Some unfinished business from last week: In that column I discussed in some detail how the Bush administration’s story about Saddam and al-Qaeda differed from that of the 9/11 commission, and scanned some of the administration’s prewar statements. In general I conceded that the Bush administration had been fairly clever and cagey about the relationship if any, citing only pieces of intelligence that suggested a relationship without ever claiming it directly. My discussion tracked closely with a piece by Fred Kaplan that appeared on Slate last week, nicely titled, “It depends what the meaning of ‘relationship’ is.”
In general, a perusal of most of the prewar statements supports President Bush’s statement last week, when he said yet again, “There was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.” He then went on to qualify it:
“The administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence met with bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda in Sudan.”
For the most part, the administration left it up to various flacks in the media (is it amusing or tragic that the Fox News channel is much more slavishly devoted to parroting and trumpeting this administration than what critics called the “Clinton News Network,” with a certain amount of rough justice, ever was to the previous one?) to pound home the message that this meant Saddam must have been involved in 9/11 someway somehow.
So the administration didn’t actually lie about 9/11 and Saddam, it just talked cagily and left it to others to amplify a few shreds of intelligence into a massive conspiracy? Not quite. Once again thanks to Slate, whose Timothy Noah dredged up the following the following for his Whopper of the Week feature.
Seems President Bush sent a letter to Congress on March 18, 2003, outlining the legal justification for commencing the invasion of Iraq. It included the following:
“[A]cting pursuant to the Constitution and [the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002] is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organization, including those nations, organizations, or persons whom planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
Remember, this was a letter about the invasion of Iraq and nothing else. It clearly places Iraq among “those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” So President Bush did specifically claim that connection – in defiance of the burden of the evidence, as he had to know since he was so careful elsewhere. And not in an offhand remark or a speech by the vice president, but in an official letter to Congress that discussed – we’re really looking at amazing chutzpah here – the legal justifications for an action many of us still believe was illegal.
So he did lie and did so specifically on this issue, a year ago March and last week. What a surprise!
HANDICAPPING THE HANDOVER
Next week is the big week. The Coalition Provisional Authority is supposed to go out of business and hand over “full sovereignty” to an interim Iraqi government. Of course it can hardly be full sovereignty with more than 150,000 foreign troops occupying the country and providing whatever passes for security in Iraq these days. But it will be an important transition nonetheless.
In some ways the handover of sovereignty, however limited, to an interim Iraqi government as of June 30 just has to work, at least in the sense that in the near future a case can be made that the Iraqis really are in control and there are signs of success, however dim. Those who have followed my unrelenting criticism of the war in Iraq and the way the Bush administration has handled it might be surprised that I think there is just a possibility that it might work that well at least, and on the ground as well as in administration rhetoric.
The administration rhetoric, of course, has been characterized – and isn’t this quintessentially Clintonian? – by treating wishful thinking as accomplished fact. Even Fareed Zakaria, in the course of trying to make a case that other interventions are a good idea in a recent New Republic article, had to acknowledge some of the administration’s shortcomings:
“The administration’s strategists used Iraq as a laboratory to prove various deeply held prejudices: for example, that the Clinton administration’s nation-building was fat and slow, that the United Nations was irrelevant, that the United States faced no problem of legitimacy in Iraq, that Ahmed Chalabi would become a Mesopotamian Charles de Gaulle. In almost every case, facts on the ground quickly disconfirmed these theories. But so committed were these government officials to their ideology – and so powerful within the administration – that it took 14 months for policy to adjust to these failures. In the last month [this was posted June 17], the United States has finally reversed course, sending more troops, scaling back de-Baathification, dumping Chalabi, bringing in the United Nations, and listening to Iraqis on the ground. This shift in policy is already making a difference, easing the anti-Americanism and the sense of international isolation that has plagued the Iraq mission. If they keep up the reversals, Iraq still has a chance.”
