Matthew Yglesias (May 14, 2007) - Strange New Respect (Foreign Policy)

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Strange New Respect

14 May 2007 09:15 am

Jim Henley and Scott Lemieux are feeling it for Paul Bremer after reading his Washington Post self-defense article. Personally, my sympathy for Bremer goes down whenever he publishes anything. I think Bremer has essentially been turned into a scapegoat for very broad intellectual errors and policy mistakes that affected a wide swathe of the American elite from 2002-2005. Rather than acknowledge that this is what happened; that certain stupendously wrong ideas gained widespread adherence in the two years after 9/11, there's been an enormous willingness to believe that, hey, no, everything's fine, it's just that Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld are really dumb.

The trouble with trying to defend Bremer from this unfair position, however, is that every time he opens his mouth he's refusing to adopt the only really viable defense he has -- that he was the fall guy for a doomed enterprise. It's not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn't an error, it's just that having done things the other way 'round wouldn't have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce. He wound up making pro-chaos decisions because the country had, as a matter of national policy, chosen to adopt unrealistic and incoherent -- yet strangely vague -- war aims. The only real blunder Bremer made was agreeing to take the job under those circumstances.

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Comments (31)

It's not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn't an error, it's just that having done things the other way 'round wouldn't have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce.

Dead on Matt.

Posted by Eric Martin | May 14, 2007 10:01 AM

I forgot where I read or saw it (Frontline or 60 mins or something of the like), but you should really follow up this post with Jay Garner's contemporaneous accounting of what transpiried when Bremer came in and Garner pleaded with him not to debaathify and disband the army.

If Garner could've handed over power early, and not disbanded the army or debaathified all levels of civil life, then Iraq today quite possibly could be slight less F***ed up then it is today. That's not to say the enterprise wasn'y doomed to begin with, but Bremer's rightfully deserves to be "scapegoated" (which I guess really means he deserves to be blamed), because those two acts showed that we were here to do more then just "liberate."

And who the F is Bremer kidding, implying that the Army practically disbanded itself. The conscripts were still gonna get paid. What's important to realize, is that the Army was an institution. And although it was "flawed" in many respects (this is the same army that was the "4th largest in the world" in 1991), it is much easier to tweak an institution, then to create one from scratch.

I wonder how these guys sleep at night...

Posted by Natty B | May 14, 2007 10:09 AM

What Mr. Bremer fails to recognize is that the Iraq adventure was doomed from the get go because the US force was too small by at least a factor of two. The too small US force was inadequate to provide security after the fall of the Saddam government and lawlessness quickly got out of hand, leading to the current situation. The fact is that Harry Reid is right, the Iraq adventure is a failure and the US does not have the resources to set it right. It's the old story, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.

Posted by SLC | May 14, 2007 10:20 AM

I think Matt and I are in pretty strenuous non-disagreement here, actually.

Posted by Jim Henley | May 14, 2007 10:43 AM

It may be the case that the enterprise would have been unsuccessful even if it had been run by people who were well-meaning and competent (and by the way, lack of well-meaningness explains what has gone on a lot better than lack of competence does; at the end of the day these guys got pretty much what they wanted out of this war). Matt is a lot more convinced about this than I am, but it may be true. But that doesn't change the fact that a different way of running the war would have made a huge difference, measured in thousands and thousands of lives. So looking at things at the level of who made which specific bad decision is still relevant.

Posted by David J. Balan | May 14, 2007 10:50 AM

christ, jim, that's the kind of gratuitous, over-the-top, non-insulting non-criticism, laced with non-venom and non-obscenities, that gives the blogosphere such a bad name for incivility.

you might as well have gone whole hog and called him a non-wanker, too.

Posted by irene | May 14, 2007 11:02 AM

When I personally state that Iraq was a doomed exercise (along the lines of SLC's comment, we went in too light), I try to stay away from "I told you so" though I did, because I risk falling victim to the DFH defense. Back when Ezra and Jesse ran Pandagon one of them and I think Jesse explained his early support for the war by saying that the only ones in his experience who were opposing it were aging hippies in Santa Cruz. Which in looking back is too revealing by half of the dangers of kids who are still getting carded for cigarettes being political commentators.

