Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 518 pp., $28.00.
Much has been and will continue to be written about the Bush administration’s disastrous adventure in Iraq. Irresponsible, ignorant, arrogant, incompetent – President George W. Bush and his aides bear the blame for plunging a distant nation into bloody chaos, while exacerbating the problem of terrorism which they claim they want to eliminate.
The Occupation of Iraq provides certainly the best Iraqi account, and perhaps the best account overall, of why America’s easy military victory has turned to tragic occupation ashes. Ali Allawi, an Iraqi emigre who served in the transitional government and parliament, understands Iraq. He wishes that the U.S. would succeed in planting a liberal democracy along the Euphrates. “I became perplexed, however, then astonished, and finally angry at the way that the country was being grotesquely mismanaged and misdirected,” he explains.
He unsparingly details the long series of blunders committed by Washington. Yet his tone is sober and dispassionate, rising above the factional feuding which has enfeebled the Iraqi government. His hope is that “an informed public would not tolerate the half-truths, platitudes and outright deceptions that have characterised the official line on the country.” But the popular frustration that sparked the Democratic takeover of Congress last year seems sadly unlikely to lead to real policy change.
Allawi, who had been sent abroad by his family in 1958, returned to Iraq on September 11, 2003. He quickly perceived a looming disaster. He writes:
“As soon as I had set foot in Baghdad, I began to experience at first hand the chaotic nature of the country and the terrible passions that had been unwittingly, or otherwise, unleashed by the invasion and occupation. The situation was going to unravel, I thought, and with it my entire premise for the ethical justification for the overthrow of the dictatorship by recourse to outsiders. For what other reason can anyone give to warrant the occupation of one’s country? I expressed my misgivings to all who were prepared to hear, but no one cared a hoot. Everyone was too busy pursuing his or her own narrow agenda to see clearly what was happening, and the Americans, together with the new Iraqi political class, were all on an altogether different tangent. At the end of the Governing Council’s life, I could see the tell-tale signs of disintegration – both in the incoherence of the American ‘project’ in Iraq, and in the utter mediocrity, incompetence and venality of the new political order.”
The war itself – that is, the campaign to defenestrate Saddam Hussein and his murderous henchmen – was quick and simple. But the aftermath has been very different. Observes Allawi, “a massive momentum had developed that propelled the USA to war, only to be replaced a few weeks into the occupation by bewilderment and confusion rapidly growing to supplant the purposeful front that had been so carefully crafted.”
The destructive weapons the Bush administration expected to find weren’t there. “There were no public cheers for democracy, no indication that this was a people hungering for the freedoms and liberties of the west,” says Allawi. Instead, there was a form of public religiosity which the otherworldly neoconservative nation-builders did not understand. And then came the complete breakdown of public order, followed by an insurgency that was not supposed to happen: the Iraqi people were expected to toss flowers, not shoot bullets, at allied forces. Along the way democracy failed to spread outward to Iraq’s neighbors.
Much obviously went wrong in such a catastrophic result. Allawi’s analysis is particularly powerful because it is so measured. The most important, and perhaps most inexcusable, error, was ignorance, or self-deception. The U.S. might as well have been invading Bangladesh or Indonesia or Brazil or Micronesia given how poorly the decision-makers understood their target nation.
Explains Allawi: “None of the proponents of the war, including the neoconservatives, and also no one in the institutes and thinktanks that provided the intellectual fodder for the war’s justification, had the faintest idea of the country that they were to occupy. The academies and researchers who congregated around the Washington thinktanks and the vice president’s office, who had made Iraq their pet project, were blinkered by their dogmatic certainties or their bigotries.”
But there was more. The Bush administration and its neoconservative Greek Chorus engaged in what Allawi terms “a deliberate revelling in the debunking of whatever knowledge of Iraq existed.” It isn’t as if no one doubted that Iraq was WMD-armed, dangerous, and ready to attack America; it isn’t as if no one recognized the fissures and fragilities of Iraqi society. But the Bush administration sought to isolate and discredit such people, preferring to live in a fantasy world of its own construction.
Having gone to war against a country that existed only in their own minds, Bush administration officials then chose wrong at almost every juncture. As Allawi puts it: “The invasion and occupation of Iraq comprised an index of errors of commission and omission. It would be difficult to catalogue them. There were just too many. They ranged from the numbers of troops deployed, to the type of people who ran the country, to the policy changes, to the off-handedness regarding decisions of monumental consequence. The range, number and pernicious effects of these errors were astounding.”
Allawi goes on to detail both the bad decisions and the pernicious effects. What makes his book so valuable – indeed, indispensable to anyone who hopes to understand the full scope of the Iraq debacle – is providing the background information which illuminates how and why mistakes were made.
He devotes a chapter to what Iraq is, or at least was before the invasion (information which would have proved valuable for the administration wunderkinds before they jauntily launched their invasion). Next Allawi explores the Iraqi opposition, which, particularly in the person of Ahmed Chalabi, played an important role in drawing the U.S. into Iraq.
But the bulk of the book is about U.S. policy and its impact on Iraq. Although no friend of Hussein’s brutal regime, Allawi’s judgment of Washington is harsh. One is tempted to ask: could successive American administrations have done a worse job had they tried to do so?
