Incompetence

The past week saw a lot of "what did I get wrong"-type articles about Iraq and they frequently put me in the mind of the incompetence dodge. I note that one frequent way in which people argue for the proposition that poor execution, rather than an underlying flawed concept, are at the root of the Iraq disaster is to simply observe that mistakes were made in Iraq. For example, here's my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg:

What the world is confronting five years after the invasion—the mess that Gen. David Petraeus is attempting to clean up today—was almost entirely preventable. It's not only my encounters, inside Iraq and outside, with senior figures of the Bush administration that have convinced me of this; the investigations conducted by George Packer, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, and Michael Gordon, among others, have unearthed thousands—literally thousands—of mistakes made by this administration, most of which were avoidable.

What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning. Suppose we were looking back on some military venture that was doomed to fail. Now suppose some supporter of that venture were arguing to us that, no, it wasn't doomed at all -- the trouble was the incompetence. The supporter can even find all these examples of incompetence -- why here are all these decisions that got made! And the decisions worked out poorly! How inept! How dare you say it was doomed to fail? I mean of course a group of people who set out to do something unreasonable are going to wind up implementing their agenda poorly. What would a flawlessly-executed but doomed-to-failure war look like?

Meanwhile, you need to put Iraq in strategic context. The goal wasn't merely to topple Saddam, but to intimidate other "rogue" regimes by creating a credible threat to take them out too. That meant that something like a 350,000 troop, 15-year commitment wouldn't achieve the goals of the policy. It wasn't "incompetent" for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to have rejected those methods; the rejection followed directly from what they were trying to accomplish.

Comments

...the proposition that poor execution, rather than an underlying flawed concept, are at the root of the Iraq disaster...

Like the movement conservatism of which it is the highest, best expression, at least in foreign-policy terms, it appears that the war in Iraq cannot fail, it can only be failed.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | March 22, 2008 12:18 PM

it's an irrational war, sold on irrational claims, continuing irrationally, and its backers are irrational in its defense. the whole thing is perfectly rational, if you accept that each part of it is irrational.

Posted by cleek | March 22, 2008 12:20 PM

Weren't Goldberg's articles second only to those of Judith Miller in persuading the East Coast political media elite to line up behind the crazy Iraq War?

And hasn't Goldberg been subsequently hired by your own Atlantic Magazine at some totally outrageous salary and with all sorts of fawning praise during the process of luring him into joining? (Meanwhile, his friend Bill Kristol has been promoted to the topmost rung of the Commentariat by becoming a New York Times columnist).

So, in the minds of Goldberg and his friends, the subconscious question governing their attitude is:
"What Failure?!"

Posted by RKU | March 22, 2008 12:30 PM

Amen! And this is why John McCain will never do.

Posted by DM | March 22, 2008 12:33 PM

That is a completely bullshit claim for another reason, too, Matt, one that is surprisingly little noted. All the supporters were aware of the number of troops we were sending to occupy Iraq. They were aware of the cost of the war, as projected by the Bush administration. The incompetence happened before the war - the numbers, as was pointed out by an "amateur" like General Shinseki (who, of course, gets no column inches to explain what he thought of the war in the NYT) - made not a bit of sense. The cost figures were laughable. The war supporters had the figures in front of them. They had further figures that weren't hard to figure out - since Saddam Hussein, on their own account, had about 500,000 soldiers, what was going to happen after his defeat with an insufficient invading force? How were you going to process them and enforce security at the same time?

A child could see this. It is as if Bush proposed to build the tallest tower in the world, using ten men and a truckload of lego logs. Gee, who'd a thought it could go wrong?

But not only did the war supporters refuse to see this - it was the very essence and charm of the war for them. They had a vision of small force, hugely successful, bringing down Iraq so that we could establish a superhero, liberal interventionist policy of the executive deciding to knock down those terrible tyrannies without disturbing the oafish American republic, cause it would be so cheap, and the military involved would be so small. Iraq was, among other things, an experiment in the theory that was supposed to then destroy Syria, Iran, and who knows what.

The incompetence was writting into the warmonger genetic code from the beginning.

Although really - I'm supposed to be surprised that Goldberg, Hitchens, Saletan and Pollack know shit about how to evaluate a project? Those guys couldn't be trusted to throw a birthday party for a ten year old. Their only expertise is in the rotten rhetoric of moral indignation - combined, of course, with heroic levels of smugness. Putzes all.

Posted by roger | March 22, 2008 12:34 PM

What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning.

Maybe some kind of regression analysis with war outcomes as DV? Wasn't there a correlates of war project at U-Mich.?

Posted by Gus | March 22, 2008 12:35 PM

Errrr....
Doesn't the Administration's incompetence extend back to the actual decision to invade Iraq? Or was that their last competent act?

This kind of writing and thinking gets this guy hired? What th'?

Posted by john Howard | March 22, 2008 12:39 PM

It sounds, RKU, that elite opinion vehicles 'choose' their columnists the same way New York restauranteurs get to 'choose' their trash haulers.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | March 22, 2008 12:40 PM

Errrr....
Doesn't the Administration's incompetence extend back to the actual decision to invade Iraq? Or was that their last competent act?

This kind of writing and thinking gets this guy hired? What th'?

Posted by john Howard | March 22, 2008 12:41 PM

Errrr....
Doesn't the Administration's incompetence extend back to the actual decision to invade Iraq? Or was that their last competent act?

This kind of writing and thinking gets this guy hired? What th'?

Posted by john Howard | March 22, 2008 12:41 PM

Errrr....
Doesn't the Administration's incompetence extend back to the actual decision to invade Iraq? Or was that their last competent act?

This kind of writing and thinking gets this guy hired? What th'?

Posted by john Howard | March 22, 2008 12:41 PM

Errrr....
Doesn't the Administration's incompetence extend back to the actual decision to invade Iraq? Or was that their last competent act?

This kind of writing and thinking gets this guy hired? What th'?

Posted by john Howard | March 22, 2008 12:41 PM

Matt the reason Shinseki's advice was so unwelcome was not that they wanted to threaten regime change but Rumsfeld had aspirations for a blitzkrieg through Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, after Iraq, finishing off with the real prize: Iran (and they may not have given up on that one according to William Polk).

