"Oh, It's Just Them Killing Each Other."

Via TAPPED, I found a very interesting article from Sunday's Mercury News. It's by Larry Diamond, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution who served as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Diamond gives us his take on how we ended up in the situation we're in in Iraq, from the perspective of someone who was involved in the decision-making. He notes the positive developments of that time: the interim constitution, the handover of sovereignty, and so forth. But he also notes the missteps:

"The coalition government relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a large cadre of eager young neophytes whose brashness often gave offense in a very age- and status-conscious society. One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion. A much more senior Iraqi interlocutor (a widely experienced Iraqi-American lawyer) became so exasperated with the young man's audacity that he finally challenged him:

"You must have thoroughly studied the history of the British occupation of Iraq."

"Yes, I did," the young American replied proudly.

"I thought so," said the Iraqi, "because you seem determined to repeat every one of their mistakes." "

Let's stop right there. There are, in the United States, a lot of people who have real experience trying to reconstruct states, advising them on constitutions, and the like. We seem to have reached out to a few of them -- Diamond, for instance. But we could have reached out to a lot more; after all, it's not as though reconstituting a country after decades of brutal dictatorship is the kind of simple task that anyone could do. But no: we actually employed and sent to Iraq a 24 year old whose idea of good advice was to say that Iraq should not have judicial review because it might lead to the legalization of abortion? And did we really allow such a person to negotiate in our name with senior Iraqis? What on earth could we possibly have been thinking?

I mean: judicial review is one of the single most important institutions a country can have if it wants to avoid tyranny. It does many, many things that matter a lot more to the future of Iraq than its possible future effects on abortion law. Things like, oh, allowing unconstitutional usurpations of power to be struck down as unlawful. Only someone who was both a complete idiot and a neocon fantasist bent on importing American political issues into the completely different world of Iraq would advise Iraqis not to have judicial review on the grounds that it might lead to the legalization of abortion. And if that struck him as a good idea, who knows what else he might have recommended? Why not advise them not to protect freedom of assembly on the grounds that it might interfere with some future President's ability to bar people who disagree with him from his rallies, or to allow searches without a warrant on the grounds that that would make it so much easier for some future Iraqi administration to pass the PATRIOT act, or to allow future Presidents the power to declare war at will so that they would never have to ask Congress for permission to invade Iraq? -- Um, something's wrong with that last one...

But wait: there's more...

"Throughout the occupation, there was a profound tension between the idealistic goal of building democracy and the desire on the part of the Americans to retain control, to shape a particular kind of Iraqi democracy.

The dilemma struck me almost immediately after my arrival, when one of our colleagues stormed into the office after a late-night meeting of the Iraqi Governing Council, uttering: "We have a problem. And no one wants to deal with it. The Governing Council is issuing orders and the ministers are starting to execute them." Several of us burst out laughing. We were fostering a transition to sovereignty and democracy. We had established the Iraqi Governing Council. But God forbid it should actually seek to start governing!

Of course, it would be hard to imagine a more overbearing and presumptuous means for one country to relate to another than to occupy it and remake its political system. That's one reason why many experts on Iraq warned the United States that establishing itself as an occupying power there would be met with sustained violent resistance. But America occupied anyway, in a way that was often filled with an ill-informed hubris, leading it for many months to misread the importance of Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani; to underestimate the depth of Iraqi resentment of American military and political dominance; to marginalize the United Nations' mission in postwar Iraq, despite its considerable knowledge and expertise; and to impose 100 colonial-like decrees.

It was hubris -- and worse -- that led one retired general to dismiss the disastrous April 2003 murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei (Iraq's most outspoken democratic Shiite cleric, and a man we had just brought back from London) with the disdainful quip, "Oh, it's just them killing each other." It was hubris that led the United States to simply dismiss the insurgents as a bunch of bad losers and "evildoers" who would be quickly consigned to the dustbin of history. Thus President Bush defiantly invited them to "bring it on." "

Ah, yes: just them killing each other. Let's recall a bit about Abdul Majid al-Khoei:

"The scion of one of the two most powerful families of Iraqi Shiites, al-Khoei returned to An Najaf two weeks ago with the help of the U.S. military after a decade in exile outside Iraq. He was the son of the former Grand Ayatollah of An Najaf, Abdul-Qasim al-Khoei, who had died in 1992 under house arrest by Saddam Hussein's regime. The current Grand Ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, was also under house arrest until U.S. troops took control of the city last week.

