Understanding the mistakes we have made in Iraq is, of course, essential to improving the situation there and also fighting the war on terror in the future. And when you read Juan Cole’s blog, it is, at its best, stimulating and informative. Here’s a passage that is pretty damning about the Bush administration’s stance, but nevertheless cogent enough:
The Bush administration simply mismanaged Iraq. It dissolved the Iraqi army, throwing the country into chaos. That army was not gone and would have gladly showed up at the barracks for a paycheck. It pursued a highly punitive policy of firing and excluding members of the Baath Party, which was not done in so thorough-going a manner even to Nazis in post-war Germany. It canceled planned municipal elections, denying people any stake in their new “government,” which was more or less appointed by the US. It put all its efforts into destroying Arab socialism in Iraq and creating a sudden free market, rather than paying attention to the preconditions for entrepreneurial activity, like security and services. It kept changing its policies – early on it was going to turn the country over to Ahmad Chalabi in 6 months. Then that plan was scotched and Paul Bremer was brought in to play MacArthur in Tokyo for a projected two or three years. Then that didn’t work and there would be council-based elections. Then those wouldn’t work and there would be a “transfer of sovereignty.” All this is not to mention the brutal and punitive sieges of Fallujah and Najaf and the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal, etc., etc.
Too harsh in some respects, but not unconvincing. And then Cole undermines confidence in him with the following assertions:
No American president has more desperately sought out a war with any country than George W. Bush sought out this war with Iraq. Only Polk’s war on Mexico, also based on false pretexts, even comes close to the degree of crafty manipulation employed by Bush and Cheney to get up the Iraq war. Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was deliberately and vastly exaggerated, producing a “nuclear threat” where there wasn’t even so much as a single gamma ray to be registered. Innuendo and repetition were cleverly used to tie Saddam to Usama Bin Laden operationally, a link that all serious intelligence professionals deny.
I don’t know what inside information Cole has to say that all this was a deliberate misrepresentation, but the glib and easy assignment of ulterior motives and bad faith is cheap and unhelpful. It gets worse:
So it wasn’t a catastrophic success that caused the problem. It was that Iraq was being run at the upper levels by a handful of screw-ups who had all sorts of ulterior motives, and at least sometimes did not have the best interests of the country at heart. And Bush is the one who put them in charge.
That is essentially an accusation of treason or double loyalty. So in the midst of an intelligent and well-informed critique, we have unproven accusations that this administration is deliberately working against the interests of this country. If you ask me, that’s why the far-left Middle East academic elite has had so little influence over this debate. Their shrillness crowds out their expertise.
The Dish 