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The Iraq disaster explained in 475 words
Here’s a simple point that crystallizes the entire reason for the Iraq fiasco. It’s not that we didn’t put enough troops in Iraq. A greater number of troops, in and of itself, would have made no difference, and might well have made things worse. What was required was both more troops and a completely different disposition of those troops, aimed at gaining complete control of the country. But, of course (as detailed endlessly at VFR over the last three years), we never took the steps or even aspired to take the steps to gain complete control of the country. There was thus no possibility of our gaining complete control of the country. What this means is that we endeavored to create democracy in a nation that had never had it, and that was rife with undefeated enemy soldiers and terrorists, whom we had no hopes and no capability of defeating. So the democracy project was doomed from the start. Our leaders had to make a choice. If they wanted to nation-build in Iraq, they had to gain complete control of the country first. If they were unwilling or unable to do the latter, then nation-building was out of the question. In that case, they would have to limit themselves to destroying the Hussein regime, installing an authoritarian replacement regime, and withdrawing. But our leaders declined to choose either one of those reasonable alternatives. They wanted it both ways, and they attempted the wholly unreasonable alternative of building democratic self-government in a country that was filled to the brim with unsubdued enemy soldiers and terrorists determined to destroy any democratic government that we might help set up. Such gross, obvious, palpable folly has no parallel in world history.
However, as difficult as I’m making it sound, I’m making it sound easier than it really was. Even if at the time of the invasion we had gained complete control over Iraq and had prevented the disastrous looting, and even if we had subsequently wiped out all the terrorists, democracy in any meaningful sense was still out of the question there, because of the nature of Iraqi society. A tribal, religiously divided, Muslim country like Iraq cannot be democratic. To be tribal and religiously divided means that government officials as well as ordinary people are devoted to their family and clan and religious denomination more than to the society as a whole. To be Islamic means that one believes in Islamic law, which of course is radically opposed to democratic government, separation of church and state, fundamental individual rights and so on. Therefore to build democracy in Iraq, the U.S. would have needed not just to destroy the Baathists and jihadists; it would have needed to destroy Iraq’s entire religious system and social structure. There was, therefore, never the remotest possibility that we could build democracy in Iraq. Email entry |