After the first Gulf War, Washington’s principal policy tool was sanctions. Alas, writes Allawi, “the effects of sanctions on Iraq were catastrophic. The regime managed to stay in power, but the population suffered greatly from falling incomes, deteriorating services and a collapse of the infrastructure already badly damaged by the war.” Yet sanctions remained the Clinton administration’s policy of choice.
When the Bush II administration chose invasion, it decided first, and accumulated evidence afterwards. As Allawi puts it: “The Bush administration did not use its intelligence resources to inform policy; rather, it selectively applied potentially damaging, but inconclusive, intelligence information to strengthen its case against the Ba’ath regime.” Indeed, far from seeking to enhance the role of intelligence, “The Pentagon played an important part in thwarting any flow of intelligence that might weaken the hawks,” he adds
The administration’s failure to provide enough troops to maintain order, let alone exercise effective control, was a critical mistake. The widespread looting after the Hussein regime’s collapse sent precisely the wrong signal both domestically and internationally. Even more so, local officials allied with the Coalition Provisional Authority had few resources with which to confront ever-bolder Islamists.
As has been well-documented elsewhere, occupation planning was almost non-existent. Had the U.S. not needlessly invaded another nation, inadvertently unleashing endless death, destruction, and chaos, the process might be confused with a badly written comedy routine. From their congressional testimony it was evident, writes Allawi, that administration officials:
“had no idea about the functioning of the state that the USA and its allies were going to inherit inside Iraq. The working model had been that of a quick war, followed by a seamless assumption of power by Iraqis from inside and outside the country, all working under the benign tutelage of a short-term occupation authority. Services would be quickly established; oil production would be increased; local elections would be soon held; and the occupying powers would then depart quickly. The entire process of managing the affairs of a country of over twenty-five million people that had been enmeshed in wars, sanctions and dictatorship was reduced to an office that had been established less than eight weeks before the invasion of the country.”
How can anyone, American, Iraqi, or anyone else, respond other than: Oh my God?
Even the best of planning likely would have failed under the circumstances, however. What good is planning when it reflects what Allawi terms “jaundiced reasoning, based on ideologically driven motives and a selective reading of history”? And then there was the mind-numbing incoherence and incompetence.
The Occupation of Iraq details how the Bush administration continually failed to measure up. For instance, Allawi details the “collapsed state,” a national government that essentially ceased functioning when American forces reached Baghdad. In a country full of bad news, he writes, “The obsession with putting a positive note on all but the more dire events obstructed the development of coherent long-term plans with realistic and realizable targets.”
Sadly, the invasion fractured an already brittle society. And that raised the power of Shi’ite clergy. Writes Allawi: “Rather than celebrate their release from the Ba’athist dictatorship and acknowledge the vital role of the USA in this process, most of the Shi’ite gravitated towards their religious leadership, and to explicitly Islamist groups.”
As time went by the situation steadily worsened in a multiple of ways covered by Allawi. “The reality of the situation was paid scant attention,” he notes, for ideological and political reasons. The insurgency worsened; the CPA failed at every turn; the Iraqis delivered a different constitution and elected different politicians than those desired by Washington; the Iraqi government did not even govern Baghdad; the electrical grid and sewage systems barely functioned; shortages of goods expanded; violent crime and conflict flared; the nation edged toward civil war between the new Sunni outsiders and the Shiite-dominated government; Shi’ite and Sunni concocted elaborate facades and routines to hide their religious identities.
In short, Iraq descended into a living hell for many of its people. Sadly, tragically, Allawi explains, “The undoubted new liberties and freedoms that the overthrow of the Ba’ath brought had to be set against the accelerating disintegration in the most elemental relationships that are the mainstay of any stable society.”
Allawi ably describes a steady collapse of Iraqi society: “Simple laborers, kitchen workers, factory hands, garbage collectors, teachers, were mowed down in a horrible campaign to frighten and intimidate often desperate people to abandon thought of government work.” But the killers’ bloody tastes eventually shifted, notes Allawi. “Bakery workers and even barbers were routinely killed en masse.” Academics and doctors were systematically murdered. So pervasive was the violence, notes Allawi, that doctors refused to undertake complex procedures. One explained: “‘What if the patient dies? You’re face to face with relatives with guns’.”
The deadly mix of incompetence, corruption, and sectarianism in Baghdad and whimsical optimism and spectacular ineptitude in Washington quickened Iraq’s implosion. In Iraq, Allawi writes, “Neither the ministers nor the bureaucracies over which they presided could deliver a fraction of what they had publicly promised.” The blind obtuseness of Bush administration officials, who claimed to be “the adults” returning to government after the feckless Clinton era, was equally incredible. Even Saddam Hussein’s execution was botched, investing him with more dignity than the officials who approved his death.
Along the way Allawi explains the personalities and crises which have been highlighted in Iraq’s downward spiral. There’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Moqtada al-Sadr, and a gaggle of politicians struggling for influence in the new government. There are two battles in Fallujah, murders and uprisings in Najaf, and problems and promise in Kurdistan. There are negotiations over a constitution and maneuvering to form a government. To read Allawi is to learn what American policymakers should have known before initiating an invasion half way around the globe. The fact that they failed so abysmally has resulted in millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Allawi still retains some hope in a federal solution. But just barely. He closes his powerful, informative, and ultimately heart-rending book: “Time is running out. The monumental patience of the Iraqi people has nearly ended. They have endured so many hardships and broken promises, but they have still kept the light of hope flickering. They are very near a terminal breaking point.”
