An interesting opportunity to do a post-mortem... :0)
TB then (Oct 02): "The nightmare scenarios of urban warfare are certainly possible, but I see them as sort of one tail end of bell curve of potential outcomes, with an early coup being the other tail. The large middle part of the curve is a short, sharp war that we win quickly and thoroughly, but with him perhaps having gotten some nasty shots off against some things we care about."
TB now: Prediction looks good in retrospect. Outcome was in the middle-of-the-bell-curve range, on the positive side (he didn't get off any nasty shots).
TB then: "[on postwar planning,] if you assume no coup and eventual unconditional surrender of the military (with Saddam dead in a bunker), then the fun begins. This is where I'm most scared this admin would fumble the ball. I simply can't understand why they haven't devoted more time and energy and resources to making the new Afghan polity work, for example, and that doesn't bode well for Iraq. They might try to pass it off to the UN or some others, in order to avoid the headaches of doing it themselves. We'll see. I'd expect that the eventual outcome would be somewhere between Afghanistan and the Balkans for a few years."
TB now: Prediction also looks pretty good in retrospect. DOD controlled postwar planning jealously, bungled the job badly, and so has had to improvise on the ground (with mixed success so far). "Somewhere between Afghanistan and the Balkans" isn't a bad description of where we should be if/when the current fighting stops.
As for your (also accurate) prediction regarding postwar military resistance--which I don't seem to have commented on back then--I have been a bit surprised by the extent of it, although my hunch is that it is due partly to the bungled initial postwar stuff (no quick provision of security or resumption of services, not enough appropriately trained troops on the ground, abrubt demobilization of the army, etc.). I think it will die down over the next few months, actually, following the death of the sons and (eventually) Saddam himself, further crackdown on the ancien regime holdouts, and further progress on reconstruction and nation-building. If I'm wrong--always possible, natch--then things could get ugly, and the critics would have the right to say "I told you so"...
tb@TWT.com |