Be that as it may there is no percentage in us DFHs proceeding in this vein, at best we get the Blind Pig Finding an Acorn thing. Wrong for being right on Iraq before being wrong on Iraq stopped being cool. Or something. So I like to fall back on the drop dead three word defense: Shinseki and Zinni.

You don't have to give a crap about whether BW got this one right. But I am sorry everyone who still supported this war after Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki testified to Congress that it would take "several hundred thousand" troops to pull it off is complicit in the war. Yeah its nice that most of you came around but exactly what gave you the self-assurance that you knew more about force levels than the highest uniformed officer in the Army? Or the previous commander of CentCom?

It was clear from the get-go that the standard post-war defense from top to bottom and left to right would be "Who knew?" To dismiss it all as the right thing just done wrong.

No it was the wrong thing done wrong and the person telling you that openly was Shinseki. Yet he just got kicked to the curb.

Who knew? Shinseki. And Zinni. (Oh and by the way Digby and some aging DFH's who maybe were drawing from some experience about the last time we were lied into war.) But the next time some war supporter tries to tell you we just need to stick it out for another FU ask him why he knows more than Shinseki does. I find it stops them in their tracks.

Posted by Bruce Webb | May 14, 2007 11:14 AM

Matt, I think this account of the Iraq war is way too deterministic. Surely it is a flaw in the account that all of the actors who made decisions in the Defense department and in the CPA are given a blanket amnesty - after all, there are only innocents on doomed missions. But because the invasion and the occupation were not, so far as we know, planned by Homer's gods, but by D.C. mortals, I think we can actually place blame. The responsibility for disbanding the army and security seems to be tossed back and forth between Bremer and the Pentagon, but Bremer, overall, seems to have been an advocate. This came after the decision not to interfere in the looting after the fall of Baghdad, and we can find actual human actors to blame for this decision too. And so on. Surely you are right that the invasion shouldn't have happened. I was glad when you converted to the anti-war side a long time ago. But into that position you have gradually infused a doctrine in which all outcomes were going to be equally bad, so - once the war started - there is no sense blaming any particular person or highlighting any particular action. That seems totally unwarrented. In fact, there are degrees of bad. It was bad to invade, but it was really bad to allow the looting. It was bad to rule by arbitrary diktat, as Bremer did, but it was really bad to use the Iraqi courts as a tool of the executive in the pursuit of Sadr, thus making a mockery of the separation of powers and judicial independence. It was bad to make it appear that American lives were infinitely better than Iraqi ones in Iraq, but it was even worse to commit the war crime of razing Fallujah. It was bad to try to re-wire Iraq's economy, but it was really bad to use Iraq as a springboard to windfall profits for American engineering and defense firms. One can't blur all the outcomes, because one then blurs not only the results - which have been massive and avoidable deaths in Iraq, and the worst refugee problem in the Middle East - but the systematic responsibility of the U.S. in bringing those results about.

Posted by roger | May 14, 2007 11:52 AM

It's just that I'm not sure how much "better" it would have been if we had left the Iraqi Army intact. The Iraqi Army would have been a menacing force in itself, with disruptive elements having more access to information, intelligence, equipment and the like.

It might have made the situation marginally better (I tend to think so), but in the end, I don't see how the effort was ever going to produce: "desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq."

Even had all the "right" decisions been made - the negative consequences of which we lack the hindsight to identify - this mission was doomed. That's because even the "right" decisions had significant drawbacks and, regardless, the popular will in Iraq post-invasion was not aligned with our goals.

We underestimated or simply failed to comprehend the extent to which an indigenous Shiia power structure had taken root in Iraq with a considerable cohort nurtured in Iran and poised to re-enter Iraq. Sistani, SCIRI, Dawa and Sadr were never going to be on board with the "mission."

The Sunnis, while perhaps made less angry by less de-Baathification and no army disbandment, were not going to be able to live with Shiite dominance. Yet the Shiites, not without it.

