J-Pod is right -- this John Burns retrospective on Iraq is well worth reading.
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Good Read
06 Feb 2007 03:21 pm
Comments (27)
I think Burns is vastly overrated. He has always struck me as a prima donna living on the praise of his journalistic colleagues. He will never the courage to break with any consensus and his best days were already in the past at the time the drums of war with Iraq started beating. The Washington Post's coverage with Shadid et al has put the Times to shame (and Burns was the bureau chief there for most of that time).
"If only the entire media contingent in Iraq were as good as Burns..."
Quite true, Al--for example, this:
"My guess is that history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done, except to impose its own repressive state with half a million troops, which might have had to last ten years or more, nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring."
Having now praised the author of this statement, are your going to renounce your support for the war?
Agree with Ben: Burns is much overpraised. Dems have a habit of clasping to their chest anyone who seems to come around to their position. Whatever made him misappraise the situation in the first place--whatever he says--remains there. On Iraq, I trust McClatchy more than I trust the NYT.
Rea: I agree with Burns' point - in fact, it's something I've thought for quite a while now. And it doesn't change my opinion of the war one bit.
Burns is right that there is virtually nothing we could have done to prevent the chaos that followed Saddam's demise. But that chaos would have appeared whether we caused Saddam's demise or whether Saddam's regime fell as a result of some non-US cause (e.g., Saddam's natural death, or a coup, or whatever). Therefore, it is incorrect to attribute all of the chaos to Bush or to the Iraq War - it all was going to happen regardless of what we did. The only thing Bush did was affect its timing.
In fact, IMO, it is BETTER that our troops were in Iraq when the regime fell (again, as opposed to Saddam's natural death, or a coup, or whatever). I think our presence in Iraq has likely led the country to a better result than if there were no international forces there. If Saddam had fallen without our troops there, I suspect there would have been a much WORSE civil war. And it is much less likley that Iraq would have been a nascent democracy within 3 years of when the Saddam regime ended.
All in all, Burns' statement only make me feel STRONGER that the war was the right thing to do.
Worth reading, sure. But it's also worth pointing out that this is yet another example of what I've been calling, based on Matt's earlier article, the "Iraqis are incompetent dodge."
(Americans) completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush's phrase, "to stand up" for themselves, to take authority, to take risks.This is, I think, a cop out. The problem is not that Iraqis were "unwilling to stand up for themselves" due to being cowed by years of repression. The problem is that the only sociopolitical institutions that existed in Iraq outside of Kurdish territory were Baath Party-dominated organizations, Shiite religious institutions, and loose traditional clans, none of which amounted to a constituency for liberal democracy.
Buying into the frame presented by John Burns requires you to swallow the same old mythic right-wing bullshit about "great men" shaping the course of history. Great men get nowhere without good political institutions. We could have sent a million troops and accomplished nothing if we just locked down the streets and waited for the magic market to sow the seeds of democracy.
The Iraq Occupation wasn't just a failure of misguided good intentions. It was a failure of conservative ideology.
So, Burns takes the same position as Yglesias in the ‘incompetence dodge’ debate. And it turns out Al does too! Strange bedfellows…
Burns is an excellent reporter, but events have shown him to be a pretty bad as an analyst. He was wrong in his over-optimistic projections before the war, and he’s wrong now when singles out the flaws in Iraqi society as the sole cause of the current civil war.
I suspect that on some level Burns is taking his current position for the same reason as Al: if the chaos we’re seeing now was all inevitable, then both the makers and the advocates of this war are absolved of any moral responsibility.
Not just absolved apparently, they are the heroes! My God, what would have happened if the US military wasn't there!
I really hope Satan is building a new level of hell for these bastards.
I don't see anything worthwhile in Burns' account. It does have the veneer of complexity and searching thoughtfulness, but at bottom it's simply a recitation of the well-worn party line. To wit:
1. The United States undertook the invasion in order to liberate Iraq.
2. Every decision the United States made post-invasion stemmed from "good American instincts": the desire to maximize Iraqi liberation.
