In any war to free a nation, negative things will happen during the transition.
This is of course true, but we didn’t fight this war to free a nation. That was one item among many, and in no way the most important. The primary objectives of the war have not yet been achieved, and that means we haven’t won yet.
We've nearly completed a major victory…. Can't you find any words of celebration in what has happened?
We’ve nearly completed the military component. That’s the first step, and by no means the hardest one. Celebration seems premature to me. It’s a little like knocking down a decrepit and dangerous tenement, then celebrating the erection of the building replacing it before that building exists, except that erecting a building is a lot easier than creating a democracy.
The most fundamental realities of war are these:
Wars are fought to attain political objectives.
A war is not won when the opposing force is destroyed. It is won when the political objectives are attained.
That’s why I’m not celebrating. I’ll celebrate when we win.
If you've ever been optimistic regarding our military strategy and execution, I sincerely missed it.
Thread archaeology is not something I’m good at, but I found this one fairly quickly, posted on Wednesday, Mar 19, 2003 10:18 PM:
Message 18725446
“I see the war is on. By the time I get back here, the war might even be over… I still expect a fairly quick combat phase, with a whole lot of surrendering going on in the early stages. Possibly some stiff fighting in the final days, when the hard core gets cornered, though I expect that much of the hard core will simply fade away when the going gets rough, and reappear to make trouble later. That’s all impossible to predict accurately, of course, but I certainly hope it goes as easily as I expect.”
I’m not going to look any farther, but I remember writing similar things in quite a few posts. Closed issue, in my mind.
No credible reason at all [for optimism]? How about the fact that millions of people who've been living in near starvation, will be able to reap the harvest of all that oil wealth? Thirty years from now, Iraq will look more like Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Their quality of life will significantly improve. Those dusty roads will be replaced with modern highways. The Hussein schools will be replaced with vibrant universities. And business leaders will replace the tank columns.
These would be credible reasons for optimism if they had happened, but they haven’t. Again, we’ve taken a step in that direction, but we have a lot more steps to take, and they will have to be agile ones, before these goals are achieved.
The link between Iraq and terrorism has been clearly demonstrated…we've dealt a vicious blow to those who build suicide-bombing suits. We’ve also struck a severe blow to a major center of cash, which infuses this movement.
I wish this was true, but I really don’t think it is. Certainly there were “links” between Iraq and US-directed Islamist terrorism, but the word “links” encompasses a fairly wide range of relationships. I’ve seen no evidence to even remotely suggest that Iraq was a critical source of support for US-directed terrorism, or that removing Saddam would cripple or even seriously harm these organizations. Certainly Osama and his cohorts have no money problems: with Anti-American sentiment at the peak it’s reached in the Arab world, they’ll have more money at their disposal than they can use. If you weigh the negative consequences of their loss of Iraqi support against the benefit they reap from the whipped-up anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and among Arabs in the West, it’s possible that al Qaeda and similar groups have reaped a net gain from the exercise. It’s possible that we’ve removed enough of their leadership that they won’t be able to exploit this sentiment. It’s possible that this wave of anti-American feeling will be expressed in non-violent means. It’s possible that our stricter security measures will protect us. Many good things are possible, but do we want to count on them?
you're focusing everything under the eye of worst-case scenario. It reminds me a lot of the same thing we heard regarding the Turkish situation. People have opinions and they express them. Many don't seem to understand that dissent and argument are a part of the democratic process. Chaliba may or may not become a big factor in the next government of Iraq. That's up to the Iraqi people to work out.
I think part of the problem here is that you’re looking at this with a distinctively American set of assumptions, namely that democracy, freedom, and prosperity are the natural state of humans, and that if gross restraints are removed, their natural tendency will be to move in this direction. This is a lovely idea, but there is little historical reason to suppose that it is accurate. Dissent and argument are indeed part of the democratic process, but the democratic process does not exist in Iraq, and bringing it into existence will require a whole lot more than just an election. This is a part of the world where dissent and argument have traditionally been resolved by violence, and these traditions don’t vanish overnight. When we see a politician we don’t like, our default response is to campaign and vote against that politician. In other parts of the world, the default response is to pop an RPG through the guy’s windshield. We’re dealing with a situation closer to the latter case.
Democracy works, in the places where it works, because citizens of those nations share certain basic assumptions. In our case, most of these are so basic that we don’t even think of them. We all identify ourselves as part of a nation, we all agree on certain founding principles, we recognize a fundamental commonality with all or most of our fellow citizens, we believe that the peace and prosperity of the nation is good for all within it. We disagree vigorously on how these things are to be achieved, but because we share these premises, we can keep our disagreements peaceful. Some of us even keep them civilized.
We are inclined to take these suppositions for granted, and we easily forget that in many of the crudely conglomerated “nations” patched together with the end of the colonial era, no such fundamental grounds of agreement exist.
