Incompetence Again

His use of "hawks" and "doves" is somewhat slippery, as well. Much of the anti-Iraq War crowd--including, I think, you--critiques the decision to go to war in the same way that Scowcroft does. Yet no one would call Scowcroft a "dove." To the extent that those Dems who supported the Iraq War are really neoconservative-lights--a fair charge--then "hawk" and "dove" doesn't get to the heart of the disagreement. More, it muddles the disagreement: the implication is that "doves" are dead-set against war in almost all cases, and that nothing is lost by grouping them with pacifists.

But as you note, the real disagreement regards the appropriate ends to which war should be used. That's not a "hawk" vs. "dove" split; that's closer to a "realist" vs. "neocon" split.

"The idea was that we were going to reconstruct Iraq into a stable, unitary, liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The odds of achieving this were always extremely low."

We're in Iraq because many different folks with different agendas all wanted us in Iraq.

The idea you've settled upon as the reason we went to war - the Athenization of Iraq - is indeed near impossible with the resources we committed. But with 500,000 multinational troops for at least 5 years, even such an ambitious goal would have been possible.

Or with the forces we did commit, deposing Saddam and quickly installing a less hostile regime so we could finally settle the ongoing Gulf War I would also have been possible.

The incompetency argument against the Bush administration in Iraq is sound because they did not match their war aims with equal war resources, and thus guaranteed us failure.

First, note the Bush team's strength: getting elected.

Second, remember that Bush told a friend back in 1999 that were he elected he'd like there to be a war so that he could push his domestic agenda.

Everything flows from that. Personally, I don't think Iraq was bungled in the sense that they stupidly made assumptions that turned out false. I think that the Bushies mangled Iraq on purpose to prolong it. Iraq's don't just come along every day and the advantages that flow from being a "war time president" must not be squandered.

It's not a question only of whether or not it could have "succeeded," Chomsky is clear enough in his opinion that it could have, and more than a few experts- on Iraq not American politics- argued that Iraqu nationalism was the stroner than sectarianism, at least at the beginning. The invasion of Afghanistan should have worked: the people there still want our help. But it's failing thanks the Bush and co.

I'd still call both invasions mistakes and the invasion of Iraq a crime. Oversimplify for your own reasons if you want. Americans understand "Law and Order" but not law.

too many typos.

>Today, all of the world's oil nations, except Norway, have either authoritarian governments, such as those in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, or what Carnegie Endowment for International Peace political scientist Marina Ottaway calls "semi-authoritarian" governments.

Canada, home of the largest oil fields outside of Saudi Arabia, has a semi-authoritarian government? This Judis fellow must be really smart, to know so much that the rest of us don't.

"There was nothing FEMA possibly could have done that would have made a levy-breaching hurricane hit on New Orleans somehow non-catastrophic; Bush took a bad thing and made it worse, he didn't take a benign occurence and make it bad."

The Army Core of Engineers could have done something about it. New Orleans did not receive a direct hit. Instead the effects of hurricane (at a level 1 or level 2 force) caused the break in the levees. Those levees should have been able to withstand that force. Congress is also responsible for not funding improvements. So the federal government, and by extension Bush, could have done something about the 'levy breaching hurricane'. Bush is not responsible for the hurricane, but insofar he is responsible for the federal government's actions, he is responsible for the hurricane being a 'levy breaching' hurricane.

just a little clarification. a LEVEE breaching hurricane did not hit new orleans. katrina caused cat 1 or 2 conditions in new orleans, and the federally designed and constructed levees failed under those conditions. there were supposed to protect against cat 3 conditions. the army corp of engineers has investigated and admitted this, but no one seems to notice.

new orleans was hit by incompetence.

Potato Head,

Norway already had well-entrenched structures of liberal democracy and civil society before its oil wealth started to pay off. If you insert Canada (or Great Britain) into this sentence the same argument applies.

Besides, Candada is 2nd largest in terms of reserves, in the form of tar sands, but I would be surprised if production from tar sands exceeds 2 million barrels/day within the next 20 years, if ever.

Interesting how these countries' fall into "authoritarianism" only happens when it stops doing the US bidding re access to its resources. If it elects a ruler who has different ideas (Venezuela/Chavez, Iran/Mossadegh), it somehow becomes a 'moral' issue that we 'liberate' the country's poor inhabitatns, and if the replacement (the Shah) is rather worse, we still send him millions of dollars in aid, as long as he reverts to an obedient posture. And then we count on dutiful lickspittles like Chait and Judis to cluck their tongues about the mysterious "curse" of being an oil-rich nation.

