On Credibility

Josh Marshall says that "the argument about the need to maintain 'credibility' when deciding whether to withdraw from an ill-fated engagement is not one that, I think, can be dismissed out of hand," before dismissing it in a non-out-of-hand kind of way. I think it sort of can be dismissed out of hand. Credibility isn't an all-purpose commodity and, indeed, it's not especially fungible. Whether or not the United States "has credibility" is rarely the issue, rather what matters is whether or not particular threats or promises we make are seen as credible.

This, in turn, is going to overwhelmingly be determined by our objective capacity to fulfill promises rather than by subjective assessments of our badassness. Under the circumstances, it's very hard to see what kind of credibility benefit accrues to us from keeping the bulk of the US Army's fighting strength in Iraq. Objectively, that only diminishes our capacity to do things in the world. What would really increase our credibility vis-a-vis, say, Iran would be for our threats to actually be credible the odds that we can somehow trick Teheran into believing we have the capacity to invade and conquer their country seem poor.

Comments

Well, Iraq is an ally now whether we like it or not. To abandon an ally when the going gets tough is to send a message, is it not, to others, including Taiwan about the credibility of our alliance commitments-- we are with you until we are uncomfortable, then we are not with you.

Posted by pt | November 20, 2006 2:23 PM

How is Iraq an ally again? Show your work, please.

Incidentally, wouldn't the best way of "maintaining credibility" always be not getting into fights you have no idea how to win? I think that part and parcel of accepting many of these rationales for staying is for those advancing the rationale to admit that they seriously fucked up in the first place, and if they had it to do over again, etc., etc. Until then, I think the proper response is "well you should have thought about that before we got in the car, now you have to hold it."

Posted by Pooh | November 20, 2006 2:27 PM

Well, Iraq is an ally now whether we like it or not.

Which Iraq is that? The one we're still considering partitioning?

send a message, is it not, to others, including Taiwan about the credibility of our alliance commitments-- we are with you until we are uncomfortable,

But what does Taiwan do if gets that message? Capitulate to China immediately? I suspect they'd hope that they misunderstood the message.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 20, 2006 2:34 PM

The last six years have been kind of unique - only 1 out of 43 Presidents is as bad as this one is -- combined with the shock of 9-11, he was able to cause damage that is hard to fully calculate at this point, but our credibility with regard to Iraq should be considered a sunk cost.

Posted by theCoach | November 20, 2006 2:37 PM

It's silly to say "Iraq" is a US ally. But it is less silly to say the Kurds are a US ally, and abandoning them would make other folks in the future less willing to do what the Kurds have done.

A few individual Arab Iraqis are also US allies, but the obligation to them can be paid by resettling them in the US.

Posted by Pithlord | November 20, 2006 2:49 PM

Credibility. We're talking about an empire that doesn't prefer to think of itself as an empire and you ask about American credibility. We've hugely more wanton and destructive than the bloodthirsty dictator we've overthrown and we see ourselves as having a peacekeeping mission in Iraq. We're wasting our national treasure to install a regime that will be inimical to our interests. And we think we're being rational. We could help relieve horrifying suffering in Darfur for a fraction of the effort, but that's Africa, and Africa is irrelevant to our national security. That's Real Politik from people who decry Real Politik.

We're so lunatic that there's no meaning to being lunatic. We're as capricious as Hobgoblin in the body of a giant. We're like AIDS if AIDS had a gun and a Mercedes.

Credibility.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 20, 2006 3:13 PM

send a message, is it not, to others, including Taiwan about the credibility of our alliance commitments-- we are with you until we are uncomfortable,

But, to reiterate my point: Really? If I'm Taiwanese, then my Iraq-related concern about credibility is that with the US bogged down in Iraq, it's objectively more difficult for the USA to help Taiwan.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | November 20, 2006 3:22 PM

The main source of the credibility argument is, to put it bluntly, that many of our leaders would rather see the young men and women in the armed forces bleed than lose face or lose political points. When a credibility issue is not prominent, as with our encouragement of a Shia revolt after the first gulf war, it doesn't seem to carry a lot of weight.
But, the Bush regime is just the latest in a long line of practitioners of this unholy tradeoff.

