Sometimes I just god-damn wonder about people.
It’s been a year and a month, roughly, since the start of the war in Iraq, and approximately a year since army-to-army hostilities ended.
And, overall, large groups of people – both within Iraq and the West – are declaring the occupation a failure, and the economy in Iraq collapsed and doomed. And, on a basic level, it’s our fault, because we didn’t have a Plan.
Now I have a number of issues with what has been done, and I’ll set some of those out in a later post, but I want to make one point first as a way of framing the discussion around a basic set of facts.
For many of us, there’s a kind of black hole between Hitler and Eva’s last stand in the bunker and the Porsche 911. Somehow, Germany – without taking a lot of room in history books – went from war, to partition, via the Airlift, to world economic leadership. That’s not quite the case. Let me offer up a few tidbits, so that you’ll understand how hard things were – and how much had to be done – between June 5, 1945 and, say 1950.
Here’s what the economy looked like in 1946 and 1947:
After World War II the German economy lay in shambles. The war, along with Hitler’s scorched-earth policy, had destroyed 20 percent of all housing. Food production per capita in 1947 was only 51 percent of its level in 1938, and the official food ration set by the occupying powers varied between 1,040 and 1,550 calories per day. Industrial output in 1947 was only one-third its 1938 level. Moreover, a large percentage of Germany’s working-age men were dead. At the time, observers thought that Germany would have to be the biggest client of the U.S. welfare state.
and this:
The winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47 were the worst Germans can remember. They were cold, and as many houses were still damaged, there was a lack of fuel (coal) and people were undernourished, many starved or froze to death. The British and the Americans, in their respective zones, did their best to alleviate the situation. The US Red Cross distributed addresses of German families to US citizens who were descendants of German emigrants and, in many cases, relatives of those in need. The American relatives than sent CARE PARCELS containing durable goods extremely scarce in war-torn Germany. The British efforts to prevent the German population from starvation stressed the country’s economy (which had not recovered from 5 years of war either) to the limit. During this process, the population of West Germany began to regard the British and Americans as liberators rather than occupants.
In large part, this was both the result of the extraordinarily destructive war, but also of deliberate policy on the part of the victorious Allies:
With surrender came the time for retribution. In the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Directive 1067 of April 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was instructed to occupy Germany “not…for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.” Allied occupation was to bring “home to the Germans that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves.”
…
Such a shift in policy from retribution to rebuilding, from collective guilt to assistance, also meant a renunciation of reparations and of the dismantling of factories: Draining financial and industrial resources from Germany was hardly beneficial to its economic recovery. In early 1946, less than a year after V-E Day, this was a hard pill to swallow for most Americans. But Truman agreed with Churchill, and on May 25, Truman halted all reparations from the U.S. Zone. The punitive Reparations and Level of Industry Plan for the four zones—agreed upon only after months of haggling on March 27, 1946—was quietly scuttled.
To an extent, it was a result of inadequate planning. In his essay rebutting James Bacques’ charges that Eisenhower deliberately starved a million Nazi POW’s, Stephen Ambrose says:
After the first week of May, all of Eisenhower’s calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany became woefully inadequate. He had badly underestimated, for two reasons. First, the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies far exceeded what was expected (more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million) because of the onrush of German soldiers across the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians – there were millions fleeing from east to west, about 13 million altogether, and they became Eisenhower’s responsibility. Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected.
No food shortage? This is the report of the Military Governor for Germany in July 1945: “The food situation throughout Western Germany is perhaps the most serious problem of the occupation. The average food consumption in the Western Zones is now about one-third below the generally accepted subsistence level.” The September report declares, “Food from indigenous sources was not available to meet the present authorized ration level for the normal consumer, of 1,550 calories per day.”
Mr. Bacque says that the prisoners were receiving 1,550 calories a day, and he contends that such a ration means slow starvation. He apparently never looked at what civilians were getting, in Germany or in the liberated countries. In Paris in 1945, the calorie level was 1,550 for civilians. It was only slightly higher in Britain, where rationing continued. It was much lower in Russia, where rationing also continued. As noted, the official ration for German civilians was 1,550, but often not met. In Vienna in the summer of 1945 the official ration sometimes fell to 500.
There is such a thing as common sense. Anyone who was in Europe in the summer of 1945 would be flabbergasted to hear that there was no food shortage.
As we realized the inadequacy of the Morgenthau plan, which intended to ‘pastoralize’ Germany as a way of ending the militant nature – and capabilities – of the German people. By all accounts, the plan was a disaster in conception and execution.
In reaction, elements of the U.S. Government reacted with their better natures.
I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth, and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.
In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe, the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines, and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past 10 years conditions have been highly abnormal. The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies, and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization, or by simple destruction. In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete. Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that two years after the close of hostilities, a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than has been foreseen.
George Marshall – June 5, 1947
And they showed results:
During the last 10 months notable progress has been made in Western Germany, which is apparent to all the world. An entirely new atmosphere of hope and creative activity has replaced the lethargy and despair of a year ago.
Dean Atcheson – April 28, 1949
It took 4 years from the end of hostilities to start the turnaround of the German economy.
We started to implement a plan that would have turned Germany into Southern France, and turned 180 degrees and helped Germany reindistrialize.
That’s how things work in the real world. They progress in fits and starts, change and turn, and most of all, they take time.
The forces that oppose us are convinced that they are more patient than we are. They are convinced that if things in Iraq aren’t perfect – if the power isn’t on and unemployment ended and all the Iraqi women listening to NPR by September – well, it’ll be a quagmire then. And then what’ll we do?
Dean Atcheson and George Marshall were probably worried about quagmire as well. But they simply put their heads down and worked, and experimented, and tried things until – at the end of the day – they outlasted the problem.
They were leaders. We need some too.
> “The British efforts to prevent the German population from starvation stressed the country’s economy to the limit.”
You know, I always thought your nickname, “Armed Liberal,” was just wrong, in that you never said anything liberal. But all of a sudden, you’re talking about making personal sacrifices in order to help people who are less fortunate. That’s liberal.
It makes me want to speechify: “This war is going to cost us deeply. We will have to raise taxes to finance it. We will have to institute a draft to raise the necessary troops. But despite these costs, we must go forward, it is our moral imperative. For too long we have spent our great wealth on color televisions and starbucks coffee. It is time to spend it on something greater: uplifting the people of the world, bringing democracy to the masses, though it costs us dearly.”