Posted by Chris Dornan | March 22, 2008 12:48 PM

Ideological blindness, duplicity and incompetence are not mutually exclusive traits.

It seems as if we have to revisit this lesson every 30-40 years.

Posted by Condor | March 22, 2008 12:51 PM

Ideological blindness, duplicity and incompetence are not mutually exclusive traits.

It seems as if we have to revisit this lesson every 30-40 years.

Posted by Condor | March 22, 2008 12:52 PM

Ideological blindness, duplicity and incompetence are not mutually exclusive traits.

It seems as if we have to revisit this lesson every 30-40 years.

Posted by Condor | March 22, 2008 12:52 PM

what's maddening about all of this is that no one talks about the path not taken. what else could we have done with this diplomatic and financial capital to change iraq and the rest of the middle east? a lot i suspect. isn't that a question we have to answer to get past the false choice of do nothing vs. invade? isn't this a question we have to answer to learn from this nightmare?

Posted by js | March 22, 2008 12:52 PM

The real incompetence started with the decision to rely on the Northern Alliance and Afghan warlords to fight the war in Afghanistan for us, and not sending in enough troops to get Osama Bin Laden and cut off his escape routes. THAT was incompetence.

Posted by How Insane Is John McCain? | March 22, 2008 12:53 PM

What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning.

Questions of epistemology, however well justified, are going to fly right over the heads of people who make national security policy and life-or-death decisions with the primary goal of demonstrating their machismo.

Posted by Buckeye Hamburger | March 22, 2008 12:55 PM

Comparables: Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union?

Like the Brits for us in Iraq, Hitler had Napoleon's somewhat similar attempt to serve as a cautionary tale. It wasn't just incompetence, although there was that, but anyone who didn't foresee that the Russians would defend their homeland regardless of how they felt about their government, and that stretched supply lines can make an army vulnerable, and that weather can be a major factor was a poor student of history and clearly subject to hubris.

Not a comparison the neocons would like, I suppose.

Posted by Mimikatz | March 22, 2008 12:58 PM

Uh-Oh, RKU made a joke about killing people!

Will you all rush to condemn his tasteless actions? Or is that only for people you don't like?

Posted by soullite | March 22, 2008 12:59 PM

Matt, I agree with you that the very decision of going to war was flawed, but your argument here is a bit disingenuous. The truth is that, just as you can't prove the problem with the war was its execution (because so many bad decisions were made), those very bad decisions also prevent us from knowing for sure whether the war could have (had it been executed well) succeeded in achieving the Neocons' vision of a post-war Iraq.

It's not true that a flawed concept can't be executed to perfection. Think of a basketball game. You can choose defensively to clog the middle and cede the outside shot to a team whose 3-point shooting is much weaker than its inside game. If you successfully stop the inside game and the team still beats you from the outside, you've executed your plan to perfection and still lost.

The obvious flaws in the US strategy were: 1. Not providing enough troops. 2. Not stopping the looters. 3. Not appropriating Saddam's army. In other words, we didn't even try to execute the obvious. We didn't try to stop their inside game when the inside was their strength. I believe we would have lost this game anyway, but we can't know this with any confidence because we didn't even execute the basic defense that a clear analysis called for.

Posted by john m | March 22, 2008 1:04 PM

It was kind of incompetent.

Posted by aleks | March 22, 2008 1:04 PM

Great post, Matt! You're on a roll, man.

Posted by Joel | March 22, 2008 1:10 PM

Thats the problem with articles of faith. Almost from the very beginning, the war was a matter of "I believe this" and "I believe that". I used to wonder - in the days before the war - that no one in his right mind will be able to convince anyone of the need for it. I still couldn't believe it when it happened.

I feel the same helplessness with respect to the warmongers that I feel with respect to the religious believers. Perhaps, the believers among you warhaters can understand what a miserable world it must be for us nonbelievers. I didn't really start with this thesis when I started commenting - but it certainly looks like a probable thesis.

The question now is, whether these believers will come around after 4 years of McCain? I say 4 years based on actuarial tables - not on any belief that they will come around.

-- r

Posted by DesiPanchi | March 22, 2008 1:11 PM

Is it an "incompetence dodge," a "strategic flaw", or a moral depravity when you fantasize that the people actually about to run such a risky operation -- namely, the invasion and occupation of a large, third world semi-industrialized nation with no functional record of a democratic government -- will suddenly become magical angels just like your favorite WWII stories, simply because you want them to be, as opposed to the venal, lying ideologues they had proven over and over that they were?

Oh well, I guess it doesn't really matter, since according to our elevated discourse system, anyone who might have asked such questions was obviously an anti-American burned out hippie traitor Khmer Rouge fan who loved Saddam and didn't understand 21st Century Warfare and who celebrated 9/11. All of which was proven wrong the The Surge which showed that everything worked out right and good.

Posted by El Cid | March 22, 2008 1:13 PM

Shorter Atlantic Magazine national correspondent Goldberg: "It was failure for thee, but not for me."

Posted by Harry R. Sohl | March 22, 2008 1:15 PM

As the Washington Independent put it:

Yet Goldberg enjoys a sterling reputation. The Atlantic's wealthy owner, David Bradley, reportedly sent Goldberg's children ponies in order to convince the reporter to leave The New Yorker for the prestigious magazine. "He's incredibly persistent and makes you feel like you're God's gift to journalism," Goldberg said of Bradley.

Truly ironic that, after all this time, ponies really would be involved.

Posted by KC45s | March 22, 2008 1:18 PM

Evidence of global warming does nothing to convince them that it is occurring. Evidence of evolution does nothing to convince them that it is has been and continues to occur. Evidence that the earth is, in fact, older than 5000 years old does nothing to convince them that it is. Even in areas where science can be directly applied to support or dissuade in the decision making process, these folks ignore it. So why would any amount of scientific research, expert testimony from Shinseki, or any other evidence make a difference to these very serious people?

Posted by Ben | March 22, 2008 1:21 PM

Matt's post is bullshit. It doesn't take a psychologist to see what Matt is doing is explaining away his all too late conversion to the anti-war side.

Matt spent 2003 hawking for war, and since he doesn't want to have to write a mea culpa, he decides that the war was doomed from the beginning and that anyone that argues otherwise is a fool.