3. To the extent that our decisions were mistakes and led to the situation that exits today, they were "good" mistakes, made with the best intentions (the intention to liberate).
4. Hundreds of thousands may be dead, and civil war may rage now and well into the future, but the United States has committed no sin for which to apologize, for its every action was selfless, well-intended and done without malice. If it must be blamed for something, it is for being too good and failing to see beyond its goodness.
But how do we square this account with such essential facts as:
1. The reasons for invading Iraq actually given at the time.
2. The CPG's initial resistance to holding popular elections, which was broken only in the face of massive public outrage and demonstration.
3. The actual repressive practices of the Occupation (midnight raids, the levelling of whole cities (such as Fallujah), indefinite imprisonment, etc.).
4. Our continued construction of permanent military bases, despite the contrary wishes of most Iraqis.
5. Our continued refusal to honor or even contemplate honoring the essential wish of most Iraqis, which is to withdraw.
6. The absence of a comparable display of "altruism" in the whole of world history.
Now, these facts don't point to any explanation of American motivation in particular, but they do undermine somewhat the CW that Burns recites. Of course, to a large degree I'm missing the point, since historical accuracy isn't what propagandists such as Burns are after. They're in the business of succoring power, providing absolution and obscuring hard questions. But it is disappointing to see critics like Matt--people who seem to want to draw lessons from Iraq and prevent fiascos like it from ever occuring again--embrace a CW that essentially makes significant criticism impossible and lays the groundwork for future repetitions of criminal disaster.
Al, so you believe the invasion was the right thing to do because it slowed the pace of an inevitable civil war? Now it's the duty of the U.S. military to serve as civil war speed bumps in disintegrating societies around the world? That's not just an imprudent use of military force - it's retarded.
> (Americans) completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush's phrase, "to stand up" for themselves, to take authority, to take risks.
What is a civil war other than a willingness '"to stand up" for themselves, to take authority, to take risks'.
Don't we need to be talking about invading Cuba? Who knows how bad it will be if the U.S. military isn't there when Castro dies.
To take Al's point with a dollop of seriousness, the point is that the civil war occurred because there was a sudden power vacuum and a complete breakdown of social order. Absent an invasion, there's not very many scenarios that would have worked out that way. Maybe Saddam would have died and left his sons in power, maybe there would have been a military coup or something, but it's not like there was a prospect that one day Saddam and the military and the police would all suddenly vanish.
I agree with Burns insofar as he now acknowledges that the probability of success in Iraq was very small (though I doubt the US would have had success with 500,000 troops except in delaying failure). However, exactly what analysis lies behind his conclusion that the inevitable failure was a result of the dysfunctional society Saddam left behind other than that is a more emotionally satisfying reason for failure to him.
"And my guess is that history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done, except to impose its own repressive state with half a million troops, which might have had to last ten years or more, nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring."
The difference between Burns' estimate of "half a million troops...ten years or more" and the estimates of Shinseki and the State Dept's Future of Iraq Project are negligible.
The chaos in Iraq was not inevitable, it was both predictable and predicted, and what it would take to prevent this chaos was laid out in black-and-white prior to the invasion of Iraq, and roundly ignored by the Bush administration.
The question for history, and for us, is why Bush was given carte blanche to do precisely the wrong thing time-after-time, often with the support of the Senate and the House.
The question for Americans is why we chose to elect, and then re-elect, a president whose smirking "incuriosity" is surpassed only by his magical thinking.
I've always distrusted Burns since his initial reporting from Baghdad during the leadup to the war. I recall it struck me as too rah rah pro US and too gullibly anti Saddam as the mother of all evil. It was not objective reporting. It was "I'm in the belly of the beast" atmospherics.
These remarks by Burns sound like an excuse and absolution for himself and the others for supporting the war and for the disaster and "suffering that followed. "Its not our fault".
