Posted on 07/18/2007 10:36:06 AM PDT by jazusamo
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Historians in the future will undoubtedly find many and varied lessons from the war in Iraq. But we in the present do not have the luxury of waiting for all the evidence to be in before we start to understand what has gone wrong and what has gone right in Iraq.
What has gone right is that the Iraq war is already over. Our troops won it. But our politicians may once more lose the peace -- and with disastrous consequences for us and for the world.
Peace has not been achieved in Iraq, though pacification continues -- always at a cost in American lives -- and shows signs of progress, much to the dismay of those who have bet their political future on an American defeat.
Defeatists have not yet had the courage to directly ensure defeat by cutting off the money to continue military operations in Iraq.
That would be taking responsibility for the defeat. What would serve their political purpose better would be to legislate preconditions for the spending of military appropriations that would make defeat inevitable, but let it be seen as Bush's defeat, not theirs.
That is the direction in which the defeatists are moving, as politicians who have never deployed troops, or even worn a military uniform, speak loftily of "redeployment," as if they actually know what they are talking about.
Having politicians micro-managing a war has been a formula for disaster, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. Our troops have already been under too many restrictions as to what they could or couldn't do under the "rules of engagement" in Iraq.
The great tragic failure in Iraq has been political failure, not military failure. At the heart of that failure have been two lofty notions -- "nation-building" and democracy.
Nations cannot be built.
You can transplant institutions from one country to another, but you cannot transplant the history and culture from which the attitudes and traditions evolved that enable those institutions to work.
It took centuries for democracy to evolve in the Western world. Yet we tried to create democracy in Iraq before we created the security -- the law and order -- that is a prerequisite for any form of viable government.
Having made democracy the centerpiece of the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, Americans have been hamstrung by the inadequacies of that government and the fact that our military could not simply ignore the Iraqi government when its politicians got in the way of restoring law and order.
People will support tyranny before they will support anarchy. Both can be avoided by creating an interim government based on competence, rather than on its being an embodiment of democratic ideals.
Neither in Europe nor in Asia did today's democracies begin as democracies. As late as 1950, no one could have called Taiwan or South Korea democracies.
Even today, Singapore does not have the kind of freedom that Westerners regard as democratic. But it is a decent and prosperous society, vastly superior in every way to what it was at the end of World War II.
Trying to create democracy in places where it has never existed -- and where the prerequisites for democracy may not exist -- has been a needless gamble.
Among those prerequisites are a toleration of different views, an accommodation of different interests, and a willingness to put the national interest above one's own.
The Middle East is the last place to look for such qualities. Such things evolved in the West only after centuries of different religions and peoples trying unsuccessfully to destroy each other.
Many have argued that democracies tend not to start wars, so that having more democracies in the world is in the interest of peace-loving people.
But that is vastly different from saying that we know how to create democracies -- or that so much blood and treasure should be gambled on that long shot.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
Dr. Thomas Sowell: Having politicians micro-managing a war has been a formula for disaster, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. Our troops have already been under too many restrictions as to what they could or couldn't do under the "rules of engagement" in Iraq.
Looks like two articles that were fused together to make one. He is right that the politicians have not been able to keep the peace and that they have screwed with our military beyond belief. That has been the flaw of the dems.
The second half on nation building is a huge rebuttal of the neo con belief that we could establish democracy in the Middle East.
Agreed...Bringing democracy to the region at this time is a monumental uphill climb.
BS! The invasion and the toppling of Saddam's regime were done with great effectiveness and efficiency by America's military warriors. The post invasion effort hasn't shown itself to a winner thus far and may never be a legitimate success.
The US military is designed to fight battles and win wars. The US military is not designed to be a police force to the world. Nor is the US military meant to be at the forefront of any nation building effort. And having the US military work to spread democracy to the Islamic world, is an effort in futility.
We can't run from this fight. The US has to win the battle for Iraq. The fact remains, after 4+ years, nothing has really changed in Iraq. The Bush admin would have been better off to have approached this with a total war mentality and not allowed its efforts to turn into a war of political correctness.
Can you add Dr. Thomas Sowell to the Haditha Ping list :)
Iraq is a democratic republic, not democracy..big difference.