But the thing is, I can’t imagine Bush ever saying anything like this. He is no liberal. He will never call for personal sacrifice.
Good commentary on humanity. We seem to have a generation of blame placers and excuse makers.
Personally I find the whole business of the 9-11 committee a frustrating and useless waste of time. Congress isn’t going to pass anything Congress doesn’t largely originate.
There IS a war to be fought and it didn’t end in Afghanistan nor has it come close to end in Iraq. How long have we been in Bosnia? 10 years?
Reconstruction worked in post-war, Germany, a westerrn European nation (plus much of the rest of Europe) and it worked in Japan, a nation with substantial cultural differences.
There’s no reason it can’t work in Iraq given similar effort and commitment.
Good post. The world wasn’t invested last week.
I’ve exhausted myself reading Iraq commentary tonight, and the analysis seems to go every which way. I can’t find any consensus. On that thought, I think the historical analogies can go different ways as well. This from Fareed Zakaria:
In early June 1920, Gertrude Bell, the extraordinary woman who helped run Iraq for Britain, wrote a letter to her father on some “violent agitation” against British rule: “[The extremists] have adopted a line difficult in itself to combat, the union of the Shi’ah and Sunni, the unity of Islam. And they are running it for all it’s worth … There’s a lot of semi-religious semi-political preaching … and the underlying thought is out with the infidel. My belief is that the weightier people are against it—I know some of them are bitterly disgusted—but it’s very difficult to stand out against the Islamic cry and the longer it goes on the more difficult it gets.” In fact, the “agitation” quickly turned into a mass (mostly Shia) revolt. British forces were able to crush it over three long months, but only after killing almost 10,000 Iraqis, suffering about 500 deaths themselves and spending the then exorbitant sum of 50 million pounds. After the 1920 revolt, the British fundamentally reoriented their strategy in Iraq. They abandoned plans for ambitious nation-building and instead sought a way to transfer power quickly to trustworthy elites.
That said, I think your post was quite beautiful, and I admire you for it.
I also found this paragraph from Zakaria interesting; he’s talking about our small presence in Iraq:
America’s lack of presence on the ground is even greater when it comes to civilian authorities–political advisors, engineers, agronomists, economists, lawyers and other experts who could help Iraqi as they rebuild their country. The Coalition Provisional Authority has about 1,300 people working for it. Douglas MacArthur had four to five times as many when he was in Japan–and that was in circumstances where the Japanese state was fully intact and functioning. As a result, the CPA has virtually no presence outside Baghdad. Across much of the country, its acronym is jokingly said to stand for “Can’t Provide Anything.”
I think in a practical sense, the task of rebuilding Iraq is quite different from Germany which was quite different from Japan. Perhaps in terms of our own resolve and the necessary timeline it is the same, but we must not confuse the issue.
Great post, A.L., but it won’t have any effect on those who are blinded by partisanship, as Josh Y so ably demonstrates.
LOSS OF VICTORY IN GERMANY THROUGH U.S. POLICY FEARED
By John H. Crider Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
New York Times; Nov. 18, 1945; pg.
WE CAN LOSE THE PEACE
New York Times; Sep 25, 1945; pg. 21
GERMANS DECLARE AMERICANS HATED
By KATHLEEN McLAUGHLIN By Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
New York Times; Dec 3, 1945; pg. 6
http://thecr.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_thecr_archive.html
U.S SEEN ‘FUMBLING’ ITS JOB IN GERMANY
New York Times; Feb 15, 1946; pg. 6
DARK GERMAN OUTLOOK ENCOURAGES RESISTANCE
By DREW MIDDLETON By Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
New York Times; Jan 20, 1946; pg. 66
U.S. PRESTIGE DROPS AFTER GI PROTESTS
By DREW MIDDLETON By Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
New York Times; Jan 13, 1946; pg. 1
http://thecr.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_thecr_archive.html
*************************************************
Now if one were to believe the NYT 60 years ago the European Occupation was such a disaster we should still be fighting insurgents.
I seem to recall it turned out OK?
Oh here is my favorite one to compare with Iraq.
http://thecr.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_thecr_archive.html
BRITISH TO QUELL HAMBURG RIOTING
New York Times; Mar 24, 1946; pg. 11
“Wiil employ armored forces if necessary to halt food disorders in their Zone>”
Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t recall us have to use armored troops to put down riots by starving people.
Some people want you to believe everything in Iraq is a total disaster and will only get worse.
They tried to tell us the same story 60 years ago.
They were wrong then too.
Nation-building in Germany was not the reason why the USA participated in WWII. And the war was really difficult and uncertain. So, having no plan in 1946 seems quite logical, and acceptable.
But in Iraq ?
If democratization of the ME is really THE objective of this operation, then the absence of plan is a problem. Did the architects really believe in their own propaganda ?
Nation-building in Germany was not the reason why the USA participated in WWII. And the war was really difficult and uncertain. So, having no plan in 1946 seems quite logical, and acceptable
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VE-Day” May 8, 1945
Care to explain what you mean by “having no plan in 1946 seems quite logical, and acceptable”???
1945 : end of the war, Germany has to be punished.
1946 : Germany needs help, but how can we help ?
1947 : Marshall Plan
Dean *Acheson*.
Just sayin’.
Another quality post A.L.!
Keep bringing on the perspective, it is sorely lacking in the media and in much of the country.
I agree with the general argument, AL. Here’s the question: what makes today’s situation different and, in my opinion, infinitely harder?
1) Iraqis aren’t Germans. Pre-war Germany had a strong tradition of a semi-authoritarian state which was respected by the general citizenry. We lopped off the top, sociopathic layer, but most of the bureaucrats remained in place. They were not “corrupt” per se, though they were to varying degrees nazis or nazi-sympathizers. The Iraqi state was, by contrast, a corrupt and staggeringly inefficient kleptocracy, led by a sociopathic clique. Blech. Big difference.
Another way in which today’s Iraqis differ from post-war Germans: work ethic. It is too easy to forget that Germany’s recovery (seed money for which we supplied) came on the backs of ordinary German workers who put their noses down and worked like dogs to rebuild their country. It helped that all their factories were brand new, but the manpower that fueled it was plentiful and cheap for decades. Iraqis are spoiled children by comparison. Where’s my free lunch and why do I have to wait so long for it (and why does it come, as Woody Allen might add, in such small portions).
