BOOKSHELF
The Armchair
Analyst
David L. Phillips renders a
tendentious and false verdict on Iraq.
BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:01 a.m.
A persistent theme of some critics of the Iraq war--again
ascendant during the past few weeks of violence--has been the Bush
administration's alleged failure to appease the Baath Party and other elements
of Saddam Hussein's former regime. One of the more visible exponents of this
point of view has been David L. Phillips of the Council on Foreign Relations.
But his "Losing Iraq" reveals just how hollow and wrongheaded the critique
really is.
The book supposedly offers a perspective from, as the subtitle has it, "Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco." Yet Mr. Phillips's "inside" experience seems confined to trips to Iraqi Kurdistan and to his work as a consultant to the State Department, for which he arranged conferences of Iraqi exiles before the war. Shockingly, he has not--as he and his publicist effectively conceded after several invitations to correct me on this point--actually set foot anywhere on Iraqi soil during the reconstruction he proclaims a "fiasco." What's more, he has never in his life set foot in Baghdad, the Sunni Triangle or Shiite southern Iraq.
Even a week's worth of firsthand impressions would have made for a far more reliable book. Granted, Mr. Phillips comes to his subject with more venom than fair-mindedness: In all seriousness he compares the Bush administration's "jihadist vocabulary" to Osama bin Laden's. Still, just a little contact with actual Iraqis might have prevented such silly lines as: "The first days of liberation were an unmitigated disaster."
Really? As in, not mitigated by the fact that the worst mass murderer in Arab history had been deposed? The Iraqis I spoke to at a mass grave south of the capital during the first of my two trips to Iraq (May 2003 and June 2004) certainly didn't think so. I heard some of them surreally but sincerely express their desire for Iraq to become America's 51st state, even as they sorted through bits of bone and clothing for evidence of their loved ones.
The book's subtitle isn't the only thing that misleadingly suggests that
"Losing Iraq" is something more than a work of armchair pontification. The book
abounds with place- and time-specific references. If one didn't know better, one
might assume that Mr. Phillips had seen what he describes. In one passage, he
notes the precise time ("10:26 A.M.") when Mr. Bremer rose from a "gilded" sofa
to hand Interim Prime Minister Allawi a "leatherbound" note. Another passage
describes Fallujah as "a twisted mix of narrow streets, back alleys and
boulevards." A data-base search elicits the source of these adjectives: the New
York Times. Here, for example, is the Times's description of Fallujah: "a
complex mix of boulevards, narrow streets and many back allleys."
Mr. Phillips should worry less about our "losing Iraq"--a tendentious and false verdict in any case--and more about regaining his own lost credibility.
Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal.
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