How Did We Go So Wrong in Iraq?

By Larry DeWitt
October 22, 2006

Doing Wrong While Doing Right

My title question presupposes a couple of things.

I am not concerned here to debate whether--in 2003--the war was or was not the right thing to do. I thought then it was the right thing to do, for the reason that it seemed to me morally right to liberate the Iraqi people from the tyranny under which they lived. I thought this even though Bush and Co. were pursuing the war for other reasons, and even though we were stuck with Bush and Co. to carry it out. I thought we could use the devil to do the Lord's work. In retrospect, this was not very smart of me.

I am likewise not concerned here to either applaud or dispute those seeming seers who knew even before it happened how things would turn out in Iraq. It seems to me those who knew what was going to happen in Iraq before it happened knew not on the strength of their foresight so much as on the power of their ideology--which is a less impressive achievement.

I thought then that there was some hope for things to turn out well--mainly on the strength of the intuition that all human beings long for certain universal aspirations, such as freedom from oppression by dictators.

Finally, I will not debate the question of whether there is any hope still for success in Iraq. I have no hope, and I will leave it at that.

Clearly, my hopes were dashed.

Somewhere along the way, my intuitions were deficient.

I want to put most of this sorry history of my own misjudgments aside for the moment and try to discern what went wrong in a broad sense--on the assumption that it was at least theoretically possible for it to have gone right.

I am interested--just now--in seeing if there are any deeper lessons here than the usual clichés bandied about by the two sides. I will leave to the pros (and the cons) the usual trading back and forth of pros and cons.

My question is deceptively narrow and seemingly simple: Can we discern some broader lessons from our experience with the war in Iraq? I think so.

I won't keep the reader in artificial suspense. Herein the answer: Things went so wrong in Iraq for precisely the same fundamental reason that the Republicans have screwed up so many aspects of their governance of our nation. That's the answer--but it will take some explaining.

One Trick Elephant

The modern Republican Party is a one-trick elephant. Somewhere along the way they blundered into a truly superb political trick, which brought them into power and sustains them in that power.

Democrats are perhaps not entirely innocent of the trick, but being out of power they are surely rusty in the art--and in these things, for decades now, the Republicans have shown the way.

To call their one idea pandering, would be too simple, and it would let the pandered-to off the hook too easily. It can be more insightfully summarized as the problem of the dietary habits of four-year olds.

Left to their own devices, four-year children readily come to the happy idea that they do not have to eat their vegetables or their fruit or their pastas or their protein. If four-year olds ruled their worlds, most of them would end up with a diet consisting only of ice cream. It is the job of the adults in the household to train the children in the necessary self-disciplines of healthy eating habits. Indulging the four-year old's wishes and desires is to fundamentally fail in one's duties as an adult.

Just so, for years now Republican political leaders have allowed the public to play the role of demanding four-year olds who want only to feast on ice cream, while these political leaders have failed in their duties to play the role of the adults in our political system. The list of our mutual irresponsibility is impressively long. Here, merely a few highlights.

In 2001 we gave ourselves a $74 billion cut in our taxes; in 2002 another $51 billion; in 2003 another $61 billion. During those same three years we added $407 billion to the nation's debt.

At the start of the Bush presidency, the total accumulated National Debt was $5.8 trillion. With five years of unified Republican governance, the debt presently stands at $8.5 trillion. Flipping these digits is not a sign of success, or maturity.

Just the other day, our President told us we have been good little boys and girls, because the budget deficit for last fiscal year, which just ended, was not the $521 billion we had projected back in 2004, but only $250 billion. We should, we were told, applaud ourselves.

When the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee--Kent Conrad--pointed out the next day that the $250 billion figure did not include the money borrowed from the Social Security trust funds last year, which would push the total deficit to $550 billion, he was dismissed as a spoil-sport--as a bearer of old news. But even old news is sometimes worth paying attention to, if we haven't been paying attention in the first place.

The economic theory behind our soaring debt is not new--it formed the core of the Reagan Administration's budget policy. Then it was called supply-side economics. Now we just allude to a vague idea that cutting taxes stimulates the economy, thereby inadvertently raising more revenue, automatically producing balanced budgets, with no one having to break a sweat--and certainly no one has to sacrifice the immediate gratification of any of their material desires.