Posted by pg | November 20, 2006 3:25 PM

Matt hits the nail on the head here. Imagine reading the following (made-up) passage: "The terrorists have already won. Bush abandoned his core principles by letting his dog into the room when it scratched at the door."

Seems absurd, right? Bush letting the dog into the room has nothing to do with terrorism or the war in Iraq. As such, actions taken with regards to the dog should not affect beliefs about the war in Iraq. As Matt points out, staying in Iraq decreases our ability to make future military commitments without accomplishing much of anything. We can't afford to become any more credible!

One problem with beliefs: if someone believes that staying in Iraq is the only thing preventing, say, terrorists from achieving global domination, then this belief cannot be disproved so long as we stay in Iraq. This belief makes no sense, but if you hold this belief and personally control our Iraq policy, we're never going to leave Iraq. Game theory runs into this problem too- beliefs about actions that are not taken drive the actions that are taken. So you need to make additional assumptions to ensure that beliefs about actions that are not taken make sense.

Posted by Joel W | November 20, 2006 4:06 PM

There is a real world out there, outside of all the inside the Beltway neocon strategic analysis and posturing about maintaining credibility. In that real world, people go away and die and never come back. Don't miss Chris Ware's stunning, mournful meditation on war and memory on the (four) cover(s) of the New Yorker and in the longer narrative on their website, which is so evocative of that larger, real world.

Posted by Madison Guy | November 20, 2006 4:12 PM

There are certain kinds of military commitments that US leaders have been far too free in making, and which are difficult to sustain because they don't involve direct threats against the US homeland, and thus depend on ambiguous and uncertain commitments from the US public. If it turns out that US leaders are in the future less willing than their predecessors to make such commitments, because potential allies in these endeavors find that the US leader's commitments lack credibility, then I would say this is an excellent outcome.

The lessons of Vietnam and Iraq are really the same. In each case, US leaders gambled on falsehood. They reckoned that could sustain public support for an optional war - one with only very specualtive strategic and defensive value - by relying on public fear and ignorance, amplified by exaggeration of the threat and it imminence, by misinformation and by disinfomation. In each case, the war lasted so long that the clouds of lies were eventually dissipated. And in both cases, support for the war collapsed among large portions of the public once these people realized that the alleged threat was not nearly so great as had been portrayed, and the costs of the war were grossly out of proportion to the actual threat the war was supposedly designed to counter.

Posted by Dan Kervick | November 20, 2006 4:14 PM

Re: Credibility and Taiwan.

1. When the US invaded Iraq Chinese militarists argued that this was their only chance to invade Taiwan because the US Army couldn't respond. North Korea has made similar calculations, and developed nuclear weapons that threaten our allies in Japan, and South Korea. How does continuing to keep our army in Iraq further our credibility to protect our allies? How does the concrete

2. When is the last time that a US soldier was killed by Taiwanese insurgents? Are there any other allies that you can point to where the US army is propping up their government from an active rebellion? The parallel that you're drawing is very strained.

3. Can you give any concrete examples of people in Taiwan drawing parallels between withdrawing in Iraq and ending our defence promises to Taiwan? Or any other allies?

Posted by Justaguy | November 20, 2006 5:06 PM

I take Matt's point; The Iraq war does undermine US commitments elsewhere. But, the converse is not also true because all else does not remain equal. The manner of our leaving Iraq will shape our intention to keep commitments that some see as tangential to US security (whether they are or not is another debate). Iraq may or may not technically qualify as an ally (I think that it's pretty clear the government is a military ally of the US when one reads the president's commitments and so on) but no will doubt that they should doubt our resolve if we leave b/c of several thousand fatalities and widespread genocide or a similar uber catastrophe results. We will have basically proven that we are not willing to spend blood and treasure to prevent a forseeable calamity. George Packer has a moving piece in this week's TNR showing how many Iraqis have helped America and trusted our word; we are now thinking of abandoning them to their fate, which we helped to create. I, for one, do not think it becomes a great nation to cast them aside. These are not "sunk costs"; they are people who will likely die because we leave.