2) There were no satellite hookups, 24 hour news cycles, or bogus “humanitarian” organizations carping from the sidelines in 46-47. There was no political correctness, whereby the quelling of riots is equated to the quashing of patriots, no impossible standard of civilian casualties to be met (kill only the guy shooting at you, as he sits in a mosque surrounded by unarmed civilians–yeah, right).
I love that line from a John Sayles’ movie whose title escapes me now: “Why wait when you can have it all now?” But of course we can’t have it all now. We can’t have peace and security without killing some bad guys, we can’t have democracy without a long-term build up of civil society, we can’t have a free Iraq that no Iraqis stand up to defend from internal and external enemies. And above all, we can’t have political stability there if we constantly undercut our sense of mission over here.
I don’t think the crisis of the past two weeks has changed a friggin thing over there or over here. The president said as much last night. The problem is, we’ve started doing a collective Mario Cuomo impersonation–angst ridden self-questioning. Get over it. We’ve got to look like we know what we’re doing even if we don’t. Looks like Bush is the man for THAT particular job! And I only have part of my tongue in my cheek as I write that.
While this is an interesting comparison, the cultural, political, and economic differences between post-WWII Germany and current day Iraq couldn’t be more stark.
For one, Germans were and are culturally unified and largely of a similar faith (thanks to Hitler, unfortunately). Iraqis, well, let’s just say they’re not.
So if you take this to mean things will potentially progress even more slowly to Democracy in Iraq, you’d probably be right. However, the longer it takes to establish firmly, the greater the number of opportunities to destroy it.
Oh how nice it would be to have the strong oak of democracy planted firmly in the Middle East. But if it requires a thousand gardners to grow, thats 999 oaks that cannot be tended elsewhere.
There were no satellite hookups, 24 hour news cycles, or bogus “humanitarian” organizations carping from the sidelines in 46-47. There was no political correctness, whereby the quelling of riots is equated to the quashing of patriots, no impossible standard of civilian casualties to be met.
It seems to me that these are the major relevant differences between Germany (and probably even more so Japan) than anything else. Wouldn’t the Fallujah and Sadr City ‘revolts’ be put down (assuming they ever arose to begin witín extremely short order in a media-free (or media friendly) environment, even without resorting to extreme levels of violence by U.S. military?
There are other relevant differences between Germany in 1945 and Iraq today and a few similarities worth noting as well.
The Germany of 1945 had experienced a series of events that shook German society to its roots over 3-4 decades: losses in WWI, massively punitive reparations and then the Depression, insanely expansive reaction in the form of Nazism and finally WWII and the joint defeat from the west and the eastern fronts.
Not only was Germany comfortable with orderly, centralized power; it also had gone through more than a generation of soul searching and intellectual despair. Many embraced the Nazi movement because it gave them something to believe in other than the corrupt nihlism of the 1930s cabaret scene, German existentialism and the emotional void that trench warfare left in an entire generation of potential social and intellectual leaders.
Remember J.R.R. Tolkein’s comment to the effect that by the time WWI was over, all but 1 of his close friends were dead. But overall, the British did not feel a crushing sense of futility and guilt after that war and during the 20s-30s. Many Germans did.
Put these factors together and by 1945 there was considerable willingness among Germans to participate in rebuilding their society. It was a sometimes passive, sometimes active willingness, motivated in part by the destruction and hunger that surrounded them. When Geo. Marshall very wisely decided on a different strategy than WWI reparations, he succeeded in part because the populace was ready for change.
Iraqis are in a somwhat, but not totally, different position. Many feel ashamed that they were not able to oppose Saddam, but they don’t feel defeated by the US and they may or may not yet be ready to move beyond the similar intellectual and moral corruption and nihlism that affects Arab and Moslem cultures around the world.
That’s part of the bad news. So too is the fact that over 80% of the total population in Iraq never knew a time when Saddam wasn’t in power and they have only the most tenuous sense of alternative approaches — except for the Islamacists backed by Iran, who have a quite detailed picture for the power relationships they want to create.
In addition, there are ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq that by and large did not obtain in 1945 Germany.
One thing Iraq does have is a history that goes back before the Arabs, before Islam and indeed, before most civilizations of today. I keep hearing little echos of this in various bloggers and comments made to the media. I suspect one reason many Iraqi aren’t thrilled with the Islamacist agenda is that they already have a dormant, but powerful, identity that is older and deeper than Islam.
Cultural issues like these can have a powerful effect on our ability or inability to foster a stable, prosperous and multi-ethnic Iraq built on a base of explicit secular law.
It’s really not fair, I think, to say that the Bush administration had no plan for post-combat Iraq. They did in fact have — and I know this from conversations with some people tangentially involved — a series of plans. Many of them were not employed because we never had the masses of casualties, refugees or other disruptions that could have occurred if the Iraqi military had in fact fought a war.
Other plans had to be changed because of a single, overwhelming fact on the ground: the demoralization of Iraqis after several decades of unprecedented and, to some degree, unsuspected cruelty and torture. We knew about some of it, but the extent to which the populace was terrorized was difficult to imagine until we got there.
Moreover, we accomplished one mission TOO well. That is, one mission beyond our goal of minimizing civilian casualties and US-inflicted damage to infrastructure.
Namely, we turned a number of key Army and Republican Guard generals at the start of the war. They surrendered or disbanded their units.
That would be okay, were it not for the fact that Saddam had had months of delay during which to cache cash, people and weapons around the countryside and to organize the Fedayeen to attempt a delayed guerilla war.
As a result, Iraqis neither felt defeated nor did they feel that we won.
Finally, the decrepit state of the Iraqi infrastructure was again greatly underestimated. Again, chalk that up to our having gutted our human intel capabilities in the 90s. Satellites can take photos of roads etc., the CIA analysts can estimate oil production figures, but noone quite realized (I suspect) just how fragile the remaining agricultural and industrial base was.
Example: power generation plants with no operating procedures, no maintenance logs, no documentation … just desperate engineers doing whatever they could to give the impression they were meeting Saddam’s quotas that month. Bechtel and Halliburton people have a HUGE effort on their hands, which they are working with great energy and personal sacrifice: they are a) building plants, b) setting up all the processes and procedures needed for real infrastructure capacity while c) holding existing plants together with chewing gum and rebuilding what has been regularly sabotaged by the attacks of remnant Ba’athists.
