It Didn’t Work
"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.
A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.
This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.
He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.
Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
Sorry about the emphases (not). The devil made me do it.
Interesting, most interesting is the fact that Buckley has not picked up on the theme of his first postulate...
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
If there is ever a concise and clear picture of the naievite [yeah yeah I know the spelling is wrong] of the US administration this must be it.
Remember if you must the comment that was made that Islam wants the world to return to the perfection of Islamic 7th century. Place alongside that thought the history of Britain in the Gulf during the late 19th century. That history includes the arbitrary drawing of boundaries between geographical areas (at which the Poms were expert - read Milligan's "Puckoon" for another hilarious if fictitious example). That history includes the arbitrary promotion of "leaders" of each of the various areas.
But truly, none of that exists in the world that is the modern US. After all, if the biggest bang in the land comes from banging two pieces of very heavy metal together what could be difficult about banging a few heads to make them see sense?
At least William F Buckley Jr has the honesty to admit that there were some fundamental flaws...
UPDATE
There was an article in Herald that prompted me posting the William Buckley item.
Neo-con dream of new world order in tatters
10.03.06
By Rupert Cornwell
It has taken more than three years, the loss of tens of thousands of Iraqi and US lives, and US$200 billion - all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war.
But finally the neo-conservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words - we were wrong.
The about-face has spread across the conservative spectrum, from William Buckley, venerable editor of The National Review to Andrew Sullivan, once editor of the New Republic.
...
For Sullivan, today's mess is above all a testament to American over-confidence and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naivete. But he, too, asserts, in a column in Time magazine, that all may not be lost.
Of all the critiques, however, the most profound is that of Francis Fukuyama, in his forthcoming book America at the Crossroads. Its subtitle is Democracy, Power and the Neo-Conservative Legacy - and that legacy, he argues, is fatally poisoned.
This is apostasy on a grand scale. Fukuyama, after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American Century", the founding manifesto of neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement.
The PNAC aimed to cement for all time America's triumph in the Cold War, by increasing defence spending, challenging hostile regimes and promoting freedom and democracy.
Its goal was "an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values". The war on Iraq was the theory's test. And after Iraq, why not Syria, Iran and anyone else who stood in Washington's way?
That doctrine, Fukuyama acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit.
Fukuyama, of course, once claimed in his The End of History and the Last Man, that the world was on a glide-path to liberal, free-market democracy. But he also pointed out that it should have been left to its own pace.
The neo-cons' first error was impatience. The second was a belief that an all-powerful US would be trusted with "benevolent hegemony".
The third was the overstatement of the threat posed by radical Islam to justify the doctrine of preventive war.
Finally, there was the contradiction between the neo-cons' aversion to Government meddling at home and their childlike faith in their ability to impose massive social engineering in foreign and utterly unfamiliar states.
Some, however, are unswayed. Kristol accuses Fukuyama of losing his nerve - of wanting to "let large parts of the world go to hell in a hand basket, hoping the hand basket won't blow up in our faces" in the Standard.
Christopher Hitchens, the one-time Trotskyist turned neo-con, derides Fukuyama for "conceding to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses".
The fact remains that the Bush policymakers who signed the PNAC are mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz, the war's most starry-eyed promoter, moved to the World Bank, silent about the mess he did so much to create.
Richard Perle, leader of the hawks at the American Enterprise Institute, has vanished from the scene.
Lewis Libby has stepped down as Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, to focus on staying out of jail. This week US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad - Afghan born and the one original neo-con who had the region in his blood - admitted Iraq had opened "a Pandora's box".
Those who are left - primarily Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfield - are not so much neo-cons as advancers of US national interests, whatever it may take.
Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member but still sympathetic - metamorphosed into a pragmatist.
It is on Bush's lips the neo-cons survive - in the commitment to freedom and democracy that he proclaims daily. But his oratory cannot obscure the irony of the Iraq adventure.
Neo-conservatism espoused the vastness of US power - but it has succeeded only in exposing its limits.
Fukuyama now wants to temper the doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not easy to change, and that the US must cut its cloth accordingly. A term for this might be neo-realism.
Fascinating - the rats leaving the ship in droves... the skipper still bravely at the helm... The colours still nailed to the masthead.
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