Pessimist till the end…It's always in the future this gloom and doom scenario.
I’m not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean. My scenario for the war was anything but doom and gloom; I predicted a walkover. I actually expected more surrendering and less fighting than actually occurred. I was pretty optimistic about that. When there are grounds for optimism, it makes sense to be optimistic, and weighing the military force and relative degrees of military competence of the US and Iraq gave good grounds for optimism. Weighing the specific concerns of reconstruction, I don’t see any similar grounds, and I certainly don’t see any credible reason for optimism being presented here.
More likely outcome. Iraq will build a free and prosperous nation. It won't happen overnight, might take twenty years to see the results.
That may be the case, but what happens in 20 years is not our problem now. Our problem now is what happens in the next few months. Many seem to have forgotten, but we still have an ongoing fight against terrorism and Islamic radicalism to win, and it’s a long way from won. A lot of the coming battles will be much more complex and much more difficult than the one we just fought.
I notice that you didn’t respond to any of the specific problems I cited as being obstacles to effective reconstruction. Does that mean you don’t acknowledge their existence?
Right now, I have to say that things look even harder than I expected. I thought there would be a honeymoon period. I still think so to some extent, but cracks in the marriage are already showing. The US is introducing a force of armed Iraqi exiles loyal to Chalabi. This is pretty dumb: even if their loyalty really is to Chalabi, they have to be presented as loyal to a free Iraq. The Kurdish reaction to Chalabi has been worse than I expected: the word “unacceptable” has been floating around. A prominent moderate Shiite leader was stabbed to death almost as soon as he got to Iraq. None of this bodes well.
To focus on just one problem, think about this. We will soon have an enormous civilian footprint in Iraq. Oil company people, aid workers, technicians of every description will be flowing in to handle the reconstruction needs. Every one of them will be a target for terrorists. How do we protect these people? How do we prevent terrorist organizations from moving people in and out of Iraq? Do we trust the existing Iraqi police force and border patrol? Can we trust them? If we can’t trust them, who will protect our people there? Are we going to deploy American soldiers to manage internal security in Iraq? This may seem like a hypothetical issue now, but if a suicide bomber kills a bunch of American engineers, it will become a very pressing concern very quickly. Can you say with any confidence that this will not happen?
Here’s a scenario that I think is very likely. We have evidence that a charismatic Shiite leader with links to Iran is implicated in a terrorist plot. An arrest would certainly provoke rioting. The will and ability of local security forces to confront such a riot is questionable. What do you do? Send in troops or police from another area? Obviously you don’t want to send Sunnis, but do you send other Shiites to confront a Shiite mob claiming that their leader was framed? Do you want to send Americans?
These things will happen. Maybe not this exactly, but something like it. They can be managed, but not easily. The people who have to deal with them have to be ready, and so do we. The dangerous thing about optimism is the speed at which it can deteriorate into disillusionment in the face of normal and predictable obstacles. If we go in with too much optimism, the inevitable problems may have serious effects on our will to carry through with the job.
I would love to see a liberated Iraq take the course of liberated Japan. What I fear is that if we don’t approach the task with realism and an accurate, even if pessimistic, evaluation of the obstacles, it might take the path of liberated Yugoslavia.
Bush was right Steven. And the pessimists were wrong again.
The only thing he was right about was that the US military could successfully conquer Iraq, and it didn’t exactly take an abacus to figure that one out. The rest of the story is still unfolding, and we haven’t begun to reach the complicated bits.
It’s way premature at this point to say that “The Iraqis” welcomed the US invasion. Any thinking person knew before this happened that some Iraqis would welcome us enthusiastically, some would welcome us with reservations, some (probably most) would lie low and hope for the best, some would passively oppose us, and some would actively oppose us. The question – and it remains to be answered – is how many people are in each category. We’ve seen spontaneous welcomes, people celebrating, people trashing Saddam relics, etc. Some of these things we’ve seen replayed fairly repetitively. These have been groups of dozens or hundreds, though, and they do not necessarily represent wider sentiment. Are the others staying home because they’re still afraid or because they don’t share the sentiments being expressed? Probably a little of both; we don’t know. We have no way to assess the number of civilians that oppose our presence – there are bound to be some - because they are keeping a very low profile at this stage, for obvious reasons. The “public reaction” question simply cannot be answered yet. We have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
One scene that I remember fairly vividly was the confrontation between a Shiitie crowd and a group of American soldiers that wanted to enter a mosque. You’ve seen it, I’m sure, it’s the one where an American officer shouts “everybody smile” at his troops. The crowd was definitely not smiling; they looked pretty damned mean, and these were people who have every reason to hate Saddam. That probably did hate Saddam, but they didn’t seem terribly happy with us either. The American unit backed off. It takes fairly rugged cojones for an unarmed crowd to face down an invading army, a lot more courage than it takes to smash a Saddam portrait these days. There were more people in that crowd than in most of the “celebration” footage I’ve seen. It’s not a terribly pleasant memory, but it made an impact.
Short term, the greatest vulnerability will be to terrorism, which could derail reconstruction very severely with even a few successful attempts.
Long term, there are some key areas of vulnerability. The most important from a macro perspective is the point at which Iraqi political parties begin to form. This is almost inevitably going to put us, at some point, in a bind. Some of the parties that form will probably be groups that we don’t much care for. Some will espouse policies, toward oil, toward Israel, and toward Islam, to name a few, that are not in line with our interests. Conflicts will emerge among factions that endanger the entire process. These things are almost inevitable. When they happen, we have to choose between sitting back and watching a process that could have very dangerous results for Iraq and for us, and intervening, which would compromise the democratic process. How will we respond when our commitment to the democratic process comes into conflict with our own interests.
Another point requiring great care will be the awarding of major reconstruction contracts, mainly in the oil and construction industries. We will be attempted to take a “spoils of war” approach, favoring companies based in the coalition countries. This is dangerous: if the new elected government of Iraq has grounds to claim that contracts were awarded on any basis other than advantage to the Iraqis, they will have grounds to rescind the contracts. Again, all this sounds abstract now, but it gets very complicated, and the opportunity for corruption and skullduggery is immense.
I would agree that almost any government would be better for the Iraqis than that of Saddam. That’s not the question. The question is what impact the current situation will have on our wider battle with terrorism and Islamic radicalism. We have not won a war; we have won a battle. Our most dangerous enemies are still at large. We need to remember that: euphoria is a very vulnerable state.
It is, of course, easy to dismiss these concerns as mere pessimism, but such a dismissal would be much more convincing in the presence of evidence or logic indicating that the concerns are overblown. |