The latter, by the way, have decreased a lot now that Iraqis have gotten fed up with the resulting outages.
Josh, I have to disagree with your claim that Bush has not called for personal sacrifice. He has made it plain that our work in Iraq will require lives, a lot of treasure and a long commitment there.
Iraq is a fictional country of ethnic groups lumped together by the Ottomans and Europeans. I see no reason why the US should continue the fiction when dividing the country solves many problems and irks the nations we’d like to see irked.
Hopefully that’s at least a fallback plan.
Well said, rkb and Gabriel. All this talk of post-war Germany has given me an idea–while it would be insane to deliberately level Iraqi cities (a la Dresden, Hiroshima or even Hama, Syria) what would it take to build entirely new ones, then encourage people to leave the old (say, Fallujah) behind?
This is what we Americans do all the time–better than anyone (to the consternation of slow growthers everywhere).
If geography is destiny, let’s rewrite the geography. There are, of course, precedents: think of Haussmann’s Paris after the bloody early 19th century. All those wide boulevards so beloved by glassy-eyed Americans replaced a city of small, cavernous alleys and cul-de-sacs (like we find throughout the ME) in which it was all too easy for “resistance fighters” of every ilk to throw up barricades and mount armed insurrections. No more alleys, no more insurrections.
So, I say, a mcMansion for every Iraqi, and a chicken in every Iraqi pot!
> Great post, A.L., but it won’t have any effect on those who are blinded by partisanship, as Josh Y so ably demonstrates.
Ah, yes. Republicans controlled congress, the presidency, the supreme court. But Bush couldn’t be honest about the war because, despite the fact that 90% of the public was in a state of fawning adoration, there were still a few critics left.
Keep drumming that line. Or you could blame it on Clinton. Or equally plausibly, Jimmy Carter.
VT:
For one, Germans were and are culturally unified and largely of a similar faith (thanks to Hitler, unfortunately). Iraqis, well, let’s just say they’re not.
It’s possible to overstate the cultural and religious unity of the Germans. When Hitler came to power Germany as a modern nation was no older than Iraq is now. And I haven’t lived there for more than 25 years but there’s quite a bit of religious and ethnic difference between Berliners, for example, and, say, Westphalians or Bavarians.
No comparison is perfect. As Shakespeare wrote, comparisons are odorous (and yes, yes, I know about odious but what Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night is odorous).
Nobody’s mentioned the biggest difference between the situation at the end of WWII and now. At the end of WWII America had demonstrated both the ability and the will to exterminate her enemies not just to defeat them. We still have the ability. I don’t see the will.
All in all, a good thing.
My last post was unnecessarily snarky. But the point remains: AL’s post has a certain nobility to it. In particular, it expresses two sentiments that resonate with me:
First, it acknowledges the fact that it will be costly, but that the cost will be worth it, because we’re helping people. This argument fits with my value system, and it seems to be grounded in reality.
The second sentiment expressed in his post is the idea that we won’t get it right the first time, we have to try things, admit our mistakes, and try again. To me, that seems like it might work eventually.
The problem is, I just can’t see the Bush administration signing on to these views. Really, honestly, can you imagine Bush admitting that he has made mistakes and that we need to change strategy? Can you imagine him calling for personal sacrifice? Can you imagine him making a speech like the one I wrote above?
Don’t just respond by calling me “partisan”. Answer honestly – do you think he will do it?
> Nobody’s mentioned the biggest difference between the situation at the end of WWII and now. At the end of WWII America had demonstrated both the ability and the will to exterminate her enemies not just to defeat them.
I think you’re right that the psychological state of Germans was very different than the psychological state of Iraqis – for many reasons. Here are two more:
Germans didn’t hate Americans before the war. They had not nursed prejudices against us their entire lives. Therefore, they had much less tendency to rise up against us.
The Axis started the war. If you attack somebody and lose, it’s humiliating. If you are attacked by somebody and lose, it’s infuriating.
All in all though, I think these historical comparisons are misleading. This is a new situation, it must be evaluated on its own merits.
I agree. Just like in Germany Iraq had to be invaded and the venom had to be drained. The best way to do is is democratizing the country and building up the economy. Liberals are shortsighted, but history will remember Bush as the guy who brought democracy and peace to the Middle East. Clinton, wwho was ruking by polls will be remembered as the blow job guy. In a hundred years, they will still remember him that way.
“:It makes me want to speechify: “This war is going to cost us deeply. We will have to raise taxes to finance it. We will have to institute a draft to raise the necessary troops. But despite these costs, we must go forward, it is our moral imperative. For too long we have spent our great wealth on color televisions and starbucks coffee. It is time to spend it on something greater: uplifting the people of the world, bringing democracy to the masses, though it costs us dearly.”
But the thing is, I can’t imagine Bush ever saying anything like this.”
God, I hope not. This war is too important for us to burden our war effort with something as counterproductive as a draft.
JY: “Really, honestly, can you imagine Bush admitting that he has made mistakes and that we need to change strategy?”
I seem to recall the US pretty much turning on a dime in replacing Jay Garner with Bremer. As previous comments pointed out, we weren’t even close with our predictions of the course of events after shooting started. We’ve changed tactics on the ground several times, most recently in the decision to recruit former officers of the Iraqi army into the new Civil Defense force. What the Administration doesn’t do is flog these decisions in public.
Bush also didn’t apolgize for doing a 180 on nation building after 9/11. This idea that Bush is a slave to dogma doesn’t make sense to me. Before 9/11 I would have expected Bush to turn Afghanistan into a parking lot and Baghdad into rubble. That’s what an isolationist reactionary would have done, but he didn’t. That counts for something, I think.
There you go Mark using facts again.
Out of curiosity, why would we need to reinstate the draft to get more troops to Iraq? The armed forces don’t seem to have trouble meeting its recruitment or re-enlistment goals, so why not just have Congress authorize and fund two or more divisions?
