressive medals for a wimp.
DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS
TO
LIEUTENANT, JUNIOR GRADE, GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH
UNITED STATES NAVAL RESERVE
for service as set forth in the following
CITATION: “For heroism and extraordinary achievement in aerial flight as Pilot of a Torpedo Plane in Torpedo Squadron FIFTY ONE, attached to the U.S.S. San Jacinto, in action against enemy Japanese forces in the vicinity of the Bonin Islands, on September 2, 1944. Leading one section of a four-plane division in a strike against a radio station, Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Bush pressed home an attack in the face of intense antiaircraft fire. Although his plane was hit and set afire at the beginning of his dive, he continued his plunge toward the target and succeeded in scoring damaging bomb hits before bailing out of the craft. His courage and devotion to duty were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Reserve.”