Reassessing Iraq

A handful of good reads on Iraq this past week, one of which comes from the first semi-announced Presidential candidate of 2008, Joe Biden (PDF). It's as good a prescription for moving forward as there is out there. Unfortunately (and not just for Biden or Democrats), I don't think anything will come of it until either Bush leaves office or something does go horribly awry during the current status quo. The Bush administration doesn't want anyone's fingerprints on their Iraq policy even if it means turning away good ideas. Moreso, they aren't even about to think about a "compact" with Congress now that even some of the GOP's ranks are calling for a withdrawal. Biden's speech is worth reading if only as a reminder that there are now, just as there have been in the past, several good ideas on how to take a better approach on Iraq policy. But other than a whole lotta "imploring" and "urging" on Biden's part, it won't go anywhere anytime soon.

Robert Kagan also has an entry into the Iraq debate, making what I think is a good point on measuring the necessity and benefit of our actions there:

To assess whether the Iraq war was worth it requires seriously posing the question: What would have happened if the Bush administration had not gone to war in March 2003? That is a missing but essential piece of the current very legitimate debate. We all know what has gone wrong since the Iraq war began, but it is not as if, in the absence of a war, everything would have gone right. Those who want to have this debate cannot simply point to the terrible toll in casualties. They have to address the question of what the alternative to war really would have meant.

There is not much dispute about what kind of leader Saddam Hussein was. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright once compared him to Hitler, and the comparison was apt in a couple of ways. Hussein, as we will soon relearn in excruciating detail, had contempt for human life and no qualms about killing thousands of his own citizens and many thousands more of his neighbors' citizens, about torturing women and children and about using any type of weapon he could buy or manufacture to burn, poison, infect and incinerate political opponents and even entire populations, so long as they were too weak to fight back. This alone placed him in a special class of historical figures, a not irrelevant factor in determining whether his removal, even at the present cost, was worth it. Was it not worth at least some sacrifice to remove such a man from power?

A more intriguing question is whether a decision not to go to war in 2003 would have produced lasting peace or would only have delayed war until a later date -- as in the 1930s. There is a strong argument to be made that Hussein would have pushed toward confrontation and war at some point, no matter what we did. His Hitler-like megalomania does not seem to be in question. He patiently, brutally pushed his way to power in Iraq, then set about brutally and impatiently making himself the dominant figure in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, using war and the threat of war as his principal tools. In the early 1980s he invaded Iran and fought it to a bloody standstill for the better part of a decade. No sooner had that war ended than he invaded Kuwait. He fancied himself the new Saladin, much as Napoleon and Hitler had fancied themselves the new Caesar.

Many argue that, even if all this is true, Hussein was nevertheless contained through sanctions and no-fly zones and therefore could be deterred. Many advanced this argument before the war, too, even when they believed with as much certainty as the Bush administration that Hussein did have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. And, indeed, although for most Americans the question of whether the war was "worth it" revolves around the failure to discover the stockpiles that most believed he had, nevertheless the key issue, I believe, remains the same as before that failure: whether Hussein could have been contained.

Among the points lost in the revision of Iraq war history is that the breakdown in containment was high among the factors that made invasion the logical next step. A quick read of Ken Pollack reminds us of this. That WMDs were used as the PR wedge by the administration (complete with Rumsfeld's "We know where they are" sideshow) didn't seem to convince antiwar critics before the war, yet their absence now seems to stand as evidence of duplicitousness on the part of only George W. Bush. Nevermind that no less than Bill Clinton stated quite openly that when the inspectors were evicted and we'd blown up various parts of Iraq during his tenure in office, there was no way of knowing whether or not we had eliminated stockpiles of weapons or not. But we knew they were there before and we knew Hussein had an active and ongoing interest in them still. So it is that I think there's more than a little "there" to Kagan's guess that we'd end up duking it out with Hussein sooner or later anyway. Better to do so with no WMDs than after he'd had more time to work on that project.

Last up is the Idea of the Week put out by the DLC. This offers up a good counterpoint to those calling for a withdrawal schedule. Instead, I think there is a case to be made for outlining the steps that have to happen for us to start actually handing over control of Iraq to Iraq and start bringing the troops home. The difference here is that instead of picking a date on the calendar and allowing the opposition to merely wait us out, peg the withdrawal to events that make Iraq self-sustaining:

Diamond argues for a three-prong "correction" of our policies in Iraq to avoid a fatal slide from "squandered victory" to defeat: a clear, public statement by the president that we do not want a permanent military presence in Iraq; an equally clear statement that our withdrawal is strictly contingent on the ability of the permanent and constitutional Iraqi government of the near future to govern the country; and a serious, internationally facilitated nation-building exercise aimed at securing Sunni participation in the government and getting the nation's economy going again. In particular, Diamond's idea of a contingent "exit strategy" would make it clear that Iraqis, not Americans, control their own destiny and must fight for a democratic future. It could help convince Sunni leaders that their goal of ending the U.S. presence in Iraq can best, and perhaps can only, be achieved by abandoning the insurgency and engaging in peaceful political activity.

This is an approach we encourage Democrats to embrace, as opposed to the current stampede on Capitol Hill toward proposals to set a fixed, arbitrary, and early deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. A fixed exit date would indeed risk "emboldening" the Iraqi insurgency to hang on until we are gone, and which Islamist extremists everywhere would try to turn into a massive propaganda victory.

The fight to advance democracy abroad is one that will continue on - and it must. But increasingly, the disparity of how we go about doing this very thing in Iraq stands in stark contrast to how we go about doing it in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. Eventually, the question becomes "If we think we can do it in those places, why can't we do it that way in Iraq now that Hussein is gone?" At some point, the legitimate successes that the administration should be applauded for: maintaining security and scheduling for elections in January, keeping Iraq from boiling over into a civil war, etc ... will highlight the failure in those areas that help move us to the next phase - training Iraqi troops, building infrastructure, sealing Iraqi borders, etc .... When the sense emerges that this War President, as he likes to call himself, has run out of successes in Iraq, the corrollary will emerge that it's time for a new idea on how to fix our own situation in Iraq.