To me, the whole point here is that regardless of the specific details — politics, economy, psychology, history, etc., etc. — taking a monumentally screwed up country and turning it into a functioning, stable democracy is spectacularly complicated, and it’s not going to happen overnight. There will be hitches. There will be remnants of the old regime that keep hanging in there and stirring up trouble. There will be new “leaders” springing up and trying to establish their own power bases, sometimes violently, sometimes not, in the hopes of winding up on the top of the heap when all is said and done. There will be lots of nasty stuff.
What I don’t understand is why anybody thought, or continues to think, that any of this could have been avoided. Sure, elements of it, maybe. But we’re talking about rebuilding a whole country here, from pretty close to scratch for all intents and purposes. The only known quantity is that unexpected and unfortunate things are going to happen along the way. Good people will continue doing their best to try to mitigate those things, and sometimes they’ll succeed (and we’ll most likely never hear about it) and sometimes they’ll fail (and the media will have a field day).
Personally, I have no time for the seemingly endless partisan carping, or even more unproductively, coddling the hand wringers. But if the debate is “we’re in it now, so how are we going to make it work better?” then I think that’s a discussion worth having, because it’s obvious to me that cutting and running is not going to happen — no matter how much carping and hand wringing goes on, and no matter who is in the White House a year from now.
Though comparing Germany to Iraq is misleading on many levels (different cultural values, different circumstances leading to this situation, etc.), it does make clear that we’ve been in similar straits before. One could make similar comparisons with post-war Japan for example.
Nation building is difficult, and trying to do it with any degree of certainty is impossible. It’s the epitome of a chaotic system. The best that anyone can do is come up with a plan and allow for enough flexibility in that plan to adjust to changing conditions. Winning a peace is very similar to winning a war; no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The goals are different, the means are different, but the idea is the same.
AL, you make a point at the end of your post that stood out to me. “But they simply put their heads down and worked, and experimented, and tried things until – at the end of the day – they outlasted the problem.”
A lot has been written about the generation of Americans that won WWII and the qualities they had to have to help rebuild Europe. Without praising or vilifying them, I have to wonder if, as a nation, we still have those same qualities.
Yes, the Allies stuck it out and made it work, but a lot has changed in the cultural make up. Do we have the same types of people today? Do we have what it takes to make it happen?
I have no doubts of our military. They have proven, time and again, that they can do what it takes to accomplish their goals. I’m more concerned about the diplomats and politicians. The fact that 9-11 has been so thoroughly politicized before and with the recent hearings makes me doubt that they have what’s needed to make the right things happen.
Josh Y.,
The most important battle of this war is not Iraq, Iran, Palestine or where ever.
The most important battle is #1 in the minds of Americans #2 in the minds of the rest of the world.
If we can fight this war without serious material privation on the home front (except for rising gas prices) all the better.
Stephen,
We still have those qualities. Here is the opening of the famous Patton speech:
“Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally.”
Please note that even on the eve of the largest successful amphib landing of all time and after two and a half years of war there were people tiring of the war. Ready to quit.
This is nothing new. This battle must be fought constantly. Welcome to the war.
War sucks.
I was going to try to add my two cents worth, but when I started to type, I realized that your eloquent words summed up my thoughts, in a manner far more eloquent that I could ever muster, given my less than stellar grasp of the use of the English language. Keep up the great work !
> If we can fight this war without serious material privation on the home front all the better.
It looks like I’ve brought up a bigger question. What if, before starting the war, Bush had said this:
“Today, I am going to create a new government program. The name of the new program will be the ‘global democratization initiative.’ Whenever the military works to create democracy in a foreign nation, it will be paid for out of this fund.”
Question: what yearly dollar figure would you think was an acceptable amount to spend on this program? In other words, how much yearly money would be too much for the global democratization initiative?
Don’t give me some cop-out like saying, “we can do it for free by cutting such-and-such other program.” That’s a cop-out because if there is some other program we can cut, then we could use that money for tax cuts. So in the end, the program will get paid for by tax money.
Also, don’t give me a cop-out like “we can’t know in advance how much it will cost.” That’s true, but we still have to try to control costs. We can’t democratize everyone all at once. So we have to set a dollar target. What target should we aim for?
Its taught historically, 50 years from revolution to a full function goverment. Looking at Japan and Germany its only now that they’ve returned to global politics (Joining the peacekeeping operations in Iraq and with Germany, oposing the war. You could also example their peacekeeping efforts of the late ninties but independence is the point to look for.)
Oh, I dunno, Josh… I’d have to do some research on what’s currently spent on any number of things. I’d definately say a minimum of $100 billion, just to put it above the $87 billion that so many people complained was both “too much” and “trying to fight the war on the cheap”.
But I wouldn’t cripple the economy that would produce that $100 billion by raising taxes. At least, not without a national referendum, rather than trusting Congress to listen to their constituents, and not without some system in place to ensure that the earmarked money actually went to that fund and was used for that purpose rather than Senatorial Pork Projects, Inc.
How much would you earmark?
And I have to agree with Ken, a draft would be counterproductive.
Ask (almost) anyone – a draft would lower the quality of troops, training, efficiency. It would be a huge, costly, not to mention politically and logistically insane move against anything short of, well, perhaps the entire rest of the world both acquiring technological parity with us and declaring “total war” on the US on a conventional ‘meatgrinder’ scale.
Well, Josh, I’d be in the ‘whatever it takes camp’, but since we do have to have a price, let me suggest that it ought to be somewhere around what 9/11 costs us – per year.
So that’d be about $100B/yr; the GDP (A) in 2003 was about $10,990B, so we’re talking about slightly less than 1% of GDP. I’d round it up for grins, and say $110B/year.
You’ll suggest that that’s an awful lot; and I’ll reply by asking a) what’s it worth to you to prevent the second or third nuke being set off in a U.S. city? and b) what’s it worth not to live in a police state because we’re worried about the second or third nuke being set off in a U.S. city?
A.L.
Josh,
Would that be pre or post 9/11?
Pre 9/11 – zero.
Post 9/11 – the spending increase in this years budget – say $400 to $500 bn. Since we are well below that I have no problem. OTOH there is a lot of pork that could go for something useful – like taking down Iran.
So for Dave, the dollar cap is 100 billion, or about $1000 per family per year.
Anybody else besides Dave willing to provide a dollar cap?
Just cause you won’t say what your limit is, doesn’t mean you don’t have one. Surely, if this was going to cost 80% of your income for the next 10 years, you’d say that was too much. So what’s your limit? How much do you think each family should be willing to spend?
