If Something’s Not Worth Doing It’s Not Worth Doing Right
Rajiv Chandrasekheran had a devastating article about what we just can’t call the Iraqi Reconstruction in yesterday’s Washin/gton Post. It embarrasses me because the whole endeavor was so inept it over-confirms what’s been my central thesis since starting this blog: that foreign interventionism is the international version of central planning and prey to all the flaws FA Hayek identified in that conceit. Briefly:
Inherently unstable coalitions form to support it – inherently, because the different factions want the intervention for irreconcilable reasons.
Based ultimately on brute force, the intervention destroys the delicate web of local knowledge required to make the society work.
The intervention itself creates problems that become proof of the need for further intervention.
Hey, we’ve been over this. Inconveniently, the Bush Administration’s effort in Iraq has been so cosmically inept you feel sheepish holding it up as an example of a structural flaw in interventionism itself. Maybe, a voice whispers, this crowd really did just suck that much. But I have to throw the flag when the lesson Greg Djerejian draws from the story is
We must now focus on lessons learned, including ensuring that a nation-building effort is never again run via such cronyistic folly, but rather by finding and incentivizing the best and the brightest to man the effort, selected mostly by rigorous meritocratic criteria. Rumsfeld initially demanded ownership of this nation-building effort and ran it with his typically cheap bravura, a frivolity that would have led a better man to long ago resign in shame (it should be noted too that the President and the Vice President are totally complicit in the mostly bungled effort).
Near as I can tell, he’s not using the phrase “best and brightest” with even a hint of irony. This isn’t the first war to produce a slew of articles and books about American naivete and vainglory abroad. This isn’t the first political party to produce a clown college of political missionaries.
Before we get too wrapped up in finding and incentivizing, it’s worth reviewing just what a stupid idea the Iraq plan was in the first place. Yglesias gets part of it:
The idea was that we were going to reconstruct Iraq into a stable, unitary, liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The odds of achieving this were always extremely low.
But it’s worse than that. “We” were going to reconstruct Iraq into a stable, unitary, liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East so that the rest of the Muslim Middle East would remake itself in Iraq’s image so that a violent fringe of the Muslim Middle East would cease committing terrorism against the United States and the mass of the Muslim Middle East would drop its objections to American policies in the region because they now basked in the sunshine of freedom. The standard theory, you’ll recall, is that oppressive governments denied self-expression to their people, bamboozling them with anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda. The most restless among their subjects turned their violent frustrations outward instead of upward. Democratic reform in the Middle East would change all this. That was how the conquest of Iraq would win the Global War on Terror.
The Iraq War could only count as a victory, on its advocates’ own terms, if the rest of the Muslim Middle East set about emulating a stable, unitary, liberal democratic Iraq and anti-American terrorism ended because of that.
Of all the reasons the Big Idea should strike you as self-evidently stupid, the biggest, I think, is what we might call the attitude problem. The Big Idea is monumentally condescending. Those silly Hajis don’t know their own minds! They say they hate our policies, but that’s just confusion!
You can’t do a genuinely effective job of “freeing” people you think so little of. While hawks from President Bush on down accused doves of “thinking some people don’t deserve freedom,” it was the hawks themselves who located all of the wisdom on our side, and all of the pathology on the Other. Why on earth would conquerors like that pay any real attention to what their subjects/clients thought their society needed? What could people like that know that mattered?
Comment by Happy Jack —
September 18, 2006 @ 11:18 pm
It’s easy to implement the Big Idea, if you just ignore the fact that other countries have cultures stretching back thousands of years.
It’s easy to ignore those cultures, if you only spend time with inhabitants who are just like us ( their groceries carry Red Bull!).
It’s easy to nurture democracy in a federal, sectarian, Islamic, oil-state, if you don’t have to provide a successful model (closest parallel: Nigeria?).
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
September 19, 2006 @ 8:25 am
This isn’t the first war to produce a slew of articles and books about American naivete and vainglory abroad. This isn’t the first political party to produce a clown college of political missionaries.
Thank you, Jim. The most galling thing to me about this affair was its utter predicability. We’ve been here before. Pick your intervention. To paraphrase A Canticle for Leibowitz, are we doomed to it?
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
September 19, 2006 @ 9:48 am
I think it’s a given that any country with the power to intervene will try to intervene, no matter what their supposed ideology is.
Therefore, the immediate danger is American exceptionalism, which causes other countries to insufficiently restrain us. I’m not sure whether even 8 years of Bush is enough to destroy that.
Comment by ran —
September 19, 2006 @ 10:13 am
This Iraq fiasco was never for a second about “bringing democracy to the ME” or “freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant” or any of that risible horseshit. Those lies were strictly for the mouthbreathing base and other gullible hence useful idiots.
It’s standard great game stuff – the oil, the permanent bases from which to menace the other countries that refuse to genuflect before their US/Israeli masters, and a useful pretext for wiping their ass with the constitution here at home and converting cowardly little moron Shrub into a strutting war president and getting the dipshit reelected.
Comment by Leonard —
September 19, 2006 @ 10:41 am
Ran, you’re missing the Hayekian point: “Inherently unstable coalitions form to support it – inherently, because the different factions want the intervention for irreconcilable reasons.”
Certainly Iraq was about “freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant†— for some people. The mouthbreathers, as you call them — people like Andrew Sullivan. It was about revenge, really, for the real mouthbreathers in this nation. It was also about oil, the permanent bases, and general power-mongering for the party in power — for some people. And it was about other things, for yet other people. I.e. for some Iraqi expats it was about freeing their people and getting into power themselves.