I suspect Zakaria may be overly sanguine about the decline of anti-Americanism and international isolation, but he could still be correct in his assessment, especially since he acknowledges some of his own mistakes:
“The biggest mistake I made on Iraq was to believe the Bush administration would want to get Iraq right more than it wanted to prove its own prejudices right. I knew the administration went into Iraq with some crackpot ideas, but I also believed that, above all else, it would want success on the ground. I reasoned that it would drop its pet theories once it was clear they were not working. I still don’t understand why the Bush team proved so self-defeatingly stubborn.”
MISSING THE PATHOLOGY
I suspect further that Zakaria is still missing just how ideologically driven and little given to reflection the Bush administration is, starting with the president himself. Remember that the thinkers in this administration, such as they are, are driven by a global ideology of American hegemony and beneficent regime change, as the Carnegie Endowment is only one of several organizations and journalists to document.
Although there’s some evidence that Douglas Feith has tried to educate himself on the region, almost all the prominent neoconservatives, from Perle to Wolfowitz to Kagan to Kristol to Libby, see themselves as global strategists of the American empire rather than area experts of any kind. They went into Iraq knowing literally next to nothing about the country and the region, arrogantly convinced that their template for expanding global democracy American-style was a one-size-fits-all proposition. (I exclude AEI‘s Joshua Muravchik, with whom I have talked and who has actually studied transitions to democracy fairly extensively, from being overly Pollyannaish about Iraq.)
If Iraq does turn out reasonably well and Bush is reelected – the former of which at least anyone who cares about the well-being of the Iraqi people should hope for; I’m agnostic on the Bush-Kerry issue – don’t expect much soul-searching or honest attempts to learn lessons from past mistakes. Taking its cue from the top man, this administration is astonishingly free of self-doubt or even reflectiveness.
Bill Clinton’s memoirs illustrate that shallowness on issues and a lack of honest reflection is hardly unique to this president or this administration. But this administration probably tops the Clintonites in self-righteousness and virtual refusal to consider, even in its internal deliberations, the possibility that it might have made even a small mistake along the way. It might have reversed course just in time in Iraq, but it is unlikely to acknowledge it publicly or to let lessons from experience cause it to reconsider its prior course. The neoconservative ideology meshes nicely with the primitive and unreflective form of semi-apocalyptic Christianity (the kind that comfortably convinces the believer that God is worth worshiping because He is astute enough to approve in advance what the believer has already decided to do and maybe it’s His mission to boot) that the president seems to have taken from his help-me-stop-drinking conversion experience.
Despite administration incompetence and overreliance on comforting ideology, however, I still think there’s a chance that Iraq itself may come out of this in tolerable shape. If so, it will be more because of Iraqi competence and determination to have a somewhat self-governing country than because of any help the administration has provided.
REASONS TO DOUBT
Not that there won’t be pitfalls, and not that Iraqis will not be paying for some time for mistakes of the recent past. A considerable group of terrorists, both indigenous and foreign, has the strongest of incentives to disrupt the transition and create even more chaos, as RAND’s Bruce Hoffman has recently explained rather cogently. They have been busy and will be busier in the days and weeks preceding and following the transition.
We know that Musab al-Zarqawi is just the visible (well, masked, if he was really in those pictures) tip of the terrorist iceberg, and the grisly beheadings of recent weeks but a taste of what these ruthless people are capable of. Both supporters and critics of the intervention agree that the transition will be marked by stepped-up violence.
There’s also the possibility that Iraq itself might well prove over the long run to be ungovernable by anything resembling democratic means. The demographic makeup ensures problems. Let me recommend once again The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Division, by Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield on this score.
In brief, the Sunnis (of which Saddam was nominally one) have been the overlords since the time of the Ottomans, but they constitute around 20 percent of the population in the artificial state of Iraq created by the British after World War I. The Shi’ites, whom Saddam either repressed or controlled with divide-and-conquer tactics, are 60 percent but not necessarily politically united. The Kurds in the north, at 15-18 percent, have always wanted autonomy and almost had it (aided by the no-fly zones) under Saddam.
