I saw the Pollack/Siegle piece when the Newsweek issue first came out. I didn’t pay it a great deal of attention. It’s hard to take a thousand-word piece in a magazine that is essentially the printed equivalent of TV news very seriously as a policy proposal: it’s just not possible to include enough detail for serious discussion. It is difficult to determine whether the many oversights and simplifications indicate deficient reasoning on the part of the authors or simply the limitations of the highly abbreviated format. I’d much rather use something more complete as a starting point for discussion of plans for a post-Saddam Iraq, but since we have to deal with what we’ve got, a few thoughts on the Pollack-Siegle piece.
The problem with the whole essay can be summed up in the concluding statement:
While it is tempting to equate regime change in Iraq with simply getting rid of Saddam, the reality is more complex. By understanding this, we can avoid substituting one set of problems for another.
The first sentence is practically self-evident. The second is almost too absurd to consider. There is no way on this earth that merely understanding that regime change will be more complex than simply removing Saddam will allow us to avoid substituting one set of problems for another. Anything we do in Iraq, except staying with the current set of problems, will substitute one set of problems for another. What we’re trying to do is ensure that the new set will be more tractable than the old set. Understanding that regime change is complex may be the first step in ensuring this. It may be a necessary ingredient in the planning process. But the idea that understanding alone will do the job is ridiculous.
That may seem a petty objection. I don’t think it is. I realize that pundits are paid to provide us with refreshing certainties. Circumstances demand, though, that we admit to ourselves, privately and publicly, that there are no refreshing certainties to be had. It is not productive to pretend otherwise.
As Pollack and Siegle suggest, two possible courses of action present themselves for a post-Saddam policy. The first, which we can call for convenience the “short option”, would be to quickly install an interim government, probably composed of Iraqi exiles and/or opposition leaders, and get out. The authors do not favor this course, for these reasons:
any such government would lack legitimacy—and, most likely, a commitment to democracy. It would not have the strength to rehabilitate Iraq’s deeply corrupted bureaucracy. Its very fragility would invite a series of coups or territorial seizures by warlords. Iraq could slide into chaos and civil war.
These are good reasons, and many more could be added to them.
The second possibility, the “long option”, is the one Pollack and Siegle prefer, and they describe it like this:
The third and hardest option, in the short term, would be to establish a viable democratic government under international auspices. That would require an occupying ground force of 100,000 to 200,000 troops, substantial numbers of which would have to remain for eight to 10 years, if not more. Even so, this is the only prospect for a stable Iraq at peace with its neighbors.
I have little quarrel with Pollack and Siegel here: these are the two choices, and resolving this choice is the first essential element in consideration of post-Saddam scenarios. It’s a simple choice, and it involves asking ourselves a simple question: why are we going to war? If the answer is simply “to remove Saddam and eliminate any WMD threat from Iraq”, the “short option” becomes the preferable one. We could go in, remove Saddam, destroy anything remotely connected with WMD, and get our people out of harm’s way. Iraq would almost certainly be left either in chaos or with a new dictator, but that problem would be theirs to resolve. As long as the country did not drift toward radical Islamism, which the experts (rightly or wrongly) seem to think unlikely, the threat to us would be removed.
If we are fighting to create a modern democracy in Iraq, the “long option” is, as Pollack and Siegle suggest, the only one available. The “short option” has less than a snowball’s chance in hell of producing a modern democracy in Iraq, and won’t even be in the picture if this is the goal.
A decision on this issue is what I want to hear, most of all, from the Bush administration. This is something that I think the US owes its people and the world: before we go to war we should clearly state our objective and, in broad terms, our plans and intentions for the conclusion of the conflict. Failure to do so seriously undercuts the legitimacy of the war effort.
It’s not going to be an easy choice for the administration, which is, I think, why it’s been so long coming. Thomas Carothers would likely call it a turning point in the struggle for the foreign-policy soul of the Repubican Party, and it’s interesting to examine this choice in the light of the ideas he presents in his article “Promoting Democracy and Fighting Terror” in the current Foreign Affairs. I won’t try to summarize it; read it at:
foreignaffairs.org
if you haven’t already.
