What We Left Behind
April 29, 2014 11:11 PM   Subscribe

 


My forecast: Iraq gets split into Sunni and Shia homelands as well as a Northern Kurdish free-state with lots and lots and lots of killing in between.
posted by Renoroc at 4:46 AM on April 30, 2014


I don't know about that northern Kurdish state, which will always meet with major opposition from both Turkey and Syria. The best case right now seems like a continuation or expansion of a de facto autonomous Kurdistan, but not one that will receive widespread international recognition or have much infrastructure or global economic participation.
posted by kewb at 4:56 AM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


What a curiously passive description of the deliberate ruin of a country.
posted by srboisvert at 5:24 AM on April 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


"The deliberate ruin of a country" pretty much sums it up. That is the measure of the military victory in Iraq: “Divisions among people. The failure of public services. The corruption. The human-rights abuses. The judicial system? There is no judicial system, really. We are losing everything.”

Mission accomplished indeed.

I hope no one forgets that Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton bravely voted YEA along with EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN SENATOR for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002 that caused all of this mess.
posted by three blind mice at 5:58 AM on April 30, 2014 [8 favorites]


Well, you do get moments like this:
[Hannah Edwar] is proud of her work but ashamed of the Iraq that Maliiki and his American sponsors have made. She recited a list of woes: “Divisions among people. The failure of public services. The corruption. The human-rights abuses. The judicial system? There is no judicial system, really. We are losing everything.”
but for the most part,

Even a decade on, there's a muted recognition that there will not be any just reckoning or even acknowledgement of what the U.S. did to Iraq. It's too uncomfortable for those who see the whole thing as a great patriotic triumph under which the line "mission accomplished" has long since been hastily drawn, too distasteful for a complicit and complacent press that cheerled war for a variety of self-serving reasons, and too difficult for the mushy U.S. left to discuss because they're often unsure of or unable to provide complex answers to retorts about their own complicity, about the easy presumption that only the United Stated could or should address Saddam Hussein's atrocities, and the misery caused by the Bush 41- and Clinton-era sanctions.

And none of this, of course, involves any attention to any Iraqi perspectives; that's too much trouble for all of "us" in this fretfully declining empire to take. "We're" so busy self-pityingly imagining ourselves as the wrongfully restrained would-be hero of the Ukraine, or maybe Syria these days, dontcha know.
posted by kewb at 6:03 AM on April 30, 2014 [6 favorites]


All predictable, and predicted
posted by mrbigmuscles at 6:07 AM on April 30, 2014 [4 favorites]


It's ... too distasteful for a complicit and complacent press that cheerled war for a variety of self-serving reasons, and too difficult for the mushy U.S. left to discuss because they're often unsure of or unable to provide complex answers to retorts about their own complicity
Yeah, the fact that knowing propagandists like Jeffrey Goldberg and the compliant editors who published their lies (I'm looking at you, David Remnick) still have careers is pretty conclusive evidence of the ideological and moral bankruptcy of the media (even the so-called "liberal" media).

I still think Remnick should have gone down for allowing Goldberg's pieces to be published in The New Yorker in the lead up to the Iraq war.
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:21 AM on April 30, 2014


The clash of civilisations we actually got increasingly looks to be Shia versus Sunni.
posted by Segundus at 6:42 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


A good article, but I'm finding myself very dubious about the one mysterious, anonymous, unsourced "CIA agent" who provided Maliki's name. Sounds like something being fed to the reporter by someone who doesn't care for Maliki, which means it could be anyone in the world.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 7:22 AM on April 30, 2014


The clash of civilisations we actually got increasingly looks to be Shia versus Sunni.

Pretty much. If there must be bloodlust can we just get the asshole leaders of these factions in a ring together in mortal combat and just end the whole fucking thing right then and there? It would save so many lives of people who would be otherwise quite happy to live beside their neighbor not giving a shit how they pray their five times a day or whether they have a stone tablet or dirt on their prayer mat.
posted by Talez at 8:36 AM on April 30, 2014


My Birthday is in a few days. I'm so old, I can remember when the Iraq war was going to pay for itself.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 8:59 AM on April 30, 2014


The Iraq War will be, I think, one of the most enigmatic parts of the post-9/11 Bush presidency. Even now, it's not entirely clear what the hell the motivation was. There are the pat answers you get from the left and the right — it was to avenge daddy, it was because terrorism — don't fully explain.

