Bush's latest spin on his failures in Iraq is that "everyone was wrong," that the Democrats are taking partisan advantage of the problems, and that anyone who questions the war or occupation is giving aid and comfort to terrorists. This is just the latest in a stream of flawed arguments and jingoistic spin.
Forget what any of the blowhards in the Bush Administration or in Congress might have said in the floor debates when they were pandering and talking tough. Let's look at what the EXPERTS said BEFORE the invasion and what they are saying NOW.
General warnings about the neo-con plot to bring about regime change in Iraq:
- In 1991, then-General Colin Powell, defending the U.S. decision not to continue on to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, said, "we would have gotten ourselves into the biggest quagmire you can imagine, trying to sort out 2000 years of Mesopotamian history" (Mills, 2004).
- In 1999, shortly after the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act that the Republicans foisted on a weakend Clinton Administration, General Tony Zinni warned that there was no unified coalition to govern Iraq, and that he didn't think policy makers understood that the "weakened, fragmented, and choatic Iraq" that would likely emerge after a coup would be "more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now" (Isenburg, 1999, p. 11).
- Fareed Zakaria warned prior to the invasion, "An American occupation, no matter how just, could soon come under fire from Iraqis or other Arabs as being a new colonialism. If it does, we might well wish we were not quite so alone" (Zakaria, 2003, p. 47).
- Prior to the invasion, Drs. Conrad Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, of the U.S. Army War College published an extensive study of the problems that could be expected in post-war Iraq. Crane and Terrill (2003) made it clear that it was "essential" that the U.S. military hand over control to civilian agencies "as soon as possible," and that in turn, the civilian agencies turn over control to the Iraqis quickly, lest Iraqis begin to resent the American invasion and the occupation forces (p. 6).
As to the notion that exporting American democracy and imposing it in Iraq and other nations will make the U.S. more secure and promote world peace:
- George Kennan, the architect of post-WWII containment policies has expressed grave concern toward Bush's post-9/11 approach to foreign policy and military deployment: "for Americans to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world is unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable" (Pfaff, 2001, pp. 221-232).
- Not everyone agrees with the principle that democratization by Western means equates to security and stability. Professor Eric Hobshawm (2004) notes:
This idea is not merely quixotic--it is dangerous. The rhetoric surrounding this crusade implies that the system is applicable in a standardized (Western) form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it can remedy today's transnational dilemmas, and that it can bring peace, rather than sow disorder. It cannot.
- The Hon. Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong notes the inherent fallacy in the American plan to "democratize" Iraq:
Democracy indeed has universal validity and should not be withheld either on grounds of cultural specificity or economic weakness. However, it must grow organically from within a society. Outside pressure can and should be applied, but democracy cannot be imposed by force (Patten, 2003).
About pre-war planning or lack thereof:
- Two months prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the analysis of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) concluded that the initial 60 days following the cessation of major combat operations would prove to be the most crucial to occupation and reconstruction efforts (Dicker, 2004, p. 3). The MCWL wargaming identified three factors that it foresaw as being the most important to the success of post-combat operations, to wit: (1) maintaining a secure environment for the Iraq people, including law and order; (2) maintaining basic necessities such as water, electricity, fuel, schools, and hospital services; and (3) rapid return of infrastructure responsibility, including governance, back to Iraqis (MCWL, 2003, p. 3).
- David Phillips, who resigned from the State Department in 2003 to protest the quagmire that the Administration had created in Iraq, relates:
What was most astonishing about our postwar plan for Iraq isn't the plan with which we went to war; it is that we went to war with no plan at all. For ideological reasons, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Vice President ignored, and even took steps to undermine, the Future of Iraq Project, which was led by the U.S. Department of State. Instead of following the advice of these Iraqis and of experts who were involved in that planning process, the Bush Administration chose instead to follow the advice of a small group of Iraqi exiles, led by Ahmed Chalabi, and to believe their own propaganda, which was that you could transform Iraq into a liberal democracy overnight, and that would then become the engine for reform in the Middle East.
The serious errors in judgment that created the debacle in the immediate hours after Saddam's statue fell in Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, set the tone and created the substance of problems that we are still dealing with today (Phillips, 2005).
- Crane and Terrill (2003) warned,
The administration of an Iraqi occupation will be complicated by deep religious, ethnic, and tribal differences which dominate Iraqi society. U.S. forces may have to manage and adjudicate conflicts among Iraqis that they can barely comprehend. An exit strategy will require the establishment of political stability, which will be difficult to achieve given Iraq's fragmented population, weak political institutions, and propensity for rule by violence (p.7).
- Eric Margolis (2004) offered an "old school" conservative and libertarian assessment:
A co-operative, turban-free regime of pro-U.S. Iraqis would quickly be installed in Baghdad, led by convicted swindler Ahmad Chalabi. However, if Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress cronies failed, so much the better, went neocon thinking. Their primary objective was to destroy Iraq, not to rebuild it; for Iraq, once the Arab world's best educated, most industrialized nation, had to be expunged as a potential military and strategic challenge to Israel.
As to the Bush Administration argument that our occupation of Iraq is similar to post-WWII:
- Bellin (2004/2005) notes,
Iraq has never achieved an advanced level of economic development. Although the country has enjoyed the bounty of oil wealth, it has not yet developed into an advanced industrialized country, and it is woefully lacking in the social and human capital essential to such ambition. (p. 597).