One estimate for dealing with the nuclear threat to the US over a 50 year time frame is $1.5 trillion in 2000 dollars. So if you insert the subject problem in for “nuclear” I’d guess that 1.5e9/50 = $30 billion/year over 50 years is appropriate. Now into this equation you have to take a level average and apply it to a varying need, so perhaps one year you might have to spend 5x that amount, and other years much less. Furthermore, that “extraordinary effort” is in addition to our support of a standing armed forces, just as nuclear forces are now.
OK, I’ve gotten a few quotes now – Dave and AL suggest $100 billion. I don’t think that’s enough: we seem to be losing, we need more troops. Troops cost money. Also, we’ll need a jobs program in Iraq. I think we’re going to have to pony up $200 billion per year if we want to achieve our objectives. That’s about the same amount of money as medicare. In more personal terms, we’re talking raising taxes by $2000 per family per year.
In other words, this isn’t pocket change. This is a sacrifice.
In my very first response, I said: “You’re talking about making personal sacrifices in order to help people who are less fortunate. That’s liberal.” To me, “liberal” is a compliment. In other words, I approved of the idea of making a sacrifice, as long as it’s to help people.
So I repeat: this war will require a sacrifice, if we want to win, and that’s OK.
Instead, he hid the truth, that a sacrifice was required. He made every effort to convince the American people that this war would be cheap and easy. They said it would cost 2 billion. Rumsfeld said it might take six days, six weeks, certainly not six months. They ridiculed dissenters who said it would take hundreds of thousands of troops. They ridiculed those who said it would cost hundreds of billions. They didn’t want people to see that a sacrifice was needed.
So now, he’s stuck. He needs to ask for more money for more troops. He needs to ask for more money for the reconstruction. But to ask is to admit that the people he ridiculed were right. To ask is to admit that he lied to Americans about the costs. To ask is to admit that his tactical analysis was incompetent. In other words, in order to get the troops and money needed to win this war, Bush would first have to humble himself.
Bush will never humble himself. Therefore, we will not win this war.
Crap. A sentence got cut out of my previous post.
Insert “Back when Bush was initiating this war, he could have honestly told Americans that a sacrifice would be required.” right before “Instead, he hid the truth…”
Josh,
Some of this is old ground.
You really need to check out Armed Liberal’s posts about how Bush was/is not doing enough to communincate the need for the war. I can’t remember the precise dates, or even the months for that matter, but there were at least two and maybe a counter thread that Trent started. Try to find them. Or, perhaps someone already has some handy links into the archives???
This topic may be worth a revisit……
lurker –
The next post in the queue is a slam on Bush for being what I believe is a crappy communicator about the war.
Trent and others claimed that the unprincipled opposition made such communication impossible; I’ll argue that his failure to communicate ceded the opposition the nation’s bully pulpit.
Josh – frame you question in a different way: How much, per family, would you spend to prevent five 9/11’s?
To all the commenters who suggested that Iraq is not Germany and so the example is invalid; no it’s not, and 2004 is not 1948 either. You can’t rerun history.
But you can learn what kind of effort it took before, and take some confidence that we’ve solved problems of a similar scale before.
A.L.
Josh,
Your credibility would be greatly enhanced by not writing inanities like “we seem to be losing” (we may or may not be, but the 5-minute-time-window perspective makes you look quite foolish.) What’s worse, you go through this big routine about “how much money should we dedicate” and when it comes down to it–surprise, it’s not so you can advocate that we do so, but so you have another hammer to hit Bush with. Do you have the slightest idea how insulting this is to our intelligence?
Of course liberals are all for reinstituting the draft.
Not for any military benefit, of course.
But because it’s awful damn hard to whine and protest a draft if there isn’t one…
> the 5-minute-time-window perspective makes you look quite foolish.
In your mind, the troubles have been going on for five minutes. But to those who were able to forsee all this, the recent wave of violence is merely the next step in a process that has been unfolding, as predicted, over the course of a year.
> when it comes down to it–surprise, it’s not so you can advocate that we do so, but so you have another hammer to hit Bush with.
In the very first sentence of the very first post of this thread, I applauded the idea that we can’t win the war without personal sacrifice, but I concluded that “Bush will never call for personal sacrifice.”
In short, I stated my thesis right up front. If you didn’t read it, don’t blame me that you were “surprised” that I returned to it.
As for why all the exposition about the money? M. Simon attacked my hypothesis: he said that it might be possible to “fight this war without serious material privation on the home front.” No sacrifice needed. I felt I had to respond to that, because it went to the core of my argument. I had little choice but to debunk the idea that the war is free or cheap. Yes, it was a long and boring exposition. I wouldn’t make such long, boring expositions if I weren’t forced to do so by conservative talking points.
There is a point to be made, in that changing a society takes awhile, and isn’t done in a year. However, this is belied by a lot of other counter-indications.
1. It is a year out from when we marched into Baghdad. Can one really claim with a straight face, that, a year later, only halfway through the month, there would be MORE casualty deaths from the U.S than for any other month? With half a month to go? That this is in any way, shape, or form, a good sign?
2. Does anyone know what the violence quotient was, both in Japan and Germany, after the end of the war? Along with this, what was the number of troops in Germany a year out from the war? The level of the troops per the level of population?
3. Germany or Japan fail as a metaphor, because the dynamics of the population are fundamentally, absolutely different than the population dynamics in Iraq.
4. So many things that this administration claimed, were untrue (or misled on – in effect the same):
a. Weapons of mass destruction
b. Links between Al-Queda and Saddam
5. The puzzling “happy talk” claims regarding:
a. How long and how many troops would need to remain in Iraq.
b. How much it would cost.
6. Getting it wrong regarding how many troops SHOULD be in Iraq. If you are going for success, you don’t skimp out on the number of troops needed for security.
7. At this point, the fundamental lack of plan regarding the turnover to Iraqis. Just last night, the president was asked what was the plan to turn over power, and he said something to the effect of “we are working on it”. We are 80 days away or so. Does anyone else get a queasy feeling about this?
Merely talking about your “resoluteness” isn’t a plan. Hope isn’t a plan. If Bush and co. have been so incorrect about their initial claims for why we went to war, and then so ham-handed and failing in the initial efforts to create a secure environment in which democracy can flourish –
Why should they be trusted to continue with “their” plan, or lack of it?
