Makiya

I wonder from time to time what's become of Kenan Makiya, the liberal Iraqi exile intellectual who sold a lot of people on the notion that invading Iraq was a moral obligation. Via Justin Logan here's Edward Wong's profile for The New York Times Magazine. Regarding people who say Hillary Clinton should apologize for backing the war, Makiya says “People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?" He also seems to have cooked up an idiosyncratic brand of incompetence dodge:

“There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures,” he said. Chief among the culprits, he added, were the Iraqis picked by the Americans in 2003 to sit on the Iraqi Governing Council, many of them exiles who tried to create popular bases for themselves by emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences. . . .

Then there is the small issue of American policy. “Everything they could do wrong, they did wrong,” Mr. Makiya said. “The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation.”

He thinks we should have, what? Invaded, sent our tanks into Baghdad, pulled down the statue, and then just left the country in a state of total chaos and somehow democracy was going to emerge from that? I agree that the occupation was a mistake, but that's just to say that the invasion itself was a mistake. The one follows from the other.

Comments

No. Makiya is referring obliquely to the argument some neo-cons have made that Rumsfeld "small footprint" military model was designed to transfer power to Chalabi's team. Thus, no occupation.

I don't have to go into the problems with this theory, but that's the jist of it.

Posted by yeselson | March 26, 2007 4:31 PM

But the Baathist military might well have resisted taking orders from Chalabi's team, so they had to go. Which meant an occupation.

Posted by dj moonbat | March 26, 2007 4:33 PM

From Spencer Ackerman's old TNR blog Iraq'd:

In An End To Evil, Richard Perle and David Frum write that "probably the most serious" mistake of the occupation "was our unwillingness to let the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq's leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad." Neglecting to install Chalabi as the new Iraqi leader, in other words, was the original sin that tainted the entire enterprise and sowed the seeds of future disasters."

http://magazines.enews.com/blog/iraqd?pid=1596

Posted by peep | March 26, 2007 4:43 PM

Geroge Packer paints a remarkable portrait of Makiya in The Assasisn’s Gate. Even though Packer is a close friend of his and obviously has a great deal of sympathy for him, Makiya still comes across as a dupe, and a bit of a megalomaniac to boot.

Posted by RC | March 26, 2007 4:55 PM

As the poster above notes, Frum, Perle, and others, believed that Chalabi had a popular legitimacy that would allow him to bridge to sunni-shia divide. This notion was undermined when Chalabi's party got less than 1% of the vote in the national elections, but it made the theory of non-U.S.occupation/Iraqi sovereignty elegant and internally coherent.

You just needed to believe that Chalabi was akin to DeGaulle, rather than to a grifter.

Posted by yeselson | March 26, 2007 5:23 PM

Is he really complaining about who was picked for the governing council? It seems an odd objection considering that the Iraqis later elected a lot of the same faces to their national legislature. Seems like the governing council was picked in such a way that it was broadly representative of Iraqi society.

The more plausible gripe I've heard is that Bremer denied the governing council much of the powers it was supposed to have.

Posted by Fred | March 26, 2007 5:26 PM

In An End To Evil, Richard Perle and David Frum write that "probably the most serious" mistake of the occupation "was our unwillingness to let the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq's leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad." Neglecting to install Chalabi as the new Iraqi leader, in other words, was the original sin that tainted the entire enterprise and sowed the seeds of future disasters."

It's really hard to overstate how utterly stupid this view is. There is not the slightest reason in the world to think that the Baath-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucratic establishment would have sat still for rule by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress drones. Chalabi could only have run the Iraqi government by engaging in the same de-Baathification and military disbanding process that was eventually tried. He could never have accomplished this without further US support. And once that happens, the insurgency is on.

The only plausible scenario which might have avoided the insurgency and civil war was a straightforward coup - replacing Saddam with some other slightly sweeter and more cooperative Baathist and leaving everything else intact - followed by an expeditious US withdrawal.

However, that scenario would have been completely unworkable politically. It is impossible to imagine that the US could have invaded Iraq only to subject their Kurdish and Shia allies to further Baathist rule. Nor given the fact that the Bush administration had convinced much of the American public that Iraq possessed WMDs, is it conceivable that the US would have high-tailed it out of Iraq after the change of leaders, leaving those supposed WMDs in the hands of a government in which one could have only slightly more confidence than the government that already had them. The fact that Iraq was supposed to possess WMD's of which it had to be "rid" necessitated a US occupation from the start, until the ridding had occured.

