Frequent commenter and self-described USMC junior officer Jay recently pointed to an influential anti-neocon policy piece, which painstakingly details some of the errors of neoconservative misjudgments with regards to Iraq. As a civilian I am obviously not qualified to debate on Jay’s level of first-hand knowledge about the article’s (Col. Patrick Lang’s ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’) accuracy. However, I do have some comments pertaining to that article which I hope will enrich the Iraq discourse.
The first is that the article’s mocking of the neocon/Likudnik clique’s infatuation with Ahmad Chalabi is dead-on. If anything, however, Chalabi was an Iranian mole, and he became a major Iranian client (as well as the only effective technocrat in the initial Iraqi government) after his already-weak US establishment credibility collapsed.
The second is that, while a number of these professional Likudniks loudly played up their influence in the White House, there is little indication, to me, that they were ever a key driver in any government bureaucracy, whether it was the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, or anywhere else. In other words, I don’t think the Likudniks’ naivete was systemic, so I believe Lang’s attribution of virtually every on-the-ground failure in Iraq is exemplary of the Platonic fallacy, of grasping to link disparate events to one underlying “form”/ preconceived notion.
US failures in Iraq were rooted in fundamental misperceptions which extended far beyond the Likudniks. Also, Wolfowitz’s recommendation to attack Iraq in retaliation for Sept. 11 turned out to be ludicrously wrong, but at the time (2 days after 9/11) that Wolfowitz made that recommendation, the two likeliest perpetrators by far were Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and Hussein at the time had much clearer motives and means than bin Laden did. After several more days of intensive research by the entire federal governmental machinery, it became much clearer that bin Laden was by far the likelier perpetrator, but Wolfowitz’s recommendation was not out of bounds at all. Iraq had been blockaded and bombed ever since the “end” of the first Gulf War.
Thirdly, Afghanistan’s location and terrain prohibited the complete utilization of military assets. The conventional armored fist of the American army, the heavy-footprint armored and infantry divisions, never would have gone into Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a “success” because the Americans used special forces and long-range air power to blast conventional Taliban strongholds, which Northern Alliance forces then overran. Afghanistan’s eventual re-factionalization was a certainty, even before accounting for the US government’s dogmatic war on drugs. (The Taliban’s revival was entirely funded by angry opium farmers.) The Army could never have been used effectively in Afghanistan. The Russian experience should have made that obvious. The argument that Iraq hamstrung efforts in Afghanistan is extremely disingenuous. The drug war, not Iraq, botched Afghanistan, to the extent that it was botched. Unfortunately, segments of American security services seem to have an extremely strong interest in maintaining the drug war (yeah, I read about that rendition plane that crashed in Yucatan with 4 tons of cocaine, too).
The US conventional army was a huge asset that was largely uninvolved in the war on terrorism. It was sitting around, doing nothing, waiting to be utilized, with no realistic conventional threat on the horizon which would justify keeping it out of the Mideast. I might add that there still isn’t one. (The Rise Of Russia has not really carried over to their military forces to the extent a lot of people think, and especially not to their clinker conventional units. I’d guess their special forces are vastly improved, and they have a lot more unconventional influence all over the world, but that is way beyond the US Army’s bailiwick).
Fourthly, in the beginning, nearly every single geopolitically interested American policy agent–the Pentagon, the intel services, the oil industry, both parties of congress, the Likudniks, humanitarianist liberals, and so on–agreed for some reason that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, for their own reasons. WMD was the ‘marketing consensus’ for the war–not the actual casus belli.
The strategist crowd believed that the United States had zero leverage over the Saudis and the other oil sheiks, who were paying huge amounts of money to al-Qaeda while they publicly affected revulsion at terrorism. Even the reasonable possibility of long-term American control in Iraq would be enough to scare the Saudis into rolling the dice by liquidating domestic al Qaeda-Saudi Arabia. And that’s exactly what the Saudis decided to do. In 2003, AQSA was one of the strongest of all the al Qaeda nodes. Today, it barely exists, and the Saudi royal family will be fighting them until one or the other is completely dead. That is an outcome of the invasion of Iraq. Ditto for the Libyan volte-face.
