Who Would Want Credit For Iraq?
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Whenever possible, I refer to the Iraq war as a war of aggression, because that is what it is and has always been. One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it could possibly mean to achieve a victory that anyone would want to celebrate as the result of a war of aggression. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans are dead. Tens of thousands of Americans are injured, some of them severely, and Iraq now boasts one of the highest percentages of disabled people in the world. Millions of Iraqis were turned into refugees or displaced within their own country. All of this has come about because of a war that did not have to happen. All of this has come about because of a war we started. It is bad enough that our government unleashed this hell on people who had never actually done America any harm, but it is unconscionable that any of us celebrate what has been done as if it were something good and worthwhile.
Of course the new administration will try to make the best of it, claim progress and take credit for anything it can. That is in the political self-interest of this administration. Having inherited a mess that the political class has convinced itself was improving, it would not be advantageous to be the one overseeing the unraveling. The rest of us are not burdened by such considerations.
I don’t think it is particular noble to destroy another people’s country on the basis of unfounded, paranoid fears that its small, economically weak, militarily inferior government posed grave threats to the global superpower. There are many words that come to mind to describe this, but noble is not one of them. It is not especially noble to do this with no meaningful plan for restoring order and governance in the wake of the invasion. There is no nobility to be found in the afterthought of poorly constructing a democratic regime whose elections served as the trigger for massive bloodshed. Likewise, there was not much nobility when our government belatedly recognized its incompetence and failure long after it could do the civilian casualties any good and proposed a plan that would temporarily reduce violence long enough for the previous administration to get out the door. It is also hard to find anything noble in a sectarian-dominated governing coalition that oversees a politicized military and police force that has begun reviving the nastier bits of the old regime. As The Economist reported last fall:
Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.
The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. In July the Baghdad police reimposed a nightly curfew, making it easier for the police, taking orders from politicians, to arrest people disliked by the Shia-led government. In particular, they have been targeting leaders of the Awakening Councils, groups of Sunnis, many of them former insurgents and sympathisers, who have helped the government to drive out or capture Sunni rebels who refused to come onside. Instead of being drawn into the new power set-up, many of them in the past few months have been hauled off to prison. In the most delicate cases, the arrests are being made by an elite unit called the Baghdad Brigade, also known as “the dirty squad”, which is said to report to the office of the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki.
I suppose there is some kind of brutish justice to having the oppressed assume the role of the oppressors, but it is hardly noble.
When I refer to the Iraq “surge,” I usually make a point of emphasizing that its political goals have still never been met. The promise of facilitating political reconciliation was central to the purpose of the “surge.” Perhaps this was always an unrealistic claim, but it was the one the previous administration made. This was the thing that was supposed to make the “surge” different from previous escalations in troop levels, and it was one of the main ways to measure the success of the plan. As far as security was concerned, the “surge” of brigades did help improve things. This was aided by successfully turning Anbar Sunnis against jihadists that were killing their people. The Awakening was a product of successfully applying counintersurgency doctrine, but it predated the arrival of the additional brigades, whose presence was temporary and which ended over a year and a half ago.
During the presidential campaign, no one in the media wanted to hear an explanation for decreasing violence that did not endorse the conventional wisdom that the “surge” had achieved this all by itself. When Obama attempted to argue that the previous sectarian violence and mass expulsions were responsible for the lower levels of violence in 2007-08, this was derided as a refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth that the “surge” was genius. It was, in fact, a temporary fix and something addressing the symptoms of Iraqi political dysfunction. “Surge” enthusiasts are a lot like TARP defenders. Numerous other factors were involved in stabilizing the respective situations, the stated goals of the plan were never realized, and then when some measure of stability was restored the proponents of the plan declare that their plan succeeded beyond all expectations.
Contrary to Wehner’s claim, the “passion for the democratic process” and the revival of sectarianism are not mutually exclusive. In Iraq’s experience, one is the product of the other. In an already deeply divided country, the politicization of sect and ethnicity through elections has been and will continue to be a cause for disorder and violence. Let’s also remember that the levels of political violence in Iraq would be considered unacceptable in most other countries. It is only by comparison with the nightmarish conditions of 2006 that things seem “peaceful.” As The Economist reported last week:
A month or more can pass without an American killed in action and civilian casualties are at their lowest in six years—though this still means that nearly 300 civilians are dying from political violence every month [bold mine-DL].