The war was wrong from the beginning, but it is not clear it was doomed from the beginning. Matt's hypothesis, like so much of the swill Matt swims in, drinks in, pisses out, is untestable.

Posted by jerry | March 22, 2008 1:23 PM

After the American Civil War, generations of Southerners played the "what-if" game, imagining, for example, various scenarios in which Lee might have won at Gettysburg. When the Pickett of Pickett's Charge fame was asked his opinion about why Lee had lost at Gettysburg, Pickett dryly observed, "I think the Yankees might have had something to do with it."

So, to answer your question about what would a flawlessly-executed, doomed-to-failure war would look like: it would look like being overwhelmed by the superior force of the enemy.

Being defeated by your own shortcomings, failures of execution, and even the manner of your participation, as the U.S. has been in Iraq, is quite a different case.

The flaw in the arguments of the late-war apologists, who seek to deflect criticism by indirection is the indirection.

The conception of the war and its execution are of a piece, they are the same continous whole. The bad execution flowed from poor planning, which flowed from a completely muddled strategic choice. Stupid is, as stupid does.

Five years in and no one can say clearly what is the legitimate strategic objective and by what plan sufficient means are being applied to achieve that objective.

Ask Iraqis, and they will tell you the problem: the country can not function economically. There is not enough reliable electricity, clean water or sewage disposal. There are no real jobs. Nearly half the population is not merely unemployed, but barely subsisting. Most of the doctors and educated professionals have fled the country.

We could have reconstructed the country. The Congress appropriated the money, nearly $20 billion in the form of an outright gift. We could have built an electrical grid that worked, and that supplied the power for a functioning economy; people would have had jobs, gone to work, and Iraq would have gone on.

We did not do it. We failed. And, we do not now plan to do it over again. So, there is no point in our continuing to be in Iraq.

The way to refute those, who confess to past mistakes, is to point out that we are not reversing the most serious errors and omissions. We once planned to do what was necessary, and failed to execute. Now we don't plan to do what is necessary, and what is there left?

Posted by Bruce Wilder | March 22, 2008 1:24 PM

Evidence that the earth is, in fact, older than 5000 years old does nothing to convince them that it is.

Welcome to the world of Credo, quia absurdum est.

The greater the absurdity, the greater the faith needed to believe it. The greater the faith, the greater the merit. So the greatest merit -- and the ponies, apparently -- accrues precisely to those who believe the greatest absurdities.

Posted by Davis X. Machina | March 22, 2008 1:26 PM

Matt, I think you are making a category mistake here.

It's not like there are two separate kinds of enterprises: (1) those doomed-to-failure, and (2) those not-doomed but capable of being screwed up. Activities that are "doomed to failure" are just those that are particularly susceptible to many well-intentioned mistakes and screwups.

On this view, it is natural that a war supporter would look back and assign blame to the execution -- they don't know what else to assign blame to . The response to them isn't to say, "What evidence would disprove your theory?", because their support for the war was not due to a "theory", it was due to a worldview. It may be more effective to highlight how the execution mistakes were latent (i.e., they were just waiting to be made) at the very outset of the war.

I'm looking forward to reading your book, by the way. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Gautam | March 22, 2008 1:31 PM

Matt, I think you are making a category mistake here.

It's not like there are two separate kinds of enterprises: (1) those doomed-to-failure, and (2) those not-doomed but capable of being screwed up. Activities that are "doomed to failure" are just those that are particularly susceptible to many well-intentioned mistakes and screwups.

On this view, it is natural that a war supporter would look back and assign blame to the execution -- they don't know what else to assign blame to . The response to them isn't to say, "What evidence would disprove your theory?", because their support for the war was not due to a "theory", it was due to a worldview. It may be more effective to highlight how the execution mistakes were latent (i.e., they were just waiting to be made) at the very outset of the war.

I'm looking forward to reading your book, by the way. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Gautam | March 22, 2008 1:31 PM

Shorter Atlantic Magazine national correspondent Goldberg: "It was a failure for thee, but most certainly not for me."

Posted by Harry R. Sohl | March 22, 2008 1:34 PM

I suspect that it was doomed even if it had been brilliantly executed. Still, I'm haunted by the words of a US diplomat who'd worked in Iraq pre-invasion, to the effect "I knew there were only one or two ways to do this right and 500 ways to do it wrong; what I didn't realize was that we would try all 500 of those."

By any larger strategic metric we had back in early 2003, this failed.

Posted by Deborah | March 22, 2008 1:37 PM

Even if you argue with the Jeffrey Goldbergs of the world on their own terms, the reality is that the Bush Admijnistration's incompetence was already manifest before the invasion. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 126:

By mid-February, it was becoming clear to people paying attention that the Administration wasn't remotely prepared for dealing with postwar Iraq. A few of those people were in Congress. On February 11, Feith and his counterpart at State, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Marc Grossman, appeared at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and tried to present a united front. Their testimony reads like a pair of schoolboys trying to fake their way through a teacher's questions about a joint homework project that they had been cobbling together and fighting about fifteen minutes before class.

So if they cheered the Administration on, it's clear that either they incorporated the Administration's incompetence into their understanding of the nature of the war they were promoting, or they themselves were incompetent, having failed to pay sufficient attention to find out what the Administration's plans for the postwar were.

And it was obvious from the get-go that the invasion was going to succeed or fail on the strength of what worked or didn't once we took Baghdad and deposed Saddam. So anyone who cheered this war without paying attention to the few things the Bushies said about their plans for its aftermath really and truly fucked up. They don't deserve a seat at the grownups' table.

Posted by low-tech cyclist | March 22, 2008 1:39 PM

Even now, knowing everything we know about Iraq, Goldberg thinks we could have won if Bush hadn't been so incompetent. But what exactly would we have gone to war for?

This is what drives me crazy about all these Iraqi confessionals. We never knew why we were going to war with Iraq, so everyone chose their favorite cause. Those of us who opposed the war from the start realized this at the time. Most of these columnists are still scratching their heads over what went wrong.

Everybody knew why we went to war in Afghanistan which is why we don't read this nonsense about that front. But nobody knew why we went to war with Iraq. We could never have accomplished the mission, because there was no mission.