Iraq's Shiites comprise almost two-thirds of the population, but have been an oppressed underclass throughout Iraq's modern history. Their numbers, and their alienation from Saddam's regime make winning their support indispensable for any representative and stable government the U.S. attempts to create in post-Saddam Iraq. It may have been to that end that the U.S. military had facilitated Ayatollah al-Khoei's return to An Najaf. Al-Khoei was reported to have taken a pro-Western position, and was working to rally support among Shiite clerics for the U.S.-led transition process. At the time of his murder, he had been due to address a group of Arab journalists flown to the town by the U.S. military — and had been expected to cast the U.S.-led invasion in a positive light."

And:

"Mr Khoei had returned to his hometown of Najaf on 3 April after answering the call for volunteers among exiled Iraqis to act as intermediaries for American and British forces.

He was last week credited with preventing a disastrous confrontation between US soldiers and Shias in Najaf when a group of 100 Marines passed close to the Ali mosque. Mr Khoei calmed the crowd by using a loud-hailer to deny that the Americans were going to enter the mosque as the troops backed away, their guns pointing to the ground.

Friends of the cleric said that he was also keen to assert his independence and had assumed a prominent spiritual role, seeking to calm tensions not only between the foreign troops and local Shias anxious to safeguard the sanctity of their holy places but also between rival factions. He said last week that he and other local clerics were trying to negotiate a deal in which hardcore loyalists would be given safe passage out of the city. (...)

It was left to supporters of Mr Khoei last night to point to the bitter irony of the words used by him to pacify his countrymen a few days earlier: "I said that I was an Iraqi who had been forced to leave but I had returned – a sign that things were now getting better and they were safe." "

Yep. Just them killing each other.

In an earlier article, Diamond goes into more detail about why our troop levels and planning were so inadequate:

"the Bush administration was never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq. From the beginning, military experts warned Washington that the task would require, as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress in February 2003, "hundreds of thousands" of troops. For the United States to deploy forces in Iraq at the same ratio to population as NATO had in Bosnia would have required half a million troops. Yet the coalition force level never reached even a third of that figure. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call for a much larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous promises to give the military "everything" it asked for, that such requests would not be welcome. No officer missed the lesson of General Shinseki, whom the Pentagon rewarded for his public candor by announcing his replacement a year early, making him a lame-duck leader long before his term expired. Officers and soldiers in Iraq were forced to keep their complaints about insufficient manpower and equipment private, even as top political officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) insisted publicly that greater military action was necessary to secure the country.

In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after the war. But doing so would also have required different kinds of troops, with different rules of engagement. The coalition should have deployed vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and enforcement. Tens of thousands of soldiers with sophisticated monitoring equipment should have been posted along the borders with Syria and Iran to intercept the flows of foreign terrorists, Iranian intelligence agents, money, and weapons.

But Washington failed to take such steps, for the same reasons it decided to occupy Iraq with a relatively light force: hubris and ideology. Contemptuous of the State Department's regional experts who were seen as too "soft" to remake Iraq, a small group of Pentagon officials ignored the elaborate postwar planning the State Department had overseen through its "Future of Iraq" project, which had anticipated many of the problems that emerged after the invasion. Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners assumed that Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as liberators. With Saddam's military and security apparatus destroyed, the thinking went, Washington could capitalize on the goodwill by handing the country over to Iraqi expatriates such as Ahmed Chalabi, who would quickly create a new democratic state. Not only would fewer U.S. troops be needed at first, but within a year, the troop levels could drop to a few tens of thousands.

Of course, these naive assumptions quickly collapsed, along with overall security, in the immediate aftermath of the war. U.S. troops stood by helplessly, outnumbered and unprepared, as much of Iraq's remaining physical, economic, and institutional infrastructure was systematically looted and sabotaged. And even once it became obvious that the looting was not a one-time breakdown of social order but an elaborately organized, armed, and financed resistance to the U.S. occupation, the Bush administration compounded its initial mistakes by stubbornly refusing to send in more troops. Administration officials repeatedly deluded themselves into believing that the defeat of the insurgency was just around the corner-just as soon as the long, hot summer of 2003 ended, or reconstruction dollars started flowing in and jobs were created, or the political transition began, or Saddam Hussein was captured, or the interim government was inaugurated. As in Vietnam, a turning point always seemed imminent, and Washington refused to grasp the depth of popular disaffection."

To this day the level of incompetence we have shown in Iraq is staggering to me. As is the price we and the Iraqis are paying for it.