A lot of people in the military honestly believed that there were WMDs. I was in the military at the time, and I still know guys who still think that we missed them, and they ended up in Syria. (Why Syria, I'm not sure, although since Syria had its own chemical weapons program it's sort of a convenient destination, since we'd never be able to tell.) Not that the mere existence of chemical weapons really suffices as a casus belli, cf. Syria or North Korea, but it was enough for those in the military and the press who were itching for a "real war" (as opposed to the rather unsatisfying initial stand-up fight in Afghanistan).

I think the most reasonable explanation is that the Bush administration was myopically fixated on the Middle East and thought that by invading Iraq we could set up a puppet state and thus apply pressure to Iran, rather than having to work through the Saudis and Jordanians with awkward and inconvenient diplomatic implications. That's the "naive" explanation. They had no idea how hard it would be to actually accomplish that, and overestimated the difficulty of invading and conquering while underestimating the difficulty of subjugating and occupying. If you believe that the Bush administration was basically a tribe of idiots, this seems plausible.

The alternative explanation, which I think of as the "cunning" explanation, is that the difficulty in effecting a successful occupation and friendly government was if not actually foreseen than at least not ruled out, but that it didn't really matter: the goal was simply to hammer a lighting rod into the ground far from home. The goal was to create a sort of 'kill chute' for angry young men from anywhere in the Middle East, with the Army standing at the end doing the slaughtering. If you believe that Cheney and Rumsfield were as ruthless and arrogant as rumored, and were really running the show, this explanation seems at least worth considering.

(The real n-dimensional-chess argument is that a Sunni/Shiite civil war was the desired outcome from the beginning, but I think that gives the Administration simultaneously too much credit while also not fitting with the facts; the withdrawal could have happened far sooner if the goal was simply to toss a match into the powder keg.)

In any event, whatever the plan was — and I don't think we'll ever get an honest accounting of it from any of the major players involved, at least for a very long time — it didn't work out, that much is clear.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:42 AM on April 30, 2014 [5 favorites]


I dunno, everything I've read has suggested the Bush Administration actually believed the bullshit they were spouting. They actually believed Saddam had these weapons hidden. They actually believed we'd be greeted as liberators. They actually believed that this would trigger a surge of democracy throughout the Middle East.

I know it's an unsatisfying explanation but near as I can tell "They actually believed it" is the truth.

Which is, of course, one of the perils of electing a guy because "I'd like to have a beer with him" and slagging the other guy for being too, ugh, smart.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:13 AM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'll meet you in the middle. I think B43 may have thought he was a great nation-builder, but the rest of those clowns were in it for the money and the glory.

It's fun and simple to lay it all on B43, and he deserves more than casual scorn for his role in this despicable piece of history. But everybody folded under the insane wave of hyper-patriotism that was wrapped around all those rationalizations for invading Iraq. It seems like only two or three of our legislators had the courage to nay-say this machine.

My theory follows the money trail: not very far, in this case. We got only glimpses. For example, a flight of cargo aircraft carrying shrink-wrapped bundles of Franklins. We can account for only some of the billions involved in that flight. Other examples include the contracts not filled, but paid for, and work done improperly. The scandals came and went, but only the monkeys on the lower end of the pole got burned for their shenanigans.

So, this to me is the work of high-level thieves, using the machinery of our government to move money from the tax payers to the fellow patriots who need to accumulate a few gazillion dollars in order to create jobs that keep our country strong and free.
posted by mule98J at 12:37 PM on April 30, 2014


Barely a double digit comment FPP tells the tale here. Lost and bombed to the back pages of history, as if the whole place was a trashed and forgotten homeless encampment. :/
posted by buzzman at 1:10 PM on April 30, 2014


Remember that movie Cube? Who would build such a thing?