Posted by Jinchi | March 22, 2008 1:42 PM

The war was morally wrong, and the cost of the war in every other way is beyond toleration. We should leave now but we won't be leaving and I do not think Obama is promising to leave as opposed to just draw down the troop level.

Posted by Jennifer | March 22, 2008 1:44 PM

the incompetence dodge is but another facet of the ontological faith iin our nation that we are ritually forced to give genuflection.

It is not just that the NeoCons don't want to admit that they were wrong. It is more than that.

Any individual can try to use the incompetence dodge, but when it works in the public realm, and works repeatedly, then it is juist a feature of something larger.

The incompetence dodge on Iraq works as well as it does because the alternative to the dodge - accountability - would require a critical self-reflection on our belief in our innocence and innate goodness.

the incompetence dodge is no different from Vietnam war revisionism. The US could have won, should have won, would have won if . . . the generals were more competent, if the civilians did not tie their hands, etc etc.

Once you have the power to destroy the world, then any time you fail in a war it can only be because some wuss held you back . . . because if they didn't, then the only alternative to winning should have been destroying the world. Ipso facto, by definition the US cannot lose, should not lose, and never would lose . . . except for incompetence and wussiness.

Posted by Joe Shmoe | March 22, 2008 1:51 PM

The Democratic campaign for President (i.e., Obama) should use the word "competence" as often as possible.

Posted by ed | March 22, 2008 1:54 PM

Granted I've been skipping the mea culpa pieces -- I have a very low puke threshold and all. I appreciate you and others doing it for me. Given that, I'd say that looking for falsifiability in anything these people say is pointless. The goals that are put forth and the theories underlying the policies are designed to be non-falsifiable. It's the policy equivalent of plausible deniability. The pundit class is not going to operate by any standards that could lead to intellectual accountability.

Of course, the entire competence argument is a dodge anyway. When considering the invasion of a far-off country, the overriding rule is Murphy's Law. Things will go disastrously wrong and somewhere, sometime, someone will manifest some level of incompetence (aka reality). In this case, the first and most fatal example of incompetence was when someone first voiced the opinion that invading Iraq would not be one giant clstrfk.

Posted by robj | March 22, 2008 2:07 PM

Matt,

What if your logic were applied to domestic policies like public education? Imagine the line of reasoning:
- our public school system is producing unacceptable results.
- defenders of public education say we should improve the system rather than scrap it.
- "What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning?"
- Ha! I have called them out on their use of the "incompetence dodge."
- therefore, we must scrap public education and rely on private spending instead.

The "incompetence dodge" type arguments deserve to be addressed and taken down on on their own merits. Simply pointing out that they are hard to disprove by their construction does not prove that YOU are right either.

Posted by annon | March 22, 2008 2:16 PM

I ask whether Lord Saletan or any of those geniuses will send any of the money they made writing about the Best War EVAR to the families of those they helped kill.

Posted by blogenfreude | March 22, 2008 2:28 PM

What would a flawlessly-executed but doomed-to-failure war look like?

I understand it is a rhetorical question, but offhand - how about the German withdrawal (OK, expulsion) from Russia following their defeat at Stalingrad?

The Russians were bound to prevail, but the Germans did fight well, tactically and strategically, as best I recall.

Or what about the whole Japanese effort in the Pacific in WWII? The sneak attack at Pearl
Harbor was well executed as was their initial surge. Unfortunately, the rest of their concept - negotiate a peace - sort of fell apart. But I think most observers would say that Japan's war against the US was fundamentally unwinnable despite a promising start, not lost due to their mistakes.

Or the Civil War - the North took way too long to win, and could have been forced to settle for a draw if Gettysburg had gone the other way. However, if you want to say the South started the war, then it was fundamentally unwinnable for them despite many Northern mistakes and superior Southern generalship.

Posted by Tom Maguire | March 22, 2008 2:34 PM

I'd say that looking for falsifiability in anything these people say is pointless.

Not exactly. I think these pieces give you a good idea of which of these people would make exactly the same mistake all over again. And which ones have figured out just how idiotic the whole idea was from the start.

Sadly, most (like Goldberg) fall into the former category.

Posted by Jinchi | March 22, 2008 2:34 PM

I think the Nazis could quite possibly have conquered the Soviet Union, if they had not been simultaneously fighting a war against Britain and the U.S. The mistake that Hitler made was to take on all his great enemies at the same time instead of dealing with them one by one. Imagine a world in which Hitler had decided to take out Britain first, only then to take on Russia, and finally when all his other enemies were crushed to turn on the United States.

It's an alternate history that could very easily have happened, and it's a true miracle of Providence that it didn't.

By the way, Tertullian actually said, "it is certain, because it is impossible", which is not quite the same was what he is quoted as saying above.

Posted by Hector | March 22, 2008 2:53 PM

I don't think there is one fundamental flawed reason that can be distilled when asking why this disaster occurred. There was an amalgam of flawed reasons that created a coalition of the willingly stupid to let this action occur. The 4 main drivers of this idiocy appear to be:

War Profiteering - I think Cheney's immediate past position as CEO of Halliburton presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to realize extreme wealth for his friends (and himself) in the MIC and Big Oil sectors.

Hubris -That would be Bush and his dream of being a beloved War pResident. An easily manipulated under achiever looking for a place in history as the Giver of Democracy. Iraq was the perfect place to start his grand adventure...and he gets to show up his Dad in the process!

Delusion - A shared cartoon perspective of the world. That would be the PNAC neo-cons and liberal hawks who thought that knocking out Hussein would somehow allow their vision for the world to flourish. Our corporate Republican media must also take credit for giving these people exclusive access to make their case without any significant opposing viewpoints allowed.

Political Opportunism- The Republicans saw this as the perfect wedge issue to divide the American people and promote their domestic agenda of looting our Treasury while dismantling our civil rights.

Most of us DFH's knew the invasion and "war" would be the easy part. Extracting ourselves from the ensuing mess would be the difficult part. Big surprise, we were right.

Posted by Innocent Bystander | March 22, 2008 3:03 PM

I dunno . . . it seems to me that the falsifiability argument works both ways.