If Bush could have bungled Katrina this badly, isn't it just possible he could have done the same thing in Iraq?

Just because it was possible for Katrina to be less of a fiasco doesn't mean SDI is possible. What a bizarre chain of reasoning (for Chait): pointing out the incompetence of the Bush admin in one area means you are granting that any of its other stated goals are achievable.

Another factor here is the "Big Gamble" of the Iraq invasion -- no matter how you slice it, invading Iraq was a gamble, a gamble in which some degree of failure was (and is) a major potential outcome. While liberal hawks may plausibly argue that the outcome has been worse due to Bush Administration incompetance, they have not even begun to make a case that total, or even partial, success would have been likely under different, more competant leadership. They argue that the Bush Administration's mistakes were all avoidable, but if those mistakes were not made (say, if a super-competant Administration were in effect), would the outcome in Iraq be 180 degrees different? Or would it be just a little bit less of a quagmire?

Or, perish the thought, would a liberal hawk administration's handling of the war have been worse due to partisan squabbling or even just dumb bad luck?

Accidents happen, history takes odd turns, and risky endeavors can turn ugly at the slightest gust of wind no matter how skilled the leaders are. The risk of failure in Iraq was (and is) far bigger than anything but the most farfetched benefits of success.

The problem, ultimately, is just as you say: the whole idea was misbegotten to begin with. The "hubris", in the neocon camp and in the liberal hawk camp, is this idea: America can spontaneously and unilaterally invade and topple a major power halfway around the world and successfully make it into a friendly ally without aggravating countless other political, military, ethnic, and ideological conflicts around the world. While possible in theory, Murphy's Law alone should be enough to convince a rational person to back off.

I still think that the heart of the whole thing is simple: the Bush Administration was, even before 9/11, scammed in a Rasputin-like way by Chalabi into beleiving that the invasion was not going to be risky. They then sold that idea to the liberal hawks, who were all too happy to take an opportunity to expose the size of their balls. Now they're all just making shit up as they go along.

What all the hawks have in common is that they seem to think the
only opinions and contexts that matter in Iraq are American ones. Many Iraqis were required to work in the disarmament program in 1991-1992, they were free to tell all their friends after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 that the WMD accusation was false. They also had experienced the rigorous embargo and the bombing in the 'no fly zones.' They also know now that Iran provided useful disinformation to help motivate the Americans, repeated faithfully by Paul Wolfowitz and Judith Miller.
The bungling and political patronage practiced by Rumsfeld and Bremer made things worse, but this is an occupation that was doomed to fail in winning majority Iraqi support. I'm sure that many other resource-rich nations in the world have taken note of the lie and violence campaign in Iraq and are not stinting in their preparations to resist the most predatory government that now exists.

Jebus, I'm having trouble reading the original Chait article. It goes from inaccurate generalization to crappy stereotyping to mislabling to just plain b.s.

He starts with saying the all Dems love the circular firing squad and that Dems are next going to have an ideological "bloodbath" over doves and hawks, specifically, whether Iraq failed through incompetence or was doomed to failure no matter what.

First of all, if it's an ideological bloodbath, it's because idiot hawks like him make it so. Second of all, he creates a false dichotomy. He labels people who believe Iraq was doomed to failure as doves. Wrong. Believing going into Iraq, a country of a few tens of millions, of diverse and often warring backgrounds, in a volatile, oil-rich region, with a different culture, for NO GOOD REASON, to build a democracy?! It doesn't take a dove to think that's a bad idea and it was doomed to failure from the get-go. Add in Bush's incompetence, his policy against nation-building, the fact that he wanted to go in with a skeleton crew, and all the other facts that should've lit up the switch board like a nuclear reactor melting down, and yeah, this project was doomed from the start.

Also, it seems Chait's still living in the 60's and early 70's, as the first paragraph indicates. He needs to WAKE UP!! This ain't the 60's. Opposing this war does not a hippie make. Nor does it mean that person is opposed to all wars, or all uses of force, or all military deployments. It simply means that people thought this war was crap from the get-go. Obviously, blindingly, crap. Chait needs to stop with the crass, inaccurate, and misleading stereotypes.