Comments

[CaseyL]

Maybe the anti-war crowd's worst fears were accurate after all. Maybe Iraq was always only about revenge.

Maybe the rhetoric about freedom, democracy, liberty was an afterthought, a retcon; meant to salve a conscience there and here, for anyone who still had one.

The Iraq war wasn't about WMDs. It wasn't about a threat to America. It wasn't about Saddam and OBL being in cahoots. Those claims were thoroughly refuted by the way US troops were deployed; by the simple fact that known weapons caches weren't secured; by the lack of any useful intelligence about OBL or AQ coming out of Iraq.

And the "freedom, democracy, liberty" claims are going the way of the WMD, threat, and cahoots claims; also thoroughly refuted by our actions. Actions like torture and murder at Abu Ghraib; rolling over Fallujah and other cities one by one; killing fathers, mothers, children; dispossessing and terrorizing and debasing families; dismissing murders of people who might actually have helped, who actually maybe believed what we said about liberating them as "Oh, it's just them killing each other."

Maybe Iraq was all about revenge. About taking revenge on someone who hadn't actually committed the original crime, and who couldn't say no. A rape, really.

And looting the country, giving billions to Halliburton, enriching neocons everywhere - was just icing on the cake.

And the damage done to our country? The dead and wounded, the ruined lives and sundered families, the vanished hundreds of billions of dollars, the polarization and demonization of our citizens, the ruination of our nation's reputation and the degradation of our honor - what was that? Just collateral damage?

Rape. Pillage. Salt the earth. In Iraq, and here.

Bush's war. Bush's vision. Bush's legacy.

[Nell]

Of all the indications that one objective was the destruction of Iraq as a functioning state, the staffing of the CPA and 'reconstruction' with right-wing children is the strongest. Perfect from their point of view, in the way that combined looting opportunities with complete fecklessness; Iraq as lab experiment for right-wing fantasies of 'governance'.

[Jesurgislac]

I dunno, Nell. I think (but am prepared to be contradicted) that, with one thing and another, there's the same people in charge at the White House who were in the Nixon administration when the US assassinated President Allende in Chile and then sent in a bunch of inexperienced economists with a Theory to help the new dictator "improve" Chile's economy - the Chicago Group.

It seems to me that you could equally argue this is the same people, thirty years on, who have come to believe that the only reason their attempt on Chile didn't work too good was because they were thinking too small: don't just assassinate the President and topple the government, invade the country.

[Nell]

Larry Diamond is an interesting case. In September 2004, he was defending his analysis against the position that Iraq was a fool's errand to begin with in this way (in Foreign Affairs):

We should never invade and conquer a country merely because we want to see it become a democracy. That kind of imperial mission is likely to fail, and it will discredit democracy promotion worldwide. But Iraq was invaded and its dictatorship toppled in a preemptive war driven mainly by security concerns, however misjudged. The challenge after the war was to build a more decent, lawful, and democratic political order-something the Iraqi people desperately want.

A lovely sentiment. But now that there's documentary proof for the idea that Bush and company knew this had nothing to do with weapons (or democracy promotion), I wonder what Diamond thinks. He opposed the war before it began; did he honestly think the administration were just mistaken about weapons?

[CharleyCarp]

I don't know guys. The 24 year old is stupid. Why not also the people who chose him?

I think you can take at face value the assertion that the folks in charge of rebuilding Iraq -- and of designing the invasion -- really did think it would be easy. They really did think those of us who were saying that it would not be easy are -- like them -- ideologues first, observers of reality a distant second. Why do I think this? Come on, the same people are all around us. Mouthing the same trite, inch-deep analyses. Hell they're still saying that our warnings that the policy isn't working are motivated not by a belief that the policy isn't working, but by a hope that it won't work and that the President will be discredited.

[Barry]

Nell, people are, in general, really good at the Dance of the Seven Veils (of the mind). When one starts with strongly held beliefs, it takes both strong evidence and strong character to confront violations of those beliefs. It takes even stronger evidence and character to acknowledge that the violations aren't just 'a few bad apples'.

I think that by that point, the majority of people will fail, unless the evidence directly confronts their interests (e.g., by May 1945, probably a strong majority of Germans figured that Hitler wasn't leading them anywhere but Hell).

To go beyond that, to realize that the failures aren't failures, but the desired results of fundamentally evil beliefs (held by people they support), is something that most people just can't do.