Imagine a bunch of really incompetent people set themselves a difficult but achievable task like, I dunno, reconstructing Europe after World War II. In that case, I would be able to pronounce it "doomed to fail" without too much fear of being disproven. Provided that the incompetents do, in fact, fuck the project up, reality won't allow us to disprove the "doomed to fail" thesis by repeating the experiment with competent management. So my "doomed to fail" thesis isn't really disprovable either.

The most you can rigorously say, I think, is that the failure of the Iraq project was sufficiently overdetermined that we probably can't attribute it to any one cause.

Posted by southpaw | March 22, 2008 3:08 PM

The last point in Yglesias' post is an important one. It is not that the Bush administration first chose to invade Iraq and then had to decide whether to go in with large numbers of forces or small numbers. This is a war that never would have happened with large numbers of forces. For one thing the war could only be sold to the public as a limited thing in size and duration. The war was never really popular on its merits as it was. Rather it was made inevitable, and people tend to be attached to their countries enough to get behind inevitable wars.

But the other thing is that for many in the administration the point was less the need to remove Hussein than it was the need to show the region how easy it was for us to remove Hussein. The key to the war was that it had to be one that we could fight and wind up in as good a position to repeat this with Iran or Syria. (Not that we necessarily would then have invaded these countries. I assume the point was that if we showed we could take Iraq without breaking a sweat we wouldn't have to invade Syria or Iran. We could just impress them with out machoness.)

As someone noted above, there was no mystery about the fact that we were going in light. So the neo-liberals have no excuse for supporting a war that was openly being fought in what they should have known was the wrong way.

Posted by Lon | March 22, 2008 3:11 PM

I wrote about this same theme at TPM Cafe this week.

Matt: It's not just that the incompetence dodge doesn't explain anything. It's also that the incompetence itself isn't explained. Goldberg, for example, says: "I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war."

In other words: these were (according to Goldberg) highly efficient, extremely competent people who turned out to be, in this war, wasteful, inept, unprepared, the opposite of "able." Why? Goldberg doesn't say because I don't think he knows.

And I am sorry to say, I don't think he wants to know. He would rather it remain a mystery.

Posted by Jay Rosen | March 22, 2008 3:18 PM

I still think that if they had patiently and publicly opened dialogs with the Iraqi people (i.e. people who actually lived in Iraq) and taken the time to build mutual trust and understanding, as well as thoroughly discuss how to handle the overthrow of Saddam and how to go about creating a new Iraqi government once Saddam is no longer in power, the invasion could have succeeded in its goals. However if they took that approach the invasion would not have happened yet, and the preparations described above might reveal some less violent and less expensive ways to get rid of Saddam. The Bush administration does not seem likely to have 'reduced violence' as a major goal, nor has it displayed much in the way of patience. Which is a pity, for violence to be effective you need to exhaust all of the non-violent possibilities first...and in my opinion they never seriously tried to do that.

Posted by oscarzoalaster | March 22, 2008 3:30 PM

There's no way to prove or disprove a counter-factual, and we'll never know what would have happened had the Bush administration not made its 1001 stupid mistakes. This whole line of thinking is simply besides the point. We are where we are an the question is not what could have been done differently, but what we are going to to do about thsi mess.

Posted by JonF | March 22, 2008 3:32 PM

To be clear to RKU, I see nothing wrong with his statement. A joke is a joke, and an obvious one at that. Hell, yours is probably even true.

But the way the right wingers (and their Hillary supporter allies) jumped all over me for a very similar (and less bloody) joke, I thought it would be nice to call them out on their obvious hypocrisy.

And to let them know that if they ever mention it again, I'll throw it in their faces that time they refused to condemn their own friend for a very similar joke.

Posted by soullite | March 22, 2008 3:37 PM

As one of those Horrible Boomer Hippies Misguidedly Believing That Vietnam Changed Everything, I found it enlightening to see Andy Sullivan 'fessing up to one of his reasons for supporting the war. He was naturally recoiling from Horrible Boomer Hippies Misguidedly Believing That Vietnam Changed Everything (HBHMBTVCEs).

I recall that Ezra Klein was at least transparent enough to admit to a similar bias back at the war's beginning. Which caused me to conclude "he's young and will grow wiser soon enough." But for older guys like Sullivan and Goldberg, there's no excuse that covers their tails.

After all, does anyone ever mention how many members of the Democratic Congress voted 'no' on the AUMF? 21 Senate Dems, 1 Independent and 1 Republican said 'no' in the senate. Versus 29 Dems who gave Bush the power. That's hardly an insignificant minority of Dems. If 4 more had voted no, that would have been a tie.

In the House, the vote was 81 ayes and 126 nays by the Dems (61% of them opposed). So cumulatively, Congressional Dems were opposed to the AUMF, 147 to 110. Must be a lot of those terror loving hippies in Congress who concluded that either the war made no sense or that Bush would renege on his word about getting fresh Congressional authority before an invasion, gaining UN approval, and providing hard evidence that Saddam had WMDs.

That also explains why the late mea culpas ring hollow. By comparison, House Republicans supported the AUMF 215 to 6 and Senate Republicans supported the offensive 48 to 1. So even the Boomers got it wrong overall, just as the majority of Congress got it wrong in the Sixties.

Being a hawk is always the easiest path to take because leading a mob outraged at some loss at the hands of a convenient bogeyman (Communists and terrorists, for example) is sure to make the ringleaders popular. Vengeance-mindedness is the most predictable force in human history. Along with torture, rape, and other atrocities occurring in every war.

Lynch mobs work on similar principles.

Mea culpas never undo the very real losses of life, never provide cover for the predictable atrocities and the lessons learned never last longer than two generations before a majority of a populace think war is perfectly acceptable in any form, even pre-emptively. Older anti-war folks are merely quaint and misguided fools that old hawks can deride to the approval of the new.

And damn few of those hawks stick around to care for the casualties afterward. That caretaking job always falls to the folks who opposed the war. There's just not much profit - or glory - in helping the damaged to survive. Those who do it are volunteers or are barely paid more than the minimum wage, and they get stereotyped as bleeding heart liberal dope-smoking hippies. Deriding and undervaluing doves helps maintain the profitability and popularity of being a hawk.

