Worldmaking (83 page)

Condoleezza Rice later confessed that she found Cheney and Wolfowitz's triumphalism unedifying: “For a brief time there was a kind of hubris among those who had been the most persistent and long-standing advocates for the overthrow of Saddam. It was summed up by the Vice President who, when challenged on the need for interagency cooperation in the postwar period, said, ‘The Pentagon just liberated Iraq. What has the State Department done?'”
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Cheney's gloating was justified in that the liberation of Iraq
was
well executed. It was mostly everything that followed the fall of Baghdad that wasn't. And this would create a foreign-policy disaster that echoed the debacle in Vietnam.

A basic problem was lack of coalition troops on the ground. The historian Philip Bobbitt—a strong supporter of the Bush administration—casts most of the blame on the Pentagon for this critical flaw in planning: “Wolfowitz claimed that it was inconceivable that the Coalition would need more troops in Iraq after the fall of the Iraqi state—‘after the war,' as it were—than during it. As a direct result of this inadequate conceptualization of war, as of November 2007 at least 80,000 Iraqis had died since May 1, 2003.”
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There was an insufficient troop presence in Iraq at the moment of its subjugation, but even the soldiers on the ground were unsure how to react to the resulting chaos. A calamitous collapse of authority followed the liberation of Baghdad on April 9. Looters ransacked nearly every public building in the capital. Lacking precise orders, U.S. troops did nothing. It is impossible to estimate how many Iraqis were instantly alienated by the invading army's inability to keep basic order. Rumsfeld's facile response to the looting that so badly undermined prospects of sound governance and national unity—“Stuff happens!… It's untidy and freedom's untidy”—likely did not allay the concerns of ordinary Iraqis about the casual incompetence of Saddam Hussein's successor.
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In the weeks that followed Bush's “Mission Accomplished” speech, it was becoming clear that America's problems as an occupying force went beyond the looting of Baghdad. At the Pentagon's behest, L. Paul Bremer—who had replaced Jay Garner as administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq—dissolved the Baath Party and the Iraqi National Army. In this instance it was not just Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz dispensing wisdom, but Ahmed Chalabi, a prominent U.S.-based Iraqi exile who had forged a close relationship with both men. It was he who insisted that the Americans would be met and celebrated as liberators. Chalabi had designs on returning from exile to rule Iraq, and the admiring Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld believed that removing all hints of Baathism would help clear his path, rooting out the last vestiges of loyalty to Saddam's regime.

In disbanding the Iraqi Army, however, the Bush administration also made some four hundred thousand Iraqis (mainly Sunnis) unemployed, affording them considerable time to nurse resentments. These men began to demonstrate volubly on the streets against the coalition authority, threatening retribution if their demands were not met. In May and June, U.S. troops were targeted and killed on the streets of Baghdad in greater number. Rumsfeld went to great lengths to characterize the violence as run-of-the-mill: “You got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month. There's going to be violence in a big city.” Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that “these people are the last remnants of a dying cause” and coalition forces “have the sympathy of the population, not the surviving elements of the Baathist regime.”
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Wolfowitz's Wilsonian optimism about the advantages that accompany liberty impeded his ability to see clearly.

If only Wolfowitz had been correct. The insurgency against the American-led occupation began in earnest on August 7, 2003, with the suicide truck bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad that killed seventeen. On August 19, a similar attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad killed at least twenty-two people, including the UN's special representative in Iraq, a widely revered champion of humanitarianism, Sérgio Vieira de Mello. A subsequent attack the following month led to the withdrawal of the United Nations from Iraq—the situation on the ground was simply too dangerous for the organization to remain. A bitter sectarian conflict was emerging in Iraq, pitting the newly emboldened Shia majority against former Baathists, foreign jihadists lured to Iraq by the prospect of killing Americans and Britons, and disempowered Sunni Arabs.

Not that this bleak outcome was necessarily foreordained. The political scientist Toby Dodge refuses to attribute the onset of civil war in Iraq to intractable ethnic divisions—there was nothing inevitable about what followed.
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Instead, he identifies the critical moment as the collapse of the Iraqi state and the inability of the coalition to replace it with a binding authority that commanded respect, if not necessarily affection. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bremer's negligence at that juncture was appalling. But Wolfowitz's failure of imagination is more difficult to forgive. This is a man who genuinely believes in the project of building a vibrant, wealthy, pluralist Iraq. Yet the department he helped run did many things to frustrate the realization of an aspiration that already tended toward the utopian.

Instead, the Iraq that emerged in the first few post-Saddam years was dystopian. Ordinary Iraqis died in the tens of thousands as the cycle of sectarian bloodletting intensified through 2004 and 2005. Recent estimates suggest that at least 133,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since March 2003, and that number continues to rise. In 2010, Dr. Haider Maliki, based at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad, estimated that 28 percent of Iraqi children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Iraq remains one of the most unstable and dangerous nations on earth.

On the American side, some 6,800 troops have been killed in Iraq since March 2003. When Bush declared victory aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln
in May 2003, the death toll stood at 128. More than 6,780 American military contractors have also been killed in Iraq. Some 970,000 veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars have returned home and registered post-combat disability claims. The insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq had a profound psychological effect on the soldiers who battled them, and the spouses, children, and parents who lived with them. The human toll is a solemn one.
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There were grim strategic consequences too. Iran was perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the Bush administration's freedom agenda. To the west, Tehran's principal adversary was crushed and a Shia majority assumed political dominance. To the east, the hostile and unpredictable Taliban were removed from power. Iran was as safe in 2003 as it had been since the revolution. Indeed, if any national leader should have contributed financially to the Bush administration's war on terror it was surely Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “Great Satan” provided Ahmadinejad—a risible, Holocaust-denying blowhard—with a genuine free ride. And this was a nation actually developing weapons of mass destruction. Iran's emboldening certainly imperiled Israel, which was probably not what President Bush and the Pentagon had intended.

