Atrios, my fellow pseud-blogger, has a tough-talking piece up on the aftermath of the war.
This is quite creepy, really. Hundreds of urban professionals have been assassinated in Iraq in the past year.
The existence of an open civil society requires that the vast majority of people, for the most part, choose to be civil. There are so many scores to be settled, so many competing factions, so many reasons for general popular discontent for the current state of affairs, that I really don’t comprehend how we’re really going to be capable of doing much of anything to improve things. Maybe – just maybe – there was a narrow window in the immediate aftermath of “major combat operations,” when if we’d done things just right, used the existing institutions including the military and much of the Baathist bureaucracy, had an army of engineers in to fix the place up the way all those breathless NPR reports kept promising us, etc… when we could have put things on the right course. But, they just lost the thread pretty quickly.
…
There’s a cancer in our press right now, and it’s going to continue to grow and grow. Even now anti-war critics, despite being ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, are being marginalized because for some reason in order to criticize the war you have to have been for it to begin with. I have no idea why this makes any sense, but there it is. It’s aided and abetted by the “liberal hawks” who for the most part seemed to just want to prove they have bigger testicles than the rest of us. But, why the hell should anyone listen to them? They were wrong, and I don’t really care about reading their tortured essays of self-evaluation. The issue isn’t simply that they were wrong, but they were wrong in a particular offensive manner. They, too, for the most part encouraged the marginalization of war critics with their smarmy condescending “we know best” tone. You know what, guys, it ISN’T ALL ABOUT YOU. Stop with the narcissistic navel-gazing. The consequence of your crap wasn’t a wee bit of embarassment at cocktail parties, it was this.
Boy, I guess the simple answer is that either Atrios is a) consumed by partisan desire and intends to look at the world in whatever way he has to in order to fulfill that desire; or b) someone whose sense of history has been overly shaped by the neat wrappers we put around events when they’re reduced to inevitable narrative after the fact.
Look, let’s set a few things out. I can’t tell you how sincerely I hope that no one within a kilometer of power in the Administration genuinely believed that once we took the palaces, that the people in Iraq would rise up, hand over Saddam and his henchmen, join Rotary and Toastmasters, and start figuring out how they could underbid high-paid American workers for jobs. Nothing in recent history – well, maybe Granada – would prepare any thoughtful person for that belief. It may well be that someone did, or even that many of them did, but I have a basic rule which is to never assume that people who are rich or powerful are truly stupid; the ones who are are usually out of cash and out of office amazingly damn fast.
I don’t doubt (and have written about here and here) the case that the Bush administration -as has virtually every Administration since Truman, at least – has undersold the difficulty of the war we face, and failed to put together the broad and compelling case for why and what we’re doing.
But, jeez, Atrios, what did you expect? By any measure the war is going stunningly well for our side. We are engaged in what is going to be a protracted low-level battle against groups within Iraq. We do have a tough political bridge to cross in that Bush has set some amazingly aggressive dates for the transfer of political power, which unless symbolic, are going to be impossible to meet without in effect cutting and running. And if they are symbolic, they will build local resentment that we will then have to defuse.
As I’ve said in the past, if we had a set of facts in the ME that compared to recent news from Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – except was opposed to our strategic goals as opposed to aligning with them, there isn’t a chance in hell that Atrios & co. wouldn’t be trumpeting them as conclusive evidence that the Administration’s plans had failed and that we faced the long-feared but never seen ‘uprising of the Arab street’. While I’m not prepared to look at these partial steps as anything but conditional, it’s nonetheless true that they are conditionally breaking our way.
But Atrios is ready to call it defeat; the problem in accepting his judgement of events today is that, of course to him it was a defeat before it started.
In the past, even as I’ve supported him, I’ve dinged him for being part of the ‘Jackie Goldberg, lemming wing of the Democratic Party’ and I’ll suggest that we’d probably disagree on a number of policy issues but that even in our disagreements we would be far closer together than I am to GWB and his Administration. But from what I can tell, he (and he’s far from alone) believes somehow that with a dash of Kyoto and a bit of ICJ, we’d somehow have managed to pull together a coalition of Western states willing to – well, willing to do exactly what? Invade North Korea? Invade and hold Pakistan? Start a campaign of covert action and assassination throughout the Arab world?
I wish I knew. And I genuinely wish that I could see a way to support him, because I’m all too damn sensitive to things like the real costs of wars.
Well the present problems with NATO trying to expand its operations in Afghanistan indicate that we could have never expected serious military support in Iraq. However, their presence would have gone a long way toward boosting the credibility and improvement of post-war conditions. The other nations could have sent lots of money and international civil and economic reconstruction teams. And that would have made all the difference in the little less than a year that has passed. With economic progress and a diverse strong unified international front working on developing a civil democratic society in Iraq I truly believe that a strong and legitimate central government would be much more advanced. If nothing else, would the international community truly stomached the appointment of living lesions like Achmed Chalabi? The true similarity of Vietnam, Algeria, and Iraq will eventually be that they will not be military failures but political failures. In the absence of a democratic government to secure law and order and represent diverse ethnic interests, factional groups will jockey to fill the power vaccuum and we will face a likely Balkans style ethnic disintegration scenario. This was not inevitable by any means, but by trying to have it “our way or the highway” we’ve at best recieved lukewarm support or tolerance of our venture by the international community. The result of that has not been a military failure, but simply getting bogged down in the minutae of political and economic reconstruction of Iraq. Let’s face it, when it comes to blowing things up no one can come close to us. But fixing things afterwards … we could have used allot more money, personnel, and expertise on the ground … and that’s exactly what our policies prevented by alienating the world community.