But let's not confuse the whole dynamic with right and wrong, because 10 times out of 9, the doves are right.

Posted by Kevin Hayden | March 22, 2008 3:37 PM

The incompetence with which Iraq was managed began with the incompetence of the decision to topple Saddam Hussein. Everything that flows from that necessarily had to be flawed, it's a simple case of garbage-in, garbage-out.

Posted by cpl | March 22, 2008 3:44 PM

The incompetence with which Iraq was managed began with the incompetence of the decision to topple Saddam Hussein. Everything that flows from that necessarily had to be flawed, it's a simple case of garbage-in, garbage-out.

Posted by cpl | March 22, 2008 3:45 PM

Lon, this sentence is I think at the very heart of the liberal hawk error:

"This is a war that never would have happened with large numbers of forces. For one thing the war could only be sold to the public as a limited thing in size and duration."

Most of the liberal hawk types were totally impressed with American military power in Bosnia. They bought the notion, promoted in Halberstam's book, Clinton's Generals, the TAC had changed everything. The fly in the ointment for these guys was what you might call the political transaction costs. If a war involves a lot of soldiers, and a lot of money, it expands beyond the control of the executive - it actually gets swept up in the democratic process, where people actually get to have a say so on it. What was needed was to de-politicize war, the way Tom Friedman claimed that Clinton had de-politicized the economy - just as you have no choice about free trade, privatization and de-regulation, since both parties are for it, you would have no choice about war - small, cheap TAC wars would be fought and the American people would think as little about it as they think about, say, the last bill to 'knock down trade barriers' with Costa Rica, or whatever. It would become simply a question of technique.

That was the not so subtle agenda of the war hawks. From Packer to Goldberg, the idea that we are massively rich, have accumulated massive military power, so let us elite use it for good was at the center of the agenda. Zipless war, in other words - no muss, no fuss.

The real fly in the ointment was that they were writing out their asses. They knew nothing about war, loved the rush of doing good and killin' in Bosnia and thought it would be really jazzy in Iraq, and so enabled at every point the insanely insufficient war preparations. Of course, when you want untrammeled use of the war machinery, you certainly can't afford to encumber yourself with coalitions, either - like in the Gulf War 1. This was why the propagandists did their best to demonize Europe. This was why the attempt to form a coalition was ludicrous - compare what Baker did in 91 with what Powell did in 2002, and you can see that the Bush desire for a coalition is like the supposed desire now, for a "strong" dollar - it is even meant to be seen through as a lie.

Not all of these people are as psychologically warped as Hitchens, but in the New Yorker profile of him, last year, they reported how bummed he was not to be there when Baghdad fell - he so wanted to play revolutionary soldier. All of them more or less did.

The people shouldn't be called liberal hawks - they should be called war enablers. It would clarify what they were doing.

(often the same group - Peter Galbraith, for instance, after promoting war in Yugoslavia moved on to do the same thing as the advisor of the Kurds)

Posted by roger | March 22, 2008 4:27 PM

A lot of pundits, especially Tom Friedman, never seemed to realize this wasn't a seminar where making witty comments before lunch was going to make you look smarter and get you a better grade. When you say "I support the X War," you get to say you support how that war is fought and say you have trust in the judgment of the president waging the X War or you are saying you support the imaginary version of that war that would exist only if you were the Emperor of the World. The pundits seemed to think they could pick and choose the facets of reality that would have an impact on the outcome.

Posted by Reality Man | March 22, 2008 5:31 PM

The pundits seemed to think they could pick and choose the facets of reality that would have an impact on the outcome...

Worse that that. I just noticed this little item in the Times Baghdad bureau blog a couple days ago:

On a recent visit to Iraq, my first trip back in over three years, a few things surprised me. There was the “countdown calendar” to President Bush’s last day in office, sitting openly on a soldier’s desk. There was the high-up United States official who told me, by way of introduction, that he did not believe the decision to invade Iraq was “reality-based."

I believe this is what the incompetence dodge is really dodging: the retreat from empiricism throughout the Bush government, which was exceptionally intense in the build-up to them 2003 invasion. None of the people who were asked what they got wrong can bring themselves to say, "I failed to see that the Bush Administration wasn't a reality-based government."

Posted by Jay Rosen | March 22, 2008 5:54 PM

Jay, I have to disagree with that. The pundits liked what they saw. The Bush administration was doing what they wanted. It was the dot com bubble all over again, except with bombs. It had that same tone, too - the can do tone, the we are the cool guys. They loved it, they supported it, they looked at the Bush plan and they heartily approved of it. The Bush's didn't hide what they were doign or saying about Iraq. It isn't like they promised to invade with sufficient force. It is, rather, that the pundits in the press were on board, going after people like Shinseki who would dare spoil their party. To say that the pundits didn't see that Bush was reality based is like saying that the salesmen at some mortgage firm were simply shocked that the people they were signing up couldn't afford their ARMS. Wow, and you mean that milkman wasn't really making 500,000 a year?

They weren't suckers, they were collaborators.

Posted by roger | March 22, 2008 6:04 PM

Five years later the NYT asks nine "expert military and foreign analysts" what went wrong. They were all supporters of the war. No Iraqis, no critics, not a person who got what a terrible idea the war and occuption was right was asked to contribute.

Now Slate is doing the same thing. Only Timothy Noah said he was just wrong and why don't they ask one of the smart ones like Obama.

Posted by Gary Denton | March 22, 2008 6:06 PM

Approximately in April, 2003, I made a post on the Iraqwar.ru site - the site that was following the war in detail with the assistance of the Russian military intelligence apparatus. It was apparent from the Russian GRU analysis that things hadn't gone as well for the US as the US media was promoting it. Still, the US clearly was "winning" the (conventional) war.

That post of mine specifically stated that Saddam won the war - that Saddam had fooled the US into thinking it had won when in fact it had lost.

I pointed out that Saddam had undoubtedly ordered his military to fade into the background and then conduct a guerrilla war against the US military. And that it was likely that Saddam had been removed by the Russians to a safe place from which he would conduct the insurgency. That latter I think was still true initially (Vladimir Putin almost admitted as much to David Frost in an interview), but of course later Saddam was dumped back into Iraq and left to fend for himself.

