IOU
Nancy Lebovitz, an answer to your question, “Jim, what do you think would have been a reasonable long-term policy towards Iraq?” The short answer is “deterrence.” The slightly longer answer is, the same deal President Bush implicitly offered the entire Muslim and Arab world after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. If you mean do I think, in retrospect, we should have pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, no I don’t. I’d trust the market. Oil butters no biscuits in the ground. The only thing Iraq could have done with Kuwait’s oil is sell it to people.
As to the question of what do we do now, we’re really, really fucked. Sorry.
More when I don’t want to get to bed more than I want to keep blogging.
Comment by the talking dog —
August 15, 2005 @ 10:53 pm
Bingo. “Deterrence”, or more precisely, “don’t do too much different than the status quo ante” was the name of the game. Too late now.
Doctors and lawyers know that sometimes the answer to many problems is “do nothing”. I don’t for one minute believe that was the appropriate answer to bin Laden and A.Q. (the Bush Administration’s actual answer being “let him escape to Pakistan in case we need an ongoing bogeyman to trot out at election time”).
But as to Saddam’s Iraq? What was the big deal? He was in a box– boxed in by us all around him, and Iran on the other side… and if he ever strayed too far, Israel was just itching for an excuse for payback for those scuds… Ah, but there was a political benefit to having a bogeyman, and the illusion of accomplishing something by having a war (it being the health of the state and all).
So here we are. My only alternative suggestion here is kind of a “Philippines” answer: acknowledging we’re going to be there for decades, and actually CALL THE PLACE our colony until we clean up the mess over a generation or two… we’d have no choice but to subsidize the crap out of it… and there’d be protests, but at least it could give us the proper cover and the proper nomenclature.
Since our entire reason for being there was in the realm of “short term domestic political”, however, that will never happen. Cut and run begins (hopefully) next week when the Iraqis approve that damned constitution (do it already!)
Comment by John Emerson —
August 15, 2005 @ 11:33 pm
Bush has used the Ariel Sharon “facts on the ground” Humpty Dumpty strategy — “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put Humpty together again”.
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If you fuck things up bad enough, no good outcome is possible. Then you can say, “If you’re so smart, what do you think we should do now?”
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(Come to think of it, Sharon is shaped much like Humpty. And I meant Sharon during the bulk of his career, not the rather more reasonable recent Sharon.)
Comment by Avram —
August 16, 2005 @ 8:20 am
Actual deterrence — if Poppy Bush’s State Dept had instructed April Glaspie to tell Saddam “No, we’ll kick your butt if you do that” instead of “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts” — would probably have prevented the invasion of Kuwait anyway.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 16, 2005 @ 8:36 am
Avram: I’m not completely convinced. Tariq Aziz’s interview with Frontline maintained that the Iraqi regime knew the US wasn’t going to be happy about it. He also maintained that Iraq assumed that Kuwait would not have gotten up to what Iraq saw as its dirty tricks without US backing.
Comment by Brian C.B. —
August 16, 2005 @ 9:26 am
Not being a big fan of Saddam Hussein, I did think that we’d do well to throw him out of Kuwait. I wasn’t blind to the fact that the Kuwait-Iraq border was something the British drew up as they abandoned the Empire, either, or that Saudi Arabia wasn’t really going to be invaded. I certainly was appalled that we were going to war to set an emir back up on a throne, a thing that substantially undercut any genuine principle other than securing the (suspect–see above) national sovereignty of Kuwait, a bit of naivete that I regret not fully, loudly, and diligently embracing, since I realize that I would now be president of the World Bank if I’d done so.
In a report that just hasn’t gotten the play it should have, the LA Times published a substantial leak from the FBI interviews of post-spider-hole Saddam. He figured, right up until March 2003, that he was Our Bulwark Against Theocracy and The Arab Frontline State Against Persia. He also figured that the CIA knew that his mass-casualty weapons programs were pathetic or defunct, so he could saber-rattle against Tehran and the Shi’a Arabs all he wanted to. Because, after all, we’re the USA, baby. All-powerful. All-knowledgeable. We’d know he was just funnin’ with the rubes, and respond with some false threats of our own.
The other side of the mirror, indeed.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 16, 2005 @ 9:36 am
I’ve got to hunt up that TIME’S story.
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I think I’ve said before that you can make a serious argument in favor of the 1991 war as a legal, principled collective response to a war of territorial aggression. The question was always “And then what?” The answers have not been satisfactory, nor am I convinced any answers could have been.
Comment by BruceR —
August 16, 2005 @ 10:33 am
I’m sorry, I must be dense, but could you elaborate on the question you’re positing as unanswerable (”And then what?”)? Do you mean that the available answers were/are insufficient WRT Saddam/Iraq specifically, or future aggressive war generally, or something else?
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 16, 2005 @ 10:55 am
Bruce, sorry I was unclear. I meant, “After you throw Saddam out of Kuwait, what do you do?” IIRC, the fear was always, It would be easy for Saddam to take it back any time, unless we [blank]. Fill the blank with “Keep troops in Saudi Arabia permanently”; “Overthrow Saddam” etc. I see the last 14 years as a series of bad answers to the “Then what?” question.
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What do you think would have worked?
Comment by Leonard —
August 16, 2005 @ 12:09 pm
Saddam would have stayed out of Kuwait after the Gulf War, so long as he was convinced that if he did it again we’d spank him again. So I don’t see any problem there.
Comment by Leonard —
August 16, 2005 @ 12:34 pm
Regarding the original question… what should we have done? It really depends on how far back you are willing to go. The correct strategy (or non strategy) has always been disinvolvement; we should have been aiming for that as far back as you care for.
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The problem has been oil and our political leaders’ misunderstanding of that market. We don’t need to be friendly with the oil-producing states to buy their oil. Oil is fungible. So it’s OK if the entire middle east refuses to trade with us. Japan buys more from there, and we buy more from Venezuela and possibly oil resellers in Europe.
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Elected politicians do not understand economics. Their world-model is one of back-slapping and popularity. They believe that they must maintain friendly regimes atop the oil. The interference in the affairs of the locals has the effect of making us hated there. So when our proxies lose control, we lose bigtime (as in Iran).
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As Jim says, the invasion of Kuwait didn’t really matter that much since we’d surely have been able to buy the oil anyway. However it was felt that we needed to respond. Fine, drive out the Iraqis and destroy enough of their army to make it painful. But that was more than enough. Saddam certainly learned that aggression was off limits, at least without our approval. We did not need to emplace “sanctions”. That was about trying to force regime change, an outcome that simply will never happen in a dictatorship via punishing the people.
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Ideally we should have partitioned Iraq militarily at the time, taking the opportunity to create more viable nation-states from its diverse people. (We did sort-of do this via no-fly zones, but it needed people on the ground.) Then we could have installed friendly Kurdish and Shi’ite dictators and cut out Saddam, who’d have ended up in an Iraqi rump state about as relevant as Syria. Of course, this sort of thing is anathema to the “international community” of politicians, because it violates the principle that states are sacred.