"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Iraq: America's
Blown SavePosted 4:41 p.m., April 9, 2006
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For a moment, it looked like the neocons had somehow gotten it right. It was February 2005. Less than a week earlier, Iraq held a startling national election, successfully choosing an assembly to draft its national constitution. Countering many predictions, voter turnout was high, violence relatively light--Iraq seemed almost united. War supporters were buoyed.
Little did they realize.
At the time, I was in Washington, D.C., on a short trip with two-dozen other Humphrey Institute Policy Forum fellows, getting face time with a cavalcade of Beltway stars. Among them was Elliot Abrams, a charter member of Club Neocon. Abrams was one of the few Iran-Contra scandal players during the Reagan administration to get convicted--for withholding information from Congress, something then still considered bad form. He has long since been forgiven, and works as a deputy national security advisor to President Bush.
"I've got to admit," I told Abrams, reflecting on the day's headlines. "For those of us opposed to the war, this election makes our position seem a little more ambiguous." I can't report his reply--the meeting was off the record. But the words were inconsequential. His real answer lay in his simple, almost beatific smile, shining triumphant benevolence upon a prodigal son.
Thinking about the Iraq War has transformed since then.
Public support has fallen off the precipice. One of the war's most staunch supporters, Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), morphed in October into one of its most forceful opponents, for eminently good reasons. On Dec. 10, the respected, nonpartisan National Journal declared an Iraqi civil war is well under way--American soldiers are simply caught in its crosshairs.
The United States is tormented by an impossible dilemma: Our military presence inspires insurgent violence, but simultaneously serves as the last retaining wall preventing the conflict from spiraling into another Spanish Civil War, a magnet for ideological violence, attracting combatants from every adjoining region.
By now, it's clear that the Iraqi national elections--ostensibly the final step toward a full Iraqi takeover--did nothing to stem the bloody tide. In fact, polls show nearly half of Iraqis approve of violent attacks against the American occupiers.
So how did we get here? To find some sort of answer to that question, I have reviewed five books from the nascent body of Iraq War literature to get a gauge on how national thinking about the conflict has evolved.
Two of these works contain material published in the run-up to war by supporters rationalizing their desire for invasion. One is the chronicle of a professor recruited by the Bush administration to help foster democracy on the ground in Iraq; he failed. The last two were written by journalists on the ground in Iraq.
Together, these works paint a composite picture of America's march of folly into Iraq.
... The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995-2005, edited by William Kristol (534 pp., $27.95, HarperCollins)
On a recent Daily Show segment, host Jon Stewart gave a faux salute to his guest, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. "I have to give you credit," Stewart deadpanned. "You were wrong about Iraq way before anyone else." Here's your proof.
As a compendium of articles sampling the first 10 years of a conservative political magazine's run, maybe it's no surprise that articles in The Weekly Standard: A Reader (2005) covering the Iraq War are stirred into a generic section titled "Peace and War at Home and Abroad." But since The Weekly Standard is known as the neocons' house organ--Kristol chairs The Project for the New American Century, the group's home base--it's surprising that he rather stingily devotes space to the conflict. This war, after all, is the apogee of the neocons' considerable influence. (Are even they now holding the war at arm's length?)
Still, important Iraq-related articles are included here, and several likely will underpin future historical accounts of the war. Of particular note is a Nov. 17,1997, editorial, "Saddam Must Go," co-written by Kristol and Robert Kagan in possibly the neocons' first important public war whoop. It was published just after Saddam ordered Americans expelled from a United Nations weapons inspection team, and it calls on President Clinton to oust the dictator. It demands invasion, goading Clinton to take "the difficult but inescapable step of finishing the job that Bush [Sr.] started." Clearly, for Kristol and Kagan, Iraq was America's manifest destiny. (Not that they're finished: The duo also recently had called for regime change in Iran.)