So what of the original casus belli? Not a lot, regretfully. Following months of scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, an official government report concluded that Iraq “essentially destroyed” its stockpiles of WMDs after the 1991 Gulf War and that its final facility, devoted to developing biological weapons, was decommissioned in 1996.
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With both WMDs and the al-Qaeda connection laid bare as fallacious, the principals instead reemphasized the democratization advantage. George Bush is confident that history will judge the Second Iraq War more generously than it has been judged in the present.

There were clear advantages to invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003. In the most obvious and immediate sense, the United States and its allies had removed an unpleasant, dangerous, and erratic despot from power. As Bush describes it in his memoir:

As a result of our actions in Iraq, one of America's most committed and dangerous enemies stopped threatening us forever. The most volatile region in the world lost one of its greatest sources of violence and mayhem. Hostile nations around the world saw the cost of supporting terror and pursuing WMD. And in the space of nine months, twenty-five million Iraqis went from living under a dictatorship of fear to seeing the prospect of a peaceful, functioning democracy.
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The demonstration effect was indeed immediate. In December 2003, Muammar Gaddafi consented to give up his WMDs and abandon his decades-long quest to acquire a nuclear capability. This was a clear win. Gaddafi's decision stemmed directly from America's preemptive attack on Iraq. But other “rogue” states drew different lessons. The two remaining “axes of evil,” Iran and North Korea, reasoned logically that it was the absence of a nuclear deterrent that made Iraq vulnerable and pushed harder to develop their own.

The democratization of Iraq can certainly be counted as a victory—at first glance, at least. The civil war that raged intensely from 2003 to 2006 cooled from 2007. In January of that year, Bush announced a new military strategy in Iraq, the “surge,” which involved the dispatch of twenty thousand additional U.S. combat troops and the embrace of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy led by General David Petraeus. When combined with the so-called Sunni Awakening—whereby armed Sunni groups rose up and turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq—the surge served to reduce the harrowing levels of violence in Iraq. Endemic bloodletting and low levels of Sunni participation had marred the first national election of 2005. By 2010, the situation had improved in the sense that more Sunnis were willing to cast votes—although violence and electoral fraud had not abated.

The situation has deteriorated markedly since then. Up until August 2014, Iraq was led by a two-term prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, with clear authoritarian tendencies. Al-Maliki reneged on earlier promises to build a unity government with Sunni political groups, undermined the freedom of the press, and built a government blighted by pervasive corruption. Freedom House, an American NGO founded by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt, offered a damning assessment in 2013: “Iraq is not an electoral democracy. Although it has conducted meaningful elections, political participation and decision-making in the country remain seriously impaired by sectarian and insurgent violence, widespread corruption, and the influence of foreign powers.”
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Throughout the summer of 2014, the extreme Islamist successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—or ISIS—launched brutal assaults against Shia Muslims and other minorities. As of today, Iraq remains mired in violence. The Iraq War “positives” seem not so much when they are subjected to scrutiny.

In an interview with London's
Sunday Times
on March 18, 2013, Wolfowitz expressed regret at the way the war was conceived and executed. There “should have been Iraqi leadership from the beginning,” Wolfowitz lamented, instead of a fourteen-month American occupation based on “this idea that we're going to come in like MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them.” The decision to disband the Iraqi Army and pursue a rigorous policy of de-Baathification was clearly ill-conceived, Wolfowitz continued, and the Pollyannaish Ahmed Chalabi was not “completely straight with us.” But Wolfowitz also provided a staunch defense of many decisions that stoked fierce criticism then and now. On General Shinseki's warning that America embarked on war with insufficient troops, Wolfowitz retorted that “this was not the kind of war you win by overwhelming force.” On the misleading use of “evidence” to justify the conflict, Wolfowitz observed, “The falsehood that the president lied, which by the way is itself a lie, is so much worse than saying we were wrong. A mistake is one thing, a lie is something else.” Ultimately, Wolfowitz protested hopefully that it was too soon to judge the invasion of Iraq as a failure: “We still don't know how all this is all going to end.”
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In an open letter published in
Harper's
magazine a few days previously, the historian Andrew Bacevich invited Wolfowitz—a former colleague from the American Enterprise Institute—to give more serious thought to what had transpired in Iraq:

Why did liberation at gunpoint yield results that differed so radically from what the war's advocates had expected? Or, to sharpen the point,
How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?

 … To be sure, whatever you might choose to say, you'll be vilified, as Robert McNamara was vilified when he broke his long silence and admitted that he'd been “wrong, terribly wrong” about Vietnam. But help us learn the lessons of Iraq so that we might extract from it something of value in return for all the sacrifices made there. Forgive me for saying so, but you owe it to your country. Give it a shot.
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One must hope that Wolfowitz rises to Bacevich's challenge, and not twenty-five years after the fact à la McNamara. For the Second Iraq War may eclipse Vietnam in terms of its shuddering impact on U.S. foreign policy. But the prospects for a Wolfowitzian self-reckoning do not appear to be promising. In an interview in June 2014, Wolfowitz observed that America had in fact “won” the Second Iraq War by 2009 but that this hard-earned victory had been squandered by the Obama administration in its headlong rush to withdraw.
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9

BARACK OBAMA AND THE PRAGMATIC RENEWAL

With all respect to James and Dewey, it takes more than a common sense instinct … to deal with the age of guided missiles [and] the age of revolution in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.