Josh,
> But to those who were able to forsee all this,
> the recent wave of violence is merely the next
> step in a process that has been unfolding, as
> predicted, over the course of a year.
Why yes, of course it was foreseeable, and foreseen. However, not everyone concludes that it means we are losing.
And as far as M. Simon’s claim, I hardly think you’ve refuted it. Just because you don’t want us to be able to win this war without great personal sacrifice, doesn’t mean anything about whether or not you’re right about that point. (And I have to be suspicious about why you have this desire in the first place–is it you want the leverage of hardship to try to convince the public to abandon the cause?)
I think a crucial difference between now and then are the players. Saddam Hussein is not a vilain on the scale of Hitler. Churchill has been lionized since so I can’t judge Tony Blair (and certainly the former faced challenges the latter didn’t) but I think it’s fair to say that Bush is no Roosevelt, and Negroponte is no MacArthur…
Obviously this conflict/reconstruction is utterly different from what we have known before.
People speak glibly of history repeating itself — but it doesn’t. No moment in history is ever the same. We may feel it is, but that’s an entirely different proposition. The facts have changed, and if we really want to examine history, we should be looking at Iraq’s, not Europe’s. They are, afterall, the people most directly concerned with what is going on over there. That is where history is in the making.
To the liberals out there making the argument that Bush misled us into war, I think it’s pretty clear that the emperor has no clothes. Those that excuse him are basically proponents of political correctness — now when have you ever convinced them to blaspheme? You won’t; their reply will always be: only those pure in heart and spirit can see the clothes!
Not being a Middle East expert, and being relatively new to Juan Cole’s site, I found this interesting:
‘ A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have incredible change . . . ‘ [- Bush, yesterday]
This premise is not necessarily true. Turkey has had relatively democratic elections since 1950, but this development had no resonances in the rest of the Middle East. Iran went theocratic in 1979, and Khomeini expected everyone in the Middle East to follow suit. No one did. Saudi Arabia is among the world’s richest monarchies, but it has not spread monarchy in the mainly republican Middle East. Middle Eastern countries are often fairly insular with regard to politics, and every tub is on its own bottom. There is no guarantee that a “free” and democratic Iraq will have any real influence on the rest of the region.
At the moment, moreover, Iraq is a poster child for dictatorship. Any Egyptian who looked at what has transpired there in the past year might well decide that the soft dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is altogether preferable to taking the risk of opening up the system and possibly causing a similar social breakdown!
The last two paragraphs were meant to be italicized, indicating authorship by Cole.
Wow, consomee, that’s insulting. Can you allow some small possibility that some of us supported the war for the simple reason that we thought it was the right thing to do?
I understand that it’s easier to believe that Karl Rove just razzle-dazzled us, and that we’re just putty in Karen Hugh’s hands…I mean after all, that means you don’t really have to engage any arguments about the war, it’s just a simple up- or down- Bush is good or bad decision.
I don’t like Bush much. I’m really doubtful that I’ll be able to vote for him in November (note that I’m less likely at this point to vote for Kerry). But I’m damn well convinced that for whatever reason, he did the right thing in Iraq, and that – if we can stick it out, which is after all the point of my post – it’ll leave us in a better world than we would have been under all the plausible alternatives I can imagine.
Just for grins, instead of a critique of the way you believe the war was sold, can we talk about a) whethyer ot not it was a good idea, and b) what we do from here?
A.L.
History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.
— Mark Twain
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
–George Santayana
People speak glibly of history repeating itself — but it doesn’t.
— consummee
********************
Stand right up and take your pick, folks.
They all are free, but the future sure has its costs and benefits.
A.L., I thought the war was the right thing to do, the good thing to do, so you’re not going to see any disagreement from me on that. Whether it was the only course of action available to us at the time — given the information we had — I can’t tell (especially since I don’t know all the information we had), but I think it’s likely that war was the only option, the only cure to the threat Saddam Hussein seemed to pose.
But whether Bush is/was the right man for it, I think that is debateable — I would like to say no he isn’t, because of his (unintentional) deceit or naiveté or whatever you want to call it, because of his inability to lead the government, and because the post-war aftermath is just abominable compared to the war (yes I know that it hasn’t been that long but in my view, all the trend lines point to failure) — but then he is a good war leader in that he is very approachable for the people, clear and concise in a simple way (not intellectually), and so public opinion has been rallied at a time when I don’t think anyone more intelligent, knowledgeable and ethical could have done it (that pretty much includes most presidents). Like you, I don’t think we really have the stomach for this war and reconstruction. So his being able to get the American people behind him is a big plus.
What we do from here… I think that’s being taken care of by the higher ups. All we can do is debate, support our troops morally and materially, get those Iraqis going as best they can, as best we can, and tend to our own democracy. I don’t think it’s fair to attack John Kerry’s national security credentials, and actually, I don’t think foreign policy will be all that different if or when he gets into power, than Bush, except that it might get better. Either way, so many things are going to happen between now and November that I just can’t say.
9/11 really shook our country up.
I wish we could have a bit more moderation in America. This polarization really helps no one, least of all the Iraqis. People on both sides of the aisle have good things to say, but what good is that if no one is listening?
Incidently, Consummee, Roosevelt died before the end of either European operations or Pacific operations, so he didn’t have to consider anything but the issues revolving around Italian occupation. If that situation was any guide, the organized crime that ran most of southern Italy during 1943-5 is a pretty good indicator of what to expect in Iraq. But then Roosevelt had bigger things to worry about with an ongoing war.
MacArthur was the Commander of US Forces in Japan. He was never ambassador, as Negroponte will be after confirmation. So what is your parallel there?
Concerning your estimate of Churchill as “lionized”, just talk to any British Labourite. You’ll get an earfull concerning that Tory bastard who made his career shooting striking miners. Then he lost the only wartime election in 1945 to Labour, in marked comparison to Roosevelt’s romp in Nov 1944. The “lion’s” age was showing politically even in 1943 when the Tories were forced to give more Cabinet posts on the wartime cabinet to Labour. In comparison, Blair’s ability to hold together an absolute working majority in Parliament has been stellar.
