Where the Iraq policy went wrong..

[question everything]

The WSJ's Daniel Henninger

(snip)

The years 2003-2005 don't exist in the ISG study, which is almost wholly about the horrors of the past year. But in the war's immediate aftermath, from May 2003 onward, Baghdad was rebuilding, notwithstanding continued violence. Retail commerce came to life. A strong real-estate market emerged. New cars filled the streets, and Iraq's universities reopened. But it was also in May that someone in the Bush administration made the worst decision of the war, as described on this page in June by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview with our Robert Pollock.

"The biggest mistake, honestly, if you go back," said Mr. Zebari, "was not entrusting the Iraqis as partners, to empower them, to see them do their part, to fill the vacuum, to have a national unity government."

The opportunity existed at that moment to form an Iraqi unity government, likely consisting of the religious Shiites Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Sunni Adnan Pachachi, Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, and secular Shiites Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad Allawi. Instead, someone in Washington (it has never been clear exactly who) decided to push them aside in favor of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. This was fatal because for two years, until last December's election, Iraqis had nothing -- other than tribes, sects and militias -- to commit themselves to politically.

(snip)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116554228133044170.html?mod=todays_us_opinion (subscription)

[pinto]

1. Revisionism lives! Long live revisionism.

The neocons learned a lot from the early models...

[yurbud]

2. I think it went wrong at the Supreme Court in about 2000...

[bemildred]

3. It was always wrong.

The fact that it was screwed up even worse than it had to be does not mean that it was a good idea.

[Briar]

5. Hear hear

Thinking that unprovoked force is justified is where they went wrong.

[some guy]

4. yeah but no

disempowering Iraqis was certainly the biggest error (well, after the error of thinking the US could just go invade and take over a sovereign nation), but it wasn't a "mistake" because that was the whole intent of the invasion - to strip Iraq of all it's political system and replace it with US corporate interests for the sole benefit of US corporate interests.

[Printer70]

6. He's right

"The biggest mistake, honestly, if you go back," said Mr. Zebari, "was not entrusting the Iraqis as partners, to empower them, to see them do their part, to fill the vacuum, to have a national unity government."

You can't ignore the power dynamics in the country and superimpose a US picked delegation of leaders for the country. And you also can't allow government to be undermined as the sole source of authority, and thats what happens when there is anarchy for two years. Of course Iraqis will look to militias for protection. In addition, we didn't see the Iraqis as partner and train them; instead our military decided to do the fighting themselvs and only dedicate a tiny fraction of soldiers to train the Iraqis. This was unconscionable.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

7. When we invaded (if not sooner)

Where the "Iraq policy" went wrong was when we invaded despite increasing evidence (per the UN Weapon Inspectors whom turned out to be right after all) that Iraq did not, in fact, currently possess any "weapons of mass destruction", not to mention the fact that anybody who had paid any attention to the news about Iraq over the years should have realized that Iraq had been seriously defanged following Gulf War I and that they couldn't possibly pose the kind of threat to anybody that Bush and his surrogates were suggesting. Iraq could't even control its own airspace! That and that alone should've been some kind of a clue as to how impotent and weak Iraq had become! You would think that a country poised to rain mass murder down upon the US and its neighbors (i.e. Israel) would at least be able to reassert control over its own airspace, right? Right? There was NO way that Bush could have ever made me believe that a country whose military was broken, whose economy was in shambles due to crippling international sanctions, and whose airspace was totally controlled by the US and its allies could possibly threaten us in the same or similar way that Germany, Japan, and Italy threatened the entire world during World War II or the Soviet Union did during the "Cold War". As a matter of fact, many of the people in the Bush administration had made public statements (i.e. Colin Powell, Dick Cheney) over the years prior to the build-up to the second "war" in Iraq that Iraq had actually been successfully contained and that going into Baghdad and removing Saddam Hussein would likely end in disaster or, at the very least, a quagmire. To sum it all up, Bush's "Iraq policy" from the past to the present has IMHO been nothing but an exercise in disaster, futility and wishful thinking.

[Skittles]

8. ridiculous

this article is based on the premise bush bombed and invaded Iraq with good intentions, with Iraqi interests at heart - only a fool (aka REPUKE) would believe that.

[TheCentepedeShoes]

9. It's screwed up

because it was wrong (politically, strategically, morally, everything) from the start.