"Democrats are never truly happy unless they're at each others' throats." It's past time we did away with this meme. It only helps the Republicans.

You're missing the most obvious "oil wealth" democracy: The United States. We used to be the worlds largest supplier of oil, and today we're something like the third (after Saudi Arabia, and Russia, but ahead of Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela). We also used to be an Oil exporter, in fact the reason the Japanese attacked us was for Oil!

Of course, Oil has always played a much smaller roll in our economy then SA or other oil nations. Oh well.

Mr. Potato,
The key figure is the ratio of oil gdp to total gdp.
In this respect Canada is more like the USA than any OPEC country or Norway. This is not some sort of metric that Judis pulled out of his back pocket, it is as fairly lonstanding political science hypothesis, almost as well established as the correlation between stable democratic regimes and the presense of protestantism. Also
Canada has a long extablished democratic constitutional order (responsible government since the 1840s), (but I bet you knew that)

The other problem Chait doesn't address is that the very nature of the build-up to war -- all the scare tactics, bully-boy rhetoric and blatant politicizing before the '02 midterms -- provided PLENTY of reasons to doubt both the motives and methods of the enterprise. (Not to mention the serious questions that were raised by serious people inside and outside the government, which -- while not accorded front-page status -- were certainly there to see for anyone paying attention, as I assume Chait was.) The nature of the Bush administration and how it was going to exploit Sept. 11 for its own political gains was already well established by that point, and everything about the beating of the war drums should have set off the bullshit detectors in the brains of anyone who knew just a little bit of history (remember the Maine? the Gulf of Tonkin? I learned this stuff in 10th grade). I remember reading Pollack's piece in Foreign Affairs and thinking, well, maybe there's a case for confrontation -- or there would be, if only we had a government that you could trust with carrying it out in good faith. But we CLEARLY did not have that government.

So whether you want to argue that it was a noble cause bungled by idiots or a fool's errand bungled by idiots, you're still left with the fact that anyone who supported it was supporting a bunch of idiots. And along the way, they either tolerated or actively participated in the sneering derogation of anyone who raised reasonable questions or voiced reasonable doubts as a bunch of America-hating, Saddam-appeasing girlie-men. So no, I don't think the "hawks" should be allowed anywhere near the policy apparatus until they show that they can tell the difference between shit and shoe polish. In the meantime, I would advise Mr. Chait to get a second opinion before he enters into any business with deposed Nigerian princes.

I think Jeffrey Davis and Christopher Fahey are circling around an important point, and that is the role of domestic politics. The primary concern of both the Bush administration and the liberal hawks was how they would appear at home. The liberal hawks were indeed "all too happy to take an opportunity to expose the size of their balls", and the Republicans wanted to ride the war president to reelection in 04. The facts on the ground were secondary. Given those priorities, incompetence in Iraq was hardly surprising. Each group has achieved their primary goal, however. Bushco was reelected and the liberal hawks are still taken seriously because they were "wrong for the right reasons".

I am growing very weary of the game of 'Quien es mas macho?' that constitutes American political discourse.

As I've said many times before, I don't ask of Iraq hawks that they publicly declare that they were in error, to put on a hair shirt, or to be banished from polite society. All I ask is that they stop saying that somehow, if you look at it sideways in the correct manner, really they were right!

Is that too much to ask?

Competence wouldn't have made their immorality any more justifiable.

Thousands of people have been mercilessly slaughtered.

The Iraq situation can best be described by this old guy I used to work with at a program that helped inner city kids get an education after dropping out of school, he would tell the wanna be gang types that ended up getting in trouble "boys you can't even do wrong right"

Apologies for posting this here instead of emailing you directly, but I couldn't find an email address on your site. I understand the appeal of trading blows with Mr. Chait, but it seems to me something might be getting lost in the mix.

I'd like to know if you agree or disagree.

http://thepremise.com/archives/09/17/2006/126

Mark

If we had had a good reason to invade Iraq (e.g., they were attacking one of their neighbors), and if we had had a leadership that was both willing and able - that is, not merely competent, but dedicated to making Iraq a genuinely better place than before we invaded it - we had possibly as much as a 20% chance of success, optimistically.