This article in the NYT reminds me of how liberals spin any news to fit their negative agenda.
The article leads one to believe that there are hundreds of innocent professionals being killed. The only data to back that ascertion is the words of one Iraq Policeman who is important enough that the Military has not even been in contact with him as he investigates all these crimes.
Now that we are seeing less American Troops being killed the NYT wants to remind us that Iraq is falling apart despite this progress. There may be a large number of professional being killed, but one must remember what type of a society Iraq is. There will be many vengeful killings carried out by both sides since transgretions are seldom forgotten in that culture.
Now the GDP is going up and the market is burning hot, the only items for NYT to report on is the lack of jobs. When those come back they will gripe about the quality of jobs.
“we could have used allot more money, personnel, and expertise on the ground … and that’s exactly what our policies prevented by alienating the world community.”
Interesting. It must be just me who thinks we didn’t alienate the world community. They had no intention of showing up and the non-stupid ones have known we’d take out Iraq after 911.
Hi.
“… when if we’d done things just right, used the existing institutions including the military and much of the Baathist bureaucracy …”
I often see this criticism. I never see any good reason to suppose that it might be valid. We invaded Iraq to remove a tyranny, not to repair it.
If we had accepted that those who had comprised Saddam’s army and his bureaucracy were the right ruling elites for Iraq, critics would have said that this proved we were in collusion with them all along, that we had not fought for any moral reasons (since we had tyranny’s neck in our hands and did not break it), that we are responsible for the crimes of the Ba’athists since they are “our bastards,” and so on. But since the Americans called this exactly right, and opted to reconstruct Iraq with more difficulty but without building everything on hopelessly rotten foundations – we hear something like this:
“… when if we’d done things just right, used the existing institutions including the military and much of the Nazi bureaucracy …”
No thanks.
You know, personally speaking, when I find myself embroiled in the details of a particular activity, increasingly overwhelmed by unexpected developments and going on the defensive to counteract them rather than moving forward to achieve my goals (by this time, it’s: “what goals?”), I know it’s time to sit down, take a break, and think about why I got involved in the first place. What are my goals? I ask.
This is why we return again and again to the reason for going to war. Why did we go?
Presuming we don’t know or we can’t know, the sit-down / think-out still needs to occur.
It seems to me our goals should be:
– prevent another domestic terrorist attack from occuring
– promote stability in the Middle East
– push countries around the world towards responsible governance (read: some form of democracy)
It seems to me our means should be:
– soft power first
– hard power second
The greatest changes which ever occurred happened in the minds of men. Domestic education and international education should be our first priority. By this I mean:
– educate the American public as to the value of the three goals noted above
– educate our allies and others in the world as to the value of the three goals noted above
– tap into all of our national and international academic resources to reach these goals (for instance, the history of democracy promotion, establishment, failure and success has been researched to death yet I detect that none of it is common knowledge among our policy makers)
How many of these “professionals” are former Baathist bureaucrats?
David Blue:
Begin quote:
“… when if we’d done things just right, used the existing institutions including the military and much of the Nazi bureaucracy …”
No thanks.
End quote
Exactly f***ing right.
Most of them, probably – though I suspect many of them were rather more than just bureaucrats. We’ve carried a couple of reports that score-settling has been happening on a pretty regular basis to people who were closely associated with the regime.
Which you could have guessed just from the words “urban professionals.” That’s shorthand for “educated and fairly wealthy Iraqis”… and if you were one of those, you had some rank in the Ba’ath Party.
Mia,
Like your post, except for reason #2. Because if you accept it, you have to throw out #1 & #3. The short and medium term cost of those 2 goals will be INstability in the Middle East.
I’m a personal believer in the idea of goal #2 being instead: “End the preaching of violence and hate for non-Muslims by Muslim clerics and madrassas around the world.” Until the jihadi hate factories stop, the rest doesn’t matter because they will always find reasons to hate.
A.L.,
What is happening to the Kurdish and Shia intellectuals is that the Ba’athists are trying to make sure they have position opening when the Americans leave for them to fill. They are being aided and abetted in this via cash from Syria and Iran because a Shia majority democratic state is a threat to both regimes.
There are two answers to this problem, but both you and Astros don’t want to go there.
Rational applied bloody mindedness in pursuit of American policy goals make you both run screaming.
Both these alternatives were dealt with in an E-mail list I participate in.
Here is option #1:
Police aren’t going to be able to do a damned thing about this John.
This looks as if someone has been reading about the Viet Cong. Their most effective assaults on Vietnamese infrastructure was through a coordinated assassination program.