There has not yet in the last 25 years been any evidence of this budget-balancing effect of massive tax cuts, but the theory endures. Which is one hallmark, by the by, of an ideology--imperviousness to mere evidence.

The economic theory is as it may be. But clearly, this approach has one undeniable virtue: people like being told they can have their ice cream and eat it too.

When the Bush Administration lobbied for its three successive tax cuts, it presented budget projections extending for only 10 years into the future--cutting off the accounting before the bulk of the cuts would take effect. Thus they could project a smaller burden on future generations than they will have to bear. Best not to frighten the children.

When the Administration wanted to introduce Personal Savings Accounts to partially privatize Social Security, they projected the transition costs from the proposal only for 10 years into the future--including in the total the first three years of that period, before the change was even scheduled to take effect. Thus they could tell us that the cost of adopting their plan would only be $754 billion, when in fact the total cost of the proposal would reach $2 trillion over the generation it would take to effect the transition.

When the Administration desired to give Medicare beneficiaries a new prescription drug benefit, it did not raise the money the old fashioned way--by raising taxes--rather it used the new-fashioned way--borrowing it from the future. And when even the borrowing might be thought to be of embarrassing magnitude, the Administration pressured the actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to not tell the Congress what the cost estimates were. Best not to trouble them with such weighty matters.

On the non-economic front, our record is not any better.

We have launched two actual wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and one virtual one (on terror) without any increase in the size of our military. We do not wish to discomfort the comfortable middle class by any suggestion that their sons and daughters ought to be the ones carrying out their policies.

We have also funded all three wars without any offsetting reductions in our non-military spending. This did not happen--notice--because of liberal resistance to non-defense budget cuts, but because the Administration and the Republican Congress did not ask us for any.

For decades now, Republicans have dismissed the science on global warming because it might require of us some scaling-back of our rapacious use of the earth's natural resources.

The President has even taken it upon himself to lighten the burden of the Congress from all that business of making the laws. So he now appends "signing statements" to legislation indicating his own unilateral understanding of what the law says, and hence, how he will administer it. The need for Congressional oversight is thereby substantially avoided. How thoughtful of him.

One could, alas, go on.

I believe this irresponsible form of governance--this defaulting on our duties as adults--began with the Reagan Administration and its promotion of extravagant tax cuts--excused by the ideology of supply side economics--as their version of ice cream for all. But I won't argue the point now. Suffice it to say, this approach to governance has characterized the present Administration from its first day in office.

Working the Trick in Iraq

Making war is earnest business. By its nature, it involves the deepest forms of sacrifice.

If there is anything ennobling about war, it is hard to see it in the violence and the gore. Heroism is a little too close to barbarism in this context.

But nobility in times of war can easily be seen in, for example, the hardships of the U.S. (and especially the British) homefronts during World War II. Rationing; wage and price controls; victory gardens; war bond drives; donating to "the war effort;" and the simple business of doing without, were among the good parts of the "Good War." These shared sacrifices were admirable precisely because they were shared sacrifices--because they were expressions of adults taking their duties seriously.

Among the many great obscenities of war, foremost is the treating of war flippantly. We now confront war as seen through the bombsights of a high-altitude airplane as it drops its bombs on some hapless Iraqi racing his car across a bridge we are in the process of destroying. War is now for most of us like scenes from some kind of inter-continental video game.

This is pretty much how America has approached its war in Iraq--at least those without family members in the military.

The list of our defaults on our responsibilities in this war is again impressively long. And again, merely the highlights.

The Pentagon's secret war plan for Iraq envisioned a quick war and a brief occupation--expecting to scale down to 25,000 troops by the summer of 2003 and to be entirely out of Iraq militarily in 2004. In quick, out quick. No fuss, no muss. No shared sacrifice required.

We have no draft, so the sons and daughters of the indifferent, the opposed, or the privileged, can stay at home, living their lives as if their nation's current war was as distant as the one between the states, while those families whose children volunteered for military life bear the sole burden of the war.