Reviewing the deeply corrupt and ineffective government Iraq has, The Economist article continues:
Iraq’s citizens are the losers. They cannot rely on their government for basic infrastructure. Baghdad has no flights to Mosul, the country’s northern hub, since rival leaders are in charge there. The road south to Amara and Basra is littered with half-built flyovers, seemingly never to be finished. By the side of the road lie toppled power masts. No wonder only 25% of Iraqis get the electricity they need. The same percentage has access to adequate health care; 22% are malnourished [bold mine-DL]. In world rankings of income per head, Iraq comes 162nd.
Iraq is as much of an economic basketcase as you might expect a war-torn, corruptly-governed country to be:
Only one thing is preventing a humanitarian crisis: public-sector employment. The state accounts for three out of five jobs, and 70% of this year’s budget will be spent on salaries and pensions. Capital expenditure is rare, admits Iyad al-Samarraie, the parliament speaker. His office is decorated with gilded chairs and extravagant mouldings, ordered by his predecessor. “This is what passes for investment,” he says.
The private sector is in even worse shape. Few middle-sized businesses have emerged since the invasion. Companies are either small family affairs or sclerotic behemoths. The non-oil industries, still partly state-owned, should soak up labour. But they account for only 13% of GDP (the regional average is 33%). Mass idleness is the result. American soldiers stationed in rural areas with few government jobs say the unemployment rate there approaches 80%. The national rate is 45-47%, including the underemployed—and, because of the high birth rate, the workforce is growing by 240,000 a year.
Even if Iraq’s democracy did not labor under these burdens, democratization has always been an insufficient reason for turning Iraq into a killing zone for seven years and risking and losing the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of Americans. Greg Scoblete has written in response to Wehner:
The invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be justified solely on the basis of our love for democracy.
Of course, there is nothing else that war supporters can point to other than the quite meager fact that Iraq’s new heavy-handed, illiberal government happens to be an elected one favored by a majority of the population. Had another major power launched such a war for the explicit purpose of toppling Iraq’s government, most Westerners, including most war supporters, would be demanding that its leaders be tried for war crimes. Instead we are treated to the absurdity of dressing up an illegal, unjust war of aggression that has laid waste to an entire country as a noble victory of which we are supposed to be proud.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
19 Responses to “Who Would Want Credit For Iraq?”
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Your article is definitive. This declaration of victory goes beyond Orwellian. These people are criminally insane.
Nice work Dan.
I think Carl Schmitt was right: “war of aggression” is a shitty concept that ought to be scrapped. On Iraq, I think the concept is problematic for a more traditional reason than the ones Schmitt gave. It’s traditionally been considered just, by some, to go to war to depose a foreign tyrant. That’s what the Bush government did, no matter how stupid and ill-conceived their plan was, and no matter what US interests were also involved in the calculation. So in the case of Iraq I think the question is, aggression against whom? The intent was to overthrow the regime and “liberate” the country, so yeah, you could call it a war of aggression against the Baathist regime, but not a war of aggression against Iraq itself. Of course you could call all wars to overthrow tyrants “wars of aggression”, but then by including just wars (by some theories of jus ad bellum) in that category you’d lose the polemic edge of your phrase.
Again, to emphasize, I’m talking about the intent of the Iraq War, not the consequences. I’m definitely not arguing that it was a good thing.
Aaron:
Just because some considers it just to wage a war on a country because the country is ruled by tyrants doesn’t mean that is in fact a just war. That’s merely begging the question. A war of aggression is military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense. This is literally what we did.
The idea that during a military conflict you can somehow separate the civilians from the ruling class is absurd. If we could, there would be no such thing as collateral damage. A primary reason wars of aggression are so fundamentally immoral is because of that very reason. And why humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war so perverse. When you invade a country for reason X to depose dictator Z, the chances are incredibly that the people who will suffer most are innocent civilians.
Its not like the the consequences in Iraq weren’t completely predictable.
