The Road to Nerfed ‘Em
Mark Danner’s new essay review in the New York Review of Books is close to the most comprehensive account of how the Bush Administration made a iatrogenic disaster in Iraq that I have read. It overlooks the extent to which the United States early became hostage to the wishes of Iraq’s local and sudden-blooming Shiite power structure. When we finally develop historians with the expertise to chronicle the Iraqi side of the Great Work in detail, I suspect we’ll find a funhouse mirror of ourselves. While Sistani and Sadr and Hakim and Jaafari and all the rest who have come and gone were closer to the real situation in Iraq than we, they were, I’d hazard, utterly unprepared to govern an entire country, and in their own way blinkered by their provincialism too, and had to fall back on pious hopes, prejudice and guesswork. Perhaps Ayatollah Sistani even wishes he could have back his insistence on early direct elections now. (Since Sistani’s name does not even appear in Danner’s article, we’ll have to find the answer to that possibility elsewhere.)
Of course our own ignorance was even greater and our instincts worse. By “we” I mean the President of the United States.
But while Danner scants the Shiite side of the story, he’s very good on the twin Hayekian failures that afflicted the decision to go to war in the first place and the Clauswitzian failure that befuddles much of DoD, the White House and its dwindling pep squad in the major and minor media, even though the names Hayek and Clauswitz don’t appear either.
Hayek said two things about central planning. First that the desire for central planning inspires irreconcilable coalitions to campaign for it: A wants central planning because it will give him the power to do X, which he regards as crucial; B wants central planning because it will give him the power to do Y, which he loves as much as A loves X, but Y and X are incompatible - fostering the one tends to hinder the other. Someone gets the power, but one or both end up frustrated in actual practice. Second that central planning cannot absorb all the information it would need to “work” on its own terms, and even by the exercise of power will destroy information. Substitute “benevolent hegemony” or “transformative war” or however you like to describe the Bush Doctrine and the principles hold perfectly for Iraq.
Yeah, I said all this before. But Danner gets them both. He opens the piece with an anecdote about “the knowledge problem” and later shows irreconcilable coalitions in action, the “humiliate and liberate” movement.
As to Clauswitz, this:
Three years and eight months after the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense and his allies see in Iraq not one war but two. One is the Real Iraq War—the “outright success” that only very few would deny, the war in which American forces were “greeted as liberators,” according to the famous prediction of Dick Cheney which the Vice President doggedly insists was in fact proved true: “true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly.” It is “within this context” that the former secretary of defense and the Vice President see America’s current war in Iraq as in fact comprising a brief, dramatic, and “enormously successful” war of a few weeks’ duration leading to a decisive victory, and then…what? Well, whatever we are in now: a Phase Two, a “postwar phase” (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) which has lasted three and a half years and continues. In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died— and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized—unplanned.
The notional division is, in Clauswitzian terms, a crock of shit. The political aims of conquering Iraq were laid down in the absurdly misnamed “Bletchley II” conference at AEI soon after the massacres of September 11, 2001. (Another time on the misnaming: only so much folly explicated per blog post!) In short: Iraq the Model. There has been no day, from the fall of Baghdad until now, in which violent obstacles have not stood in the way of ITM. From the looters to “deadenders” to death squads, someone has been presenting a political and military challenge to the Great Work. Even the far narrower terms of “producing an unthreatening Iraq by force” have yet to be met for even a moment, as the President and his retainers admit every time they tell us how we dare not leave.
It’s all the same war. A wrongly launched, stupidly fought, unsuccessful and wasteful one. Imagining otherwise is both symptom and cause of the folly.
UPDATE: Neel Krishnaswami objects in comments:
Their behavior is almost like the opposite of rational choice theory. We can’t call it “the same war” because that suggests a level of coherent purpose that Bush and his appointees aren’t competent enough to achieve. IMO, It’s “all the same random, bloody, pointless screwing around”, rather than “the same war”.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
November 30, 2006 @ 10:57 pm
I am not at all convinced that its all the same war, because I no longer think that the Administration had enough of an idea of what it was doing to seriously ascribe continuity of motive to them. They had bad intentions, AND they had false ideas about what was possible, AND they ignored the evidence, AND they made bad choices even relative to their immoral, incorrect, and willfully ignorant understandings.
Their behavior is almost like the opposite of rational choice theory. We can’t call it “the same war” because that suggests a level of coherent purpose that Bush and his appointees aren’t competent enough to achieve. IMO, It’s “all the same random, bloody, pointless screwing around”, rather than “the same war”.