The Pentagon war strategy was to rely on a surplus of technology and a deficit of people to defeat and then govern Iraq. This strategy has the supreme virtue of minimizing the inconvenience to the voters. If we had to place, say, 500,000 troops in Iraq, someone might notice.

We told ourselves that this war was free-of-charge, that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for both our expenses in the war and the cost of rebuilding a shattered nation. I think this is precisely the circumstance for which they invented the expression "pipe dream."

Not only was lunch to be free in Iraq, but breakfast and dinner as well. Hence, we can happily urge permanent tax cuts in a time of war, on the theory that cutting taxes stimulates economies which then balances budgets. Ronald Reagan would be proud. Supply-side economics now stretches its magic formula from Washington to Baghdad.

When the result of our fiscal undiscipline threatens to be unpleasantly similar to that of the Reagan legacy--massive exploding deficits for generations to come--we simply redefine the expenditures for the war as being "off budget." We do this by calling them "supplementals." Which means they bypass the usual budget process--with its messy requirement of at least nominal spending limits. The resulting money spends just as freely, but our books look better, if one does not examine them too closely. So the war is not contributing to the budget deficit--by definition. How convenient. No fuss, no muss. No sacrifice required--at least not from us.

Pay no attention to that dark and ominously growing mountain of debt on the distant horizon. Everything is fine. It is still morning in America. What happens to our grandchildren's generation--well, that's a problem for some other Administration. For now, we shall demand all the ice cream we want!

In Iraq, we wanted it quick and on the cheap. We wanted a minimum of bother. We wanted that banner saying "Mission Accomplished"--which was draped across the conning tower of the USS Abraham Lincoln as it bobbed in the serene waters off the shore of San Diego--to be true. The perfect Hollywood ending to the perfect Hollywood war story.

We wanted our life filled with an endless series of bowls full of ice cream--without any interruptions for duty or self-denial. And the Bush Administration was only too happy to tell us we could have just that. This was--after all--their one big idea. It had worked for them so well in the past. Surely it had to work in Iraq as well.

To put it simply: the course of the Iraq War is the Bush approach to governance applied to foreign policy. A short-hand nemonic for the whole debacle in Iraq is: The Republicans Perform Their One-Trick Show on the Road.

Lessons Learned

So where, one might reasonably ask, do we go from here? What should we do about the situation in Iraq? Those of us who thought we should get in, seem to have some obligation to say how we should get back out.

Honestly, I have no idea what to do. I can see nothing but disaster whichever way I think to suggest we might turn. We seem to be in a pit from which there is no escape.

I see no hope of going forward and "winning" the war. I see staying the course as merely failing in perpetuity. I see simply leaving, as little more than inviting the Four Horsemen to take their ruthless ride across the Iraqi landscape.

Some I know are positively insistent on this last option--and insistent we do it sooner rather than later. After all, it is somebody else's landscape. No fuss, no muss.

Our options foreclosed, we seem to be reduced to just hanging on, and waiting to see what happens next. This is a sad measure of just how badly wrong things have gone in Iraq.

In the long run, we will most likely do what we did in Vietnam: declare victory and leave. This will be an even bigger lie than it was then, and the only suspense will be to see if anyone will be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for having finally stopped doing what they started doing in 2003.

Like I say, I have no good ideas, and even less hope.

But there is certainly one thing that is within our power--one thing we surely ought to do, no matter what else we do or don't do about Iraq. We ought to learn our lessons. We ought to tell ourselves the truth about why things went so terribly wrong in Iraq. We ought to face ourselves and see who we really are, and why--despite all the best intentions of some of us, and the dire warnings of others--we have destroyed Iraq in order to save it.

The central lesson is this: America is a nation of spoiled children. We want everything quick, easy and cheap. We want to only eat ice cream. We want the adults in our world to tell us that only eating ice cream is perfectly okay. And the adults indulge us. Therein our shame, and Iraq's shambles.

This point, of course, is not limited to Iraq. This is about the modern approach to governance. Iraq is merely the most grotesque and costly current example. There will be others in the years ahead--as the long-deferred chickens come home to their roost.

