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June 07, 2006

Looking Back at Iraq

As longtime readers are well aware, I supported the decision to go to war in Iraq back in 2002 and 2003 (and yes, I know I need to fix my archives). I believed then, and believe now, that jihadism is a serious threat to the United States. Not because I believe that jihadists could by themselves defeat the United States militarily; I subscribe to Lincoln's beliefs when it comes to threats to our republic.

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Nonetheless, while I remain concerned about how we may react to future terrorism, my logic that led me to support the war in Iraq was flawed. My argument at the time was as follows: jihadism springs from a particular brand of Islam exacerbated by the disastrous conditions under which most Arab Muslims live. From Egypt to Iraq, the average Arab lives under conditions of despotism and is told on a regular basis that it is the Jews' fault that his status is so poor. Under those conditions, it is hardly surprising that a number of Arabs choose the route of terrorism as a means for them to have some influence on the larger world. Therefore, the means to eliminate jihadism is to change the culture that spawned it by giving Arabs the opportunity to govern themselves rather than responding to the dictates of a King or dictator. Iraq was the logical place to make this effort, because we already had a casus belli in the form of the violations of the 1991 cease fire agreement between Iraq and the United States, as well as the belief Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction. Iraq also had some history as a more cosmopolitan state, albeit history now several decades in its past. Still, it did not seem unreasonable to believe that we could remove Saddam Hussein from power and give the people a chance to form some kind of Islamic Republic that, while fundamentally Arab in nature, gave the people a stake in the performance of their own government. And if Iraqis could be shown as capable of mastering their own fate, that could undermine other despots throughout the Middle East.

Was I overly optimistic about our ability to change things? Probably, but I'm not convinced that we could not have done many of those things had we done a better job planning for and executing the postwar mission. The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon certainly suggests that there is an appetite for change in at least some parts of the Middle East, and the Iranian overtures made in the wake of our initial invasion of Iraq could have placed us in a much better position vis-à-vis the entire Middle East, had we taken advantage of them at the time.

Let me pause here to note that I am not attempting to mitigate my mistake with the argument that, had the Bush administration only done things right, all would now be sweetness and light. Yes, the administration made mistakes, and I don't think I'll get much argument on the proposition that we could be a lot better off today if we had planned for the worst case in Iraq rather than hoping for a miracle that never materialized. But I cannot excuse my failings with others'; I should have been more wary of what would come from a war in Iraq.

Government, as I have noted on numerous prior occasions, is inherently inefficient. This is not due to malfeasance or incompetence (although those do sometimes play a role), but because government does not operate under effective feedback mechanisms. Because government provides what we consider essential services, it is effectively 'too big to fail.' So when we do discover that government is doing something poorly, it doesn't go out of business, it's just told to do better next time. Without the possibility of failure hanging over them, a significant motivator to improve performance is gone. Look no further than the government's response to revelations about failures prior to Katrina: the Army Corps of Engineers blew it, so we should give them more money for next time. Again, that doesn't mean that people in government aren't necessarily trying to find better ways to operate, but Samuel Johnson's dictum is quite true: "Depend on it sir. If a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.' That missing motivator is compounded by the vagaries of politics.

Take, for example, the C-130J. If you spend much time flying, you've seen one, because the military has bought an ungodly number of them and so the Air National Guard gets them in wholesale lots. Why do we have so many? Does the Air Force really need that many? Or did they buy them because the C-130J is built in a Georgia congressional district that was once held by a representative named Newt Gingrich? Yes, we're back to the issue of earmarks, government dollars that have to spent on particular projects, aka pork. The military is no less susceptible to this process than any other part of the government, as the current flap over the continuing resolution demonstrates. I'm not suggesting that bureaucrats (in or out of uniform) are right all the time by any means, but the fact is that if you hire someone to perform a certain task, you ought to let him do the task using the tools he thinks will be most effective. Instead, our government runs things like a homeowner hiring a plumber and giving him a band saw and a level and telling him that he needs to fix the toilet using only those devices. Even if he can pull it off, the fix will be neither cheap nor efficient.

Optimism, they say, is the triumph of hope over experience, and it seems to fit the decision to go to war in Iraq very well. I knew going into the war that the postwar period was key to our success; winning the initial fight was a foregone conclusion, although by no means easy. But finding a way to transform Iraq from a group of tribes Saddam Hussein spent two decades setting against one another into a functioning republic would have been a huge challenge under the best of circumstances and required a great deal of planning and the investment of a vast amount of resources. When General Shinseki was sent to the woodshed for the 'crime' of claiming we'd need hundreds of thousands of troops that should have been a warning sign for all of us who supported the transformation of Iraq that the administration either was not serious about the task, or simply did not understand the magnitude of the task it was about to undertake. In either case, that was a clear sign that going to war in Iraq was a bad idea, and we failed to recognize it as such.

