“We don’t belong here, and people are afraid to say it.”
So a US Embassy employee in Baghdad tells Leila Feidel of McClatchy Newspapers. (Via Spencer Ackerman.) Well I’ll say it. Reading all the back and forth lately between Eric Martin and Cernig about what alliances may or may not be developing among this or that faction of the opposition, or the goverment, or people in transition from one to the other, and musings from the odious to the anguished about who may need to get whacked, just brings home that
1) Nobody in this country either knows or can know what the real agendas of the various Iraqi factions are. That goes for the US government and the American people both.
2) Nobody in this country can “make Iraq better.” The American people can’t even say at any given point that “making Iraq better” is the US government’s aim.
3) America has no idea what it is doing in Iraq. Nor can America know what it is doing in Iraq.
4) We don’t deserve to redefine victory as some vicious thing we could actually achieve and pursue it.
5) The notion that we must “save Iraq” is based on the same monumental vanity that prompted the invasion in the first place. We committed an act of enormous vainglory and callousness, and it is sinful to compound it. Our “mission” in Iraq has become a sick joke. Everyone in the world gets it but our governing elites and hangers-on, though nobody laughs.
Comment by steve duncan —
May 14, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
Bush (among several others) surely deserves to hang for his crimes.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 14, 2007 @ 9:45 pm
You said it all, Jim.
Comment by the talking dog —
May 14, 2007 @ 11:02 pm
Well, this is the problem with still refusing to publicly come clean and reconcile that the reasons we went in for proved to be… erroneous. It still serves domestic political agendas to pretend that (1) there really were massive stockpiles of
Nucularnuclear weapons, and that Saddam and that (2) OBL were, you know, the same guy. It kind of throws off, you know, the mission in Iraq… but what matters is winning American elections, not some stupid foreign persons’ hearts and minds.Third place– Wolfowitz’s/Feith’s battle against the Nazi/Baathists who killed 6 million Jews/sent $10,000 checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers (no word on whether any were ever cashed given the state of Palestinian/Iraqi banking)/launched scuds at Israel– involved “democratizing” and bringing our perfectly rational goal of instantly bringing a hostile Iraqi public (that we had f***ed over before, btw, under the tender and able tutelage of Poppy Bush, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, no less)… into a magical state that would welcome us with flowers, and immediately become pro- American and pro-Israel–
kind of didn’t work out.
So now, we kind of have to go for reason (4), i.e., we need to prevent the kind of regional insanity that could draw Turkey, Iran, and quite possibly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States into all of this mess, destabiilizing the region for decades, providing a real (rather than imagined) base for terrorist operations, and sending the price of oil to the moon (which would, you know, force us to conserve energy… albeit, by causing some economic… disruption…
So to prevent a really bad outcome that would have been inconceivable had we not gone in in the first place, it looks like we’ll have to stay, you know, a while longer…
(There’s still a bright side: we can stil call those who want to, you know, point out the… errors… “traitors” and “defeatists” and all of those other productive names that have served us so well in lieu of rational discussion for the last 5 1/2 years.)
Comment by julian —
May 15, 2007 @ 4:28 am
“America has no idea what it is doing in Iraq. Nor can America know what it is doing in Iraq.”
This (strong) claim — always elegantly phrased — is one of the things that keeps me coming back. I’m wondering if either Jim or someone else can unpack it. If it’s true, it has obvious political ramifications, not least for the conduct of foriegn policy, but my interest in the claim is strictly epistemological. What I’d really like to know is just how radical a claim it is. So: when does a strange group attain this un-knowable status? And how big does it have to be? Can it be as small as a single individual? Further: just how limited is our knowledge supposed to be? In my disputes with my next-door neighbor, am I as epistemologically constrained as the US Army is when it intervenes in Iraqi disputes? I gather that the answer to these might just be “Go read some Hayek!” but if there’s something else people could add, I’d be in their debt.
Comment by Nell —
May 15, 2007 @ 6:59 am
I’ll give it a try. It has less to do with the inherent un-knowability of the group than with the ingrained self-deceptions of the would-be “knowers.”
(Though enormous gulfs in language and culture only increase the effect, they’re not the essence of the problem.)
My conviction that this is so comes from the U.S. experience in Viet Nam and then, with only a pause of a few years, in El Salvador.
There was nothing inherently un-knowable about Vietnamese society and politics. Among others, Bernard Fall and Frances Fitzgerald, wrote accessibly and knowledgeably for an audience that was willing to come to the subject with few preconceptions.