But anyone who had watched Bush in action at any time during the campaign, or during the Selection fiasco, or during his first months in residence in the White House, already knew better. They knew that Team Bush not only lacked the heart to build a free country, but was ideologically opposed to the existence of such a country even if they hadn't had the sociopolitical divisions, backed by religion, that already affected them.

In other words, it was obvious well before we invaded that doing so was, at the very best, a really risky idea under any circumstances, and utterly insane under Bush's leadership.

But it was even more insane to do so when we had just been attacked by Islamist religious extremists.

Many people compare invading Iraq after being attacked by Al Qaeda with invading Mexico after being hit by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and having Hitler declare war on us. It is not. It is like attacking England or France.

Chait's upholding the standards of TNR alumni again, eh?

Gotta ask: Chait, Beinart, Easterbrook, Sullivan, Zengerle -- the list goes on, and it's long. Why should anyone give a fuck about the opinions of such determined shitheads?

My problem with all of this claptrap is that it conveniently sidesteps, and thus, in a sense, legitimizes, the insane, destabilizing and dangerous Bush preemption doctrine.

"I'm not super-concerned about personnel as such."

Right. Got it. They will now admit you in the club and buy your book. I figured it was coming.

Capitán Canuck,

Using the ratio of oil production to total gdp is a good idea, but there is still a problem, which is that the oil to gdp ratio is endogenous. That is, you can pull oil out of the ground even when your domestic institutions are in terrible shape --- viz Mexico at the height of the Revolution, or Angola during the Southern African wars, or Nigeria today. It's much harder to have, say, a vibrant manufacturing sector or sophisticated service providers when your domestic institutions don't work well. So in a country with lousy institutions, then oil will be a big part of the gdp. On the other hand, if you've got good institutions, then all sorts of others things will be going on in your economy, and oil won't (certainly not after a time) drive your gdp.

FWIW, Sachs and Rodriguez, one of whom first brought the broader "resource curse" hypothesis to the forefront of the field, have made a slightly different form of this argument to explain Sachs's finding that countries with high resource exports-to-gdp ratios are richer but grow more slowly than other, similar countries.

The oil curse as Judis presents it is a stronger hypothesis --- the oil curse argues that oil somehow makes your institutions worse. It's hard to find evidence of that. Is Trinidad more badly managed than Jamaica? Does Venezuela have worse state institutions than Colombia? Is Iran less democratic than Egypt? Was Sudan a paragon of good governance before finding oil? I have some doubts.

None of which has any bearing on Matt's argument, of course. Rebuilding Iraq as a liberal democracy was a mug's game, for all the reasons he mentions ... except oil.

Re: Second, remember that Bush told a friend back in 1999 that were he elected he'd like there to be a war so that he could push his domestic agenda.

If Bush did say that then it's more evidence that the man is a fool. Wars (when serious and sustained) generally drive domestic agendas onto the back burner. And the history of the Bush administration shows exccatly that: most of his domestic successes occured fairly early, but since Iraq has come to dominate American politics there have been very few domestic policy successes.

JonF,
Bush is a fool -- I believe the only Presidential history he really knows is his father's, and I think his father's incredible Gulf War I surge in popularity, followed by the precitpitous decline leading to his defeat had a profound impact on GWB's political outlook. I think it is worth keeping that in mind when thinking about GWB's decision to greenlight the Iraq war.

I would suggest that what we take for unbelievable incompetence of this administration in Irak is in fact the consequence of the failure of a decent but risky gamble and the lack of a backup plan. Very probably, the original plan was something like what Petey describes; "deposing Saddam and quickly installing a less hostile regime". It would have been less brutal than Saddam, more inclusive of Shias, with even a few rigged "elections" now and then, a Saddam Lite, if you want. That was certainly not impossible with the resources allocated and numerous details of the original planning only make sense under this hypothesis. But unfortunately, that plan assumed two key components that failed to materialize; the changing of side of a large part of the Iraki Army and the Baath Party during the early phase of the war and the existence of a real base of political support and organization for Chalabi inside Irak. With the Iraki Army (and the police and most of the administration, too) basically desintegrating (or remaining loyal to Saddam and going underground) and Chalabi incapable of producing even a minimal number of organized supporters, there was basically nobody to "install" left. And it was then when things started to go really wrong, because nothing had been planned for that circumstance and so we were left to contemplate the improvisation and incompetence that we are almost used to now. We can argue about what would have happened if several Iraki Army divisions and a few provincial governors had changed sides as soon as the troops invaded (and if Chalabi had possesed even the skeleton of a political organization inside Irak) and I will grant that a Chalabi led "soft dictatorship" with the support of a large part of the Baathist elite and Shias would have been possible in that case. But it wouldn't have been democracy in any sense of the word and THAT has to be clear.