Indeed, Tom Roberts, as you point out, the differences in history between this moment and then continue even within the players’ own histories. Concerning MacArthur, I was refering to he who got credit for setting up Japan. Am I wrong? Also, Negroponte will for all practical purposes take over Bremer’s position as viceroy, as it used to be called, or am I wrong there too? I imagine that’s where the buck is going to stop in Iraq. (As for Churchill being lionized, I was refering to his reputation in the US. Let’s hope Blair doesn’t go the same way he did; I kind of like the guy, but then I’m not British.)
Oh, about Roosevelt, he did lead us successfully through WWII and the formation of the United Nations. Not to mention he was with us when we suffered Pearl Harbor. I guess I see your point about Truman being more apt a comparison to Bush since we’re discussing reconstruction, but I think that only buttresses my point that historical comparisons can’t get much traction when it concerns current events.
If we really want to compare, I think it makes a lot more sense to dredge up Iraqi history. We like to take credit for Germany and Japan (while totally ignoring our more multiple faillures in nation-building elsewhere), but really, where it concerns the growth and maintenance of democracy, the people there deserve the credit.
Consummee- With your MacArthur parallel, you have most things upside down. The US ran a military occupation zone until the mid 50’s in Japan. MacArthur was both the military and civilian governor of Japan (the Japanese called him the “white Emperor”), which is both more powerful than Bremer is now before transfer of sovereignity and certainly more powerful than any ambassador will ever be. We don’t have viceroys (look up the derivation of that term and you’ll see why) so your comment there is irrelevant. In summary, no one person in Iraq is or will be as powerful as MacArthur was in Japan, which probably gave him a big ego in preparation for getting fired by Truman in Korea.
But beware of crediting the Germans and Japanese too much. The Germans and Japanese have never apologised for their parts in WW II, and when stationed in Germany I could converse with several Germans who said that the big difference between Hitler and Roosevelt was that Hitler was a man of the people while Roosevelt was rich. Now that is indeed an interesting take on history.
Buy – consomme – is there really one person posting under that name? The last few comments have been the spirit of reason; thanks for those.
A.L.
A.L., thanks. 🙂 As far as I know, it’s only me. I’m really enjoying your site (or Joe’s?) as well, so thanks for that. I especially like the diversity of subjects and the Sufi touch is nice.
Tom Roberts — you’re right. The historical analogies break down pretty quickly. “Viceroy” was a quip. 😉
Consummee- your error here is to confuse
the data of “history”: facts, events, people, thoughts, ideas, treaties, etc.
with
the process of “history” (aka historical analysis).
The historian always has to be aware that the product of his analysis might be more than a little due to his selection of historical data and his own anachronistic viewpoint concerning that data, rather than due to the overall events that actually occurred. There have been famous examples of this, with the latest hyperbolic example being that of the Emory fellow who simply made up his early American gun ownership data when the data available was inconclusive.
So when considering historical parallels, one should carefully see how the two situations are both similar and different, as both illumine what the point of your analysis should be. In almost all cases two situations are never precisely parallel, but contain some degree of skewness.
E.g. There were many Roman and Byzantine Emperors like Justinian in his autocratic methods, but nobody else had a wife like Theodora at his back.
Stephen Yes, the Allies stuck it out and made it work, but a lot has changed in the cultural make up. Do we have the same types of people today? Do we have what it takes to make it happen?
Very good question. Changes to the tax code under Reagan stimulated the go-go economy of the 1990’s that was characterized by corporations suddenly shifting gears and changing course. Businesses became managed for the short-term quarterly statements that reflected shareholder profit and not for the long term viability of the business that reflected wage earner security and job stability. It also encouraged a rash of corporate transactions that were little more than asset stripping before the skeleton was sold and the managers walked away with tidy profits, typically after bankrupting employee pension plans. Time frames were shrunk into quarterly snapshots and short-term gain.
The culture has indeed changed. But I also hold the irrational belief that it might work to everyone’s advantage in Iraq, which has a large educated population that – with breathing room from violence and the subjugation bred by fear of violence – could quickly evolve into a functional state, given the influence of modern media (which as noted by others has not been nearly leveraged to full effect) and a rapid deployment into civic self determination, with military defense assistance provided by the U.S. and/or the U.N.
Consommee,
I truly do not understand the equivocation you display. You say “whether Bush is/was the right man for it, I think that is debateable — I would like to say no he isn’t, because of his (unintentional) deceit or naiveté or whatever you want to call it, “. Bush is the Bayesian apriori fact within any strategy for success in Iraq with our current approach.
I agree with A.L., that there is a profound failure of communication, and I truly don’t understand it. I can understand why Iraq– mathematically. After Afghanistan, the bright boys sat down with their Kepler-Trigo threat matrices, and guess who popped up at the head of the list? That’s right, Uncle Saddam. But WMD was only one of a host of parameters employed in these equations. I blame the news media for their frenzied fixation on WMD, but why didn’t Bush just explain the process that drove Gulf II? Is it a classification issue? The same is true of the 911 commission. Anyone can read the signs, from the budgetary reviews, the lack of arabic language analysts, the fact that Bob Kerrey was forced to say ‘Guawtemala’ upon his exit from the classified session– we…didn’t…have…any…humint. With the ‘firehose’ of data that pours in every day, it is improbable that any match-up could have occurred between CIA and FBI, even without the ‘Gorelick’ barrier. But why can’t the administration just say that? This president is more open-handed with classified data than any president I’ve ever seen. When Kim Jong Il denied the death camps in NK, GW just put the eo on cnn. Why not just say it?
I have always maintained that if every American had classified access the democratic party would vanish in a puff of smoke, and ditto the UN!
Earlier posters suggested a fund of $100 billion/year to spend toward world democratization. Saudi Arabians send 4-7% of GNP out of the country to promote their version of Islam. If we did the same to promote liberal democracy and civil society, it would cost us half a trillion dollars every year.
We did have a plan: grateful Iraqis, after showering us with flowers and sweets, rebuild the country with oil revenues under Uncle Sam and John Bull’s benign gaze. Meanwhile the UN oversees the development of a government respectful of human rights.
As of April 16, the plan appears to be “cut and run on June 30”. That might be the best plan, though we could threaten the neighbors with the formal recognition of Iraqi Kurdistan and establishment of a protectorate there should they not quit Iraq as well. (And if Macedonia could finesse its ethnic strife, nothing says that NATO member Turkey cannot do the same with their Kurds.)