Given what came later--and what may yet lie ahead--their rationale in this editorial sounds strangely adolescent--like Orson Welles talking smack prior to a playground rumble. "Some nations can afford to suffer more humiliation than others," Kristol and Kagan puff. "When you're the United States, even a little humiliation exacts too high a price."
Perhaps the key piece in this collection is Reuel Marc Gerecht's "A Cowering Superpower," published just 10 weeks before Sept. 11, 2001. The Weekly Standard deserves credit as one of the few mainstream U.S. publications to seriously analyze Osama bin Laden's terrorist movement prior to 9/11. This article bashes Bush for failing to take the terrorists seriously, particularly for failing to retaliate against al Qaeda's Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.
But Gerecht anticipates no domestic attack, and badly underestimates the tenacity of bin Laden's "sleeper cells," writing that "few men in bin Laden's network are likely to have the fortitude, talent, and discretion to hold themselves in position long, their death-wish intact."
Nonetheless, his conclusion still resonates. Bin Laden, "in the not too distant future," might rightfully proclaim liberal, secular democracy dead in the Arab world, Gerecht writes. "This would be an amazing accomplishment for a Saudi holy warrior, considering the forces arrayed against him."
As other books reviewed here suggest, killing off Middle East democracy may indeed be bin Laden's legacy. But as the next books demonstrate, he will have had a little help.
... The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, by Kenneth M. Pollack (494 pp., $25.95, Random House)
Published in 2002, Pollack's book was possibly the most influential pro-invasion text published before Baghdad felt the first quivers of "Shock and Awe" (in March 2003). Despite its congenital wonkishness, Pollack's earnest work created a major splash, proving especially persuasive to Congressional doves lining up for the march to war.
It was also a stunningly prescient if, unfortunately, often a turgid, redundant and inelegant read. There is tragedy in that failure of style, because it can be assumed that most lawmakers who picked up this book before casting their war vote reached exhaustion long before they reached Pollack's critical final chapters. Would that Pollack's muse had driven him to place them at the beginning.
The first three-quarters of the work is dedicated to Pollack's case for invasion, but it's not premised on weapons of mass destruction, which he believed would not soon be within the dictator's grasp. Instead, Pollack favors war because of his revulsion at Saddam's brutally repressive tactics, and because 9/11 had fortuitously opened a window of opportunity that soon would close.
But Pollack sternly warns against skimping on troops: Either we go in with everything, he advocates, or we call the whole thing off. He assumes that the Pentagon would unleash a ground force of around 300,000 troops, more than double the number ultimately dispatched. Overwhelming force, he writes, would quickly quell any insurgency, rapidly establish order, and set Iraq on its upward arc toward liberal democracy.
But in those neglected final chapters--perhaps conscious of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's dreams of a devising a new, lightly manned, tech-heavy military--Pollack issues his Cassandra's cry:
"With only a small force, the United States would not have the strength to assume the security function throughout the country--and so would be heavily reliant on local Iraqi leaders and the forces under their control to handle those tasks. This would produce warlordism, thereby making the creation of a unified Iraqi political and economic system impossible."
-- Kenneth Pollack,
"The Threatening Storm"Welcome to today's Iraq.
... Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, by Larry Diamond (369 pp., $25.00, Times Books)
Call it the march of folly. For Stanford University political science professor Larry Diamond, the Iraq debacle can be easily explained as a case of "path dependence." Translated simply, blunder inexorably begets blunder.
In the fall of 2003, Diamond--a former academia colleague of Condoleezza Rice--was recruited by the Bush administration to help Iraqis make the leap from dictatorship to democracy. Diamond opposed the war, viewing it as an "imperial overreach" capable of spawning a wave of anti-Americanism much more threatening than Saddam.
But he took the assignment: Having dismantled Iraq's ruling infrastructure, Diamond felt America was obligated to forge a democracy to prevent the country from becoming an international terrorists' haven.