The “liberation” reason for fighting the war also wasn’t really commonly used as justification until, a few months later, all the WMD claims were well and thoroughly demonstrated false. Then, it turned out that we invaded Iraq cause we love democracy so damn much.
A great summation and one of your best.
[...] Wilkinson, amplifying Larison: [...]
As the old saw goes, worse than a crime, it was a mistake.
Why did we think we understood the place? How was our national interest involved?
If Obama gets us out with relatively little additional damage and something less than total disaster as a result, he will deserve a bit of credit, not in the victory sense, but for competent extrication, which is what he advocated.
It’s too much to ask, of course, for an actual strategic analysis of why this adventure was so wrong, and applying the lessons to our policy stance overall. Then we’d have to question NATO, troops in East Asia, “peacekeeping” operations and the rest.
The threat of national bankruptcy drove Anthony Eden out of Egypt in 1956. It’s probably too much to hope that our fiscal mess will motivate a bit of foreign disentanglement.
Right on, Dan.
My impression is that Iraq will have another round of civil war when the American ground troops leave next year. There’s just too much unsettled business left among Iraqi groups. Mostly between Shiites, I think, though picking on the now rather weak Sunnis is what they do to pass the time.
Why the shades of gray? Cheney and the oil companies had Iraq’s oil fields all prettily divided up as spoils before the event. Halliburton and Blackwater made squillions.
This was international corporate gangsterism, pure and simple. The US was a vehicle for the multinationals that ran it.
A reply: I didn’t say overthrowing foreign tyrants is just (though I think it can be). I’m saying that it’s traditionally been considered just by some important thinkers: Jean Bodin comes to mind, but probably some famous ancient Greeks or Romans too.
For a persuasive conservative argument against the whole concept of “war of aggression” – another bad 20th-century innovation in public law – see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth. The concept is a lot slippier than it seems at first glance, for several reasons. In practice, it’s one of the main conceptual weapons in the arsenal of these bloody 20th-century humanitarian crusades, which are almost invariably waged against “aggressors”.
You can attack a regime as opposed to civilians. Tyrannicide, for instance. There will usually be collateral damage, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that the existence of collateral damage erases the moral distinction between attacking a regime and attacking a people. No matter how awful things turned out in Iraq, the distinction remains.
The noblest Romans and Greeks – the Brutuses (Bruti?), Harmodius and Aristogeiton engaged in tyrannicide as citizens, without beneift of any army, let alone a foreign army (those who do enjoy foreign army benefit are called QUISLINGS). The tyrants they targeted were domestic ones. For Greeks, the tyrant, by the way, simply means a sole ruler without benefit of hereditary right or of customary procedure (one with that benefit was a basileus or perhaps an anax; or magistrates).The Romans had no time for any king after 509 BC (244 ab urbe condita), until Napoleon named his son the King of Rome in the early 19th century. Republicans, especially the heirs of Washington and Jefferson, should recognize this. Little sickened me as an exprogressive more than reading the cruise missile liberals pretending to the mantle of such Athenians or Romans – or for that matter John Wilkes Booth…..Am checking my Bodin and Schmitt…
Daniel: “One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it could possibly mean to achieve a victory that anyone would want to celebrate as the result of a war of aggression. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans are dead. Tens of thousands of Americans are injured, some of them severely, and Iraq now boasts one of the highest percentages of disabled people in the world. Millions of Iraqis were turned into refugees or displaced within their own country. All of this has come about because of a war that did not have to happen. All of this has come about because of a war we started. It is bad enough that our government unleashed this hell on people who had never actually done America any harm, but it is unconscionable that any of us celebrate what has been done as if it were something good and worthwhile.”
Remember, to the right, the Iraqi casualties are as nothing; they no more care about those than I think about the horrors of a slaughterhouse while enjoying a steak (rare, with A-1 sauce, maybe some red wine). They might use the odd, highly selected Iraqi deaths and suffering for propaganda, but in the end, the only objection they’d have to a pile of skulls is the possible PR problems.
As for American casualties, we saw in the last 30-odd years how little the right cares for them, as they neglected the VA, and gleefully back-stabbed any Democratic vietnam veteran who became inconvenient, including besmirching their courage, despite combat wounds. They don’t
As for money, well, it was a profitable for war the contractors and mega-corps who supplied it – note, it was far, far more profitable than a short, highly successful war would have been.