For Iraq to have accomplished the goals I sought in 2003, we needed to go into Iraq with overwhelming force. The only two successful instances of creating democracies in the wake of war, Japan and Germany, were successful in no small part because the Japanese and German peoples had been beaten down by years of war and had no further stomach for fighting. While that does not mean we needed to bomb Iraq indiscriminately, it does mean we needed to establish up front our ability to maintain order and to punish severely those who chose to try and fight us. To do that means having lots of troops on the ground early, to prevent the kind of anarchy that reigned in Baghdad following the collapse of the Baathist government. It means having a plan for gaining control, maintaining order, and restoring services. And while I can rail at the Bush administration for not paying attention to those details, the fact is that I didn't either. No, it wasn't my responsibility to plan the entire post-invasion, but as a supporter of the war, I did have a responsibility to draw attention to the issue. Would it have made a difference? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do. If you support an action, you have a responsibility to consider the failure points of that action and work to draw attention to them to avoid or mitigate them. I failed to do that.

Having said all that, would I support the war if I had thought all this through four years ago and I saw more signs of the Bush administration being willing to take the postwar period seriously? No, because there is another side to the issue. A wise general noted that, when planning an operation, the enemy gets a vote, and the same can be said of attempts to change a culture. Ultimately, as I have said on many occasions, responsibility for the success of the Iraqi government lies with the Iraqis. Unfortunately, there's a lot of evidence (much of which was available prior to the war) that the Iraqis aren't ready for representative government yet. That is in no way a slur on Iraqis or Arabs or Muslims; it's just a harsh truth. By the time the United States broke off from England, we had been governing ourselves for about 150 years. Expanding local government to the national level required some work, and it's plausible that we're still not proficient at it yet, but at least we had an idea of how it all worked. Iraqis have not had that opportunity. Asking them to take this foreign concept (sure, people may want to be free, but the devil is in the details) and apply it to a country where even self-government at the local level is the exception rather than the rule is asking a great deal.

Then add in the problems of religious and ethnic differences. Japan didn't have much experience with representative government either, but they did have a relatively homogenous culture. Iraq is instead a mélange of many different groups, in large part because the country was created by British fiat rather than by assessing where various ethnic and religious groups predominated. Yes, the United States is a rather heterogeneous mix of cultures and religions, but we do at least have some nominally universal beliefs that pull us all together as Americans. Further, when we chose to form the United States, we were a lot more homogeneous than heterogeneous: the United States was run and for by relatively wealthy white landowners. Modern Iraq, on the other hand, has to reconcile the desires of the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shias, while still protecting the rights of smaller minority groups. That's a pretty big circle to try and square, and while it's not necessarily impossible, it's certainly hard, and those of us who supported the war should have thought of that before the war.

Was success in Iraq impossible? I don't think so, but I think that the odds against it were a lot higher than we gave it credit. Which leads to another excellent reason to have withheld support for the war: America has little patience the kind of war Iraq promised to be (and has become). One can complain that this is an inherent failing of the American people; I'm not so sure of that, but it is a fact nonetheless. We'll put up with a lot if we see progress, but the kind of long, slow slog that Iraq has become, punctuated with the painful reminders of dead American troops week after week after week with little sign of progress is a process almost guaranteed to leach public support from the undertaking. Given that, and given that we knew (or should have known) that success in Iraq was not going to come quickly, we would have been wiser to withhold support, because pulling out now could easily leave us worse off than we would have been had we simply left Hussein in power.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and perhaps it's unreasonable of me to expect that I should have seen all of this in 2002. But going to war is the most serious act a nation can undertake, and when I made the decision to support the war, I placed myself in a position where I needed to be reasonably certain that the payoff was worth the risk. I failed to do that, and I have no one to blame for that but myself.

Having said all that, what does that mean for what we should do now in Iraq? That is a difficult question; just because I was wrong to support the war doesn't mean that we can pull out next week and return to the status quo ante. The situation has changed, and we've got to assess it based on that knowledge. And, of course, it's fair for people to ask, 'why on Earth should we listen to you now when you got it wrong then?' All I can ask is that you assess my arguments as they are, if with a jaundiced eye. Still, that will wait for another day, as I believe I've spent enough verbiage for one day. I will now retire to my foxhole, as I get blasted on the right for apostasy and on the left for being a day late and a dollar short.