Of course, he failed and Squandered Victory (2005) is his account--possibly his rationalization--for how that happened. The thesis is familiar, if elevated by Diamond's status as an eyewitness: The United States, its leaders dazzled by the righteousness of their cause, invaded Iraq without a plan to secure the peace, thus dooming the enterprise. That miscalculation merely bred others, in an unalterable chain of events.
The seeds of failure, he writes, were planted before the invasion, by the administration's decision not to appoint a leader of the reconstruction effort until January 2003, only weeks ahead of time. As the first postwar Iraq administrator Jay Garner later told Congress, "This was an ad hoc operation, glued together in about four or five weeks time."
Still, shortsightedness in planning might have been corrected in early May 2003, Diamond believes, had Garner's replacement, veteran diplomat L. Paul Bremer, not made the war's crucial blunder. Taking over as head of the new transitional government, Bremer immediately established himself as Iraq's de facto dictator with two portentous gaffes. First, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army. Then he banned virtually all Baath Party members--everyone all the way down to ministry office workers and schoolteachers--from seeking government employment.
On the instant, thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis were left without paychecks or prospects. The potentially stabilizing influence of Iraq's professional military was shunted aside. America's presence formally became an occupation. The insurgency was born.
Bremer, of course, has recently published his own book, My Year in Iraq (not reviewed here), in which he claims success in all the areas Diamond says he failed. The Iraqi Army had already disbanded itself, he asserted to NBC's Meet the Press host Tim Russert--he merely put an American stamp on that reality. And Baath party members simply had to go, end of story. As for Diamond, Bremer sneered, it's a little hard for a professor to see the reality on the ground from high atop his ivory tower.
To be blunt, that's crap, considering that Diamond's boots were on the ground well before Bremer's. The professor conducted a series of town hall meetings and education sessions throughout Iraq aimed at generating interest and understanding in democracy. Diamond feels he and his team were making real headway until their most key, credible Iraqi contacts were scattered on Bremer's command, and travel throughout the countryside became next to impossible as violence spread. By early 2004, Diamond abandoned the effort and left Iraq.
To Diamond, Bush's "cardinal sin" was going to war utterly unprepared for its aftermath, despite detailed warnings from sources like the State Department and the Army War College. Bremer's crime, Diamond declares, was officially sanctioning an American "occupation," a move destined to stoke violent resistance. Both leaders and others like them, Diamond says, are no less guilty of criminal negligence than the parent who knowingly and repeatedly returns a child to a dangerous and abusive babysitter.
"There are no laws--and there probably cannot be--against negligence, however gross, on the part of government officials at the highest levels. But in the broader calculus of moral responsibility, which is the greater offense?"
-- Larry Diamond,
"Squandered Victory"
... The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer (467 pp., $26.00, Farar, Straus and Giroux); Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, by Anthony Shadid (424 pp., $26.00, Henry Holt)
"Why did the United States invade Iraq?" New Yorker reporter George Packer asks at one point in his haunting Iraq War memoir, The Assassin's Gate (2005). "It isn't possible to be sure--and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. ... It was something that some people wanted to do."
Brilliant and panoramic, Packer's book traces the evolution of his own thinking about the war, which became ineluctably altered amid the chaos in Iraq. He describes heartbreaking encounters with the father of a fallen soldier, a man clinging fitfully to the belief that his son's death was worthwhile. He masterfully outlines the White House's inner ideological battles over the war, masked behind the Bush administration's cloak of secrecy, arguments that went unresolved even after the invasion.
He also briefly traces the history of the neocon movement that started when some Democrats in the early 1960s--Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson among them--became disenchanted with that decade's liberal excesses and tentative foreign policy. These primordial neocons broke away, some joining the Republicans to take a tougher, more interventionist stance, which insisted not only on thwarting communism but spreading democracy, by force if necessary. By the time of the current president's second inaugural address, this philosophy was sealed in policy as the Bush Doctrine.
