I'm still undecided on whether it was wise to invade Iraq. What I am certain of, is that how it was done was one of the most bungled attempts ever by the United States.
Even assuming it is possible to create democracy in Iraq
by force, the Bush administration blew its chance through a long string
of miserable decisions: It rejected voluminous advance planning done by
the State Department for a post-Saddam Iraq, disregarded military
projections of force levels needed to maintain order, dismissed
accurate CIA analyses of likely post-war ethnic and tribal conflicts,
disbanded the Iraqi army, under-equipped U.S. troops and installed a
hapless-to-corrupt provisional governing authority. And then there's the whole torture fiasco... It just doesn't seem the Bush administration is capable of planning for more than one possible outcome.
Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, for example, beefed up months of
scattered news reports with a detailed account of the operations of
Shiite paramilitary death squads within the Iraqi police force and
Interior Ministry, including the use of torture in secret prisons and
summary executions of Sunni opponents. ... But the world doesn't need to judge the U.S. solely on words. Other
nations can hardly be expected to forget Muslim prisoners abused and
humiliated at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan, the web
of internationally scattered CIA secret jails, the arbitrary
imprisonment of prisoners without trial or even charges at Guantanamo,
the administration's opposition to a statutory ban on inhumane
treatment, the secret transport of prisoners to foreign countries for
interrogation and, almost certainly, torture.
Do Bush, Cheney et al. believe these things have no effect on the credibility of the United States of America?
The happy band of incompetents led by George Bush and Dick Cheney is
nothing if not consistent. Alas, where they are most steadfast is in
maintaining their disconnection from reality, particularly in clinging
to the delusion that there is no penalty for failure.
Even assuming it ever was possible to create democracy in
Iraq by force, the Bush administration blew its chance through a long
string of miserable decisions: It rejected voluminous advance planning
done by the State Department for a post-Saddam Iraq, disregarded
military projections of force levels needed to maintain order,
dismissed accurate CIA analyses of likely post-war ethnic and tribal
conflicts, disbanded the Iraqi army, under-equipped U.S. troops and
installed a hapless-to-corrupt provisional governing authority.
Does the president think he gets a mulligan for such pervasive ineptitude?
There are consequences. Ironically, they are mostly the same boogeymen
the administration conjures as the consequences of pulling American
troops out of harm's way: civil war in Iraq, further instability in the
Middle East, increased vulnerability to Islamist terrorism worldwide,
the loss of U.S. credibility.
By any reasonable measurements, all these have already taken place, and they are of Bush's own making.
Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, for example, beefed up months
of scattered news reports with a detailed account of the operations of
Shiite paramilitary death squads within the Iraqi police force and
Interior Ministry, including the use of torture in secret prisons and
summary executions of Sunni opponents. Sunni militants, of course,
represent the vast majority of the country's increasingly sophisticated
and lethal insurgent forces.
Meanwhile, Iraq's former defense minister and dozens of his associates
have fled to Jordan rather than face arrest warrants issued in the wake
of an investigation of $1 billion that disappeared from the ministry's
funds. Make that U.S. taxpayer funds. Yet, as reported last month by
Knight-Ridder, the Pentagon hasn't had auditors in Iraq watching over
reconstruction funds for more than a year.
The Iraq debacle also has been - and continues to be - a potent
motivating force for the growth of international Islamist terrorism,
undermining, rather than advancing, the best interests of the United
States. Britain's former ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer,
credits Iraq with the increase in terrorism by British citizens on
British soil. "There is plenty of evidence," he told the Guardian newspaper earlier this month, "that home-grown terrorism was partly radicalized and fueled by what is going on in Iraq."
Administration officials like to point to elections in Egypt as
evidence of the spread of the democratic impulse. But those on-going
elections - the final round is scheduled for Thursday - have seen a
newly invigorated Muslim Brotherhood movement already more than
quadruple its parliamentary representation. The radical group is
banned, so its candidates run as independents.
As for U.S. credibility, it could hardly erode further. Although the
Bush administration continues trying to duck responsibility for the
errors, the world well remembers the U.S.'s definitive declarations of
Saddam's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, his reconstituted
nuclear programs and his ominous working alliance with al-Qaida. All
were definitively wrong.
But the world doesn't need to judge the U.S. solely on words. Other
nations can hardly be expected to forget Muslim prisoners abused and
humiliated at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan, the web
of internationally scattered CIA secret jails, the arbitrary
imprisonment of prisoners without trial or even charges at Guantanamo,
the administration's opposition to a statutory ban on inhumane
treatment, the secret transport of prisoners to foreign countries for
interrogation and, almost certainly, torture.
Do Bush, Cheney et al. believe these things have no effect on the credibility of the United States of America?
Administration defenders have been reduced to trotting out the old
criticism-hurts-the-troops canard, knowing full well that what hurts
troops are bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and the roadside and
suicide bombs against which they are all but defenseless. Then they cry
that critics haven't shown the president a way out of his own mess.
Nonsense, and nothing exposed the desperation of the Bush camp more
starkly than its response to Rep. Jack Murtha.
On Nov. 17, the 73-year-old Pennsylvania Democrat issued a quiet but
powerful and impassioned call for removing U.S. troops from Iraq,
positioning a quick-response military team elsewhere in the region to
protect American interests and pursuing international diplomacy as the
route to stability in Iraq. The White House and its congressional
operatives first tried a thinly veiled smear of the respected
legislator and decorated veteran, then backtracked in a panic when the
strategy backfired.
Murtha is no naive dottering senior. The specifics of his proposals
might need tweaking, but his analysis of Iraq is unerring: "Continued
military action in Iraq," he stated, "is not in the best interest of
the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf
region. . . ."
The dream is over, whether or not the Bush White House realizes or
admits it. U.S. troops are going to leave, and Iraq will continue to be
a mess. The only questions are how bad a mess it will be, how many more
will be killed and injured and whether the president is capable of
putting the welfare of the troops and the country before the unhealthy
messianic fixation cited, most recently, in this week's New Yorker by several former and current U.S. military and intelligence officials.
In 1984's "The March of Folly," the celebrated historian Barbara W.
Tuchman reviewed centuries of calamitous statecraft, looking for
examples that met three specific criteria: "To qualify as folly," she
wrote, "it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own
time, not merely by hindsight. . . . A feasible alternative course of
action must have been available. . . . (and) the policy in question
should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist
beyond any one political lifetime. . . ."
Tuchman focused on the refusal of Renaissance popes to correct rampant
abuses in the Roman Catholic Church, thus producing the Protestant
Reformation; Great Britain's war with its American colonies, resulting
in an independent United States of America and contributing to the end
of the British Empire; and the Vietnam War, in which Democratic and
Republican administrations betrayed American principles with enormous
long-term costs.
The continuing war in Iraq is poised to join Tuchman's tragic roster of dishonor.