“Soldiers are the only hope against democrats.”

—Wilhelm von Merckel

The Bush administration’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and build Iraq into a democratic model for the Middle East has become a highly controversial and divisive undertaking.  Larry Diamond was not a supporter of the war in Iraq, but when his old friend Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush’s national-security advisor, asked him to go to Iraq as a democracy-development specialist, he agreed.  From January to April 2004, he served as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.  It proved to be an enormously frustrating experience, as he encountered a military occupation and a political democratization mission riddled with miscalculations and outright bungling.

As an examination of the blunders made by the U.S. occupation authorities, Squandered Victory is a useful book, for Diamond documents those in impressive detail.  The Bush administration’s assumptions that U.S. forces would be welcomed as liberators by the vast majority of Iraqis and that the military occupation would be of short duration proved to be wildly optimistic.  U.S. officials drastically underestimated the importance and influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.  Washington even managed to mismanage the little things.  For example, the first U.S. civilian administration arrived in Baghdad with an appalling lack of personnel who could speak Arabic.

The author’s indictment of the Bush administration’s faulty assumptions and wishful thinking is very much on the mark.  Contrary to Washington’s initial rosy scenario, the Iraq mission has become a fiasco.  Indeed, as Diamond notes,

from the moment the war ended, Iraq fell into a deepening quagmire of chaos, criminality, insurgency, and terrorism, which even in the months following the January 2005 elections, showed no prospect of ending anytime soon.

Diamond lays the blame for most of that ineptitude at the door of policymakers in Washington—especially senior officials in the Department of Defense.  Officials in Iraq, though, do not escape responsibility, including the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Amb. L. Paul Bremer III.  It must have been painful for Diamond to criticize Bremer’s performance, since he clearly admires the man, describing him as a “remarkable and talented administrator.”  That makes Diamond’s critique all the more devastating.

Soon after he arrived, Bremer imposed three fateful decisions that collectively put the United States down a treacherous path: dissolving the Iraqi Army, purging from public office tens of thousands of Iraqis . . . , and converting the U.S. presence into a formal occupation, with no clear timetable for transferring sovereignty back to the Iraqis.  These decisions he made, or at least implemented, with a high degree of confidence but little knowledge of the country.

All of those criticisms are valid.  Yet in this case, as in so many other instances in Squandered Victory, the author fails to get to the core of the problem.  Diamond’s underlying assumption is that, with better planning and execution, the occupation of Iraq would have gone much more smoothly and could have produced highly beneficial results.  It is perhaps understandable that Diamond might have embraced that dubious thesis when he was in Iraq during the first quarter of 2004—less than a year after the war began.  It is less excusable that he continues to indulge in such a fantasy, given the numerous adverse developments that have afflicted the occupation since that time.

To take just one example, Diamond argues that the United States should have taken more forceful action to address the security situation and crush the growing insurgency.  Yet in November 2004, the U.S. military adopted a highly proactive strategy, virtually leveling the city of Fallujah and (supposedly) killing or capturing more than 1,000 insurgents.  Although Fallujah was clearly a military victory, it has had very little impact on the effectiveness or the resiliency of the armed campaign against the U.S. occupation.  Diamond presents little credible evidence that resorting to a “Fallujah strategy” earlier in the year would have produced better results.

Incisive critics of the Iraq mission reject the notion that better planning or more astute tactics would have led to success.  Even before the war, realist scholars warned that ousting Saddam Hussein’s regime would convert Iraq into an arena of chaos.  They cautioned that, by occupying Iraq, the United States would become responsible for the political future of that fragile, fractious country.  Not only was a potent armed insurgency likely, they predicted, but, by removing the Baathist government, conditions would be created for radical, anti-Western Islamic forces to gain power.  All of those warnings have come true.

Diamond was never a hard-core critic of the Iraq adventure.  He emphasizes that he opposed the war, but the rationale for his opposition is most revealing.  His primary objections to the invasion were that it was premature and that it was unilateral—not that it was a bad idea in principle.  He wonders whether the mission was doomed “after we invaded Iraq without much international support.”  In Diamond’s view, the United States should have given the U.N. inspectors more time to determine whether Hussein had violated U.N. resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction.  Moreover, if military action became necessary, it should have occurred only after the United States had built a vast international coalition with the U.N.’s blessing.

