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Thursday, September 26, 2002
09:24 p.m.
And after that glorious victory over Iraq? Read on.....
An interesting essay (or here) which attempts to tease out some of the major difficulties victorious US forces would find having crushed Saddam's forces.
Slightly disappointing that it's at a rather high level of generality for such a long piece of work - the author doesn't, for example, give names and 'rap-sheets' for the rag tag and bobtail of the (laughingly called) Iraqi 'opposition'; or details of the current Kurdish factions (each of which, on past performance, will choose their 'liberation' by the US as the pretext to pick sides with neighbouring states - Turkey and Iran, in particular - the better to pursue their favourite sport: killing other Kurds).
But the task as he outlines is daunting enough - and is almost universally ignored or skated over by the War Party (patron saint: Mr Micawber).
He is properly dismissive of their pet Munich analogy -
"I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it." -
and stresses the likelihood and magnitude of 'unintended consequences' of starting the war: the War Party assumes that, Marquess of Queensbury-style, hostilities will take place in a clearly demarcated area, and cease once the knockout blow has been struck; and some even entertain the utterly Pollyanna-ish, Woodrow-Wilson-on-LSD notion that the existing Middle East states will indeed collapse, but, in their place, genuinely democracy will flourish.
"This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world", according to James Woolsey, an ex-director of the CIA. ".......It's not Americanizing the world. It's Athenizing it. And it is doable."
And, lest the CIA man be thought an isolated lunatic,
'At a Pentagon briefing.....Rumsfeld asked rhetorically, "Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if Iraq were similar to Afghanistan - if a bad regime was thrown out, people were liberated, food could come in, borders could be opened, repression could stop, prisons could be opened? I mean, it would be fabulous."'
If this analysis came from a junior high school student, you'd hope he would get an 'F'! Rummy has a story, and he's not going to let the facts (or, in many cases, hideous uncertainties) get in the way of it. It's Wilson's moronic 'self-determination' idea, plus Kennedy's 'pay any price' rhetoric, delivered with John Wayne sophistication.
Just like the 'domino theory' - which led the US to fight its last large-scale preventive war - the current Administration thinking on post-war Iraq and its environs seems to be largely based on desk research, sweetened by an enormous helping of wishful thinking.
Just as successive Administrations failed to understand the objectives and reasoning of Ho Chi Minh, so - it seems - this Administration has little real grasp of the situation in and around Iraq.
'"[Rumsfeld's idea] is so divorced from any historical context, just so far out of court, that it is laughable," [says] Chris Sanders [, an American who worked for eighteen years in Saudi Arabia and is now a consultant in London].'
[Is the necessary regional expertise available to Administration decision-makers? (One complaint concerning the Vietnam war was that, by the end of the 50s, most key South East Asia experts had been cleared out of the State Department under the Truman 'loyalty oath' and other anti-communist laws and regulations.)]
The point is that the "'Athenizing' crusade" may be meant as window-dressing to humanise the 'hard' military facts of the invasion. But its patent absurdity naturally casts serious doubt on the quality of the analysis of intelligence on Saddam's military capabilities and intentions on which the invasion decision is reliant.
Only a man with a brain of mush could really believe Rummy's quote: but I'm not convinced he wasn't being entirely serious!
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