Setting aside U.S. considerations, do you believe Iraq had it better under Saddam? Or do you believe Iraq is better off now and in the near future because of the coalition’s invasion? A greater amount of Iraqis participate politically, political parties have multiplied and live and die by their responsiveness to the ruled. That seems pretty important.
More important is that more Iraqis now live free from oppression and terror, free to voice opinions, free to slander their government and politicians, free from a knock on the door in the middle of the night that means a father or son is disappeared, property stolen and family made destitute. (If you haven’t lived in that atmosphere, its hard to understand how dehumanizing it is and how crazy it is to emerge from it). The anecdotes and allegations in the Economist report is horrifying when compared to Switzerland, but nothing when compared to Saddam’s butcher bill.
[Again, whether the coalition profited is not the point I'm making]
Mr Larison,
The fact that America started this war is undeniable. The assertion that the horrendous destruction unleashed within that country is solely America’s responsibility is a little harder to support.
The sectarian carnage that followed the war was severe and claimed thousands of lives. If America was responsible for unleashing the sectarian bloodbath than Bush’s father is a great humanitarian for leaving Saddam Hussein in power after Desert Storm.
Assume for a moment that, following Desert Storm, we continued sanctions against Iraq which ultimately resulted in the downfall of Saddam’s regime. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where a similar bloodbath would not have occurred. Would we be responsible then for the lives that were claimed?
Don’t get me wrong here… I’m against preemptive warfare. I still believe that the proponents of the war justify the cost under the specious pretense that displaying America’s military might preserves Paux Americana and that the ends justify the means.
Unfortunately with the advent of precision weaponry, we are able to wage war more effectively “under the radar”. These weapons keep civilian casualties “lower” which prevents mass uprisings and mass revulsion back at home.
There is no accounting for a future that did not happen. What actually happened in Iraq is a direct consequence of the decisions of US policy makers, government officials, surrogates, etc. Ink stained fingers do not prettify the results.
No one is “better off now” because our innovative approach, ie turning just war principles upside down, disregarding the rule of law, further imperializing our presidency, further bloating our military industrial complex, politicizing our intelligence services, and getting just about everything wrong, cannot be made to look better by asserting that none of it matters much because things might have been worse. We will never know.
This war was an out and out screw up from the start and the price has been severe, most grievously borne by the Iraqi people. Not the least of the price we have paid is the precedent that has been established that a complete yokel, if he happens to be president of the United States, can order up the destruction of a country half way around the world. This adventure has been not just a screw up, it has been a debacle. Worse, the debacle has been treated to no formal resolution, is unacknowledged by many in our country, and is celebrated by even more. One is left wondering what else might be coming down the pike.,
Nice article but most of us knew the Iraq War was a disaster and a human waste. So what if Mr. Larison now recaps history for us? The public outrage of that war has long subsided, replaced by other matters, mainly the economy and jobs. Nobody was, or ever will be, held accountable.
The Hurt Locker Oscar last night, in my opinion, was a sop thrown to the military as a belated apology to the men and women who lost their lives and limbs in that hellhole (and are still losing lives in Afghanistan), which, unfortunately, ignores the fault of those immoral and defective leaders who launched this gargantuan lie and imposed lethal force against a broken country.
History professor Dr. Newt Gingrich no doubt would disagree with Mr. Larison. Maybe a collective case of public amnesia isn’t so bad after all. Iraq? Oh yeah, that’s where the Bush “surge worked” and we won, right?
Very recently, the main attraction at an event held by my state’s (OH) Right to Life organization was Sarah Palin. Yes, that Sarah Palin. She who has led many a lusty cheer for the destruction of Iraq and other US wars of aggression. Now in the Buckeye state, holding forth on the “right to life.” At least she rebated her honorarium. Not that it mattered to me. I quit donating to Ohio Right to Life years ago.
Aaron: “The intent was to overthrow the regime and “liberate” the country, so yeah, you could call it a war of aggression against the Baathist regime, but not a war of aggression against Iraq itself. ”
For a war which was not against ‘Iraq itself’, it certainly killed a bunch of Iraqis.