And the rejection of this course of action by the US and international community would likely have been near-total, and immediate. To have invaded another country without a clear reason for war, violated all kinds of international laws and the will of the international community in the process, killed thousands of people in the invasion and march on Baghdad, damaged the US reputation in the world, and blown a large amount of property in Iraq only to accomplish a run-of-the-mill coup and very modest undemocratic government upgrade in Iraq would have been repugnant to almost everyone, both inside and outside the US. Nor would the Bush administration itself have contemplated it, since it would entail the US leaving without getting its bases. And without getting the bases, the whole operation would have been a waste from the administration point of view.

Do Frum and Perle honestly believe that Ahmed Chalabi and his coterie could have walked up to all those army bases and government offices in Iraq, said "I'm in charge now. Please submit to me, and hand over information on the the locations of all your weapons caches, including those WMDs", and expect to be followed? What asses! For all their supposed toughness, these neocons seem remarkably ignorant of the material, military preconditions for holding and maintaining power and government control over a country.

American officials fantasized that Iraq was run by Saddam and his two sons, who exercised magical control over the whole country, and that by destroying just that tippy-top of the Iraqi government, they could take over. But Iraq was not run by "Saddam". It was run by a regime of which Saddam was just the boss. It was run by a government bureaucracy and an army and a police security apparatus, with a broad foundation of reasonable support among a sizeable segment of the public, who were never going to hand over Iraq without a fight. The remains of that regime - including its popular foundation - are now the insurgency.

So perhaps anouther way in which the US might have achieved its aims and prevented the insurgency is if it had endeavored to destroy that regime utterly, by launching a psychopathic war of untold destruction, bombing most of central Iraq back to the stone age, killing three or four million people, destroying every building which might have possessed a weapons cache and rendering the few survivors left from the onslaught without any base of operations at all.

But not even most of the Bushites - only a small percentage of whom are genuine psychopaths - could have looked past the absurd contrast here between the stupendous military solution and the miniscule security problem which lead to it. Some form of this absurd contrast has been part of this episode from the beginning.

Posted by Dan Kervick | March 26, 2007 5:39 PM

Of course, the key mistake the Bush administration made was not building a landing site for the motherships of Zoikdraw-7. If only we had extended a hearty welcome to the peaceable alien race of Zoikdraw-7, they would have landed and led the people of Iraq to a happy and productive democracy.

Amazingly, the same people who think that this invasion would have been a success if only we'd done one or two things differently would argue that the Zioikdraw-7 plan is unrealistic.

Iraq was a country whose indigenous leadership had been targeted for decades by a murderous and self-serving dictator. A country which was awash in small arms and ethnic rivalries, where resources were unequally distributed between these groups. It was surrounded by powerful and rich neighbors with their own strong interest in seeing various groups prevail. It had a long history of being oppressed by foreign troops, and outright hostility to English-speaking Christians with guns. And we knew all this before we went in.

Why would anyone in their right mind think this was going to be easy? How can anyone look back and think if we'd done a handful of things differently, this would have worked?

Posted by anonymous | March 26, 2007 6:56 PM

The sad thing about this is that Makiya's and Mneimneh's "Manual for a 'Raid'" on 911 remains a classic, I think

Posted by dan Tompkins | March 26, 2007 8:40 PM

I always associate Makiya with that article he wrote during the invasion in which he said the American bombs falling on Baghdad were 'music to his ears'. Hey, some bomber or another has been hearing that music ever since. I figure, however, that a person who says that is essentially a moral jerk. The article shows that he is also - suprise! - a comfortable academic narcissist who will never have to suffer a day's discomfort from his botched liberation.
I can only hope that the victims of all the bombings in Iraq throng his dreams, the insufferable creep.

Posted by roger | March 26, 2007 10:55 PM

Invaded, sent our tanks into Baghdad, pulled down the statue, and then just left the country in a state of total chaos and somehow democracy was going to emerge from that?

Well, as an alternative to "invading, sending our tanks into Baghdad, pulling down the statue, staying for four years and counting, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, taking twenty thousand casualties, killing a hundred thousand Iraqis in air strikes, triggering an insurgency that kills several times that many, antagonising the entire Muslim world, and ending up with the country pretty much in a state of total chaos anyway" I think the Makiya Plan has a lot to be said for it.

Posted by ajay | March 27, 2007 5:34 AM