Comments on: Iraq

Iraq

semmi — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:10:26 -0800

What Went Wrong in Iraq, By Larry Diamond, From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

By: y2karl

y2karl — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:22:03 -0800

Or, rather-- What Went Wrong In Iraq Although the early U.S. blunders in the occupation of Iraq are well known, their consequences are just now becoming clear. The Bush administration was never willing to commit the resources necessary to secure the country and did not make the most of the resources it had. U.S. officials did get a number of things right, but they never understood-or even listened to-the country they were seeking to rebuild. As a result, the democratic future of Iraq now hangs in the balance. Larry Diamond is Co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. From January to April 2004, he served as a Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. The article has an interesting discussion of the failed first campaign against Moktada Sadr that was written well before the current one began.

By: matteo

matteo — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:30:42 -0800

Cordesman's opinion (.pdf file)

By: y2karl

y2karl — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:45:38 -0800

Cordesman's Opinion in HTML.

By: fold_and_mutilate

fold_and_mutilate — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:45:53 -0800

"Incalculable human and political costs" would have been the result, [he] has said, if his administration had pushed all the way to Baghdad and sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. "We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq," [he] wrote. "The coalition would have instantly collapsed. ... Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome." Hey, who is this unpatriotic crackpot, anyway? Why does Bush the Elder hate America so much? ~chuckle~

By: y2karl

y2karl — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 11:48:52 -0800

Cordesman's Opinion in HTML. Or so I thought--my bad. Well, carry on...

By: strangeleftydoublethink

strangeleftydoublethink — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 12:03:35 -0800

An article like that is the icing on the cake. If by icing I mean shit, and by cake I mean the faces of the current administration's top officials (State dept. excluded). Regardless of the bad intelligence on WMDs, the lack of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, etc., these people are just bad leaders. Period.

By: jasper411

jasper411 — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 12:20:53 -0800

This seems like a big deal to me because of its source. The Hoover Institution is widely acknowledged to be a right wing think tank If *those* folks are talking this way, I wonder if it has larger implications about the movement of right wingers away from the present administration.

By: kgasmart

kgasmart — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 12:23:05 -0800

This is a decent piece, but it omits one major aspect of what has been a historic blunder: the economic side. Naomi Klein has a piece in the current harpers - "Baghdad Year Zero" - that, if accurate, is among the most amazing things I've ever read; it places much of the blame for the continuing insurgency at the feet of Bremer's/the administration's economic plans for Iraq, whereby they were going to turn it into the world's most open market, Milton Friedman writ large. This, among other things, would have meant the complete sell-off of formerly nationalized companies - and the attendant job losses this would have entailed. The subtitle of Klein's piece was "Pillaging Iraq in persuit of a neocon utopia"; it might well have been "Even in Iraq, it's the economy, stupid."

By: nofundy

nofundy — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 12:31:03 -0800

What kgasmart said. Read the piece by Klein as soon as you get a chance. Neocon wet dreams. Yes, the Hoover Istitution definitely is a right wing [ahem] "think tank" (feeling generous today).

By: trharlan

trharlan — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:10:42 -0800

Yeah, nofundy, because "think tank" is such a generous term for an organization that boasts five Nobel Prize winners.

By: caddis

caddis — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:34:38 -0800

The Hoover Institution may be a right wing think tank, but they are no friend of the neocons and certainly not the neocons who got us into this mess. I believe traditional conservatives such as the types at the Hoover Institution tend to think that the neocons are quite mad.

By: jasper411

jasper411 — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 14:47:17 -0800

Condolezza Rice is a fellow...

By: juiceCake

juiceCake — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 15:52:19 -0800

Christian Parenti's bit on NOW (transcript) makes some similar observations, particularly about infrastructure trouble and the level of control.

By: semmi

semmi — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:51:20 -0800

jc: Great link, thanks.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 18:09:14 -0800

interesting link, but a postmortem on an ongoing (and endless) occupation is weird and useless, since the adminstration has just dug us in deeper and does not listen to even constructive criticism, and-- the question can be answered in one sentence: We invaded and occupied a country that had done nothing to us, and was not a threat, but, thanks to our actions, now is. Maybe a) they should have been speaking of this stuff pre-invasion, if they truly did/do have sympathetic ears in the white house, and b) they shouldn't treat Iraq as if it's over and already history, which belies the continuing and ongoing costs--in lives and dollars, etc.

By: weston

weston — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 18:49:47 -0800

they are no friend of the neocons and certainly not the neocons who got us into this mess. Rumsfeld is listed in the Wikipedia article as a past or present fellow.

By: caddis

caddis — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 19:10:43 -0800

Rummy is no neocon. Wolfowitz and crew have certainly turned some of these old school conservatives like Rummy, Condi and Cheney toward their way of thinking. At their core the neocons are radical, and they promote radical change. The old school conservative typically resists change. A schism of sorts has opened up on the right between the neocons and the old school crowd. Oh the neocons were exciting at first with their energy, optimism and right wing ideas. However, now that the optimism has turned out to be wrong and things are all screwed up in Iraq some of the old school conservatives just see the neocons' failures as damaging political prospects for the right, not that many of them want to air their dirty laundry in public though.

By: boredomjockey

boredomjockey — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 21:57:59 -0800

I second (third, now that I look) kgasmart's recommendation on the Klein article in Harpers. Just got done reading it over lunch today. Fantastic.

By: dinsdale

dinsdale — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:44:06 -0800

Haven't read the Harpers article, not sure how much overlap there is, but here's an article on the same subject by Klein from April: Bomb before you buy.

By: rough ashlar

rough ashlar — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:56:43 -0800

The article has an interesting discussion of the failed first campaign against Moktada Sadr And does the present time change what happened before? If the 1st campaign was a failure, what makes this change now?