The umpteenth re-hash of the invasion of Iraq is going on across the blogosphere with some fairly distinguished participants. Andrew Sullivan beats up Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld yet again for failing to commit enough troops. Kevin Drum retorts just wait one minute: there were no more troops to commit. Von of Obsidian Wings rejoins
It’s true that as Iraq has soured, many in the peanut gallery — including me — have proposed subsequent increases in troop strength. These are best-of-a-bad thing proposals and, if Kevin’s calculations are right, perhaps they are unrealistic. But I don’t see Kevin addressing the core claim that we should, and could, have put many more troops into Iraq at the start.
Brad Plumer has put his two cents in:
Von at Obsidian Wings revisits two points on Iraq that come up now and again. The first is the “we should have invaded with more troops” bit. Kevin Drum says we just didn’t have the troops. On this, I think Von’s rejoinder is technically correct: the U.S. never had the manpower to sustain 400,000 troops in Iraq for three years, given the need for rotations and the like, true, but in theory we had enough to go in with 400,000 or so initially, stabilize things in the early days, secure Baghdad, and quell the insurgency before drawing down to more sustainable troop levels by late 2003. Von also says, as many others have, that disbanding Saddam’s Iraqi Army was a big mistake, since it decimated the country’s native security force, and all those soldiers went to go join the Sunni insurgency. In general, hawks who think Iraq was a decent idea but got badly botched in the implementation point to these two mistakes.
I tend to think, though, that even if the United States had done both of those things, Iraq still would have been a gamble, and hardly destined to succeed.
He follows with what I think is a reasonable analysis.
I’ve made my own views of the invasion of Iraq pretty clear. I don’t know if the invasion was conducted with not enough troops, too many troops, forces mismanged, or not enough forces to mismanage. And I don’t think any of the bloggers above know, either.
But what has concerned me from the first day of the invasion is that President Bush took the action without adequate domestic political support for it. More domestic political support would have enabled Bush to conduct the war differently from the way it was, in fact, conducted in many different ways, particularly, I think, in allowing him to apply the level of resources (which isn’t just manpower) to securing Iraq’s borders more closely and establishing a higher degree of order in the country early on. Had we taken the obvious steps towards accomplishing those ends we would have taken significantly more casualties earlier in the war and, with the tenuous support that Bush enjoyed and the opposition of much of the news media, I doubt that would have been politically tenable.
The Iraqis have just completed voting in referendum on their new constitution. We won’t know the results for several days what the actual outcome was and, frankly, I don’t know that it matters much what that outcome is. The insurgency will continue; Sunnis will continue to be chary of the intents of the Kurds and the Shi’a; Kurds and Shi’a will continue to be jealous of their new-found autonomy such as it is. And, as regular visitor Lounsbury pointed out, the incentives of the men with guns have not changed.
Referendum day did demonstrate several things. First, it demonstrated that even more Iraqis are taking ownership of the political process there. That may not be much but it’s something. It’s certainly important for the Iraqis. Second, it demonstrated that a pretty decent level of security can be established there if only for a day. Third, it suggested that the ability of the violent opposition in the country to affect events is faltering.
As I noted in the original post comments, I don’t see anything of the sort with respect to Iraqis taking ownership.
I see Shia Arab (and there several factions), Sunni Kurd, Sunni Arab and the Sunni and Shia Turcomans all jockeying for position in a play on power – none of which have a real comitment to this “process” – a mere Potemkin thing for the Westerners.
Lebanon bis.
As I said, it ain’t much.
Actually, the Sunnis are fragmenting into different groups. A larger than expected group of Sunnis seems to be accepting the way the winds are blowing in Iraq and trying to grab as large a slice of the action as they can. Those that remain committed to the civil war, and the idea of everlasting Sunni domination in Iraq, are growing fewer and more isolated. You can know them by their tribes and clans. Rather than a civil war, in the western provinces Iraq could develop into a fratricidal war.
The real question is, what is to happen to Syria?
Ron
Wonderful. I heard the same fucking things in regards to Lebanon in the day, always turning the fucking corner.
Never got me fucking pony.
Dream the fuck on my dear prat.
lounsbury you witless wonder. Who gives a flying *%$ what you think you zero? Tell it to your captive students who haven’t yet realized what a maroon you turned out to be. And to think you once had such fine dreams!
Dave, one of the first elements of a good education is knowing who to ignore. Our friend Juan lounsbury is a great one to start with.
Ron, you may have confused two different people. Juan Cole is a professor of history at University of Michigan. Lounsbury, if I’m not mistaken, is a financier currently in Morocco.
Please take care to attack the argument rather than the commenter.
