Around the World: Iraq; Musings and Stuff

A few good questions:

Is the idea behind this "troop surge" that George W. Bush, despite the advice of everyone he's said he trusts, honestly thinks 20,000 more U.S. soldiers will really make a difference? Or is it that he's hoping the newly-Democratic Congress will stop him and then he can say, "I could have won the war if not for those craven Democrats"?

Or is he maybe just doing it because he can't admit his war has failed, can't continue to Stay the Course and doesn't know what else to do?

That's what I wanna know.

Link.

One guy's not-completely incorrect survey of theories of what went wrong:

The easiest view to dismiss is the 20/20 hindsight of the neoconservatives, who blame the Iraqi tragedy on Bush, Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks, Jay Garner, Paul Bremer—on anyone, in short, other than themselves. In the January issue of Vanity Fair, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and others explain that incompetent Republicans spoiled their picnic by failing to prevent looting, to give contracts to the right people, to rein in Paul Bremer, to trust in Chalabi, and so forth. In the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol and the Brothers Kagan have consistently argued that the administration has failed to send enough troops. Paul Wolfowitz, the chief brain behind the war, reportedly takes the view that our big mistake was not removing American troops fast enough.

Blame-shifting aside, what's irritating here is the continuing fantasy that war in Iraq could have dependably followed any preconceived plan. Rumsfeld is right about one thing—stuff happens. Military decision-making demands improvisation and entails error. Our problem in Iraq hasn't been too much military flexibility—it has been too little in responding to looting and chaos, the insurgency, and the growing strength of sectarian militias. It's absurd for the neocon architects to stand around now complaining that the builders rendered their masterpiece poorly, especially now that we know how implausible their original design really was. The idealized war of the neocons, with its reliance on Ahmad Chalabi, remained a blueprint for good reason. It might well have produced something worse than what has happened, such as an Iranian superstate or a quicker plunge into anarchy and ethnic cleansing. There's little basis for thinking it would have produced something better.

Yet the arguments at the other extreme—that no occupation of Iraq could have been successful because it is an artificial country, or because we don't understand it, or because the ethnic and religious factions there prefer war to peace—also seem unpersuasive. Much left-wing criticism of the war sees American intervention as a kind of original sin. Born arrogant, we cannot help screwing up other countries when we try to fix them. Yes, as Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias recently wrote in the American Prospect, blaming incompetence can be a way for those of us who endorsed the war to dodge responsibility for our mistake. But nothing that went wrong in Iraq, including the Sunni-Shiite civil whatever, was fated or inevitable. The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn't between a country that wanted peace and one that didn't. It was a matter of better management and better luck. To assume that American intervention can't work ignores the relative success of recent "wars of choice" in Bosnia and Kosovo (leaving aside the more debatable propositions of Somalia, Haiti, and Panama).

Closer to the truth, it seems to me, is the broad middle ground occupied by various supporters, opponents, and journalistic neutrals, who, whatever their views on the war's original merits, think that the catastrophe in Iraq was contingent rather than foreordained. Reading Thomas Rick's Fiasco, or Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, or James Fallows' Blind Into Baghdad, or George Packer's Assassins' Gate, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Bush and the Pentagon made a series of avoidable, catastrophic errors in the run-up to the war and the first year of the occupation. These errors were so significant that they virtually guaranteed our defeat.

Link.