Posted by pt | November 20, 2006 5:20 PM

pt, your point is weirdly disconnected from reality. We do not have the capacity to prevent the calamity if we stay. We are doing no good by being there. At most we slow the pace of the killing while extending the time period it will last. If you want to protect Iraqis who have helped America, resettle them here. We did this with the South Vietnamese leadership. It is a far lower cost and less destructive way to handle the problem than maintaining an occupying army in a foreign nation.

If our government actually cared about preventing genocide in Iraq, we would be thinking about getting other Arab peacekeeping troops in there and our own troops completely out. We are incapable of maintaining order in Iran at the force levels we are capable of committing. Our troops are an alien and hated presence, who don't even have a common language with the people they are supposed to be policing!

Posted by MQ | November 20, 2006 5:36 PM

What about leaving non-Kurdish Iraq, but staying in Kurdistan?

Posted by Pithlord | November 20, 2006 5:44 PM

How do we actually establish a muscular foreign policy credibility? It's not weather we show "resolve" or some sort of Nitschzian sense of will, but simply a realistic ability to project force.
I think that Iraq has proved the US can get a little crazy, and when it does, it can topple a foreign power with a large army in a matter of weeks. So credibility rests upon keeping a well-trained and well rested military along with a global alliance to help us project power/force anywhere on the globe.
We lose our credibility a little more every day we are in Iraq, because our army is a little more degraded, damaged, and less ready to drop in on any corner of the world.
If we want credibility, we need to do what it takes to re-boot our alliances (so that people want to be our friend, instead of deploring our current actions but kowtowing to our power and influence), let our military forces relax and replenish themselves, and invest in more C-17 transport aircraft.
Then we need to restore the right of Habeus Corpus, give due process to the prisoners in Gitmo, and lead the world in effort to stop the genocide in Sudan (an actually moral act of foreign policy).
That's credibility. Bumbling around in Iraq while a civil war ignites beneath our feet? Definitely a credibility destroyer.

Posted by agorabum | November 20, 2006 7:01 PM

I think you need to distinguish between different types of credibility, for different types of tasks. At the simplest level we offer other countries carrots or sticks. I think Bush has established great credibility with the stick. The problem is he has zero credibility with delivering carrots.

Possible benefits to regional players- for Turkey, an assurance that an independent Kurdistan won't happen. For Iran, a guaranty the U.S. won't attack, or support an attack by Israel. For Syria legitimacy, and for all of them pressure on Israel on the Palestine issue. Do any of these regimes think the U.S. capable of following through? Until they do, a regional solution to Iraq stays a non-starter.

With respect to withdrawing from Iraq, it's irrelevant to credibility on either carrots or sticks. The only credibility it affects is Bush's personal credibility with the American people, and who cares about that?

Posted by BJC | November 20, 2006 8:41 PM

pt:

but no will doubt that they should doubt our resolve if we leave b/c of several thousand fatalities and widespread genocide or a similar uber catastrophe results. We will have basically proven that we are not willing to spend blood and treasure to prevent a forseeable calamity.

This is the part I don't understand. You worry that pulling out of Iraq will hurt our relations with other allies because they will doubt our resolve. But we famously betrayed the Kurds, as I understand it. From wiki:

Kurdish leaders took heart in American statements that they would support an uprising and began fighting, in the hopes of triggering a coup. However, when no American support was forthcoming, Iraqi generals remained loyal and brutally crushed the Kurdish troops. Millions of Kurds fled across the mountains to Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. These incidents would later result in no-fly zones being established in both the North and the South of Iraq. In Kuwait, the Emir was restored and suspected Iraqi collaborators were repressed. Eventually, over 400,000 people were expelled from the country, including a large number of Palestinians (due to their support of and collaboration with Saddam Hussein).