The weakest point of the Pollack/Siegle essay is the actual argument in favor of the “long option”. It is a weakness largely imposed by brevity, and I hope we see a longer, better argued version of the piece sometime soon. The only way to make this sort of policy argument effectively is to lay out the advantages and positive possibilities of a desired course of action, acknowledge the limitations and risks, and demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks. Pollack and Siegle were only able to lay out their positive points and most elementary recommendations; unable to discuss negative points, they came off sounding like simple-minded cheerleaders, which I don’t think is actually the case. Even viewed in the most charitable light, though, the arguments given are disturbingly unconvincing.
Start with the opening presentation, already cited:
The third and hardest option, in the short term, would be to establish a viable democratic government under international auspices.
I’m amazed that they got that past the editors. It’s just plain wrong. The sentence should read something like this:
The third and hardest option, in the short term, would be to establish an occupation government under international auspices, and during the term of that government to develop the capacity for viable democratic self-government.
The difference is obvious. It’s simply a question of honesty. Establishing a viable democratic government is not what we’d be doing, at least not initially, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. We’d be going in to establish an occupation government, which, in Pollack and Siegle’s estimate, we’d have to maintain for at least 8 to 10 years, and hoping that in that time we can lay the groundwork for democracy.
So why didn’t they come right out and say “the third option is to establish an occupation government under international auspices”? All I can think of is that they didn’t think that’s what readers wanted to hear, so they tossed the universally agreeable, if inaccurate, line to the front of the sentence. It’s one of the oldest rhetorical devices in the book, and I’m amazed that they thought they could get away with it. Perhaps they assumed that nobody studies rhetoric anymore (given the general quality of argument that we see these days, this may have been a fairly astute assumption).
Pollack and Siegle fail to mention the greatest danger of the “long option”: that the time required to lay the groundwork for a functioning democracy in Iraq might exceed the commitment or patience of the occupiers. The single worst outcome I can imagine for a post-Saddam Iraq would be an incomplete attempt at a democratic transition, which would be an outright defeat. If we are thinking seriously about the “long option”, then, it is essential to acknowledge up front the sort of conflicts and difficulties that are certain to arise. Just as imagining that regime change is merely a matter of removing Saddam is a recipe for disaster, imagining that establishing democracy in Iraq is simply a matter of understanding the complexity of the task and following a few basic recommendations is a recipe for defeat. It won’t be simple. Let’s not kid ourselves.
The first and most obvious issue surrounds the duration of the exercise. Pollack and Siegle estimate “8 to 10 years, or more”. How does an Administration make a commitment that will be binding beyond its term of office? How much of a commitment is the US prepared to make? The time to decide is before we go in, not after.
“Involve the UN”, Pollack and Siegle say. I agree. I don’t think anybody wants to see an occupation government purely under American auspices. But that also limits our war options: if the US goes to war unilaterally, how willing will the UN be to put the pieces back together? There are also incipient questions of jurisdiction. Pollock and Siegle speak of an occupation army of 200,000 – 300,000, much of which would be committed for the duration of the occupation. This kind of force can only come from the United States. US authorities generally do not desire to place their troops under UN authority. So we are looking at a military chain of command that is totally separate from the civilian government. That will eventually cause trouble. What happens when the US doesn’t approve of the manner in which the UN government is handling things? If one or the other pulls out, the whole thing tumbles down.
Who pays for the army of occupation? Do we pull the money from Iraq’s oil revenues? American troops are the world’s best, but they are staggeringly expensive to maintain. Pumping Iraq’s non-renewable assets to pay for an army that many Iraqis won’t want hands an easily exploited issue to the many people in and around Iraq that will want the effort to fail. We will also create a situation where the financial needs of the occupation army compete with the financial needs of rehabilitation.
Pollack and Siegle suggest creating a “transparent” board for the allocation of oil revenues. This is a good idea, but it barely begins to address the issues caused by international control of Iraq’s oil. Who will decide how much to pump? How will the occupation government address OPEC cooperation issues? An occupation of Iraq will give the UN control of an oil exporter with reserves large enough to effect world prices. There will be pressure to pump, and push prices down. If we do that for too long, we will cause fiscal chaos in oil-producing nations around the world, and we will be accused, with some justification, of burning Iraq’s patrimony for short-term benefit. Not an unmanageable issue, but one requiring delicate handling and prior consideration.