The critiques we hear today are very reminiscent of the charge that LBJ’s Vietnam escalation to over 500,000 troops was a ‘total failure.’ That action was a failure itself, but it provided a huge encouragement for Indonesian military forces to massacre Indonesia’s powerful Communist element, which from our perspective was a great outcome. Would they have liquidated the Indonesian communist party without the prior American “all-in” in neighboring Vietnam? Who knows. But after the American Vietnam escalation, the Indonesian officer corps did not have to worry about Indonesian communists gaining support from sympathetic foreign governments. The distribution of outcomes from a preemptive massacre was substantially improved.
Fifth, Lang disingenuously attributes Bush’s support for the war to blind religiosity, which strongly suggests that his expertise does not carry over into knowledge of the motives of all the various players. Karl Rove may have weaved a nice, convenient narrative of Bush The Coked Out Fratboy staring at the mirror one morning with puke all over himself and resolutely turning to JC, but aside from politically-tactical rhetoric, there is scant evidence that Bush was ever a seriously religious man.
I have never met Bush myself, but I know more than one person who has, and religion was simply never part of any conversation between Bush and anyone I know. The closest religion ever got to Bush was Michael Gerson, a pretentious Catholic speechwriter who quit in early 2007. Weaving some Baptist symbolism into political speeches is a long way from being a religious nutjob. Political rhetoric aside, the evidence suggests that Bush is far less religious than some of the religious tribes which support him–if he’s religious at all. It’s hilariously inconsistent how the usual suspects charge that Bush is some kind of religious nut, and then attribute Bush to being the slave or agent of icily calculating atheists like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove.
I think Bush does have a “Judeo-Christian” Clash of Civilizations consciousness, but Bush shares that conviction with millions of utterly secular people, from me to Sarkozy.
Not a single member of Bush’s inner circle is remotely devout, so far as we can tell. I don’t think Bush is either, even though it is politically convenient for Bush to act as such, just as it is convenient–but disingenuous–for Bush’s detractors (e.g. Patrick Lang) to paint him as such.
Finally, I have a hard time trusting anybody who defends the intelligence agencies, period. Let’s assume that the intelligence agencies, in concert with George Soros’s constellation of “nonprofit” NGOs, were crucial in instigating the Color Revolutions across the CIS in 2005, as well as Venezuela and Burma. (Burma was not designated a color revolution, but it was straight out of the same playbook, and Chinese media chatter blames Soros for being involved (and they don’t habitually blame Soros for every single bad thing that ever happened).) Let’s say the American intel establishment is just that crafty, and let’s assume that there is some substantiation underlying the ‘If you knew what the intel agencies had actually accomplished, they wouldn’t be doing their job’ tripe. So how has that been going?
The color revolutions are all flops or flops in progress. Serbia is reverting to the Milosevic status quo. (Vojislav Kostunica’s overthrow of Milosevic was seen as the original Soros/Color dry run). The “Orange” coalition in the Ukraine is a joke. Venezuela was a total flop the first time, although the recent referendum’s outcome was more promising. Georgia is a complete mess. Kyrgyzstan (sic?) is similarly dysfunctional. Burma was a blood-soaked fiasco.
So, even if we take a leap of faith and assume the American intel establishment actually has honestly tried to further some American foreign policy objectives over the past several years, they have still failed. I don’t see how that generous interpretation of their track record gives them or their apologists the stature to criticize failures in Iraq. The intel establishment was on board for its own reasons, and while the marketing veneer for the war (WMD) has failed, the more legitimate reasons are still very much there, even if public opinion won’t synthesize them for years. Meanwhile, the intelligence agencies are just sticking Bush with the bill.
I will probably update this post frequently as I think about the issues more. Or maybe they’re just too big for any one post. I dunno. I would especially appreciate comments on this one, especially from those who have served in the military or intelligence.
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