IN DEFENSE OF THE HANDLING OF THE IRAQ TRANSITION

Some people, like Pat Buchanan, think the war in Iraq was always bound to lead to an unwinnable quagmire. Buchanan writes:

In the fall of 2002, the editors of this magazine moved up its launch date to make the conservative case against invading Iraq. Such a war, we warned, on a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us, and had no role in 9/11, would be “a tragedy and a disaster.” Invade and we inherit our own West Bank of 23 million Iraqis, unite Islam against us, and incite imams from Morocco to Malaysia to preach jihad against America...

Everything we predicted has come to pass. Iraq is the worst strategic blunder in our lifetime.

I disagree, but it's plausible. Others, like Andrew Sullivan, argued and still maintain that the war was a good idea, but still consider the present situation a disaster, and claim that the administration has managed the post-war incompetently. Here's Andrew Sullivan, yesterday:

The only reasonable response to the Bush administration's non-existent war-planning is outrage, mixed with incomprehension.

Today he added:

So both Garner and Bremer have now publicly faulted what was obvious very early on. The rest of the Michael Gordon piece makes you want to weep: because of the promise in Iraq that was lost, because of a noble, vital war undermined by arrogance and incompetence.

I read the Michael Gordon piece, by the way. The first thing to note is that it is in the New York Times, a notoriously anti-Bush source; nevertheless, I certainly didn't come away with the sense that the Bush administration had been especially incompetent (though certainly the piece suggests that mistakes were made).

Defying conventional wisdom, I think we handled the transition pretty well. Against this, the standard line is "We didn't have enough troops, and we didn't have a plan to win the peace."

What would the war have been like if we had done things the way the "incompetence" camp thinks we should have?

1. If we had sent more troops...

Would more troops have pre-empted the insurgency? Would they have kept order in the all the cities, all the streets, so that Iraqis would have a more positive attitude towards the new authority? Would they have "won the peace" more quickly? I doubt it. More troops would probably have meant more casualties on both sides. They would have increased the sense of occupation. There would also have been greater strain on US resources. We would have more vulnerable elsewhere with more troops tied down in Iraq. And we would have had fewer troops to rotate into Iraq if the insurgency took place all the same.

2. If we had "a plan to win the peace..."

Would a firm, definite plan for post-war Iraq have enabled the transition to go smoothly? Would we have been better positioned to establish a legitimate authority, in control of the country, which Iraqis would buy into and support? We must take another look at the paradox of "imposing democracy." To the claim that it can't be done, the answer is: Japan and Germany. By way of explanation, one may distinguish the form of government (democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship) from the substance of governance (laws and policies). Democracy is a form of government, which gives the people channels to express their will, but someone must impose the form first before these channels are operational; once democratic procedures are up-and-running, the people determine laws and policies.

In practice, though, form and substance, laws and men are not so neatly separable. We couldn't just write the rules; we needed to empower people, Iraqis, who understood and were committed to the rules. Who? From the pre-invasion perspective, there were two choices: 1) exiles, 2) Baathist officials. Both groups' legitimacy was very suspect, Baathists because of their implication in the old regime's crimes, exiles because they were out-of-touch and, having lives abroad, were likely to be under-committed to Iraq's success.

The most valuable leaders in Iraq to date are Sistani and Allawi. Each has emerged as an ally and leader in the course of the transition. Sistani has displayed wisdom and calm and used his great moral authority to dissuade armed insurrection against the coalition, and to encourage the country's move towards elections; and he has declined to pursue theocracy. Allawi, unlike so many Governing Council members who vanished abroad when the going got tough, has shown a bold and passionate commitment to Iraqi democracy and won the country's trust. Neither figure's emergence as a force for good in Iraq was foreseeable. Neither was "planned" by the Americans. If they had been, they would have been less legitimate.

3. If we had maintained the army and let high-ranking Baathists stay in the civil service, they wouldn't have fueled the insurrection...

The idea that our army would induce the collapse of Saddam's authority, then we would turn around and tell their army, which had been "the enemy" days or weeks before, to stay in the barracks, and pay them, and that we would maintain in power people who were high-ranking officials of the Baathist party, agents of a murderous totalitarian state, is crazy. So crazy that it just might have worked. Iraqis would have been frightened. "They just want to install another strongman, another Saddam, only more friendly to them," Iraqis would say. And the Arab press, the international left, you name it. People would remember that we had helped Saddam come to power, we had supported him. It would be taken as evidence that we didn't care about Iraqi freedom, we just wanted to secure our oil supply. But then the revolution could come from below. We would, with feigned reluctance, allow anti-Baathist and anti-American organizations to form. The Baathists, afraid of a revolution from below, would turn to us for support; and we would give it to them, a little bit, but not enough. Order would be maintained for a while while a peaceful popular revolution surged up from below...

Maybe.

Overall, though, I think the administration has done a very difficult job pretty well. More troops or a "plan to win the peace" would have been a mistaken, and to befriend the Baathists and pay the army and make the Iraqis win their freedom in the face of our apparent indifference would have required more Machiavellian cunning than America could pull off. What happened was basically that we walked into a revolution. Revolutions are unpredictable and often bloody. You have to improvise. Overall, we did all right.

To the extent there were mistakes, there's a flip side to mistakes: learning. I think the past two years have been a fantastic lesson about people's desire for freedom and its difficulties, about what an army can do to navigate in a post-totalitarian imbroglio, in what capacities we need and will need in the future.

It's worth bearing in mind, of course, the bad things that didn't happen. There wasn't an Iranian-style revolution leading to an Islamic Republic. The country hasn't been partitioned, and there hasn't been a Shia-Sunni-Kurd civil war. The death toll is far less than Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, the Congolese civil war, the number killed by the Iraq sanctions, the Iran-Iraq war, US casualties in Vietnam (let alone Vietnamese!), and so on. Is the glass one-quarter empty or three-quarters full?

Something else didn't happen, too. A Rumsfeld worry:

Neither the Defense Department nor the White House, however, saw the Balkans as a model to be emulated. In a Feb. 14, 2003, speech titled "Beyond Nation Building," which Mr. Rumsfeld delivered in New York, he said the large number of foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo had led to a "culture of dependence" that discouraged local inhabitants from taking responsibility for themselves.

By now, Iraqis have come to understand they'll have to fight for their own freedom against monsters like Zarqawi. And they're doing it. By contrast, in Bosnia and Kosovo there's no foreseeable exit from being US/UN/NATO protectorates.

I think Iraq was the Bush administration's most brilliant move. It was a great place to stage a strike against Hobbesian sovereignty and the dictator-legitimizing UN ancien regime. It's not just that "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein" (though it is!) Iraq is a valuable warning to dictators everywhere, and I hope it will prove a fruitful precedent.