Posted by Eric Martin | May 14, 2007 1:04 PM

Eric, obviously one problem fits into another. The Bremer/Rumsfeld line that everything in Iraq was analogous to WWII is all the more astonishing in that, at the end of WWII, the U.S. was confronted with a vast, surrendering army. And the U.S. put that army in vast camps, and rapidly denazified it. To do this, you have to have a large number of personnel. Moreover, thousands of german soldiers were fastforwarded as low risks so that they could take on guarding and security duties.

The disaster that has overtaken Iraq is not the failure of the American mission, but the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the fleeing of maybe a twentieth of the population. If you take the point of view of saving Iraqi lives and preserving some continuity in Iraqi life, the security gap that the Americans aggravated led, materially, to mass murder and all the structural things that are striking down Iraqi kids, the sick, the old, etc. At a minimum, elevating security concerns would have kept open hospitals and allowed doctors to work - that in itself would have saved thousands of lives.

The "it was all doomed from the getgo" idea shares with the Bush mission one crucial common element - it forgets the Iraqis themselves.

PS- one element that also gets left out of the story, which is told in Shi'ite/Sunni terms, is class. Class counts for a lot in Iraq. The opposition to the Americans and the fact that unemployment is at 70 percent, according to a WAPO article today, aren't separate facts. More than the sectarian divide, it was the American willingness to break the class that is the natural ally of the Americans - the upper middle class and the wealthy - that destroyed any support for the U.S. in Iraq. The lack of class analysis, and the easy substitution of a story about feuding sects, is part of the newly formed conventional wisdom. I think that CW is truly screwed up.

Posted by roger | May 14, 2007 1:45 PM

The one question I've never seen asked of Paul Bremer when he says that the Iraqi Army "disbanded itself" is why he didn't try to re-muster it. Not to put it immediately back to work, but to at least get the soldiers off the streets. We could have billeted them at remote bases, and paid them, while we or Iraqi authorities sorted out who belonged in a new Iraqi Army. Even the ones found to not-belong could have been kept on the payroll and stationed somewhere where they could do little harm -- far better than letting them be recruited by insurgents.

Posted by Harry | May 14, 2007 2:36 PM

The "it was all doomed from the getgo" idea shares with the Bush mission one crucial common element - it forgets the Iraqis themselves.

Hmmm. I think my position on the futility of this mission is based entirely on the conflicting goals and designs of the Iraqis themselves. It is the Iraqi leaders and populace that would never have been amenable to our designs (as enunciated by Matt), nor would they have been willing to subsume their goals to ours. That was and is the biggest stumbling block. I'm not forgetting the Iraqis, but rather recognizing the centrality of their power and influence in these matters. To argue that had we done things differently (better), the outcome would be materially improved seems to ignore the Iraqi role and focus more on ours.

Which says nothing of the influence of foreign actors and nations that had their own ability to disrupt our designs - and would have had this ability regardless.

At a minimum, elevating security concerns would have kept open hospitals and allowed doctors to work - that in itself would have saved thousands of lives.

True, but would this have changed any conclusion based on the feasibility of the mission and/or the associated cost/benefit analysis.

Let's say that we could have 50,000 fewer dead Iraqis because of hospital/security improvements. Let's also say that instead of 2 million refugees, we only have 1 million. Would we be significantly closer to realizing our designs? Could anyone point at this affair and say: "success"! based on those improvements?

If not, then I would argue that if optimizing our approach would have only provided marginal or middling improvements (or at least insufficient to achieve success) one should rightly conclude: doomed from the getgo.

Posted by Eric Martin | May 14, 2007 3:06 PM

Eric, I'd say one of those extra 50 OOO Iraqis might give a thumbs up to like, living!