There are only two ways out of the downward spiral of children living on diets of ice cream. Either some adult has to come forward and start behaving like an adult--some political leader has to call us to a spirit of sacrifice, effort, self-discipline, and self-denial--or we have to grow up. We have to stop billing and cooing at the adults who pander to us. We have to demand our vegetables!

CODA: Same Thoughts, Second Explanations

By Larry DeWitt
November 1, 2006

Following the publication of my new essay on Iraq I received some unusual feedback from various of my liberal readers. The responses fell into two groups, both of which troubled me. One group took issue with what they saw as serious flaws in the essay. Most of these criticisms were based on what seemed to be misreadings of my argument. Other of my liberal readers—whom I expected to take issue with central aspects of my position—pronounced themselves well satisfied with everything I had to say. Clearly, I had done a poor job of communicating.

The problem, I now think, is that the mood of the piece was sullen, confessional, and dispirited. This led to a certain terseness of style, bordering on the cryptic, which led to serious misunderstandings. So let me restate a few things, in a more direct way. Less artfulness might, I hope, lead to more understanding.

The argument about Iraq has been going on for some time now. I have twice before written at length in this forum arguing my own views. As an initial supporter of the war in Iraq, mine was a lonely position among my (mostly) liberal friends and readers. The new essay was crafted in the context of this history, and it presumes much that has gone before--perhaps too much. So allow me to restate the argument in brief.

My liberal friends asserted three claims:

1)      The war had no possible moral basis, as the alleged moral bases (WMDs, links to terrorism, etc.) were all mistakes or lies;
2)      The war could not be successful in bringing democracy to Iraq because our real motives were so corrupt, and perhaps also because the Iraqis do not desire western democracy;
3)      The war effort would inevitably fail as the Iraqis would hate us because of our corrupt motives, combined with their natural resistance to military invasion and occupation.

I asserted three alternative claims:

1)      Liberating Iraqis from their tyrannical government was a legitimate moral basis for the war;
2)      Iraqis would welcome the opportunity to remake their society into a democratic one, as the aspiration to the freedoms of democratic governance is universal in human nature;
3)      The war effort might well be a success, defined as bringing a stable democracy to Iraq.

The point of the new essay is to concede on point 3). I am now forced to admit that the war has been a failure. We are nowhere near bringing democracy to Iraq—and I doubt we ever can. Too many IEDs have been exploded in Iraq to allow any real hope for a stable democracy to emerge there.

This failure is what I have to explain—given that success was at least theoretically possible. My liberal friends, who knew the war could not succeed, have no explaining to do on this point. But I surely do.

So this is the burden of the essay: to explain how we did so wrong while trying to do right. Thus my explanation, which is that the war failed because America tried to achieve it on the quick and easy, rather than investing the level of resources (manpower, money, skillful diplomacy and widely-shared self-denial and sacrifice) that would have been needed to make it a success. I assert, furthermore, that this kind of “free lunch” mentality is the essential political trick of the modern Republican Party, and that it afflicts many aspects of our public policy.

So I concede the war has failed, and I was wrong to expect otherwise. As to what I do not concede:

I still cling to my position on claim 1). I still believe the war was a just war, on the basis of freeing the Iraqis from tyranny. No doubt, others had other motives. And I concede that this was not a popular position. I would be surprised if 5% of America supported the war for this reason.

As one of my readers observed, the nation's support of the war was primarily based on post-9/11 hysteria, and a desire for revenge, which was carefully cultivated and encouraged by the Bush Administration. Our national policy at the outset of the war was not that the war was justified as a selfless act of bringing democracy to Iraq. Our justification relied on classical "self-defense" arguments: WMDs and Iraq as a breeding ground for terrorism threatened America, thus we were merely defending ourselves, thus the war was a just war. It was on this basis that most Americans who supported the war did so. Which no doubt caused them some serious buyer's remorse when these justifications turned out not to be true.

Whether the claims about WMDs, links to al Qaeda, etc., were mistakes or outright lies, hardly matters. It is clear we went to war for these reasons, and not for the reason I supported the war. As I conceded in my April 2004 essay ("The Five Hard Truths About Iraq"), the Bush Administration's embrace of the goal of bringing democracy to Iraq was late, cynical, and disingenuous. But as I explained, this was well and truly beside the point. Bringing democracy to Iraq had become the nation's main justification for the war by the end of 2003, and I suggested, the optimum strategy here was to embrace this goal and hold the Bush Administration accountable to attain it.