Democracy succeeded in Germany and Japan, even after dictatorship, because those nations were composed of individuals that shared, almost comprehensively, this kind of common assumption set. Countries that lack this sort of common ground have had a much more difficult time moving toward democracy. In Iraq, our first challenge is not to build democracy, but to build the kind of fundamental common ground that democracy needs to prosper. This won’t be easy - the groups we’re dealing with have no reason to trust each other and every reason to hate each other – and pretending that it will be easy is only going to undermine our resolve when the going gets tough.
How do we protect them, is akin to saying, how do we protect Americans from terrorism in our own country.
The problems in Iraq will be infinitely more difficult to manage. Imagine trying to maintain security in an environment where it is entirely likely that a significant part of every internal security agency is actually working for the other side. Imagine trying to prevent terrorism without any even vaguely reliable investigative capacity or intelligence network. Compare the difficulty of moving terrorists into and within the US to that of moving people into and within Iraq. I could keep going, but you see the point.
We have to accept, from the beginning, that there are people who want this effort to fail. We have to expect that they will act to try and make it fail. We have to anticipate and prepare for the measures they will probably take. If you hope for the best and prepare for the worst, your preparations and your planning process will look pessimistic, but it’s better than being caught with your pants down.
Now we get to the core of the optimism-pessimism issue. I proposed a scenario, to this effect:
...imagine that 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?
You proposed an alternative scenario:
A charismatic Shiite leader emerges who embraces a renaissance in Islamic theology, whereby Islam tolerates other religions, including the Jews. I believe people are going to be surprised by how easily the religious elements in Iraq accept pluralism, democracy and resent terrorism.
And then you proposed the one comment that, ultimately, stands between us on this issue, one that I have to emphasize:
Just depends on which mental model you wish to look at. The negative one, or the positive one.
I’m sorry, but I think this is just plain wrong. This has nothing to do with what model we wish to look at. We’re not looking for what we want to see, we're looking at the precedents set by democratization efforts elsewhere and at the situation in Iraq, and trying to anticipate the events we think are most probable. This has nothing to do with what we want to see, and if it does, we’re in trouble. We have to forget about what we want to see, and assess what we really do see.
I selected the Shiites for a reason: our problem with the Shiites is not hypothetical. SCIRI, the largest Shiite organization and the largest single constituent of the INC, has formally announced a boycott of meetings with US officials and demanded the immediate return of Iraq to an Iraqi government. This is a message that will win some support, especially coming from a group violently opposed to Saddam. This support may not be comprehensive, but it is likely to be significant. SCIRI has ties with Iran and is believed to have had a military force (I’ve heard the figure 5000) trained in Iran. I don’t know if the training has been oriented toward combat or toward terrorism, but the latter seems likely to have been part of the curriculum. If any terrorist events occur – and I don’t think anybody’s betting against it – they will be prime suspects, and if evidence points that way, my scenario above would very likely turn real.
Of course if a terror attack does occur, there will be plenty of loud voices to call it a US/Zionist plot to justify prolonged American occupation and eventual turnover of Iraq’s oil to a bunch of bloated capitalists. This sort of thing sounds ridiculous to us, but we have to understand that reality is sometimes less important than perception, and we are dealing with people with highly distorted perceptions. We’re talking about a part of the world where most people still firmly believe that 9/11 was the work of the Jews. A friend in Dubai tells me that the current whisper there is that the Iraqi army folded up so quickly because Saddam and his inner circle were really US agents all along, and the whole thing was a setup to justify snatching the oil. These things get believed. It’s not because people there are stupid or crazy, it’s because the information input in that area has been distorted so comprehensively and for so long that they literally do not see the same world we see.
The murder of Ayatollah Abdel Majid al-Kho'i, the moderate Shiite exile leader who was stabbed to death within days of his arrival, does not look entirely isolated. A London-based Arabic newspaper has reported that Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the elderly Shiite leader that al Kho'i hoped to succeed, has been ordered by an armed gang to leave Iraq within 48 hours. There is maneuvering going on, and I don't really think the objective is democracy. The Shiite problem is not future doom and gloom. It’s already started.
Let’s forget about which scenario we want to look at. Look at my scenario, and look at yours. Which do you think, honestly, is more likely to happen? Which do you think is more likely to happen in the next few weeks, or months? I’m not talking about things that might happen in a few years here. I’m talking about immediate risks.
Looks like you missed the huge celebrations in the north. Once again, we can focus on the negative images, negative possibilities or positive ones.
The little TV I get here is British, and we do see much more coverage of the south. I would expect that we would have overwhelming support in the Kurdish or Turkmen/Kurdish areas. They have their agendas, of course, but at the moment our agenda serves theirs quite nicely. That may not always be the case, and we can’t count on that support continuing, though I think we’ll have an easier time there than elsewhere.
From the rest of the country, I have seen no visual or reportorial evidence that a large majority of the population is welcoming us.
In some ways, that doesn’t matter enormously. A positive beginning would be nice, but ultimately our lasting level of welcome will be defined by the first few months of the interim administration. If we handle it well, most who were not out on the streets to welcome us will change their attitude. If we handle it badly, most of those who welcomed us will turn against us.
I’m hoping as much as anybody, but I’m seeing a heap of red flags, and precious little reason to see the next stage of this going smoothly. |
