Consensus is normally hard to come by on Capitol Hill, but all three experts who testified today before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations agreed that America's postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq have left a lot to be desired.
Testifying in the third of a series of hearings on post-conflict Iraq were Peter Galbraith of the National Defense University, Geoffrey Kemp of the Nixon Center and Frank Wisner of an independent task force on Iraq reconstruction that was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
The looting and chaos that ensued after the liberation of Iraq was predictable, as the committee's chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), noted. But this predictability didn't lead government officials to develop adequate plans to secure "critical sites," Galbraith argued. The Bush administration's failure to react quickly to secure such sites may have resulted in "the remote chance that dangerous biological or radiological information could have been lost," Galbraith charged.
Could the initial lethargy of the postwar effort be symptomatic of the administration's broader lack of vision for nation building in Iraq? And is the United States close to blowing an historic opportunity? "Any occupying power has a short window before the goodwill gained by the liberation is lost," Galbraith said. This quickly evaporating reservoir of goodwill could have repercussions for the safety of American troops, the image of America in the Middle East, and the success with which the United States and coalition forces can secure Iraq. "Iraq is a work in progress," Kemp said, but "postwar U.S. mistakes need to be corrected quickly" -- and with the close attention of Congress.
For his part, Wisner asserted that the maintenance of law and order in Iraq is "absolutely vital," both for the credibility of the United States and for the benefit of the Iraqi people. "Without order, no political or economic progress is possible -- nor will there be confidence in U.S. and coalition forces," Wisner said.
Wisner added that the administration must publicly commit U.S. and coalition forces for as long as it takes to stabilize Iraq -- and must make clear its plans for constructing a just government based on liberal democracy, a federal system that can accommodate Iraq's diverse population and a market system of economics. Wisner warned that America's failure -- at least so far -- to make such a public commitment is proving unsettling to Iraqis and to the rest of the region.
Wisner also argued that the administration and Congress must be honest with the American public about the kind of commitment it will take to rebuild Iraq. He noted that "we will be in the region for a long time," and that American citizens need a set of objectives that they can understand and monitor for progress. "We have to establish the political priority and the consensus that it needs to be done," Wisner said.
The biggest obstacle to this goal, of course, is the Bush administration itself, which has so far treated the rebuilding of Iraq as an ad hoc project rather than a serious commitment requiring long-term vision. The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, told the witnesses that "there is an ideological impediment to nation building in this administration." Biden dismissed the idea that the administration could have been caught off-guard by the difficulties that would follow the liberation of Iraq. Rather, he said, the problem is that this administration has fundamentally small expectations of what nation building can accomplish. There is an "ideological divide between the neocons and the rest of the administration and the rest of us as to what is achievable," he said.
To support this point, Biden cited a discussion he'd had with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in which she proclaimed the current political state of affairs in Afghanistan to be "stable." If America's casual rebuilding of Afghanistan is any indication of what we're planning in Iraq, it doesn't bode well for the Iraqis -- or for us.
Anna Morris is a TAP Online intern and a graduate student at Columbia University's School for International and Public Affairs.
