'Squandered Victory' and 'Losing Iraq': Now What?
COULD the administration have chosen a different course in Iraq that would today have the country farther down the road to popular government and cost fewer lives? Two new books -- among the first ''insider'' accounts by former Iraq advisers -- find the White House guilty of an incompetent occupation. Representative government may, just possibly, still take hold in Mesopotamia, but neither Larry Diamond, a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who was called by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to temporary service in Baghdad in early 2004, nor David L. Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an adviser to the State Department before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, are at all optimistic.
Though thematically similar, Diamond's ''Squandered Victory'' and Phillips's ''Losing Iraq'' are distinctly different books. The former is essentially a memoir of three months in Iraq: January through March 2004, the period when Diamond served in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupation brain center run by L. Paul Bremer III and the American military. Phillips's book is a recollection of a year's work on the Future of Iraq Project, the State Department's much-praised but little-used prewar planning document. ''Squandered Victory'' is a serious volume; ''Losing Iraq'' is not.
Two months after Rice summoned him to public service, Diamond arrives in Baghdad. He doesn't really have a firm idea of what he will do -- a common fate at the C.P.A., especially among American civilians on temporary duty. A scholar who made his reputation writing about young democracies, Diamond is annoyed by the ad hoc nature of occupation decision making; he is also often deeply impressed by the commitment, and sometimes even the planning, of the Americans and Iraqis he works with. He finds the C.P.A.'s plan for building democracy in Iraq ''conceptually impressive and exciting,'' and throws himself into his job, which more or less develops into giving tutorials to Iraqis and serving as a scholar-in-residence for Americans.
The two roles come together as Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law -- the interim constitution -- is being written and rewritten by Iraqi drafters and their alternately intrusive and reticent American proctors. After the signing of the constitution on March 8, 2004, Diamond started ''to sell it'' to Iraqi audiences who ''wanted very much to learn about the document and discuss it -- not simply to accept it and praise it but to dissect it, question it, debate it and curse it.'' Diamond becomes a sounding board for Iraqi opinion among the increasingly isolated and very young Americans who dominate the C.P.A. Although he has minimal knowledge of Iraq, doesn't speak Arabic and is reluctant to travel outside the American compound in Baghdad without substantial security, he tries to convey local sentiments and the weaknesses of American policy to his inner-circle colleagues (who appear to travel even less than he does).
Conscious of his own limitations, Diamond generously shares the limelight. He underscores, in particular, the prodigious pro-democracy efforts of Michael Gfoeller, a scholarly but streetwise Arabic-speaking foreign service officer who almost single-handedly runs the American show in the critical Shiite lands south of Baghdad, reaching out to Shiite tribal sheiks, clerics and local notables. Gfoeller is one of the real heroes of the American occupation, and Diamond's awe of his talents and accomplishments speaks well of his own fair-mindedness toward his compatriots in Iraq.
Unfortunately, the character sketches in ''Squandered Victory'' usually aren't strong. Iraqis and Americans come and go, and some keep reappearing, but Diamond rarely gives you a strong sense of who these people really are. Quoting a colleague, he touches upon a problem for the occupation: ''The core of the process in Iraq is democratization. But the people at Usaid and in local governance just didn't sufficiently buy into this. There was no strong consensus on democracy building.'' Diamond drops this bombshell without once providing any detail on colleagues who hadn't bought in. His reticence about probing their doubts, hopes and frustrations makes the book feel at times like a characterless white paper for a Washington think tank.
Even more regrettable is Diamond's failure to supply insightful commentary on the major Iraqi players. His discussion of Ahmad Chalabi, the notorious head of the Iraqi National Congress, is especially weak. Even if Chalabi is ''voraciously ambitious'' and a ''darling of American neoconservatives,'' we aren't helped to understand the events and historical forces that elevated him to his leadership position among the Iraqi exiles, or why, despite the best efforts of the C.I.A., the State Department and the National Security Council, he has become more influential, not less, as Iraqis have gained more sovereignty.
Chalabi, who was supposedly a Svengali on the Potomac but a dud on the Tigris, was the driving force behind the creation of the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the most votes in the Jan. 30 national elections; he is now a deputy prime minister and the de facto head of the oil ministry. Diamond's suggestion that the Pentagon just wanted to pass Iraq to Chalabi (and hence engaged in no serious prewar planning) exaggerates Chalabi's influence -- even as it minimizes the impact of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's desire to transform American war-fighting (smaller is better), along with the preferences of Vietnam-scarred senior officers who, it appears, were reluctant to think about another ugly counterinsurgency campaign in another Asian country.
Diamond chastises American officials for underestimating the power of Iraqi nationalism. He quotes Gen. John Abizaid, an important senior officer involved in planning for Iraq, as saying: ''We must in all things be modest. We are an antibody in their culture.'' This is a commendable attitude for a cultural anthropologist. It is less so for a military officer responsible for the lives of Iraqi civilians who were being robbed, shot, butchered and blown up at an ever-increasing rate. Diamond nails Rumsfeld, correctly in my view, for his decision to occupy Iraq with too few soldiers. Of course, it's impossible to know whether more infantrymen could have nipped the insurgency in the bud, but certainly a larger force would have had a better chance of making the roads more secure and the insurgents less so.