Yet if we have one close set of allies in Iraq, or even the Middle East (excluding Israel), it's the Kurds. Which suggests to me that we can betray our allies without adverse consequences to our relationships to them, largely because a desperate man will grasp at any rope, even one thrown by someone who pulled the rope away at the last second only moments before. It's not pretty, but I think that's an accurate summary of how these things actually work.

Thinking otherwise--thinking that words like "honor" are applicable here--smacks a little bit of D&Dism to me. And sometimes I think that's more or less the mindset that got us into this mess in the first place.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 20, 2006 8:58 PM

The Kurds supported the US again because Bush built his Iraq policy around opposition to the 1991 betrayal of the Kurds. I like Bush 41 but that decision was sickening. Every liberal should think it is sickening. We encouraged them to rise and then abandoned them.

We are stopping genoicide in Baghdad now. If we can bring in arab forces to prevent calamity after we leave or if we have voluntary resettlement before withdrawal, then that's okay. But if we leave in the full knowledge that our leaving will result in genocide (by the Shiites of the Sunnis), and only because of the level of casualties we are now suffering, then let no person who supports that decision ever mutter platitudes about "never again" the holocaust, "never again" rwanda, because by their actions they will have revealed themselves. The neocons may have maliciously loaded the gun, but it is they who will have pulled the trigger, with feigned innocence.

Posted by pt | November 20, 2006 9:15 PM

let no person who supports that decision ever mutter platitudes about "never again" the holocaust, "never again" rwanda, because by their actions they will have revealed themselves.

But that's the thing: how seriously could one take "Never again!" after Rwanda? 800K dead in a few months. We do what our interests dctate. And our moral interests are the first to fray. I think most leaders in the world understand this. I think the Kurds trusted us because they saw that our interests aligned with theirs, and I think they have built up their militias and engaged in acts we would prefer they hadn't because they know that alignment may not be permanent.

Again, I worry that things like this--"The neocons may have maliciously loaded the gun, but it is they who will have pulled the trigger, with feigned innocence"--indicate a willingness (all too apparent at, for example, TNR) to let policy follow poetry.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 20, 2006 9:29 PM

I vote for "badassitude" rather than "badassness".

Posted by ae | November 20, 2006 10:48 PM

But, but ... In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might, beware my power, etc.

Posted by CJColucci | November 20, 2006 11:15 PM

Credibility should surely be tied to a reasonable view of the extent of America's real power in the Middle East. In the post-Cold War world, American power - not having the Soviets to act as a convenient scare figure - was naturally going to diminish. 9/11 didn't change that. The neo-cons, who intentionally smashed the pre-9/11 order in the Middle East, smashed a system that optimized American power. In a sense, though, the choice was between a gradual descent and a catastrophic one. It is too bad the Iraqis bore the brunt, in hundreds of thousands killed, of that choice - but beyond the massacre, in fact, the U.S. is going to have to adapt to a lower level of influence. This isn't the end of the world. Recognizing Iran and seriously talking with Iran is the most important step the U.S. can take to adjust to its new status.

When U.S. power significantly eroded in Southeast Asia, it didn't hurt the American people at all - there was absolutely no harm whatsoever. Not a penny from anybody's pocket, not a single death or injury, nada. But the interests of the American people are, and always will be, asymmetrical to the particular interests of the policy elite running or trying to run American foreign policy. This is a long term problem. The Iraq war proves that a small group with half assed ideas can actually promote and enact a war costing 500 billion dollars. The system that allowed this to happen is seriously sick.

Posted by roger | November 21, 2006 1:43 PM