The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong. I sensed the hubris of this administration after the fall of Baghdad, but I didn’t sense how they would grotesquely under-man the post-war occupation, bungle the maintenance of security, short-change an absolutely vital mission, dismiss constructive criticism, ignore even their allies (like the Brits), and fail to shift swiftly enough when events span out of control. This was never going to be an easy venture; and we shouldn’t expect perfection. There were bound to be revolts and terrorist infractions. The job is immense; and many of us have rallied to the administration’s defense in difficult times, aware of the immense difficulties involved. But to have allowed the situation to slide into where we now are, to have a military so poorly managed and under-staffed that what we have seen out of Abu Ghraib was either the result of a) chaos, b) policy or c) some awful combination of the two, is inexcusable. It is a betrayal of all those soldiers who have done amazing work, who are genuine heroes, of all those Iraqis who have risked their lives for our and their future, of ordinary Americans who trusted their president and defense secretary to get this right.
Like some others I was beguiled for too long by meteorological contemplation of threatening storms. Somehow the existence of sophisticated arguments in favor of war in Iraq obscured quite obviously sufficient arguments against. Notably, ones about our President’s capacities: never send an incompetent to do a competent’s job.
The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread, and how bipartisan, is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost. The administration therefore may not appreciate how close the whole nation is to tipping decisively against the war. In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether this popular and elite perception of the situation in Iraq is too simplistic and too pessimistic. The perception, if it lingers, may destroy support for the war before events on the ground have a chance to prove it wrong. So Iraq could be lost if the Bush administration holds to the view that it can press ahead with its political and military strategy without any dramatic change of course, without taking bold and visible action to reverse the current downward trajectory….But if the administration does not take dramatic action now, it may be unable to avoid failure.
Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington’s assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq.
Ugh. I still believe things to be not-irreparable in Iraq. The stakes are very high, and the U.S. has got to get this right. But I didn’t think they would ever go so far wrong.
I now suspect that at the end of the day Iraqis will be much better off but the U.S. will be noticeably worse off than if the war had not taken place. Iraq will end up as a more federal, more constitutional, more democratic state than exists in the Arab world so far. But, after the eventual Iraqi state has rearmed sufficiently to put down all the internal threats, it will also be more authoritarian, more militaristic, more theocratic, and more anti-American than it might have been. The U.S., however, will have sacrificed a great deal of its moral capital and credibility in the process– moral capital and credibility that it needs in order to fight both the military and the social-transformation fronts of the war on terror.
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