Packer doesn't mask his status as a disenthralled liberal hawk. Initially, he supported the war, spurred by his friendship with the exiled Iraqi dissident, Kanan Makiya--the man who later gained infamy for telling the president that troops would be greeted on Iraq's streets with "sweets and flowers." However, once in Iraq as a working correspondent, Packer's idealism quickly faded to confusion, and disillusion.
Packer believes that, even with too few troops, concerted efforts might have halted widespread looting, which did more damage than the bombing of Baghdad and destroyed American credibility. Iraqis came to equate the alien term "freedom" with chaos, instability and destruction.
He describes in riveting detail the events that transpired after the Americans' first critical blunders: the rise of Muqtada Sadr and the Islamist political parties, the machinations of wily Pentagon darling Ahmed Chalabi, the persistent suicide bombings, and the dismissive, what-me-worry attitude of the Bush administration and its supporters toward any problems on the ground.
"Few pro-war ideologues allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding the truth, or they continued to take such a long view of history that a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing hardly factored."
-- George Packer,
"The Assassin's Gate"Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid's chronicle, Night Draws Near (2005), packs an even heavier emotional wallop. As an Arab-American and fluent Arab speaker, Shadid was able to penetrate Iraq and its culture in ways most American reporters could not imagine.
There are myriad fascinating tales in Night Draws Near. There is the former Iraqi government media "minder" who, post-invasion, becomes Shadid's close friend and ear to the ground. There is the 14-year-old girl whose increasingly desperate diary entries form the heart of the book. Because of his Lebanese ancestry and grasp of the Arab language, Shadid could escape the sanctuary of Baghdad's Green Zone and report from the field in much greater depth than most reporters. He was even able to secure interviews with both Muqtada Sadr and the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the power-broker cleric who refuses to speak to American officials.
Here we learn how the eruption of Shiite anti-American violence traces to an incident on Aug. 13, 2003, in the Sadr City slum, prompted by someone in a coalition helicopter who tried to kick over a black flag bearing a religious inscription as it fluttered above a six-story transmission tower. (Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez acknowledged two weeks later that the helicopter had in fact tried to knock down the flag.)
The incident sparked mass protests at a time when the Americans and Sadr's ragtag forces were still sizing each other up. To that point, Shadid insists, Sadr displayed no real anti-American sentiments, though Americans clearly viewed the young cleric as a dangerous demagogue.
Afterward, Sadr and his followers thought much worse of the Americans. "What happened clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war on Islam," one speaker told a fervent crowd. Before long, Shiite militants would murder four American contractors and sling their bodies from a bridge. American soldiers would then march on Fallujah to root out Sadr and his Mahdi Army, a battle that all but razed the city and left relations between the Americans and Iraqis festering.
In effect, Shadid traces the evolution of thinking about the war among the Iraqis themselves. The attitudes on the street were generally skeptical and tentative but hopeful early on. But that eventually became, for many normal Iraqis, a seething rage toward their American occupiers who could do no better containing the spiraling violence around them than they could do keeping the electrical and water utilities functioning.
Nothing illustrates this rage more clearly than Shadid's account of the death of 32-year-old Omar Ibrahim Khalaf. A devout Sunni building contractor, the "hot-headed" Khalaf joined several townspeople to attack an American convoy with nothing but grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs. They were quickly slaughtered. Khalaf, somewhat rejected in life, was suddenly revered as a hero martyred by the infidels.
It was then that Shadid heard from a Sunni shopkeeper who had been friendly with Khalaf. His words brought the reporter to a conclusion that more Americans reach every day--see President Bush's 36 percent approval rating. Not unlike Graham Greene in his prescient 1954 Vietnam War novel, The Quiet American, Shadid has an epiphany--the Americans in Iraq will never find a way to bridge the gulf between their good intentions and their ruinous reputation.
Americans, that shopkeeper seethed to Shadid, had wronged Islam. And Islam commands vengeance. "Revenge," he spat, "is part of our tradition."
-- Kevin Featherly