But the people responsible for making decisions simply could not take in what these writers said. To do so would require abandoning too many beliefs that sustained them in power, or in the pretense that there was anything right, noble, or even legitimate about that power. It would have required abandoning the stated goals of the war, which were to prevent the Viet Minh from coming to power.
The problem isn’t at bottom one of knowledge, it’s political. That is to say, it’s about power. Counterinsurgencies develop because political conflicts aren’t defused or contained by accommodation. To ‘know’ the ‘enemy’ well enough to be effective requires recognizing what accommodations would be enough to de-escalate the conflict. But those are usually the accommodations that are in direct conflict with the very goals of the counterinsurgency campaign.
Comment by Nell —
May 15, 2007 @ 7:04 am
The effect is heightened, multiplied, when the powers that be try to sell the U.S. public on a prolonged counterinsurgency or occupation. The imperatives of domestic politics make it even more impossible for people who need to stay within the bounds of permissible thought and discussion to speak the truth.
The truth, in most matters of foreign and military policy, is unsayable. We can’t handle it…
Comment by the talking dog —
May 15, 2007 @ 8:12 am
When you own the kind of hammer that looks like the ground-based, heavy armored divisions you used in the Battle of the Bulge (and planned to deploy against the rolling Red Army in Central Europe for decades), the problems of the world begin to look like the kind of nails that get hit by those kind of tools…
The world hasn’t really looked that way for decades, but our military still does; the irony is that we are making THE SAME MISTAKES in Iraq as we did in Vietnam, i.e., not being one iota as flexible as our enemies. In Iraq as in Vietnam, our military boasts that it never lost a battle; and once again, forgetting the total irrelevance of this if it does not lead to overall strategic victory.
The irony remains: we had an excellent option vis a vis Saddam’s Iraq in early 2003 (i.e., do nothing)… but there was no “debate”, no political backbone by anyone in office (just by a probable slight majority of the country who knew something was wrong, but was unrepresented at the all-important Beltway cocktail parties or the New York Times newsroom.)With al-Maliki’s and Chalabi’s Iraq in 2007, all of our options are bad.
Someone who isn’t a moron may be able to sort this out in some way that is less than “disaster”; the question is, will the public be willing to continue to take the casualties and expense until the moron leaves in January 2009 (as, Heavens!, “impeachment is off the table).
Comment by Eric Martin —
May 15, 2007 @ 9:27 am
The problem isn’t at bottom one of knowledge, it’s political. That is to say, it’s about power. Counterinsurgencies develop because political conflicts aren’t defused or contained by accommodation. To ‘know’ the ‘enemy’ well enough to be effective requires recognizing what accommodations would be enough to de-escalate the conflict. But those are usually the accommodations that are in direct conflict with the very goals of the counterinsurgency campaign.
Well said Nell. For example, the question is: Which side is the Iraqi government on? Are the various parts that make up said government really trying to push for reconciliation, or just their own respective narrow interests. Or, perhaps relatedly, are some pushing an agenda on behalf of Iran.
We probably know at least part of the answer (sadly, the latter two), but politically we cannot admit as such. Further, the groups that we would most likely need to enlist to establish a broader, more inclusive regime would be the elements that would insist that we leave. So we pretend, and sometimes the policymakers involved in pretending can hypnotize themselves with their own spin. At the very least, what comes out is an incoherent and jumbled mash whereby we host SCIRI’s top guy at the White House, but hold up Sadr as the “Iranian friendly” radical. Sure.
One more item to unpack is the tension between Iran and our Sunni Arab allies in the region. On the one hand, we’d like to unify those Sunni regimes in opposition to Iran, but those same regimes view the current Iraqi government as an important manifestation of the Iran problem. But we won’t abandon that Iraqi government because it is our convenient fiction.
So what are we doing in Iraq? Trying to rally support to counter Iran, while supporting the most obvious manifestation of Iranian ascendancy in recent memory.
A commenter at needlenose captured the circularity of this logic quite well the other day while discussing Cheney’s trip to Saudi Arabia:
[Cheney is going to] tell the guy who’s funding the insurgency that we’re going to lean on an Iranian friendly gov’t (running death squad operations out of the fifth floor linen closet) [to make political concessions in order] to end the insurgency he’s funding?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
May 15, 2007 @ 10:03 am
Everything Nell said is right, and also there are more reasons for why our government remains ignorant. Bluntly, learning about Iraq will not help your Congressperson get reelected. So they don’t. That’s why you can have a head of th House subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence unaware of the difference between Shiites and Sunnis.
People learn when they face personal consequences to their decisions. Our leaders and bureaucrats do not face any consequences whatsoever for their Iraq related decisions, and so they have no incentive to abandon their delusions. Only Iraqis and our soldiers will pay the price.