If there’s one thing we can glean from David Ignatius’s most recent Washington Post column, it’s that he does not like Donald Trump one bit. Neither do I, so we have that in common.
Beyond that Mr. Ignatius’s column freely intermingles assessments, preferences, and nit-picking. I agree with Mr. Ignatius’s assessment of Mr. Trump’s remark about paying for the Iraq war:
Let’s start with Trump’s comment in an NBC forum that after invading Iraq, his policy would have been to “take the oil.†That’s what many Arabs, in their most extreme conspiracy theories, believe U.S. intervention was all about. His argument that seizing the oil would’ve stopped the Islamic State is probably backward. It would have been a recruiting tool.
I think the remark was bone-headed and short-sighted. But why stop there? The invasion of Iraq was bone-headed and short-sighted. There was no practical way to do it right and that was always the case. Statements about our invasion of Iraq should begin and end there.
Mr. Trump’s remark being a “recruiting tool” for extremists is a bit of a red herring. Intervening in Iraq would be a recruiting tool for extremists and failing to intervene in Iraq has been a recruiting tool. Having made the initial error, there’s nothing we can do that is not a recruiting tool.
Mr. Ignatius’s discursion on America’s generals suggests to me that he has a preference for permanent occupation. Maybe I’m misreading him. Is what has been accomplished in Afghanistan a success or not? Has it depended on a strong U. S. military presence there?
Possibly contrary to Mr. Ignatius and certainly contrary to Mr. Trump, my view is that there never has been a victory to be had in Afghanistan or Iraq or, heavens forfend, in Syria. There are only different kinds of failures and generalship won’t change that.
However, this:
Analysts do not make policy recommendations. It’s a violation of their basic tradecraft. What they do, at best, is offer honest, unsentimental assessments of whether policies are working. Over the decades, they’ve offered withering assessments of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, to name just a few. But that doesn’t mean they’ve offered policy direction.
is nitpicking. Analysts do in fact make policy recommendations. They just don’t like it when they’re called that and whether Mr. Ignatius believes it or not human analysts are incapable of making completely “honest, unsentimental assessments” by the very fact of their humanity. They come equipped with politics, preferences, and prejudices and those invariably leak into their assessments.