It was what Phoenix was created to fight, by finding _potential_ (suspected) members of the assassination groups and killing them first. No trial, no jury, just a list of suspected assassination team leaders and “providers” (intel sources.) As much as possible, clean assassinations. Guards, yes, family members (unless they were support) and servants, no.
And the counter assassination program worked quite well. Cut the rate of assassinations from over 2000/year at their peak (this included family members and servants) to under 500 in 1975. (Yes, Phoenix was a “post-retreat” program.)
BTW: the “counter-assassination program” will be dismissed by the media as “right-wing death squads.”
Since people like you and Astros would rather die than have us engage in such things, we are going to get option #2:
This looks like the work of Sunni Baathists. Al Qaeda is not that sophisticated.
If I’m right, we will see an exchange of Iraqi Sunni Arabs for Syrian Shiites of the Alawite sect within about five years. Perhaps two million of the former will flee Iraq for Syria, and a million of the latter will go the other way.
Understand that this is like those old TV brake repair commercials — “You can pay me now or you can pay me later…and later will cost a whole lot more”. We can be sufficiently brutal now to reconcile the Iraqi Sunni to Shia majority government, or a year after American ground troops leave Iraq, 1/3 of Iraqi Arab Sunni will be dead, 1/3 will be fled to other nations and 1/3 will be a throughly repressed and despised minority who would envy the Palestinians their Israeli occupiers.
Either path will serve American interests. A horrible example of opposing American power will work for us as well as Sunni reconciliation.
As for me, if that comes to pass, I will feel no guilt or remorse. We are afloat in a sea of blood in this business. It is people like the Sunni Ba’athists and their Western enablers like Astros who would have made that possible future happen.
Trent, I am sure that the Iraqi Communist party could have some role in the new “Phoenix” teams. Then let them call ’em right wing death squads!
Wow, let’s go through this little gem one paragraph at a time shall we? Along the way we’re gonna find clues as to why nobody really pays attention to AL anymore- because rarely does he make an arguement that engages anyone else, really he’s just argues with himself:
We’ll start with the first graph: here we’ve a got vain mindreading exercise, along with some inept attempts at insults that really speak more about AL than anyone else- like his idea of “neat wrappers” around events.
On the next graph, we’ve got a riciculously relativist stab at a straw man: apparently Al’s of the opinion that since he can think of an even dumber sounding “Iraqi Liberation” scenario than the one pushed by Bush that somehow Bush didn’t misjudge the Iraqi mentality before the war. Kudos for that.
Then the relativist whirlitzer really gets cranked up. Apparently lying doesn’t matter because all presidents undersell to the public when they go to war. And really it’s not lying, it’s a failure of “making a compelling case to go to war.” But hold on, since Atrios doesn’t think there was a “compelling case” under the lies, Al’s not really agruing with him anymore, is he?
Moving on, Al drops the relativist-schlop and enters into the realm of willful naivety. Where was it, one of his previous “best of/Iraq’d” posts where AL mentioned that he had a “tolerance for fluff and spin?” Well that seems to have been an understatement, because now we aren’t referring to the upcoming US “pullout” of Iraq as a problem in itself, we’re just gonna call that a “tough political bridge to cross”- as if the creation of that “bridge” had nothing to do with our decisions, our misjudgements, or the failure to sell the public on the reality of the war.
Next paragraph is incoherent conjecture.. ignored.
Then the kicker: all the sudden we have the claim that AL is suddenly and suprising -really not a neoconservative- but really ideologically closer to Atrios & Co. than GWB & Co! But of course there’s a caveat, AL really believes that as oppossed to Iraq, the only other real options for dealing with Al Qaeda are a ridiculous set of arbitrarily stupid concoctions that AL can think of off the top of his head. Again, Al’s not really arguing with Atrios or antiwar bloggers here, he’s really arguing with himself.
The best advice I can give AL here isn’t mine, in fact it’s already been said, IT ISN’T ALL ABOUT YOU.
Roscoe, when you want to make some arguments, let me know…
A.L.
“…but I have a basic rule which is to never assume that people who are rich or powerful are truly stupid; the ones who are are usually out of cash and out of office amazingly damn fast.”
Surprisingly, there are quite a few people out there who have difficulty grasping the concept.
If we were talking about Mongolia, “hundreds of urban professionals” would be a big deal. But Iraq surely has tens of thousands who fit that description. Not to mention huge numbers of educated and under-employed young people eager to fill their shoes.
And it should be repeated that our goal is not to fix Iraq, but to get the Iraqis up to speed on fixing their own problems and making their own decisions. SOME chaos is a good thing.
I suspect some of the criticism of this sort is not just political, but also motivated bya fear of upheaval and change—something that seems to me to be fairly common on the Left side of the spectrum…
What liberal media? Who concocted this ridiculous story? Hundreds of professionals are killed in American Cities over the span of 4-12 months too. Yeesh. You would think Iraq is falling apart at the seems, but every now and then you get something around the media like that memo that just leaked. And in that memo an Al Quaeda operative is complaining about how badly they are losing.
Kinda like all of the anti-war liberals that just can’t see past their own foolishness.