Diamond favors more Iraqi input and control over their governance. Yet he holds firm to a belief -- not unlike his boss Bremer's -- that national elections must come gradually, ideally after an incubation period of a few years, after security and important national institutions had been restored, and after all parties, but especially Sunni Arabs and secular liberal democrats, had had a chance to organize.
In a perfect world, this makes sense. But in Iraq, people don't like occupation and many, especially the Shiites' pre-eminent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had caught the democratic bug. Had Diamond's prescriptions been followed, the entire country might have flared into rebellion. His call for a postponement of national elections -- he made it in The New York Times in January 2005 -- might have arrayed the entire Shiite community against us and supercharged the spirits of the Sunni-Arab rejectionist camp. For most Iraqis, and for others in the Middle East, Jan. 30, the day of the national elections, remains an inspiring and hopeful moment.
Still, ''Squandered Victory'' is required reading because of what the author reveals about himself. A deeply conflicted liberal, Diamond was decidedly ambivalent about the war but nonetheless went to work for George W. Bush's democracy project in Iraq. Indeed, the book often seems like vengeful therapy, a way for him to disassociate himself from the president's men and their failure. This is odd, since Diamond's picture of his own work and others' presents an enterprise that, for all its serious mistakes, is probably as thoughtful and adaptive as any earlier American occupation of a foreign land. ''Arrogance, ignorance and isolation . . . plunged America into the war in the first place,'' Diamond writes. The invasion was, as one diplomat told him, an ''original sin,'' from which more mistakes ineluctably followed. Yet before the invasion he had written that ''Saddam Hussein clearly has no intention of complying with the U.N. resolutions'' and ''unless Saddam is toppled from within or goes into exile, war with Iraq is inevitable, sooner or later.'' Like President Bush, Diamond wanted to prevent ''a cruel, reckless and megalomaniacal dictator from having the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.'' Bush's ''original sin,'' then, is really one of process: He just didn't try hard enough to convince the ''international community''it should go to war.
Diamond's ambivalence makes him representative of an important strain in American liberalism. It will be interesting to see whether he continues to believe, as he did in February 2004, that ''nothing in this decade will so test our purpose and fiber as a nation, and our ability to change the world for the better, as our willingness to stand with the people of Iraq over the long haul as they build a free country.''
David L. Phillips, by contrast, is free of all such self-contradictions. ''If the idea was to create a model democracy in the heart of the Arab world, Iraq was not the place to start,'' he writes. ''Iraqis lack a sense of national identity. . . . There is no tradition of participation in politics. Leadership has always been about power and force.''
''Losing Iraq'' seeks to set the record straight by arguing that the Bush administration's failure to appreciate the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which brought together nearly 250 Iraqis, severely weakened the American presence in Iraq. Phillips doesn't really make the case that the project would have saved us, but his job at State was to monitor the Iraqi exiles in the project's democratic principles working group, and he's angry that his handiwork was ignored. He resigned from his job at Foggy Bottom in September 2003, he tells us, when he realized the administration was ignoring the 13 volumes (over 2,000 pages) of Iraqi deliberations begun under the project's auspices.
Many critics of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq (including Diamond) have cited this project as an enormous opportunity lost, because of turf battles between the State Department and the Pentagon. By this account, Foggy Bottom had planned for a post-Saddam Iraq, anticipating many of the awful things that could go wrong.
There is only one problem with this version of events: for the most part, it's not true. The Future of Iraq Project was not a serious post-Saddam planning exercise for a department readying itself for war. According to the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, who was perhaps the most influential voice within the democratic principles working group, it was mostly busywork for Iraqi exiles whom State wanted to guide and control. For exiles like Makiya -- and some neoconservatives in Washington like me, who would have welcomed serious postwar planning in any quarter -- it was clear that the Near Eastern bureau at State, which oversaw the project, did not want to engage in any planning that might make the path to war easier.
In fact, Makiya (who had a tense relationship with Phillips) told me, State stubbornly refused initially to have any democracy-planning component inside the project because it could turn into a platform for a vocal band of Iraqis with ideas that might well run counter to what State envisioned. Congressional pressure and protesting e-mail messages sent by Iraqis inside the project to a variety of senior administration officials, Makiya says, eventually persuaded department officials to allow for a more unrestricted discussion of Iraq's political future. And what most Iraqis involved in the project saw as a first principle of post-Saddam politics -- a provisional government established before an American invasion -- was rejected by State and by virtually everyone else in Washington. According to the final report, all other political ideas and planning flowed from the early establishment of Iraqi sovereignty. Yet Phillips never accurately describes the birth of the democratic principles working group.
Beyond this, much of ''Losing Iraq'' is given over to armchair geostrategic assertions (the Bush administration alienated Tehran's democracy-crushing ruling clerics, who would've helped America in Iraq), to Chalabi-bashing, to comparing President Bush's rhetoric to Osama bin Laden's and to detailed reporting on all the dismal things that have happened in post-Saddam Iraq. In rendering this version of events, Phillips relies on other sources, since it appears that he himself didn't visit postwar Iraq. Which raises a question. Why read Phillips's book when you can read journalists and Iraqi bloggers who have themselves seen the tragedies, and the triumphs?
logoprinter.gif
Description: GIF image