The Iraqis were not too scared to seize the "democracy" that we gave them. We were too scared to put in the greater number of troops and to endure the higher casualties needed to provide a miminum of physical security so that anybody could take the risk to stand up. Hard to stand up if you will be shot or blown up. Hard to fault the Shia for finally saying enough. We've never been able to control the Sunni insurgency - the number of their attacks have continued to increase. So even if the Shia death squads hadn't reared their ugly heads we weren't succeeding against the Sunni insurgency. Plus we encouraged a consitution which enshrined a weak central government as a sop to the Kurds and SCIRI. Now we wonder why things are spinning apart?
The central failure was always not enough troops and police, whether ours or a reconstituted Iraqi army. That was a failure of our own will.
But I can't fault that failure of will, because I don't really care that much about the Iraqi people and Saddam was never a real threat. Clearly most Americans don't either. So the cost of "victory" isn't worth the cost. But those self serving rationalizations by Burns sort of make me sick.
An aside: while Burns has lived in the US for a while, outside of his postings, he's another of the group of non-US correspondents who hold the fort for many American outlets in Iraq. While there are Americans with a Baghdad byline -- Filkins, Chandrasekaran, Ellen Knickmeyer, the McClatchy team, on the television side you have Jane Arraf, Lara Logan, Michael Ware and a couple of others.
Anyway, the Frontline piece on Jay Garner's whistle-stop trip to Baghdad comes close to the better second draft of history in this regard, proving once again that Al is a fucktard who shares his fucktard's slice of the blame for the mess in Iraq.
I am surprised you found the Burns commentary worthwhile; I have found him and his reporting overall to be shoddy and tied to the idiotic invasion in a peculiarly obtuse and ignorant manner and for a far longer time than one might expect from sentient lifeforms. But you undoubtedly impressed by something he said. Maybe you could explain.
Reading the above comments I am struck by how much I agree with Ben Brackley above. I am not surprised at J-pod's enthusiasm for Burns comments...after all Burns takes everything Bush and cronies did at their face value (or better). Isn't a reporter with such a high position supposed to have SOME critical faculties?
I am surprised you found the Burns commentary worthwhile; I have found him and his reporting overall to be shoddy and tied to the idiotic invasion in a peculiarly obtuse and ignorant manner and for a far longer time than one might expect from sentient lifeforms. But you undoubtedly impressed by something he said. Maybe you could explain.
I have to disagree with MY - Burns analysis seems like total crap to me. The idea that the Americans came in with good intentions simply ignores too much history, from the way Chalabi was dropped in as an American proxy by the Pentagon - which definitely sent waves through an Iraqi populace that well knew his hisory, vide Nir Rosen - through the idea that Iraq is some kind of cancerous Frankenstein patched together by the British. Substituting colonial powers for the British, we have, of course, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, etc. The UK itself is a country that emerged from intense intertribal struggles in the 16th and 17th century - so I guess that would be another patched together country - and indeed, there Scotland is, like Kurdistan, threatening to separate.
The idea that the American footprint was small because of some idealistic belief in the Iraqis is so laughable one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry that a grown up Timesman actually believes it. The footprint was small because the Bush crewe, in 2003, made it obvious that they wanted to create a unique win win situation - our first war with tax cuts! The whole history of the war has been, on the one side, a blunderbuss approach to neo-colonial rule in Iraq, and on the other side, the politics of non-sacrifice, in which the white house nursed its base by lavishing every perk upon it, and using the fortunate opportunity of the long long long long war to pour money out to every corporation that could brand itself something vaguely having to do with Security. It was the Security gold rush. What Burns sees as idealism - my God, is the guy really that dumb - is the usual corruption + bullying m.o. I suppose if Burns went to New Orleans, he'd find it remarkable that the Bush administration is keeping a little footprint, and attribute it to their idealistic faith in the people of the 9th ward.
Burns was, is, and will forever be one of the more pathetic reporters ever to disgrace Mesopotamia. I haven't even gotten to the obvious class blindness of the guy - whereas Timesmen usually represent what they hear in foreign countries from the upper and upper middle class, Burns didn't even get that right, and forget it re his knowledge, interest or investigation about what working class and poor Iraqis, the majority of the country, were thinking.