This proved to be more or less true - although Saddam was pretty much out of the picture as the insurgencies formed mostly on their own accord, although some of the insurgency IS being run by former Saddam and Baathist cronies.

Many people with a military background or any knowledge of Middle East or Muslim history, like Scott Ritter, knew that any invasion of a Muslim country would end up in a bitter guerrilla war which the invading force would lose sooner or later.

The reality is that the only way the US could have "won" in Iraq would have been if they had turned around and LEFT - COMPLETELY - in April or May of 2003 - or at the latest once Saddam was captured.

Then Iraq would have reformed around either what was left of the Baathists, or would have degenerated into a short but cleansing civil war.

There would have been no insurgency, no occupation, no return of Saddam (even if he had not been captured, his power would have been broken), and probably the casualties in the civil war, if there was one, would have been less than that which has occurred over the last four years.

The cost to the US would have been hundreds of billions less. The US could have afforded to prosecute the war in Afghanistan better - a mistake, in my view, but at least it would have been feasible to try.

OTOH, had the US done this, it is likely we would have been at war with Iran much sooner. So perhaps Iraq should be seen as a blessing - at least, until we start a war with Iran anyway.

There was no possible way the war in Iraq could have been "won" in the manner described by any of the pro-war advocates - unless, of course, reality was different and agreed with the pro-war advocates. And we know now it didn't and doesn't.

And at base, it's a little ridiculous to suggest that the Bush administration and the Pentagon making thousands and thousands of mistakes might not have happened if they...hadn't made thousands and thousands of mistakes.

Well, but they did. And they would have regardless - because that's what the US military DOES. The US military at its base is a flawed military concept. It does not know how to fight an insurgency and it doesn't know anything about Fourth Gen War. And because it doesn't understand that the best way to fight an insurgency happens to be - not to fight an insurgency - there was no way the outcome could ever have been different - unless the entire Pentagon machine was different.

And it isn't.

It made the mistake in Iraq.

It made the EXACT SAME MISTAKE in Afghanistan.

And it's going to make the EXACT SAME MISTAKE in Iran.

And then it's going to make the EXACT SAME MISTAKE in Pakistan.

Because it's NOT (just) a mistake - it's what they DO.

Until you realize this, everything is going to be a mystery to you.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 22, 2008 6:24 PM

Yours is indeed a different view, Roger. I can see how you got there. I never got there.

Let me provide a little more detail on why. Journalists-- reporters and ex-reporters who became pundits--have some pretty strong cultural norms and these are also "what's cool" and not cool to do. And as ridiculous as it sounds one of these is a norm against cheerleading, which is internalized as shame and looked down on. Being in the tank and even "on the team" is a casting out term in the peer culture you are generalizing about. Even if you are sympathetic to the cause, it's not something they ever think they are doing. I am simply talking about self-descriptions in the press tribe.

Now, if we know this, and yet we observe that sometimes the press does wind up cheerleading or supporting one side in a way that's real and consequential, then we will look for explanations that involve a certain style of self-deception in which the fool, let us say, is not the dreamer but the self-nominated realist, the hard bitten one who thinks he sees through well enough and constructs his illusions from that mistaken belief.

Posted by Jay Rosen | March 22, 2008 6:35 PM

Well, I suspect that having Goldberg, Kristol, Judith Miller, Pollack, and all their friends lined up and shot would be regarded as "pretty persuasive evidence" by all the surviving members of the East Coast media...

I'd settle for forced labor, alongside Cheney and Bush, cleaning toilets in the Green Zone for as long as we occupy Iraq.

Posted by Kyle | March 22, 2008 7:37 PM

You wonder, "How can they go on? Go on issuing opinions and judgments after prior opinions and judgments proved out to to be so catastrophically wrong?" I watch them now and see their lips move, but the words I hear are these:

Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great,
'Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall: simply the thing I am
Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this, for it will come to pass
that every braggart shall be found an ass.
Rust, sword? cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live
Safest in shame! being fool'd, by foolery thrive!
There's place and means for every man alive.

Posted by Steve Paradis | March 22, 2008 7:48 PM

Somebody needs to deal with this shit:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/03/21/thoughts-on-a-speech.aspx#comments

Say whatever else you want about them, but Zinn, Chomsky and that "wing" of "Teh Left" was fucking right about Iraq, and has continued to be right about Iraq.

Posted by dadanarchist | March 22, 2008 7:49 PM

Public policy commentators and even policymakers in this country seem to find no inconsistency in going to war with and bombing countries to the stone age on moral grounds, *after* creating the environment and conditions in the target countries that is necessary for the said moral arguments to be made. Examples abound with Iraq as Exhibit A: Until 1990, Saddam Hussein was the United States' favorite dictator in the Middle East. When he invaded Kuwait (and there is evidence to indicate that he even *asked* permission from the GoTUS to do so), he suddenly became public enemy no. 1 and the World's Worst Dictator. Given this premise and the people running the show in the US Govt in 2002, any half decent public policy commentator/policy maker (this includes the present host) should have had sufficient reason to suspect the motives of those arguing a case for war. And an unbiased look at the evidence presented would have made pretty clear that the causus belli was a manufactured fraud.

As Kevin Hayden rightly pointed out, all these mea culpas miss the point. War is the ultimate crime (to paraphrase the scriptwriters of the West Wing), and this is not a new discovery, a centuries old prohibition exists against the making of war. The ultimate cost of this fraud is in the lives lost and the societies ruined, not in the reputations of a few incompetent policy wonks.

What is most disturbing about this whole sorry episode, is the ease with which the US went into a one sided war, without any real consequences for the people who started such wars, except for a few reputations diminished. Clearly, the United States has tremendous and overwhelming military power, but this episode shows a disturbing lack of understanding regarding what this power means and a moral complacency that accompanies the use and misuse of this power. This war was not a mistake, it was a crime.

Posted by kris | March 22, 2008 8:43 PM

To some extent, I believe in the "incompetence dodge".

I don't believe it could have gone well in any event, but sanctions were killing ~13,000 people a year and I felt that blood was upon our collective hands. Since I was told (again and again) that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that lifting the sanctions was impossible, I felt it was incumbent upon the US to create a situation where we were not responsible for more and more deaths. I believed, at the time, that it was extraordinarily unlikely that the Iraqi death toll would exceed 13,000 people a year for a protracted period.

