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Our victory in Iraq (an ongoing series)

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 12:23 — Joel

Via Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress offers an "Iraq War Ledger" tallying up the financial, human and other costs of the Iraq War. Bottom line: Not good.

But a couple of data points interested me more than the others:

Empowered Iran in Iraq and region. The Islamic Republic of Iran is the primary strategic beneficiary of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime removed Iran’s most-hated enemy (with whom it fought a hugely destructive war in the 1980s) and removed the most significant check on Iran’s regional hegemonic aspirations. Many of Iraq’s key Iraqi Shia Islamist and Kurdish leaders enjoy close ties to Iran, facilitating considerable influence for Iran in the new Iraq.

Stifled democracy reform. A recent RAND study concluded that, rather than becoming a beacon of democracy, the Iraq war has hobbled the cause of political reform in the Middle East. The report stated that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

In the absence of WMD, of course, creating US-friendly democracies in the Middle East became the backup rationale for the American invasion. Turns out there were no WMDs ... and that our invasion might've throttled whatever nascent democratic spirit existed in that region. The Iraq War, simply put, is never not going to be a disaster for us.

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Sat, 05/08/2010 - 12:50 — Wry Mouth

The Iraq War, simply put, is never not going to be a disaster fo

(1) Center for American Progress. Heh.

(2) "The Iraq War, simply put, is never not going to be a disaster for us." Harry Reid could not have put it better.

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 14:35 — Joel

Re: Never not going to be a disaster

Your second statement is clever, Wry, the first less so. CAP undoubtedly is a left-leaning outfit ... but you're not actually saying why they're wrong.

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 18:27 — Wry Mouth

CAP: Bastion of Nuance (?)

Let's try it this way: what was the "pro" side of their ledger like?

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 14:27 — Deregulator

Heh indeed

The wisdom of entering Iraq to depose Saddam and what happened afterward? I could be convinced of either side of the proposition.

The benefits of the invasion to Iraqis? Unquestionable. Getting rid of Saddam's murderous, undemocratic, corrupt, despotic regime was a boon to Iraqis. The notion that life would be better for everyday Iraqis had Saddam remained in power is laughable.

Was it the business of the United States to get rid of Saddam? I cannot say. I was a big supporter at first. Now, I'm not as sanguine about it simply because we were not willing to assume control of and responsibility for civil institutions there. And given the total vacuum of civil instititutions in Iraq (caused entirely by Saddam's regime), our response -- let the Iraqis figure out how to govern themselves -- now looks like a tragic and costly miscalculation.

Still, anyone suggesting Iraq would be a better place had Saddam stayed in power is a moron.

Sun, 05/09/2010 - 11:13 — Capuchin the Wry

Vacuum of civil institutions and US Responsibility

Hell; I saw that one coming and I'm a rube math teacher in the sticks with no foreign policy training.

Put a country under a despot's heel for 30 years. At the end of that, most people in the country won't know anything but despotry (Cuba, anyone?), and, being human and all, will have made their peace with the situation.

So, we run in and free a nation, and don't plan on providing a little guidance (probably due to the fact that if we did the UN would throw a hissy fit and yell at us)? We decide "compassion" means "find your own way?"

For a nation under recent tyrrany, with experience in democracy (republicanism, whatever you want to call representative government) that might work. But not for a people crippled by generations of dependency.

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 14:39 — Joel

Re: Saddam

"Still, anyone suggesting Iraq would be a better place had Saddam stayed in power is a moron."

Perhaps. I'm not making that suggestion. Saddam was an evil, mass-murdering tyrant. I do think, however, that it was not the business of the United States to depose him, and I think that subsequent events continue to bear that out. But kinda blaming Iraqis for their failure to make lemonade out of the lemons of our invasion, I think, is also wrongheaded.

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 15:00 — crywalt

My Question

My question on the whole Iraq invasion thing -- and I admit I'm moving into vague and philosophical waters here -- is this: Why Saddam Hussein and not any other really bad people in the world?

I understand that there are strategic answers to this. The Iraq war was winnable, for example, in a way invading Iran would most likely not be, or North Korea. And attempting to repair Somalia is probably also unwinnable in an entirely other way. And so on. And of course Iraq has oil, and invaded our employers -- scratch that, friends -- Kuwait. And we wouldn't attack Saudi Arabia because we like those despots for some reason. And so on and so forth. There's a lot here I'm sure I don't know about, too, which is fine. [waves hands]

My question is framed more philosophically. If we're going to say, hey, the people of Iraq are absolutely, definitely, unquestionably better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein -- which point could maybe be argued against but for the moment let's take it as true -- if it's true that Iraq is now a better place in which to be Iraqi, what argument can we give for not deposing every tinpot dictator on the planet?