John Burns:
. . . the British constructed it, by drawing geometric lines on the map — Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia in the 1920s . . .
Lawrence of Arabia was involved in drawing the borders of Iraq? News to me.
A quick google turned up this:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4967572
It says Lawrence proposed a quite different map, with an independent Kurdistan.
It looks like Mr. Burns is another Thomas Friedman - a 'journalist' who just makes stuff up.
Sillyness.
Sure, it wasn't that we destroyed all civil order in Iraq, and unleashed chaos.
It was that we were too naive. We thought that we could just liberate the wogs, but it turns out that they were too uncivilized.
Clifford Geertz wrote a study of the development of Islam from its introduction to modern time in Indonesia and Morocco. Islam Observed demonstrates that the forms of Islam adopted in both societies adapted themselves to indigenous religions, and never reached the widespread practice of what we would call fundamentalism until the onset of European colonialism.
When occupied by an outside country they emphasized religious difference in order to have an identity out of which they could resist.
It strikes me as a bit absurd to assume that there was no change in whatever underlying social forces are at play in the Iraqi civil war due to the fact of the US occupation.
Burns was wrong before the war, and he's wrong now.
He says we were greeted as liberators. That is true only if the subject in that passive sentence is "by an unknown percentage of the Iraqi population."
He said we underestimated the Iraqi willingness to "'stand up' for themselves, to take authority, to take risks." If this is true, then why did we think we needed to invade to liberate them? After all, if the Iraqi people as a whole were willing to "stand up" and "take risks," they would have done so to overthrow their much-hated dictator. By the very act of invading to liberate them, we admitted that we saw the Iraqis as helpless and passive.
He says there was "nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring." Yet he leaves out the one obvious thing we could have done to prevent this disintegration: not invade the country. [And even assuming the hawks who say that it would have disintegrated anyway are right, at least we wouldn't have wasted the reputation, treasure, or blood of the United States, it's allies, and the people of Iraq.]
J-pod is right. First time I've ever read that sentence.
And you guys need to stop responding to Al, you're only encouraging him to keep posting bullshit. Ignore him, he will go away.
Burns is talking nonsense. Thirty years of Saddam was what was keeping Iraq together. Burns is parroting Cheney in turning that completely upside down. Take Saddam's repression away and everybody turns back to their sectarian feuding. Always obvious from the Yugoslavian example if for no other reason.
If anybody here is serious about stopping the insanity of our occupation of Iraq consider this political equation:
Tax fairness + Sacrifice in Iraq = Bush implodes
Lieberman of all people has just stepped on a big landmine: suggesting a tax to fund the war on terror. Change that into a one-time surtax on top incomes to fund the Iraq Supplementals -- with an exemption for taxpayers with family serving in Iraq -- and you have a potent political weapon.
Bush's residual support is rich folks who are afraid to undermine him for fear of losing their tax cuts plus the non-rich "support the troops" crowd who are blind to how utterly contemptuous of them the whole Bush White House has always been.
The battle over an IRAQ SURTAX would blow the doors off this coalition. We just need to show the flag wavers the spectacle of their "Commander-in-Chief (tm)" Bush fighting tooth and nail to protect his 'haves and have mores' base from sharing the SACRIFICE he expects of 'the little people' serving in Iraq.
"Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Iraq would have decended into chaos whether or not we had attacked."
I smell a meme coming on. Just remember that the job in Afghanistan was far from complete when President ADD turned his attention toward Mesopotamia.
"Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Iraq would have decended into chaos whether or not we had attacked."
I smell a meme coming on.
Christopher Hitchens has been peddling this one for a while.
Comments closed February 20, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Agreed. By why doesn't he link to the whole transcript? Now I'm going to have to find it myself. Hrph.
If only the entire media contingent in Iraq were as good as Burns...
Posted by Al | February 6, 2007 3:25 PM