If you are seriously asking the question: if you could save 50,000 lives and keep a million people from going homeless, or ... not, which would you do? I think the question answers itself. The point is not that the Bush "mission" in Iraq could have been a success - it is that Iraq could be in much better shape, outside of that plan, if the U.S. had done certain things and not other things in the course of the occupation. I can think of many. If they hadn't flown Chalabi over to Iraq and continually played him up as though he led some significant segment of Iraqi opinion; if they had made a good faith attempt to stop the rioting, declaring martial law, and early on enrolling the Iraqi security forces; if they had, from the beginning, negotiated with the Baathist officers in the Army, and not taken the position that the Ba'ath had no place in Iraq; if they hadn't imported thousands of mercenaries, drawing down the U.S. army if necessary to fill those positions; if they hadn't encouraged things like the Wolf brigade and played with the Salvador strategy in Iraq; if they had concentrated solely on foregiveness of Iraq's foreign debt, and quickly let the Governing council start borrowing money to get the state oil industry qua state oil industry working; if they had not put thousands of people in jail temporarily, or ran campaigns such as Odierno's in 2003; if they had not razed Fallujah; if they had early on recognized Iran's common border and history with Shi'a political groups gave Iran an interest in Iraq that was legitimate, and had not simply opposed it; if they had not shut down the government industries, and made employment for Iraqis a primary goal of the first year of occupation. Those are just things off the top of my head. They were all doable. None of them would have been done perfectly. All would have had problems. All would have recognized that the first thing Iraq needed was not shock economic treatment, but less violence. None of them justified the invasion, but all of them would have been better courses to take than the worse courses that were taken in the course of the occupation. The net result might just have been to, at a minimum, reassure the middle and upper class they could stay in Iraq - and that would have been very good for Iraq.

It wasn't an all or nothing proposition in Iraq. It wasn't a greek tragedy. It wasn't a sci fi ship of doom. It was your usual human activity, in this case animated by greed, desire for political gain, ignorance, etc., etc. Who cares about optimal outcomes? I'd rather the 50,000 Iraqis were still alive.

Posted by roger | May 14, 2007 3:38 PM

One thing to keep in perspective about the number of refugees: Iraqis weren't exactly free to come and go under Saddam. So even if Iraq weren't a war zone now, you'd still see plenty of Iraqis taking advantage of their new passports and getting out of dodge.

Posted by Fred | May 14, 2007 4:38 PM

Eric, Roger and David, among others: why should we take the word of people like you who won't even bother coming up with a pseudonym to hide behind when you spew your "arguments" and make your "cases?"

Posted by Jim Henley | May 14, 2007 4:44 PM

One thing to keep in perspective about the number of refugees: Iraqis weren't exactly free to come and go under Saddam.

Is that really true or are you assuming? My understanding is that Iraqis were relatively well-travelled, actually.

Posted by Jim Henley | May 14, 2007 4:54 PM

I'd say one of those extra 50,000 Iraqis might give a thumbs up to like, living!

If you are seriously asking the question: if you could save 50,000 lives and keep a million people from going homeless, or ... not, which would you do? I think the question answers itself.

Obviously Roger. Come on now. Every life saved would have rendered a better outcome. Every injury avoided, and refugee prevented - ditto. But what Matt was arguing about, and what I am arguing about, is whether such a variance in casualty/refugee figures would change the ultimate judgment as to the success or failure of the overall mission.

The answer is: no. Still an overall failure - even with a little less carnage and disruption.

Those are just things off the top of my head. They were all doable. None of them would have been done perfectly. All would have had problems. All would have recognized that the first thing Iraq needed was not shock economic treatment, but less violence. None of them justified the invasion, but all of them would have been better courses to take than the worse courses that were taken in the course of the occupation. The net result might just have been to, at a minimum, reassure the middle and upper class they could stay in Iraq - and that would have been very good for Iraq.

And Roger, someone could point to the inverse side of each of those coins. All of those "better" options carried their own risks. Each would have led down their own respective path to failure with its own distinct tragic outcomes. There was no magic combination of actions that would have led to "victory" in this endeavor.

Who cares about optimal outcomes? I'd rather the 50,000 Iraqis were still alive.

Well, we didn't invade Iraq so that our occupation could only result in the excess deaths of, say, 400,000 Iraqis rather than 450,000 Iraqis. Our invasion had a purpose (many?) and the question is: Did we achieve that purpose? If not, were there any steps we could have taken to achieve that purpose?