Ummm... Venezuela has an elected president who has stood up in several campaigns, as well as a trumped up recall election. There is no evidence that his regime is "authoritarian", unless you mean "pisses off rich people" as authoritarian.

On the other hand, though, it's not Bush's fault that a hurricane hit New Orleans.

Silly Matt! Everyone knows Katrina was God's judgement on the U.S. for being dumb enough to elect the guy two times.

Canada and Mexico aren't oil nations?

Well, we all accept that Bush administration is utterly incompetent, and, of course, it is possible that incompetence may have been the reason for the fiasco in Iraq.

That does not prove, however, that the Iraq project was not doomed to begin with. This is precisely the basis of the main liberal critique of the 'liberal hawks', i.e., they enthusiastically supported the Iraq war which was a thoroughly bad idea even before the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad.

That "resource curse" idea is pernicious nonsense, ignoring as it does the context in which these authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes arose. It is because first the UK, then the US actively helped these repressive regimes come to power, overthrowing more democratic regimes in e.g. (wottacoincidence!) Iraq and Iran in favour of authoritarian regimes that did as they were told.

To then pretend that, gee there's something magical about oil that makes countries that have it not democratic is just offensive. Oil rich countries tend to have authoritarian governments because that's what the US wants, as long as they do as they're told. It's only once they stop doing so that the US gets terrible concerned about democracy. Viz. Venezuela, so anti-democratic the US just had to sponsor a coup there.

Most victims of invasion would challenge your assertion that being invaded is "a benign occurrence."

But since you're a sheltered little bourgeois American (and no immigrant from a war-torn land, nor apparently have ever talked with one), which is just longhand for "lacking in empathy", you *still* don't understand how having the hell bombed out of your infrastructure and foreign armies on your soil could be a negative.

Wow. Just wow. (And people wonder why I'm not impressed with Ivy League schools - or their products.)

Most victims of invasion would challenge your assertion that being invaded is "a benign occurrence."

The only person who used that term is Matthew.

He said, "Bush took a bad thing and made it worse, he didn't take a benign occurence and make it bad."

As best as I can tell, you're criticizing Matthew for asserting something that he emphatically rejects.

Re: It is because first the UK, then the US actively helped these repressive regimes come to power, overthrowing more democratic regimes in e.g. (wottacoincidence!) Iraq and Iran in favour of authoritarian regimes that did as they were told.

What former democratic Iraqi regieme? Are you posting from some alternate reality? Iraq has always been governed by autocrats-- first by Hashemite monarchs, then by Baathist dictators. And the US (although not the UK) is largely blameless in the accession of any of those thugs.

Just to be clear, the fourteen leading oil-producing nations in 2004 were:

Saudi Arabia
Russia
United States
Iran
Mexico
China
Norway
Canada
Venezuela
United Arab Emirates
Kuwait
Nigeria
United Kingdom
Iraq

It's really hard to claim with a straight face that the US, Canada, Norway, the UK, and Mexico are totalitarianisms, and not easy to make that claim about Venezuela. Russia moves back and forth across the border, and I'm honestly not sure where Nigeria falls these days. Most of these top fifteen are marked by heavy kleptocracy, though--the US now much more than five years ago, with all of the attendant ill effects.

(The US is an extraction economy--it is heavily dependent upon depletion of natural resources for its survival. The two biggest in the US are oil and underground water.)

Well, I would say that Matthew should be taken to task for supporting aggressive, pre-emptive wars in the first place. His liberal cred is blown away completely by that.

Any complaining or analysis you do after the fact, Matthew Yglesias, is a waste of time and effort.

This war is YOUR fault. ALL the death and destruction that is a result of YOUR support is on YOUR SOUL. Who cares if we didn't know how badly the cheney administration would bungle the result? Everyone knew it was a bad idea from the start. A bad, illegal, unnecessary and completely un-needed idea.

Your support for it makes YOU a bushite. I blame people like you for the place we are in now.

I hang the iraq war like a burning tire around YOUR neck. Good luck getting it off, you pompous, fake liberal.

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