Comment by scats —
November 30, 2006 @ 11:26 pm
a guy i met who was in Iraq in the Guard told me that in practice they called the invasion and conquest of Baghdad the “first war” and everything after the “second war”. As in, “Back in the first war is was in Mosul, but I spent most of the second outside Fallujah.”
this had the dual propaganda function of making them feel victorious in the first instance and giving them moral highground in the second. after all, they had won the war, it was over, and thus the country was in a state of peace until the Iraqi’s started attacking them.
So the Iraqi’s were the aggressors who unjustly violated the peace and bore full culpability for the situation.
Comment by Grant Gould —
December 1, 2006 @ 7:22 am
The difference between the would-be Iraq-rulers in the US and the would-be Iraq-rulers in Iraq is that the ones in Iraq are suffering a crude form of natural selection entirely absent from the US. People incapable of rule in Iraq are discredited, imprisoned, or killed; people incapable of rule in the US are kept on for a while, perhaps given a medal.
It is likely that this form of accelerated evolution will bear fruit: Iraqis will, in the end, prove to have produced and promoted more people capable of tyrannizing Iraq into relative quiet than the Americans did. The power of incentives, I suppose.
Comment by 555 —
December 1, 2006 @ 9:52 am
Their behavior is almost like the opposite of rational choice theory. We can’t call it “the same war” because that suggests a level of coherent purpose that Bush and his appointees aren’t competent enough to achieve.
This line of argument misunderstands Hayek. It says, if we had only had the right people in place, we would’ve succeeded or, at least, done better. They didn’t lack coherent purpose - if anything they had an overabundance of it - they lacked the ability to negotiate among all of the political considerations, including differences within the Administration itself - in order to effectively implement their vision. In addition, there vision was to remake a country, so it was bound fail. This is Hayek (of the Road to Serfdom) and Hayek (of The Fatal Conceit).
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
December 1, 2006 @ 11:57 am
555, I think that the public sales job of the war was overdetermined — Weapons of Mass Destruction! Saddam and al-Qaeda! Iraq the Model! — but I don’t think the administration actually believed any of the reasons it offered for the war. That’s because every single argument they made along these lines turned out to be filled with deliberate lies.
We know they didn’t believet the WMD argument because Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN was filled with faked evidence. We know that they didn’t care about making democracy, because Rumsfeld actually forbade any planning for the postwar epoch. And Saddam’s “links” to al-Qaeda were just made up out of whole cloth, and carefully hinted at in just such a way that they could deny they were linking them.
The sole possibility left is that they wanted to kill a bunch of foreigners, and then come home — “shock and awe” was the goal itself rather than tactics. Immoral as that goal was, they screwed it up, too. Anyone who’s read any history knows that shows of force don’t work on peoples; they work on governments. Bombing London makes the English people as a whole more defiant, not less. The show of force only works on the government, because it reminds the leadership that they have a valuable sinecure they can lose. The instant you topple the enemy government is the instant you can no longer have a short victorious war.
Bush I understood this, and his son didn’t.
Comment by Pooh —
December 1, 2006 @ 2:09 pm
Grant Gould - exactly.
Reminds me (as do most things) about a scene from “The Wire” - two cops are watching some drugs dealers beat the crap out of some other drug dealers. One says to the other “That’s why we can’t win. They F*** up, they get beat. We F*** up, they give us pensions.”
Comment by Thomas Nephew —
December 1, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
Something I think Danner overlooks — or maybe it’s just outside the scope of his excellent article — is the underlying motivation. I think it was basically to get to that “Mission Accomplished” photo op, and then rule this country on that basis. From an interview I wrote about with Mickey Herskowitz, Bush’s 2000 campaign biographer:
Also:
I think Iraq itself and all the foreign policy of it was always decidedly secondary to them. Rove and Bush probably planned their election campaigns with more care and attention to data than they planned Iraq 2003, because that’s what they cared about most.
Comment by sean —
December 1, 2006 @ 6:06 pm
Regarding Grant Gould’s comment above, and some others in the same spirit, doesn’t it seem more likely that Iraq is simply on a path to ungovernability? Which is about where Gaza is now, or where much of Europe got to during the Thirty Years War. Eventually, if history is a guide, Iraqis will sicken of the slaughter, but it could be decades. I sincerely doubt that any current player will emerge as a secure ruler.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 3, 2006 @ 1:26 pm
Sean - yes, but “cuius regio, eius religio” isn’t possible till you have a prince.