There were four major errors committed in Iraq that helped create the unstable environment which our troops have been doing a remarkable of redeeming. 1) We did not go in with enough troops to provide security after Baghdad fell, and this led to a complete lack of confidence in the coalition. Thus when the insurgency started gaining momentum, the Sunni population backed what they perceived to be the stronger horse. The insurgency probably would still have occurred after the troop strength reduction in late 2003, but that would have bought us the time to make inroads with the populace. 2) Disbanding the Baath military was not the mistake. The mistake was in not giving them anything to do after they were fired. If you’re a Sunni ex-military whose just experienced the humiliation of having your whole army dissolved and you have no way to support you family, it’s not hard to imagine that you’d be open to firing at US troops at $500 a pop. 3) Reconstruction projects were not nearly visible or immediate enough to the average Iraqi. What difference does is it make that a 500 MW powerplant or a 1 million gal water treatment plant will be completed 18 months from now if you’re in the middle of the summer desert without air-conditioning or water? The emphasis at the beginning should have been on short-term projects which incidentally could have employed the disgrunted Sunni ex-military. 4) We did not do enough to convince the Sunnis that they would have a place in the new Iraq, which they would not lead for the first time in centuries. These mistakes are interelated and have at the their source the wishful thinking about post-Saddam Iraq and Rumsfeld’s vision of transformation which strives for a smaller but more potent force. That vision is fine for major combat operations, but is fatal for low-intensty conflict which is man-power intensive. Had Rumsfeld and Co. planned for a more realistic aftermath, they would have requested a significant increase in the size of the Marines and the Army right after 9/11, a time when recruiting was much easier than it is now.
Sunnis had gotten accustomed to wielding power in Iraq. The shock of losing that power could not be assuaged by a few token projects or make work job assignments. Any plan whatsoever for the makeover of Iraq would have been obliterated the instant it was put into practice. Plans are like rectums, every ****** has one. The crux comes when one must admit that one’s plan was bolluxed and improvisation becomes necessary. Academics are great ones for plans. Having no responsibility, and no actual likelihood that their plans will ever be tested, they are completely safe.
My dear Ron:
lounsbury you witless wonder. Who gives a flying *%$ what you think you zero? Tell it to your captive students who haven’t yet realized what a maroon you turned out to be. And to think you once had such fine dreams!
Hmm, I have no captive students, nor indeed any students at all. I work in finance in the region, business my dear fellow, and I have financial interest in Iraq related issues.
In short, I have a financial interest in everything turning out just fine and dandy in Iraq. Money on the line. You might care that despite that, I find visions such as your own deluded and absurdly misinformed. Real money, real experience.
Dave, one of the first elements of a good education is knowing who to ignore. Our friend Juan lounsbury is a great one to start with.
Insofar as you seem unable to even figure out who you are talking about, it would strike me that yours is not advice one should weight terribly heavily.
Now, attacking Cole, well, he may be annoyingly stereotypical Lefty professor of history or whatnot, but his analyses of the Sunni Arab – Shia Arab dynamic with respect to Iraq have been quite good and are well worth paying attention to even when he gets things wrong. As I recall he was convinced (someone correct me on this) that civil war was impossible when discussing the issue back in early 2004 (whereas my read of the situ from being close to the situ and working on private equity deals related to Iraq was that Iraq had already entered what I called “the Lebanese logic” iwth no real countervailing factors), but his discussion of his thinking was in itself interesting and informative.
In short, I rather prefer reading Cole who is informative and well-informed even when wrong, than some ill-informed prats blithering on with wishful thinking. Like I said, I heard the same bloody fucking things about Leb land, always ready to turn a corner.
One has to strip away the ill informed attachment to irrelevancies such as the constitution and look at the real drivers. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, it is going to be the armed factions and the degree to which they think they can sieze rents via violence and the degree to which zero sum communal calculations trump others. Given no strong real countervailing force rooted in Iraqi society – all political angle are sectarian based and tending, due to zero central gov security, to sectarian/communal based security solutions, i.e. sectarian militias and all the chaos they imply.
So, dream the fuck on.
That’s precisely why I read Juan Cole’s posts every single day and why I’ve defended him on occasion. I just wish he’d hew closer to his areas of expertise.
Oh he should definately stick closer to his areas of expertise and probably would do well to tone down his sweeping readings of certain things, as in e.g. the issue of the Zaouahiri letter. His catch on the language phrasing was interesting and correct to an extent, but he did over-read it a bit.
So long as one goes into reading him (and skips over his tedious blithering on with respect to American domestic politics, which in any event hold little interest for me) with an understanding of his quirks, he’s quite useful.
But what has concerned me from the first day of the invasion is that President Bush took the action without adequate domestic political support for it.
I think he had plenty of domestic political support for the invasion. What he didn’t have was support for the occupation — and a big part of the reason is that his administration continually downplayed (and continues to downplay) the risks and costs the occupation would have.
Great! Another opportunity to push my blog! Start with Why is the U.S. in Iraq? [Excerpt]:
Why would the terrorists do that? Wouldn’t they just attack elsewhere if the U.S. invaded in force and took over the country?
Not if we kept our occupation force to a bare minimum and made our goal the construction of an Arab Muslim democracy.
John Mueller has an essay in Foreign Affairs about domestic political support. He makes the case that a lot of the drop in support seems to be inevitable, given the similar declines in support for the Vietnam and Korean Wars. Worth a look.