“Reconstitute Iraqi Institutions”, advise Pollack and Siegle. 3 words for a huge, and in some ways nearly impossible, job. In many cases it is less a question of reconstituting institutions than of building them from the ground up. As Pollack and Siegle suggest, the intelligence services and the Republican Guard can be disbanded entirely, being pretty superfluous. But what about a police force, a court system, a legal system? If Saddam’s government iss half as comprehensively dictatorial as it is said to be, these will have been completely compromised. The dictatorial attitude tends to be reflected at all levels of an organization: if a central government is devoted to paranoia, nepotism, corruption, and patronage, this same pattern is usually reflected at all levels of the bureaucracy. The only way to make these organizations work will be to build them from the ground up. Then where do you get the people? Saddam, like most dictators, restricted training and influence to people of known loyalty. The exiles are limited in number and devoid of local connections and knowledge. Building institutions in this kind of environment is a staggering task, and one at which it is very easy to fail, especially if we start taking the easy way out and building them around their corrupted predecessors.
All of this, of course, raises another quirky question: what do we do with the bad guys? Pollack and Siegle claim that Saddam’s Intelligence srvice had 500,000 members, over 4% of the adult population. I don’t know if that includes the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard; if it doesn’t, the percentage is even higher. Saddam also has his people at every level of the bureaucracy and the municipal governments. Many of these have participated in torture, oppression, and genocide. What do we do with these people? We can’t try them all. To complicate matters even more, many people will try to settle personal scores by denouncing people they dislike as Saddam accomplices. Sorting out the reality will take years, and will never be completely accomplished.
It’s a real problem. The practice in other places has been to try and punish leaders and decision-makers, letting the people who did the actual dirty work go free. This isn’t good enough, in this case. The populations that have been the main victims of oppression will want revenge, and not just on the leaders. Even if we lock up or execute the worst offenders, we still have a few hundred thousand individuals roaming around who know no profession other than political thuggery, and who have every reason to be hostile to the occupation government and to the US. This provides an easy pre-trained recruitment pool for terrorist organizations and anti-democratic elite factions who want to see the occupation government fail, so that they can take over themselves.
Pollack and Siegle’s suggestions on the actual building of democracy seem steeped in naivete. A good constitution is a wonderful thing, and institutions, though difficult to build, are essential. Laws and institutions, though, are no better than the people behind them, and if the people behind them are more interested in gaining power for themselves or their groups than in building a democracy, the laws and institutions will fail.
This is the most difficult task of all: creating a new generation of leaders, and dealing with the old generation. Many of Pollack and Siegle’s suggestions are aimed at keeping the old elites out of power. I don’t think this will be so easy: the Iraqi elites are not going to fade away; they will see what the occupation government is trying to do and they will do everything in their power to obstruct it, including whipping up popular resentment against the occupation forces and government. Starting from the grassroots is no solution: in most developing countries, especially those that have known extended dictatorship, local governments are as corrupt, undemocratic, and patronage-ridden as the central governments. Local social and political organization is complex and practically incomprehensible to an outsider. Established local powers have extended networks in place and the benefit of years of patronage-based relationships behind them. Devolving power to the local governments and holding early local elections is very likely to achieve a purpose opposite to that intended, returning the government units in direct contact with the people to the traditional elite-based anti-democratic class.
Where do we find this wonderful new generation of leaders? Under Saddam, anyone with the capacity and inclination for leadership had to either join, flee, or die. Much of the anti-Saddam leadership will be consumed with a desire for revenge on their former oppressors and with personal ambition. The exiles are out of touch with the country and lack any real constituency.
It is not an impossible task. It is an extraordinarily difficult one.
That actually sums up the job pretty well. Not impossible, but very, very difficult, thankless, and long. It is also a job that, once started, must be finished, unless we want to openly concede defeat. Since that is the case, it is essential that we honestly assess the challenges before we make any commitments, lest we commit ourselves to tasks that we are not prepared to complete. Pollack and Siegle’s essay may be a starting point, but does not even begin this essential process of assessment. Hopefully we will see more detailed discussion soon. |