I've watched it in one clear case on the Web: Phil Carter of Intel Dump. John Cole of Intel Dump is still in the 'maybe' column (IMHO, he's still commited to a non-existant sane Republicanism). Andrew Sullivan doesn't count; he didn't turn against Bush until the anti-gay policy of the GOP was so strong that it pierced even his self-delusion. Krugman doesn't count; he was always a centrist economist, who had 'merely' the strength of character to hold fast, although the ground shifted.

[NeoDude]

It was a lynch-mob.

Lynching in the name of democracy, liberty and "defending our culture and way of life."

[bob mcmanus]

You are going to have a very hard time getting me to believe Cheney and Rumsfeld are stupid. Sorry, not my default position, I have known of these guys for 35 years.

People like Frist and DeLay can be stupid and blinded by ideology, arrogance, hubris. If Cheney and Rumsfeld are going over a cliff it is because they have tested the airbags.

[Ugh]

Aren't the next round of pictures supposed to be released today? Or did the government appeal?

[Tad Brennan]

Barry--

I agree that Bush's betrayal of gays was the last straw for Sullivan, but it wasn't the only thing. He is also genuinely appalled by the torture problem. What continues to baffle me about him, though, is that he still holds to the "Little Father" view of Bush, i.e. that Bush is a decent and honorable man who just happens to be surrounded by a crowd of thuggish incompetents. (It's Brad DeLong who reminded us all of this trope from Tsarist history). Oh, and for some reason not only did he hire nothing but thuggish incompetents, but when they get caught red-handed in acts of thuggery and incompetence, he promotes them. One of these days Sullivan, and the rest of the country, will lose their last illusions that there is anything honorable, decent, or likable about the man. Till then, some people find him charismatic, though I'm not someone who can explain his charisma.

Which reminds me: you know part of what I liked about Kerry? The fact that I didn't like him that much. He struck me as competent, experienced, smart enough, and likely to do a good job. And completely incapable of eliciting hero-worship or cults of personality.

We have had too many cults of personality in the WH lately, and it is an extremely dangerous trend. I never trusted that aspect of Clinton, or of his followers, and I loathed the canonization of St. Reagan. I was too young to keep track of JFK's presidency, but in hindsight I think it was far too personalized as well, too.

Democracies should elect public servants, not messianic celebrities. Elect an executive, elect a cabinet, elect a team of people to do a job for a fixed time. Don't elect a Savior of the Nation. Approaching elections that way is a small step towards fascism. (And remember, o ye Godwin cops, that I include the nation's attitude towards JFK and Clinton among these small steps to fascism).

That's one of the reasons why I'm a "Bush-basher", i.e. someone whose political objectives do not stop merely with resistance to the content of policies (e.g. I want to stop him from destroying the environment, Social Security, etc.), but extend to a desire to have him publicly and historically exposed for the fraud that he is. I hope that it will help the nation move back away from the cult of personality model, towards a model of democratic equality. (And since that's the end I really want, I would not be at all happy if Bush-bashing merely led to having Bush replaced by a Democratic personality-cult. "He's a fascist demagogue but he's our fascist demagogue" is not an attitude I can endorse at the domestic level, either).

Even in a democracy, there are good reasons and bad reasons to vote for someone. We infantilize the electorate when we focus on the bad reasons (hair style, accent, smile) and dismiss the good reasons (experience, education, competence, record of concrete achievements). The trend over the last many years has been that bad reasons drive out good ones, and candidates with charisma defeat candidates with qualifications. (The closest to the model I endorse, i.e. the non-charismatic public servant, was Carter. He lost to a man who was long on charisma and completely unqualified.)

I don't know if there's any way to reverse that trend, but it is a central reason why I don't simply want to defeat Bush's unsound policies, I want to expose the basic corruption behind the fabricated image of decency.

[McDuff]

As far as I can tell, the Presidency has always been about a "cult of personality," and the ideal of the President seems to assign him more power and responsibility in the public eye than the office, in fact, holds.

Any presidential system will invariably trend towards such, it seems.

[Bruce Baugh]

Wow, Tad. That sums up so many things I've been thinking in recent years, compactly and clearly. Good work. I share the same hope: I would like to see the current wave of personality cults break and recede, and yield to some genuinely competent, genuinely honorable public servants rather than public masters.

One of the things that keeps me from going very far with Lakoff's work is his talk about the state in terms of contrasting styles of parenthood. I don't want the state to be my parent at all, or anyone elses. It's neither Mom nor Dad, and we are not its children or its subjects.