And I still think my claim 2) was a plausible claim to make. I still think the Iraqis might have embraced democracy, had we done a great many things differently.

I still believe in the universality of the aspiration for political freedom represented by the ideal of democracy. All people long to be free of the various forms of tyranny (political, religious, etc.) which have afflicted us throughout human history. The progressive movement in world history is a movement toward the universal adoption of liberal democracies. Those who fancy themselves progressives are, it seems to me, obligated to support this movement. Perhaps making war is not the optimum way to bring democracy about--I take the point. But a refusal to commit ourselves to the objective of universal democracy, is to reveal ourselves as the enemies of progressive reform.

I think America has in general gotten too comfortable with its place in the scheme of things and is no longer interested in the crusade for universal justice. We are all for freedom and democracy, in the abstract, just so long as we do not have to sacrifice any of our own creature comforts in this cause. This, I think, is a tragedy for the world, and a tragedy for our nation's soul.

In any case, these are the points I concede, and the ones I do not.

One point I made in the essay has been especially misunderstood. I alluded to those who knew the war would be a failure before it even happened as informed by ideological commitments rather than insight. Some readers have taken this to be a criticism of those people of conscience who opposed the war because they had moral qualms about it. I am not criticizing such persons.

The target of the remark are those liberals who knew as a matter of a priori certainty before the war even started that it could not bring democracy to Iraq because they “knew” we had no intention of doing so. In their view, the war was a grab for territory, or a resurgence of Yankee imperialism, or an attempt to steal the oil of the Iraqis, or an attempt to somehow help Israel, or all of these, and the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq (even as one motive among many) was a lie pure and simple. In this view, when the neocons in the Administration talked about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, this was just a cover-story for spreading American hegemony around the world. Given this, the war could not succeed in bringing democracy to Iraq, in their smug reading.

This was an argument repeatedly directed against me to persuade me that I should not support the war based even on the hope that it might succeed in bringing democracy to Iraq. This is the position I was mocking. This was the attitude of virtually every liberal I know, and it was a wide-spread position among the liberal chattering class on the blogs and in the popular culture.

This attitude about the war in Iraq has its intellectual roots, I think, in a post-Vietnam/post-Watergate viewpoint which has afflicted liberals since those historical experiences. I am not referring here to the "Vietnam syndrome" in which we think the American military cannot successfully wage war. Nor am I suggesting that liberals have become pacifists in the wake of Vietnam (some liberals are quite proud of their support of the wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia).

My point here is that after Vietnam and Watergate liberals developed a deep distrust and suspicion of the motives of their own government and society. They became chronic critics of America, especially in the realm of foreign policy. They distrust our motives and see us as a bully in the world. The idea that America might act for noble and selfless reasons (such as bringing democracy to an oppressed people) is to them laughably naive.

The knowingly cynical idea that we are in Iraq to steal their oil, or to impose a permanent military presence on them, or for some other corrupt motive, is the view I have in mind here. This interpretation of American motives and values is the ideology which allowed my liberal friends to know the war in Iraq was immoral and would fail. They knew this based on their ideological attitudes about America and its motives. We might short-hand it by calling it the Noam Chomsky view of America. This, I suggest, is the disease that liberals were infected with by their passage through the miasmas of Vietnam and Watergate. And this view of America in the world informed a substantial body of opinion in the liberal opposition to the war.

So, that is what I was conceding and what I was not conceding in my cryptic essay. Now, perhaps, all my liberal friends will be able to find the appropriate reason to dislike what I have to say.

I once had hope that by accepting the goal of bringing democracy to Iraq—and supporting the war on that basis—that the Bush Administration might succeed in actually bringing democracy to Iraq—sort of in spite of themselves. I now realize that we could never do this with the Bush Administration, for the reasons explained in the essay.

That I have been so foolish as to believe in an America of serious adults, earnestly engaged in an effort to make the world a better place, is to my ultimate shame and embarrassment. The war in Iraq has proven me a fool. This too, I now concede.