I don’t usually blog on Iraq, if only because I have never been there. Nor do I have any Arabic at all. But lately there has been so much talk about how the war is going. Jacob (below) writes about who has and hasn’t changed their minds. Perhaps an outsider’s perspective on the whole matter might prove useful.
Here is what I expected before the war started:
1. WMD would be found, and probably used by Iraq during fighting.
2. The whole world would come to America’s side.
3. Iraqi reconstruction would be a huge mess.
4. Our administration (indeed any administration) would handle it badly.
5. In Iraq civil war would ensue. Ten to fifteen years later Iraq would end up with a (relatively) stable oligarchy, better than Saddam but hardly ideal.
6. A kind of de facto partition might arise/continue, under the U.S. guise of protecting the Kurds.
7. If we didn’t fight the war something worse would happen. I never thought Iraq was a threat to the U.S., but I envisioned a wider Middle Eastern war breaking out, sooner or later. We would intervene later, but on worse terms.
8. The strike would cause some countries to accelerate their nuclear programs, but this would happen anyway. The pace would not so much matter.
Let’s do a simple stocktaking. Clearly I was wrong about #1 and #2. So far I am right about #3 and #4. #5 and #6 remain to be seen. In that department things have gone as I had expected. We’ll never know that much more about #7, since it is a counterfactual. I will stick with #8 as written.
When it concerns how the war will turn out for the Iraqis, subsequent events haven’t caused me to revise my priors much. The war is worse for America’s global reputation than I had thought, largely because #1 hasn’t kicked in. (That being said, the war has been less bad for American troops than I had expected, for this same reason.) #7 remains a hovering uncertainty, never to be resolved.
When I now wonder whether the war will turn out to be a bad idea, my thoughts go in the following direction. The cost, international backlash, and Quagmire factor will make it harder to do this again. A pre-emptive strike will sometime be necessary, but a succeeding President is more likely to flinch. (Of course this is not certain. If Bush wins handily in November the door might remain open, perhaps too open, for this to happen again.)
The war could conceivably turn out to be worse for the Iraqis too. But nothing I’ve seen so far has caused me to update my earlier estimates. I was fooled in 1989 about the difficulties of constructing a civil society. Since then I’ve learned that lesson.
So the key comparison concerns #7, which we probably will never know. Iraqi reconstruction could go very badly, without forcing many of us to change our minds. That being said, we ought to hold great trepidation about our ability to forecast counterfactuals. So no one should be very sure that the war was a good idea, either.
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