Obviously, I was horrifically wrong in ways that have cost lives, and caused me to reevaluate and transform many facets of my life, my ethical principles and career direction. I am not convinced, however, that the magnitude of the disaster in Iraq was necessary. I no longer know how I ought to have weighed the deaths we were certainly causing through our nominally "peaceful" means against the deaths we might potentially cause through war.

Posted by Anthony Damiani | March 22, 2008 9:11 PM

"The goal wasn't merely to topple Saddam..."
Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil.
25% of the world's oil.

OK

Have we got that?

Posted by freejack | March 22, 2008 9:54 PM

The US Army's war-fighting doctrine is based on nine principles of war. These serve both as planning interrogatives and guides to action. At the top of the list is Objective. From the start of this pathetic adventure, the Objective has been incoherent. It shifts in response to the whims of the moment, the spin of the latest news cycle.

Even with the best planning and best execution imaginable, the Iraq fiasco would have been doomed to failure because there was no coherent Objective. There never was one; there still isn't one. It's specious to say the Objective is victory (or even not-to-lose), because those are meaningless terms without some standard of measurement, some real metric for assessing 'victory' or 'loss'. After five years of carnage and nonsense, the burden of proof is squarely on the shoulders of those who advocate continuing in Iraq. What is the damn Objective?

And to counter the canard that 'retreat' or 'withdrawal' is equivalent to 'surrender', let me propose an analog from World War II. In 1940, in an untenable strategic position, the British army retreated to Dunkirk and withdrew from the continent. They didn't surrender, did they? It is pragmatic to withdraw from a strategically untenable position. Iraq is a textbook example. Get the hell out. Do it pronto.

Posted by Stephen Thurston | March 22, 2008 10:55 PM

This is an interesting question. Can we imagine best case scenario where postwar occupation would have been a success? Say 500.000 troops providing security, thousands of civil administrators managing multiple infrastructure projects, heavy UN involvement, not disbanding Iraqi army, no de-Baathification, etc. In general policy based on understanding sensitive cultural, religious and political realities in Post-Saddam Iraq. Even so it still seems like a very tall task...

Posted by OM | March 22, 2008 11:05 PM

"What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning."

Try David Lewis' "Counterfactuals"?

Posted by sherifffruitfly | March 22, 2008 11:19 PM

I would offer those simple twenty-seven words (the former SecDef's a verbose guy):

"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

The same goes for administrations you have, or want, or wish to have at a later time.

Posted by Randy Owens | March 23, 2008 12:53 AM

OM, good counterfactual. Now, imagine actually gathering those soldiers together, and paying for the mission. I'm figuring, at the bottom rate, we are speaking of an initial 200 billion dollars. Imagine Bush asking Congress for 200 billion dollars to pursue the war in 2003. Imagine the dumbfounded looks on the faces of the American people when 200 billion dollars is forked over, and there's no WMD found - at all. My, the laugh would be on us! We'd roar in appreciation. Ho ho ho.

In 2002, Max Boot published Savage wars of peace, his paen to small wars - the meme, among the foreign policy elite, that the U.S. routinely takes on "small wars" with small forces, and always wins wins wins. This is the beginning of the review in Foreign Affairs - which gives us a taste of the absurd, ludicrous conventional wisdom among the foreign policymakers that year:

"The fact of American empire is hardly debated these days. Even those who fear and oppose it (in this country, the libertarian right and the remnants of the new left; abroad, a variety of voices from Paris to Baghdad to Beijing) define international politics almost entirely in relation to U.S. power -- and especially U.S. military power. The "unipolar moment" has become a unipolar decade and, with a little effort and a little wisdom, could last much longer. Even Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who in the mid-1980s predicted U.S. "imperial overstretch," has become a believer. Stunned by the initial success of the war in Afghanistan, he wrote in February,

Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Britain's army was much smaller than European armies and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies -- right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy. Napoleon's France and Philip II's Spain had powerful foes and were part of a multipolar system. Charlemagne's Empire was merely western European in its stretch. The Roman Empire stretched further afield, but there was another great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. There is no comparison."

Yeah, we are all real astonished at that Afghan victory, man.

These people thought they could manage the world and still take off for a long lunch. Smug, stupid, obscenely distant from any real fighting - this is the poxy proxy corps that still has its vulture like grip on our foreign policy.

Doesn't the unipolar decade feel just scrumptious to you?

Posted by roger | March 23, 2008 12:58 AM

What would a flawlessly-executed but doomed-to-failure war look like?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Of course, if the Nazis had survived a little longer, they'd no doubt have started blaming the inadequate progress on the Eastern front on dissenters at home and the failure to be tough enough on the local population.

Posted by brooksfoe | March 23, 2008 2:56 AM

Stephen Thurston makes a valuable point--the Bush people were all over the map in terms of "objective", and this continues to be a major problem. In my view, they could and should have made the simple case that Iraq dragged us into a war in 1991, and this war had been left disastrously unresolved. In the aftermath of 9/11 it was widely seen, and not just by "neocons", as unacceptable to carry on with an overt enemy regime controlling the keystone state in the region producing most of the oil and most of the terrorism.

The status quo was untenable morally as well. I don't know where Anthony Damiani gets the "13,000 per year" figure, but UNICEF says the sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, and perhaps the same number of others among the most vulnerable. There is of course huge debate about current casualty figures since 2003, but the most recent UN/Iraqi Ministry of Health study seems to me to have the most reliable methodology and by far the largest sample base, and it comes in between less reliable studies showing both far more and far fewer deaths. It shows less than a quarter of the number of deaths caused by the invasion as caused by the sanctions. These figures also take no account of the literally millions killed by Saddam's various wars of aggression, internal repression, and genocide. There is significant evidence that that our ability to contain Iraq was falling apart, and none whatsoever than it was going to be enhanced.

Under Clinton, the US policy became "regime change" which, while hardly sufficient, was the starting point for any formulation of "objective". The fact that actually winning the war was seen as too hard in 1991 when we had 500,000 pairs of boots on the ground and the international wind at our backs seems to me the fundamental mistake here. Trying to do it with less than ha