IIRC, establishing a democracy has never been our goal. Only to provide security (During a foreign supported insurgency) until police forces and Iraqi military can establish rule of law.
What law that is is up the the Iraqis.
What Sowell misses, is that we had absolutely no choice, if left to the UN and Al Quida, New York, NY would be a smoldering hole and Saddam would be the grand Imam of the ME.
Bringing democracy [in our image] to Iraq is not the principle reason we are in Iraq. It is not necessary as long as a stable Iraq emerges that is an ally in the WOT. It is up to the Iraqis to seize the opportunity we have given them.
I agree with him that we shouldn’t be nation building and with you that the post war military effort has been lacking until very recently but some progress is beginning to take shape.
You’re right in that we have to win this and that we should have gone into this with a total war mentality.
If you’ll get Dr. Sowell to sign up here with a screen name I’ll be more than happy to put him on the Haditha list. :-)
Well said. There are many forms of democracy and they will definitely not have one in our image anytime soon.
Sowell, as usual, is spot on.
I don’t see a true, self-sufficient democracy coming in Iraq for a long, long, long time, if ever. For one thing, democracy is incompatible with Islam. Secondly, the only reason that Iraq was a single nation was because it was held together with an iron fist. Without Saddam’s brutal rule to keep things in check, the long-held anomisity among the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis is allowed to bloom. It will be a long time, if ever, before those three become one. Middle-Easterners seem to have very long memories of past injustices, and they hold grudges for...well, forever and ever, Amen.
This is why Iraq will be a very long, painful process, and why Bush & Company have no real exit strategy. You can’t just expect to establish a “beacon of democracy” in five, ten or possibly even 30-40 years on a (lack of) foundation like that.
Then you have fighters funded by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia doing their level best to ensure that Western-style democracy does not take root there.
As much as I’d like to see this “nation-building” venture succeed and Iraq turn into a stable, democratic ally of the US, I have one hell of a lot of doubts that it will ever actually happen — no matter how much time we give this.
I’m all for the surge in troops, I am against any suggestion of pulling out now, and I think that now that we’re there and we are trying to do this, we had better be prepared to be in for a long, long haul and work to finish the job. I just wish I could convince myself that “finishing the job” is a plausible outcome. I’m not even sure I know exactly what “finishing the job” even means in this context.
I was writing my post while some of you guys were posting. Just want to add that yes, I agree that we should have gone into this with a total war mentality.
Ah, so was 13 dissimilar colonies.
Pray tell, who would you give Iraq to? Osama Bin Laden perhaps?
You make a lot of good points, especially about Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia funding terrorists and other fighters. Stopping that should be a number one priority.
Check my posting history and come back and ask another question.
“The great tragic failure in Iraq has been political failure, not military failure. At the heart of that failure have been two lofty notions — “nation-building” and democracy.”
The goals were high, and perhaps too high. I believe that the democratic nation-building was an attempt to address the root of the problem (as many so often tell us we need to do).
If the Iraqi’s don’t step up; they will lose their chance at a democracy. That will be tragic.
In actuality, installing “experts” rather than a democracy was precisely what the United States did at the behest of the State Department, in the form of L. Paul Bremer and Lakhdar Brahimi. The State Department’s hatred of Iraqi dissidents and exiles such as Chalabi prevented Iraqis (aside from the limited circumstances mainly involving the Kurds) being allowed to participate in their own liberation. Allawi’s book is very good on these points. The fact that Afghanistan was allowed to have its own government sooner is one reason, it seem to me, why it has, as Karzai has said, been able to do more than Iraq with less aid.
As Sowell himself has written, few things are all good or all bad; there are trade-offs to virtually any endeavor undertaken on Earth rather than in Heaven.
Technocracy-— rule by experts-— has, as democracy does, both strengths and weaknesses for nations that have no experience in it and nations that have had it over 200 years. The weakness of technocracy is that if you have the wrong experts, it doesn’t work. The Democrats and the State Department and perhaps the CIA applied their influence and managed to remove Jay Garner, who had been successful in the North previously, and who had wanted to follow the Afghanistan model, with L. Paul Bremer, who had no experience in the region, much less a similar record of success in it to speak of.
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