All of these disparate groups were never going to agree on how to reconstruct the place, just as they did not agree on why to attack it. Many would not care about reconstruction – people like John Derbyshire, who’s realistic about what is possible. Many wanted their oil, so, that would take precedence. Some had their messianic urge to export democracy. And some just wanted themselves as the new Saddam.
Comment by solarjetman —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:00 am
#5 – I’d like to add one more group – the group that wanted the next American election to be about war.
Comment by Keifus —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:18 am
The standard theory, you’ll recall, is that oppressive governments denied self-expression to their people, bamboozling them with anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda. The most restless among their subjects turned their violent frustrations outward instead of upward.
One of the great ironies of this is that the promoters of the standard theory needed to deny self-expression to their people with jingoistic propaganda, in an effort to turn their violent frustrations outward instead of upward. The buck stops where again?
I also liked where you were going with the chain of reasoning for a democratic middle east. Even if the probility of each of those things were modest (which is unlikely), once you start multiplying them, the odds go south right quick.
K
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
September 19, 2006 @ 11:40 am
foreign interventionism is the international version of central planning
Very true — except it lacks the democratic controls that allow central planning to often work just fine in the real world. The catastrophe in Iraq has not reduced my faith in the NYC subway system one bit.
But yes, the lesson one ought to draw from Iraq is that the US should not try to improve foreign governments by force — should not, in fact, use military force abroad except in response to an actual attack.
Trackback by Inactivist —
September 19, 2006 @ 3:09 pm
Hayek, Iraq, and the never-ending need for further intervention…
Jim Henley pulls out his Hayek, and examines whether Operation Iraqi Freedom was just a particularly inept attempt at nation-building, or whether one should understand that it is nearly always a fool’s errand. Jim has long rejected that any serious p…
Comment by thoreau —
September 19, 2006 @ 7:45 pm
First, Jim, you nailed it here:
Of all the reasons the Big Idea should strike you as self-evidently stupid, the biggest, I think, is what we might call the attitude problem. The Big Idea is monumentally condescending. Those silly Hajis don’t know their own minds! They say they hate our policies, but that’s just confusion!
Second, I never thought about the “inherently unstable coalitions” part before. I’ve argued with some people who say “Why does there only have to be one reason? Why not several reasons?” Now, in most parts of life I’m fine with having several reasons for doing something. In fact, for most things in life you’d damn well better have more than one reason to do it.
But wars are the sorts of things that you do with the goal of ending it at some point. If you don’t have a very clear objective, then you’ll never get out.
And, to be quite blunt, I think that for a lot of Americans it was in the end about lashing out for 9/11. Some will talk about “spreading democracy”, others will talk about “permanent bases” (they’ll only be “permanent” until the last chopper departs from the roof). People who like to pretend that they’ve attended the War College will say “In Fourth Generation Warfare you need to establish a credible deterrent to put in place the proper incentives for dictators to cease state-sponsorship of unlawful combatants.”
But in the end, they want to “spread democracy” because they think we need to kick some ass after 9/11. They want permanent bases so we can kick some ass after 9/11. They want to (insert fancy words here) because of 9/11.
Comment by Jennifer —
September 19, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
They want permanent bases so we can kick some ass after 9/11
Even without 9/11, permanent bases in close proximity to the Middle East and lots of oil would be useful, I’m sure.
Comment by wade —
September 20, 2006 @ 3:40 am
i heard that Robert Pape on the radio yesterday, talking about what motivates suicide bombers… although his conclusions amount to stating the bleeding obvious, there are at least some facts and figures with which to batter the the interventionists… can i sue my government for putting me at greater risk of terrorism by invading foreign countries and stationing troops there…??
Comment by Monte Davis —
September 20, 2006 @ 12:41 pm
On your “so that” sequence: look back to the razor-sharp wish list in David Corn’s “I hope the neocons are right” column of March 2003:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=497
Comment by pseudonymous in nc —
September 21, 2006 @ 7:44 am
Some of the best and brightest were in Iraq. They were the British civilians sent to the south: lots of Arabic-speakers and people with post-conflict experience. They were the UN mission that left when its leader was killed. Didn’t really work out that well. Rory Stewart’s book shows what happened in his corner. The idiot progeny in the Green Zone may have played their part, but ultimately the Big Idea got bit on the ass by the Big Reality.
Comment by Andrew —
September 21, 2006 @ 4:08 pm
Just to make an interesting argument of it (Jim, you might remember me from a time when I was a Hawk, and you praised a comment I made on the uselessness of intellegence Info).
Perhaps there WAS a real issue in 2003, that might be settled by force: the sanction regime was falling apart – and brutalizing the Iraqi people – and the prospect of Saddam getting a fresh inflow of 40 billion cash is simply unacceptable.
So…a short war to remove Saddam and his sons (Remember, we wouldn’t have gone at all, if he had voluntarily left…and no Democracy Project.)
AND…we go in with a RANGE of options, depending on what we encounter. Of course, if the folks are weeping tears of gratitude, and throwing flowers on the tanks, we stay a couple of years to help them build their fledgling democracy – even if hundreds, or thousands of American troops become casualties of minority soreheads.
OR…if we encounter lethargy, paranoia, resentment and pettiness, then we hunt down the Saddams, make a deal for the Kurds and get out in six months (without rebuilding a damn thing).
Why not have a range of goals, between a minimum and a maximum?