The only argument against it is logistical: America can't afford it. Although, really, we probably could. We've afforded the Iraq War so far despite its astronomical cost. And in costs of American lives -- I want to make it perfectly clear that I personally consider one life too much -- but in costs of American lives, Iraq hasn't been that bad. Nowhere near as deadly as Vietnam. Across the duration of the Iraq War there have been about 4,000 killed; across the same duration about a quarter of a million people died in car accidents in the U.S. I'm not someone who considers deaths statistically -- I want everyone to live to 110 and die peacefully in their sleep during the best wet dream ever -- but if you do the comparison....

So what reason could we formulate for not exporting democracy at the point of an M4? If we accept as true that we've improved Iraq, it seems to me it's actively immoral for the United States not to invade and democratize any and every country with a heinous government. Isn't it?

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 15:43 — Deregulator

Great question

And I have no satisfactory answer. Or at least no answer that could be applied uniformly as a matter of principle. (That's one reason foreign policy can be, well, somewhat foreign to me. It's difficult dealing with it based on first principles because governments are complex entities that often do not act rationally.)

There are some among us who would argue it's never justified under any circumstances for the United States to intervene in the way we did in Iraq. I don't accept that. (Was entering the European Theater in WWII also not justified? I can't agree with that, though again, there was a significant isolationist sentiment in the late '30s/early '40s.) Then again, I could not support the Bosnian intervention of the 1990s because I did not see how it a) served our national interest and b) was worth the cost, even if it did.

When you're a global power, intervention always is a judgment call, based on a host of calculations. And these do not lend themselves to simple formulations, unless you're a doctrinaire isolationist or a knee-jerk interventionist.

Hope I cleared that up!

Sat, 05/08/2010 - 15:59 — crywalt

My Approach

When I think of these kinds of things, I imagine -- automatically, it's not as if it's something I do on purpose -- explaining the actions of my country to someone from that country asking me about it. So I imagine a woman in a headscarf from, say, Yemen, coming to me and saying, "Why did America save the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein but leave us to suffer?" You can't answer a question like that with strategic foreign policy objectives and Pentagon reports. She won't care that the Air Force wanted bases in the Middle East or whatever other reasons might be invented for the invasion. She'll want to know why her firstborn son died when medicine to treat his sickness couldn't go through the trade embargo, why her husband was carted off to an interrogation and never returned, why her cousin was blown up at the market.

The obvious answer -- "Life's not fair" -- doesn't really work for me, either. I mean, it isn't, but I thought it was our job as humans to try and fix that as much as we can.

Sun, 05/09/2010 - 13:39 — Deregulator

Blaming Iraqis?

Please.

Where do you think I said anything like that?

I think it's telling that the U.S. foreign policy establishment under Bush assumed that Iraqis, freed from the shackles of Saddam and his sons, would embrace something like Western democracy. (My guess is, they looked at what happened to Eastern Europe when the Soviet Empire fell and figured something similar would happen in Iraq. Hey, I briefly drank that Kool-aid. But I soon came back to reality and understood that (aside from Israel) the Middle East has no civil society to speak of, and Eastern Europe enjoyed centuries of civilization before the Nazi/Soviet eras.)

It's difficult to imagine how self-government would spontaneously emerge from a society in a society with no traditions other than feudalism or dictatorship. Failing to allow for that was a failure of U.S. policymakers, not the Iraqis.

Mon, 05/10/2010 - 07:12 — Khabalox

"Civil Society"

But I soon came back to reality and understood that (aside from Israel) the Middle East has no civil society to speak of,

I'm curious to know what exactly you mean by "civil society." Your statement sounds like a very broad over-generalization, and I'm having a hard time figuring out what it is that Israel has that the rest of the Middle East does not (that could be called "civil society").

Mon, 05/10/2010 - 10:35 — Deregulator

Civil society

By that, I mean the social institutions found outside the government and commercial sectors. Loosely speaking, it's NGOs or nonprofits, but civil society goes beyond that to encompass informal arrangements as loose as community bake sales or neighborhood watch or people who watch after their friends' pets.

We saw a resurgence of an Enlightenment-inspired awareness of civil society when the Soviet Empire collapsed (referred to here). A defining characteristic of feudal and/or despotic regimes is that they tend to crush independent social institutions.

Perhaps I should revise my earlier comment. Most of the Islamic world -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt come to mind, and there probably are others -- lacks those institutions. The state (or the state-run church), along with the commercial sphere (which is heavily under state control and therefore hardly a free market) dominate daily life.

That's what I was getting at.

Mon, 05/10/2010 - 10:21 — Joel

Re: Blaming Iraqis

Rick: Let me withdraw that comment. I misread your point, and I apologize.

Mon, 05/10/2010 - 10:24 — Deregulator

RE: Iraqis

Joel: Accepted. Not a problem.