[Mark]

Neodude, I agree, Rumsfeld and Cheney are, by any standard, extremely intelligent people; as are many of the other architects of the Iraq strategy. And, with their lifetime of experiences, probably they feel as if they have "tested the airbags". But airbags have been known to unexpectantly become inoperable. In the engineering world, we call it "catastrophic failure".

[st]

OT - o'connor just retired: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8430976/

[Chris]

Just as this Iraq adventure was beginning, I was asked by ABA Journal to check in with those who might be called on to help Iraq with its new legal infrastructure. I talked to the Carter Center, which had helped with the purging (the de-Baathification, if you will) of El Salvador's judicial system; with experts who had helped birth legal training in Eastern Europe and Cambodia (especially challenging in the latter, where there were something like 10 lawyers left alive in 1990); with business attorneys in UAE and Saudi; and with those still drafting Afghanistan's constitution.

Somehow, I didn't think to check in with the 20something "experts" being sent over by the Heritage Foundation to run the CPA. My tinfoil hat was a little rusted, and it didn't occur to me that anyone could actually be that stupid.

Now, given the well-known disregard of anyone with any experience in favor of those who can "test Rumsfeld's theories", we can only grimace at the results. I'm gritting my teeth waiting for Saddam's show trial.

[Tim]

We sort of knew that they were this incompetent last year, and it didn't really lead to anything. I recall Simone Ledeen's 15 minutes of fame that all the media ignored.

[John Thullen]

"What on earth could we possibly have been thinking?"

I typed that quote from Hilzoy's post into the comment box and then watched the cursor blink while I considered where to start and how wordy I might need to be.

So, let me just say this. Watch the Tom Cruise interview recently on the Today Show. Watch this intelligent, talented, good-looking individual display his utter certainty, his utter lack of doubt, his
Dan Rather-like steely-eyed determination to make the world in his image and you might, like an intern in a city hospital emergency room running across a series of patients presenting similar, dangerous, highly contagious symptoms, draw conclusions about the virus carried by all who inhabit the Administration.

They not only carry it, they culture it, nurture it, spread it through infiltration, recruit it. Replicate the 24-year-old ideologue and place his clones not only in Iraq, but throughout the United States -- start with local school boards and county commissions, move on to state legislatures, and then plant the carriers throughout the Federal government's agencies, its courts, etc -- and the media.

John Dioulio (sp?) and Colin Powell, and Treasury Secretary O'Neill: preserve their DNA, because they exhibited a rare resistance which might lead to a vaccine.

Found a university. Call it Patrick Henry University. Train the cadres in counter-intelligence and counter- insurgency as well, for later bigger battles on American soil. A new much more virulent strain of the virus, because the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the other hack-mills aren't quite good enough.

Prevent the institution of judicial review in Iraq. Then return home and write for Red State, or clerk at SCOTUS and kill judicial review in the United States.

Public service? There is no such thing to these children. They serve something bigger, more noble, more messianic: their ideals, for which they will kill many times over.

As to airbags: Rumsfeld's and Cheney's ideologies, like the Wall Street Journal's ideology page, don't permit airbags or seatbelts. Better children through the windshield than compromise the freedom to die.

Tad Brennan is absolutly correct: This government is created by George W. Bush in his image. Impregnable certainty; inexorable, implacable vengeance against enemies; the smirk, the swagger --- and then the lump in the throat and the welling of tears -- as he remembers the human being he once was before the drinking stopped and the mission began.

Well, I certainly achieved wordiness.

[Nell]

Billmon has a post on Larry Diamond that echoes some of my thoughts in the 4:00 a.m. post above and takes the question (Democracy or Imperialism?) much deeper. Highly recommended.

[derrida derider]

The tendency to a cult of personality around the US Presidency is a structural problem in the US Constitution (I'm a foreigner so I'm allowed to say that document has flaws as well as strengths).

The President embodies the nation and is therefore bound up with all those irrational tribal feelings of patriotism that we are all prone to. But at the same time he is given lots of very real power. You ought to have a symbolic Presidency that is a symbol of national unity, and a separate, less prestigious but more powerful Chancellor or Prime Minister to run the Executive branch. It is then safe to teach your children to revere the President (in the way constitutional monarchs are revered) while still teaching them to be sceptical of mere politicians like the chancellor/PM.

[oskar]

what derrida said. exactly.

the president is the father figure to the nation, that's why Clinton's blowjob was such a big issue. it didn't square with the mental image.

OTOH, starting a foreign war is just like slapping rowdy kids.