If there is anything like democratic governance, the Sunnis will have to cope with giving up power they have always had and the Shi’ites will have to debate among themselves whether to use their newfound power to govern equitably or to settle scores. The Kurds, if they don’t get effective self-governance, may rebel, but the revenues from the oil fields around Kirkuk will be a sore point.
Furthermore, the likelihood that the Iraqis will be able to handle security themselves is quite low and will probably be so for some time. The police are poorly trained and still labor under the widespread impression that they are U.S. puppets. The guerrillas/insurgents have a certain amount of sympathy among the Iraqi police, army and other forces that will be expected to control them.
Theoretically, these divisions and problems could be handled at least in part by installing a federalist-style regime with considerable local autonomy and a limited central government. In the past the preferred method has been a brutal central government. The Iraqis have little or no experience with self-governance, and thanks to Saddam’s modified socialism, few sectors of society were effectively independent of central state control, through favors, prison terms or bullets.
REASONS TO HOPE
Despite a lack of democratic experience, however, there is a significant number of relatively well-educated Iraqis, the makings of a merchant class, people with government experience who never liked Saddam, a culture of tribalism that can be a double-edged sword – instilling habits of order but with a narrow focus – and a certain number of people with a more Iraqi nationalist than regionalist or tribalist attitude, ironically to some extent fed by shared opposition to the U.S. occupation among groups that could well be at one another’s throats once the occupation ends. And not all the administration claims about kids in school and rebuilt infrastructure are exaggerated.
There’s also the possibility that once it is Iraqis under Iraqi command, however ill-trained and rudimentarily organized, trying to maintain security rather than U.S. forces or obvious U.S. puppets, that enthusiasm for the insurgency will wane. There will still undoubtedly be a hard core of committed insurgents, but they may get less sympathy from the general population than they have when they were fighting mostly against Americans. The experience in Fallujah, admittedly, is mixed, with some evidence that the relative peace since the decision that the Marines wouldn’t go in with rockets blazing has been broken. But it might be significant that the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has said he plans to form a political party once the transition is in place.
A PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENT
I talked with James Dobbins, who heads the RAND Corp.’s International Security and Defense Policy Center, after a State Department career that included being special envoy at critical rebuilding times in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia, this week. He told me that while the challenges are immense, the main problem with the transition is that it didn’t start earlier.
“For the first time in 50 years we didn’t have an ambassador in place when the occupation began, but a transitional figure in Paul Bremer,” Mr. Dobbins told me. “A slower turnover would have worked better with 400,000 to 500,000 U.S. troops, and we should have begun training Iraqi security forces much earlier. Given the situation now, however, the sooner Iraqis take over the better. U.S. troops have become more an irritant than a stabilizing force.”
Mr. Dobbins had dinner with interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi a few weeks ago and was favorably impressed. “He is self-possessed, understands security problems and has fairly broad support,” he told me. We didn’t get into what Allawi’s experience with the CIA might do to Allawi’s credibility among Iraqis. Dobbins thinks the Iraqis understand that you defeat an insurgency not so much by killing insurgents as by marginalizing the violent extremists, and they plan to work toward that end, which will require distancing themselves from the U.S.
Can they be successful? Expect violence for quite some time, perhaps an escalation right after the handover. If it starts to subside after a month, maybe two, that should be a sign that the interim government is developing some degree of legitimacy.
James Dobbins says the measure should be fewer Iraqis getting killed – by the U.S., insurgents, the interim government, common criminals, or anyone. He notes that none of Iraq’s neighbors has a real interest in an unstable Iraq, so they might be helpful with insurgents – but both the U.S. and the new Iraqi government need to talk to them, and the U.S. has hardly been very good at that recently. It’s more likely to threaten them.
It just might work. The odds in many ways are against it, to be sure, but it just might work.