I say the answer is no - no matter what we did. We could have optimized our actions, and the best this would have done was mitigated the scope of the catastrophe and human tragedy somewhat around the edges (most likely). Now that would mean a lot to the folks benefiting by a less destructive, but still brutal, occupation. But that wasn't the topic being discussed (at least by me) so that is mostly a diversion - albeit a morally wholesome one.

Because in the end, this invasion and occupation was destined to lead to a massive and bloody conflagration. No matter the mistakes or "right" choices available.

Posted by Eric Martin | May 14, 2007 5:31 PM

Eric, Hey, I feel like we are going around the bushes in this argument, conducted with our obviously fake names!

I should say, I was heart and soul against the invasion, but when it happened, the anti-war side lost. It happened. At that point, however, it is not the case that one just packs up and watches. No, that’s when the anti-occupation side should have emerged. Unfortunately, it didn’t, or at least in this country. It is still hard to know what the mission was in Iraq. If the mission was getting rid of Saddam Hussein, far from being doomed, it was a real success. That, in fact, was the only mission that was popular in the states. Contrary to pundit belief, the average American has not been gnawing his fingernails, worried that free enterprise was being stifled in Anbar province. The Cold War era left a malignant legacy in the amount of power granted the executive to pursue foreign policy, and perhaps the Bush administration is just the logical endpoint of that abuse. However, if one feels like the Bush administration should not unilaterally decide what the mission is in Iraq, especially after getting in without having a clear one, and appointing such suits as Bremer, suitable perhaps to manage a second rate country club golf course, to preside over the disaster, then one can very well suggest one’s own missions. The problem with the doomed from the start scenario is it relieves the critic of any responsibility for an ongoing American policy, one that is, moreover, horrendously inhumane. The benefit from showing that Bush’s Iraq was logically incoherent is to show that other forms of action are possible that may have less dire results, actions better adapted to the reality in Iraq, aimed at calming the violence in Iraq rather than in a political victory that is now long gone, and that will result – extra points!- in a successful withdrawal. Any action one takes will have negatives; any action one takes from premises that are logically and structurally contradictory, however, will have many more negatives.

(If the Bush administration hadn’t, by its years of irrationality, forced us all to talk baby talk, this shouldn’t even need to be said. Even more than they hate Darwin, the right wing apparently hates Russell – they are in open revolt against set theory and all it entails. But nevertheless, iteration will never make a logical contradiction go away.)

There’s a recent news story that illustrates what I mean. A majority in the Iraqi parliament have apparently cobbled together enough support to pass a bill giving the occupation a time table. Now this is one excellent thing. Positive feedback from the states would perhaps breath this idea into life. It is a little like Brzenski’s idea about getting Iraq to invite us to leave. Here’s, to my mind, a less bad scenario that one can work with to make withdrawal not simply a demand, but a project. Yet if anti-war people let themselves drift along under the impression that the war is some curse they can’t interfere with, this chance will simply pass. I imagine it actually will pass. It doesn’t need to. It shouldn’t. But it could easily burn itself out. Too bad.

Posted by roger | May 14, 2007 6:44 PM

Bremer's role in organizing the "privatization" (aka corporate looting expedition) in Iraq, as described by Naomi Klein, is more than enough reason to hate him.

I started hating him twice as much when he said the mission of the CPA was to promote "free markets and strong intellectual property [sic] protections." That's a direct contradiction, along the lines of promoting "strict vegetarianism and a buffalo haunch in every oven."

Posted by Kevin Carson | May 15, 2007 12:38 AM

About whether Iraqis were "free to come and go" under Saddam. There were already a million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries when the US invaded, 2 million if you count Kurdistan as a neighboring country.

Saddam's policy in his final years was "Arabization." He was doing his best to expel the Kurds, push the Marsh Arabs into Iran, and about the same to other minority groups. There were exceptions -- Iraq was still holding 10,000 to 20,000 Iranian civilians who had been interned in the Iran-Iraq war -- but mostly Saddam was pushing people out of the country, not holding them in.

Posted by Ragout | May 15, 2007 4:10 AM

I feel like we are going around the bushes in this argument

Agreed Roger. We're just quibbling on the margins of a fine point. And we've probably split all the hairs left...

But hey, that's what blogs are for. Sort of. Anyway, cheers.

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