We'd like to thank George Packer for his response to our "Incompetence Dodge" article. We should also take this opportunity to say that there's an invaluable trove of reporting in The Assassins' Gate, and, clearly, on-the-ground experience yields insights that can't be adduced from an office in Washington. That said, the future of liberal foreign policy is an issue in which we all have a stake, and in a democracy we can't say that the only people entitled to an opinion on the Iraq War are those who've covered it in person.
One of our main goals was to provoke some debate and discussion on this issue; we seem to be succeeding. Of course, when you aim to provoke you run the risk of over-personalizing things, and reading Packer's reply we're afraid this discussion may be going down that road. Our desire isn't to cast blame for past events. We simply think that, faced with an enterprise in Iraq that just about everyone in the progressive family recognizes has gone awry somehow or other, it's vitally important to have a rigorous discussion of how and why it went awry to serve as a guide for the future.
Whatever Packer may think, our primary concern really is the future of humanitarian warfare, liberal internationalism, and other worthy concepts that have at times been enlisted in defense of the Iraq War. There are at least two ways of looking at why this issue is important. One is the question of whether or not anyone beyond a small band of magazine writers will ever be interested in an idealistic foreign policy from the left as long as the leading proponents of such a policy are saying -- as they often seem to be nowadays -- that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is to reject idealism itself. The other is the question of just what might happen in the world if someday the present administration is replaced by a liberal hawk one. At the intersection of the incompetence thesis and the notion that the moral rationale for the Iraq War still endures after the collapse of the strategic case is the idea that if we had a putatively competent national-security team (President Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State Joe Biden, et al.) it would make sense to go around locating tyrannical regimes that pose no particular security threat to the United States, invade and occupy the countries those regimes rule, and build liberal democracies in their place.
We think that conclusion is wrong, and that the failures in Iraq shed a lot of light on why it's wrong.
Note that the question of how many troops were or were not available for deployment to Iraq isn't especially relevant to this forward-looking debate because everyone now agrees as a general matter that it's a mistake to invade countries without sufficient troops. We go on about the topic at some length in our article, however, because the "not enough troops" line has been a very prominent part of dodger discourse and has proven remarkably, and revealingly, impervious to countervailing evidence. Packer says he spoke with an Army staff officer who told him that "350,000-400,000 troops on extended rotations could have been mustered for Iraq," though "it would have been difficult.” One can find our argument about troop levels fleshed out in a bit more detail here or here, but our basic point involves pretty simple math. If you had 350,000-400,000 troops deployed in Iraq for a period of years, that would require dedicating 700,000-800,000 members of the military to the mission on a rotating basis. Given that the Army has only 1 million people -- that's including the National Guard and Army Reserve -- this would mean something like 70 percent of its total strength would be dedicated to Iraq, including much higher proportions of its combat strength and its active component. There's probably a sense in which this would have been possible (that's the kind of thing staff officers would indeed know more about than we would) but there's a much clearer sense in which it would have been strategically foolish. Simply put, it wouldn't be consistent with all the other missions the military has around the world and therefore wasn't a real option on the table.
This is why, incidentally, pretty much nobody was calling for such a thing before the war. Eric Shinseki's famous testimony that "hundreds of thousands" of troops would be required for Iraq was primarily a cautionary note against the war, and was interpreted as such at the time. The Council on Foreign Relations' Iraq Task Force report that Gideon Rose called "conventional wisdom" among "a lot of folks in the field" before the war called for an occupation force of 75,000-200,000 troops. That's roughly the force we in fact have.
As we say, this genuinely isn't our main point. Our main point is that Iraq's fate is and always was primarily in the hands of Iraqis, and the problems in that country since the decision to invade was made have primarily stemmed from Iraqi conditions.
Packer characterizes our position as an inevitability thesis. Inevitability is a metaphysical question and it's a concept we'd like to avoid. What we prefer to say is that the Iraq War envisioned by democracy promoters lacked the reasonable prospects for success that are both morally and pragmatically necessary to justify a war. Certainly, if America had done things differently, something different would have happened. But there are many different ways something like this could have gone wrong, and our view is that if things had gone differently, it's much more likely that they would have gone in a different bad way, rather than that the liberal hawks' hopes would have been fulfilled.
Consider that for all the things that have gone wrong, we've also dodged some bullets. We haven't had to deal with formal Kurdish secession and all the problems that might have brought about. Nor have Muqtada al-Sadr's forces launched the second front in the insurgency that seemed likely for a while. Efforts to be more conciliatory to Sunni Arab opinion might well have succeeded at keeping the insurgency at bay only to provoke new problems in either of those two areas. Packer emphasizes "the longing of Iraqis for a simple, ordinary life, and their openness to those of us who came from outside." Neither of us doubts that most Iraqis had high hopes and aspirations for the future in the early days of the post-Saddam era. But the wishes of ordinary people, while important, do less to shape the dynamics of a given society's political situation (and set the parameters for what an outside nation-building effort might expect to accomplish) than does the specific array of institutions, empowered groups, and political interests in that society. The fundamental question in the case of Iraq is whether or not the early post-war hopes of ordinary Iraqis included the sort of broad consensus across ethnic and sectarian groups about how to organize the new Iraq that would be necessary for peace and stability.
The evidence suggests that it did not. The in-depth reporting in Assassins' Gate, in Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, and elsewhere makes it clear that there was always a vast diversity of opinion about these things. Even before the war, efforts to get the various exiled political parties to agree about the future of post-war Iraq were deeply troubled. These divisions, it's worth emphasizing, were of extremely long standing. Iraqi politics has always been characterized by serious questions about the legitimacy of the state, with Kurds essentially rejecting it, Sunni Arabs propagating an Arab nationalist vision that renders them a local minority but a member of the broader Sunni majority in the Arab world, and Shiites envisioning a Shiite-dominated Iraq. It's by no means inconceivable that these differences could be reconciled, but evidence from all around the world and throughout history suggests that such disagreements frequently lead to war or tyranny and that people everywhere find them hard to transcend.
On top of that, it's never been clear to what extent there was ever grassroots support for liberalism in Iraq. Before the war, we heard primarily from America-friendly exile intellectuals who, it turned out, lacked a serious base of support in the country. We also saw a lot of romanticizing about the nature of the regime in Kurdistan, which, while certainly representing an advance over Baath tyranny, was never really a model democracy. The main actors in Shiite politics have been high-level clerics and Iranian-backed Islamist parties. Sunni Arabs have shown a proclivity for deferring to their own Islamist leaders, and Baathism can now be seen to have had a non-trivial basis of public support as an ideology of Sunni Arab supremacy and Arab nationalism. Kurdish opinion is overwhelmingly oriented toward minimizing control from Baghdad.
This, it seems to us, simply isn't the stuff out of which a pluralistic, stable liberal democracy can be built by an invading outside force. At a minimum, it wasn't very likely to work. And doing it again somewhere in the future is unlikely to work out any better. The difficulties here were structural. In their excellent volume Ending Civil Wars, Stephen Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth Cousens conclude that "Three factors are most commonly associated with a difficult environment" in stabilizing a country. Those are "Spoilers -- leaders or factions hostile to a peace agreement and willing to use violence to undermine it; neighboring states that are hostile to the agreement; and spoils -- valuable, easily tradable commodities." All three factors were present in Iraq, which would make the successful implementation of an accord between its major groups unlikely to succeed. And there wasn't -- and isn't -- even an agreement in the first place! There's a lesson to be learned here that goes far beyond questions of administrative competence, and those of us who think American power can and should be used for good in the world have a duty to try and learn it.
Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias are Prospect staff writers.
