I recall on the eve of the Iraq war wrestling with final doubts and being reassured by two things in my own mind: a) Saddam was so evil that removing him would by itself make the world a better place (my liberal, neocon side); b) we can always buy support from the Iraqis by pouring reconstruction funds in as soon as we impose order (my cynical, paleocon side). Of course, since Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were determined not to restore order, and content to manage chaos, my judgments were thrown completely off. They even managed to screw up Saddam’s death. But the reconstruction failure is deeper and more damning. Ken Pollack has a serious recap of the debacle here, in a piece published last month that I missed in pre-Christmas frenzy. Money quote:
Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s fall. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion. Americans returning from Iraq – military and civilian alike – have proven unanimous in their view that the Iraqis desperately want reconstruction to succeed and that they have the basic tools to make it work, but that the United States has consistently failed to provide them with the opportunities and the framework to succeed.
Jake Weisberg helpfully draws the following conclusion:
There is, of course, no way to know what might have happened if we hadn’t made these mistakes, and others. An American defeat still would have been possible with better planning, sufficient troops, realistic goals, and sound strategy. But even in this mistakenly chosen war, our failure wasn’t inevitable. It is the product of blunders made along the way by President Bush and his people‚Äîand the blunders they are making still.
It’s still too early to make a definitive judgment on this issue, but I think the evidence now tilts decisively in favor of the argument that the Iraq war was always going to be very hard to pull off, but what chances it had were unforgivably bungled by its leaders, whose errors of ignorance became copounded by errors of arrogance. Contingency, as always, rules.
The Dish 