Subduing the Insurgency 1

This was clearly our biggest failure in this war. The mistake we made was essentially dismantling Iraqi civil society and leaving no discernable alternative, throwing parts of the country into effective anarchy. Newt Gingrich is right when he says that disempowering the local elites and bureaucracies created the insurgency that we're seeing today. I never had any problem with removing Saddam Hussein, especially if we had a better alternative ready to go and especially if he really indeed did pose a major security threat to our country.

The war early on became a Wilsonian struggle to bring "civilization" to Iraq; by dissolving old ties which bound that country together and remaking it according to our desires. We heard the argument that the swamp of the Middle East needed to be drained in order to get rid of terrorism. But you dont fight terrorism by completely dismantling a society and assume that it will all turn in our favor. As opposed, it could create more problems for us, as having an army in foreign soil for an extended period of time makes us a roaming target. Democracy is much more than just holding elections. When we dissolved the military and the bureaucracy in May 2003, we lost effective control of that country. That wasn't necessary, as much of the army outside the Republican guard wasn't political, as wasn't the bureaucracy. All what we had to do in Iraq was remove Saddam, stay for a few months while a new regime was being formed and then leave, with perhaps a few military advisors in the country left afterwards. That was the armies plan. But the civilians in the Pentagon, many of them ideological neo-conservatives, had a far out plan to impose a form of government on the Iraqi people that is foreign to them, that they never desired for to begin with. History is an evolutionary affair; revolutions, whatever their nature, rarely lead to their intended consequences. Look at the French Revolution: what started out as liberty, fraternity and egalitarianism became tyrannical. The neo-cons are right about something: freedom is indeed on the march, but its not on a roll. Societies have to develop into democracy, it cannot be imposed. Thinking any other way is philosophical extremism, which by the way is usually the result of ahistorical revolutions like this one in Iraq. In my opinion, this may put back the development of moderate democracies in the region by a generation.

Would there have been more political liberties in an Iraq free from Saddam Hussein? Very likely. The problem was that our people got too idealistic, too sure of themselves. They believe that we could effectively run a foreign country with little knowledge about its history or culture. That we dismissed the local Sheik's that have run that country for 1300 years as "irrelevant" tells you the kind of incompetence and hubris that our people have operated under. It's a tragedy in many respects because it simply didn't have to be. Had we handled the post-war operations right early on, we probably wouldn't be there today and Iraq would be a functioning society. Instead, we find an Iraq coming apart at the seams, an American foreign policy that is decidedly diminished and resurgent fundamentalism in the Middle East, especially in Iran and Lebanon. Iraq has our hands tied behind our backs, and there is little we can do to regain the advantage at the moment.