- Zakaria (2004) criticizes the comparison as well:
If the president really thinks that Iraq today looks like Germany in 1946--an advanced industrial country with a long liberal tradition, centuries of experience with capitalism, the rule of law and a defeated population that fully cooperated with American occupation--then he's in for a rude surprise.
Criticism of the so-called "Global war on terror" overall:
- Dr. Jeffrey Record of the U.S. Army War College has been critical of the military and foreign policies of the Bush Administration since 9/11. Dr. Record argues that the shifting rationales for Bush's "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) results in a lack strategic clarity:
The nature and parameters of that war, however, remain frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States (Record, 2003, p.5).
- General Wesley Clark noted, an ncreasingly "interdependent world will no longer accept discriminatory dominance by one nation over another" (Clark, 2004, p. 200).
Prospects for Iraq now:
- Klein & Mate's (2004) analysis of the operation concluded,
Liberation will never be a trickle-down effect of this invasion because domination, not liberation, was always its goal. Even under the best scenario, the current choice in Iraq is not between Sadr's dangerous fundamentalism and a secular democratic government made up of trade unionists and feminists. It's between open elections -- which risk handing power to fundamentalists but would also allow secular and moderate religious forces to organize -- and rigged elections designed to leave the country in the hands of Iyad Allawi and the rest of his CIA/Mukhabarat-trained thugs, fully dependent on Washington for both money and might.
- Margolis (2004) notes the grand scheme is likely to fail:
The Pentagon plans three major military bases in Iraq from which to control the oil-producing Mideast and to protect the new "Imperial Lifeline," the pipelines bringing crude westward from the Caspian Basin. Britain used Iraq for the same purpose. In all but name, the U.S. has become heir of the old British Empire.
Washington wants a compliant regime of Iraqi yes-men, what Algerians used to call, beni oui-ouis, running internal affairs under the stern gaze of American garrison troops, who will intervene, like the British imperialists, whenever the locals get out of hand or Iraqi politicians grow too independent-minded.
- Talal Gaaod, an Iraqi civil servant, remarked,
The political process, and the American project, it has failed. Believe me, there is no need to waste anymore one penny of the American taxpayers' money and not more one drop of blood of the American boys. Continuing on the basis to build a democratic process in securing the country, it's only a dream (Ignatius, 2005).
- The imposition of a proportional representation system based on ethnic and tribal parties does not bode well for long-term peace. Dr. W. Andrew Terrill (2005) of the U.S. Army War College notes,
Ethnic and sectarian-based political parties, even if internally democratic, often feel pressure to tolerate or even embrace extremism in order to retain their base of power and undercut rivals who might claim more expansive rights for the community. Except for the fear of intercommunal conflicts, such political parties often have few political reasons to consider the rights of rival communities since they are outside of their base of power (p. 5).
- Pavel Baev, the Director of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, argues that civil war in Iraq "not a threat. It's not a potential. Civil war is a fact of life there now" (Murphy, 2005). The textbook definition of a civil war is conflict with at least 1,000 casualties who died violent deaths as a result of "a national government and one or more non-state actors fighting for power" (Murphy).
- Larry Diamond notes,
American authorities have failed to understand
the fact that, although most Iraqis were grateful for having been liberated from a brutal tyranny, their gratitude was mixed with deep suspicion of the United States' real motives (not to mention those of the United Kingdom, a former colonial ruler of Iraq); with humiliation that the Iraqis themselves had proved unable to overthrow Saddam; and with unrealistic expectations of the postwar administration, which Iraqis expected to quickly deliver them from their problems. Too many Iraqis viewed the invasion not as an international effort but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers, which evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraq's former overlords (Diamond, 2004).
- General Tony Zinni has said,
"In the end, the Iraqis themselves have to want to rebuild their country more than we do, but I don't see that right now. I see us doing everything. I spent two years in Vietnam, and I've seen this movie before. They have to be willing to do more or else it is never going to work" (Rogers, 2004).
- Retired USMC General Hoare, former commander of CENTCOM says:
The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong (Blumenthal, 2004).
- General William Odom, a Vietnam veteran and former Director of the National Security bluntly states,
"Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost. Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends" (Blumenthal, 2004).
- Dr. Jeffrey Record of the U.S. Army War College says,
"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the Second World War in Germany and Japan" (Blumenthal, 2004).
- Dr. W Andrew Terrill argues,
I don't think that you can kill the insurgency. We have a growing, maturing insurgency group. We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view (Blumenthal, 2004).
- James Dobbins (2005) of the RAND Institute has concluded,
The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the ongoing war in Iraq is not one that the United States can win. As a result of its initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation, Washington has lost the Iraq people's confidence and consent, and it is unlikely to win them back. Every day that Americans shell Iraqi cities, they lose further ground on the central front of Iraqi opinion (p. 16).
In summary, I refer you to General Odom, who says bluntly, "We have failed," and "the issue is how high a price we're going to pay - less, by getting out sooner, or more, by getting out later" (deBorchgrave, 2004).
Reference: Jumper, S. (2005). Exporting democracy to advance national security: The cycles of American isolationism, multilateralism, militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and determinism. Paper submitted to Walden University, PhD candidate.