Arrogance and Ignorance

[struggle4progress]

Three authors make the case that time and again, the U.S. has made disastrous mistakes in Iraq
Todd Oppenheimer

Sunday, October 1, 2006

.. Individually, each of these books -- "Fiasco" (The Penguin Press; 482 pages; $27.95), Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Knopf; 320 pages; $25.95) and The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (Simon & Schuster; 260 pages; $26) -- has its shortcomings. But those misses are dwarfed by the weight of persuasive material each author has found, and by the elegance of their presentations. Taken together, their evidence makes a staggering case against President Bush and his staff. Their argument, in sum, is that the administration staged a war with a grateful, homogeneous country in mind rather than the proud, deeply sectarian culture it confronted; that it failed to plan for any contingency or any stabilizing follow-up beyond achieving quick success in toppling Saddam Hussein; that its officials in Iraq lived and behaved in a thoughtless, corrupt, imperious manner; that this wasted billions of dollars and alienated the Iraqis, thereby encouraging the insurgency. And, as things further unraveled, that it misinterpreted, and thus mishandled, one crisis after another.

How could prominent federal officials stumble so badly? A primary reason, according to these writers, is disturbingly simple: For those in charge of the Iraq campaign, neither knowledge of the Middle East nor expertise at one's job was a priority. What mattered most was political commitment to Republican ideology, especially faith in the appeal of capitalism, preferably of the nouveau, top-down, supply-side variety. Critiques of this sort can sound ridiculous, like ill-informed whining from out-of-power liberals. That is not the case this time. Each of these books goes to extraordinary lengths to document the way key moments were poisoned, again and again, by amateur, often young ideologues who were playing Monopoly with one of the most volatile regions in the world.

Consider this from "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, an editor at the Washington Post and formerly its Baghdad bureau chief. When new staffers were needed in Baghdad (and they were needed constantly), job applications were sent to James O'Beirne, the White House liaison at the Pentagon. O'Beirne considered one young man "an ideal candidate" primarily because he had worked for the Republican Party in the 2000 Florida recount. Two people said O'Beirne's staffers asked applicants if they supported Roe vs. Wade and had voted for Bush. A former staffer who worked near O'Beirne "saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy ... and Commerce denied positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent Republican National Committee contributors." The job of reforming the Iraqi stock exchange -- a critical piece of the administration's privatization program -- was given to Jay Hallen, a 24-year-old political operative who had no business experience; he soon fired his sole assistant, a 39-year-old family man who had worked in insurance and financial services, been a private investigator and spent six years in the Navy ..

In his final chapter, Ricks sheds valuable new light on how the Iraq war has hurt U.S. prestige and credibility, and empowered our opponents. He then lays out four scenarios, from best case to a chilling worst case, of our future in the Middle East. Even the best case "means staying in Iraq for years," Ricks writes. Its closest analogy is the American war in the Philippines, which ran from 1899 to 1946, and which started as a similarly naive conventional campaign, turned into a messy guerrilla war, and eventually transformed into a peaceful, even friendly, long-term effort at containment. Two worse possibilities are repeats of France's humiliation in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, or Israel's in Lebanon, where the invader wins the battle but sorely loses the global PR war. Those scenarios may allow for an early, face-saving pullout, in Ricks' view, but they're likely to leave a civil and perhaps regional war and unsecured oil fields at the center of these disputes. This could prompt yet another U.S. invasion of Iraq, and maybe of its neighbors, too ..

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/01/RVGFQLDQRJ1.DTL&type=books