I think the Iraq war is like that. You have your robber barons; your pie-in-the-sky nation-building neoconservative idealists; your antiterror/WMD folks; your "should've taken out Saddam the first time" crowd. All these views had representation among people who had their hands on the levers in the Bush administration, and the one thing they all had in common was: they wanted to invade.

Throw in a heavy dose of nepotism and the spoils system that resulted in the appointment of incompetents at all levels (the hallmark of GWB administration) and there's your explanation for the whole shebang right there.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 1:11 PM on April 30, 2014 [2 favorites]


It's fun and simple to lay it all on B43, and he deserves more than casual scorn for his role in this despicable piece of history. But everybody folded under the insane wave of hyper-patriotism that was wrapped around all those rationalizations for invading Iraq. It seems like only two or three of our legislators had the courage to nay-say this machine.

If Bush had not wanted to go into Iraq, we would not have gone into Iraq. Period. Are there other people who deserve scorn for abetting him? Absolutely. But he is the singular one who could have, at any point in the process up to and including the day we rolled into Baghdad itself, said, "You know what? This isn't going to happen," and it would have been over. I say this as someone who hopes that Paul Bremer goes down as the third person in Satan's mouth in the Iraqi Dante's version of Inferno: anyone else's blame -- everyone else's blame -- is only that of an enabler.
posted by Etrigan at 1:57 PM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


Even now, it's not entirely clear what the hell the motivation was.

I think we are still refusing to recognize just how shallow a person George W. Bush is, and whatever other "reasons" were built up, his prime motivation was a belief that Sadaam Hussein's political survival after we defeated him in Gulf War I was the main reason Bush I was only a one-term President, and, even without 9/11 happening, Bush II was going to "finish the job", partly to 'avenge his daddy' but also partly to 'restore America's status' which he considered his sworn duty to History.

And the war's ultimate goal was not just to destroy Sadaam Hussein, but to destroy the nation of Iraq for the ultimate insult of allowing him to continue in power.

Mission Accomplished.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:27 PM on April 30, 2014


And the war's ultimate goal was not just to destroy Sadaam Hussein, but to destroy the nation of Iraq for the ultimate insult of allowing him to continue in power.

I agree with everything you said up to that point. If Bush (or anyone else) had really wanted to do that, they would have partitioned Iraq into Shia and Sunni areas (and left the Kurds out so as to appease Turkey) right off the bat, or at least when things got really bad for U.S. troops. It was just that the people who were trying to guide Iraq from a centralized socialist single-party militaristic system into some form of liberal democracy had no fucking idea how to do it.
posted by Etrigan at 2:36 PM on April 30, 2014 [1 favorite]


I know it's an unsatisfying explanation but near as I can tell "They actually believed it" is the truth.

This was particularly infuriating because there was no shortage of people challenging their assumptions, and Rumsfeld basically mocked them for it. This includes the UN weapons inspectors as well as academics and experts. I think in the end they had a photo of a random factory from above, a drawing they made of what a mobile chemical weapons lab would look like if such a thing existed, and a vial of some chemical or biological agent they gave Powell to wave around for effect at the UN.

Such hubris
posted by Hoopo at 3:02 PM on April 30, 2014




It does seem like "they actually believed it." And it's also worth recalling what seems to have been the outsized respect given to Laura Mylroie in the Bush administration. A lot of people seem to have signed on to her theory that Al Qaeda was merely Sadaam's catspaw, and therefore Sadaam was behind the 9/11 attacks, and therefore taking him out was the only way to prevent another. This was insane, of course. But a lot of Cheney's cronies seem to have swallowed it.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:54 PM on April 30, 2014


The book "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks is an easy read of how much of the Iraq war began and unfolded as a, uh; fiasco.
Best filed upside down on the bookshelf; so the more conservative crowd doesn't notice it.
posted by buzzman at 7:18 PM on April 30, 2014


The End of Iraq, author I can't remember but he was on the ground while the coalition set up a provisional government, is another good book about this.
posted by mrbigmuscles at 8:55 PM on April 30, 2014


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