His criticism of the Iraq war is tentative and highly conditional.  It also embraces an all-too-common liberal fantasy.  Liberal opponents of the war explicitly or implicitly argue that, if the arrogant, unilateralist George W. Bush had not been in charge of the effort, developments would have gone far better.  According to that thesis, the United States ultimately could have secured international support (including far more military contributions) both for the war and the postwar reconstruction effort.  Typically, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was still arguing in late 2004 that he would be able to get other nations (especially the NATO allies) involved in Iraq.

Diamond embraced that same fallacy from the beginning.  He laments: “On both the war and the postwar, the Bush administration pursued policies very different from what I had favored.”  Instead of a prolonged U.S. military occupation and direct rule by U.S. officials, he had advocated the rapid creation of an interim Iraqi government “through a transparent and legitimate process of dialogue, working alongside an international coalition that would include the United States but not necessarily be led by it.”

The problem with his proposal is that there was always a dearth of evidence to support the liberal interventionist thesis.  Contrary to the liberals’ wishful thinking, other countries were not eager to spend their national treasure on transforming Iraq.  They were even less willing to sacrifice the lives of their military personnel on the altar of a nation-building mission.  The brutal reality is that the Bush administration launched the Iraq intervention in the only way it could have proceeded: as an overwhelmingly U.S.-British venture with a handful of good wishes and token contributions from the so-called coalition of the willing.  Diamond’s idea of a truly international intervention was always a nonstarter.

Just as Diamond does not understand why the Iraq mission was a terrible idea from the outset, he learns only secondary or peripheral lessons from its increasingly evident failure.  He attaches great importance to Washington’s decision to send a relatively small military force to invade and occupy the country.

We never had enough troops in Iraq—particularly at the beginning when it was vital to secure public buildings, streets, and weapons depots; to hunt down the remnants of Saddam’s forces; to seal the borders; and to establish decisive authority.

Leaving aside the dubious assumption that the United States—unable to control her own borders—could have sealed Iraq’s vast, porous, and ill-defined ones, Diamond ignores the reality that it would have been difficult to send more troops to Iraq without a full-fledged mobilization.  Indeed, the current level of troop commitment has strained both the active-duty force and the reserves to the breaking point.  The United States does not have a military designed to police a large, disorderly imperial province.  Yet that is what we have attempted to do in Iraq.

Diamond argues that the civilian side of the mission was also “underresourced.”  Consequently,

the CPA relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a cadre of eager young neophytes—some arrogant and others reflective, some idealistic and others driven by political ambition.

His message is that matters would have gone far differently if the United States had at her disposal a cadre of nation-building experts.

That is the core deficiency of Diamond’s analysis.  It is both naive and arrogant to assume that the same government that is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently or providing an adequate education for the nation’s youth is capable of remaking entire societies on the other side of the planet.  The goal of implanting democracy through force in cultures that have never experienced that political system and lack even the most basic preconditions for its development is a peculiar form of self-sacrificing imperialism.  At its most fundamental level, nation-building is a belief that government social-engineering projects, which have failed so spectacularly at home, will somehow work abroad in cultures about which we know little or nothing.

None of that deters Diamond.  Although he acknowledges that the American people “will have little appetite” for nation-building ventures, he contends that “humanitarian and geopolitical circumstances are bound to compel us to become involved again somewhere, sometime in postconflict reconstruction.”  Therefore, it is essential that we learn the right lessons from the bruising experience in Iraq.  The first lesson, in his view, is to deploy a robust, utterly dominant military force to control the security environment from the outset.

The second lesson concerns resources.  Success in these difficult circumstances requires a substantial commitment of international human and financial resources, delivered in a timely fashion, and sustained over an extended period, lasting (through an international engagement) for a minimum of five to ten years.

If those are the requisites of a nation-building mission, it is no wonder that the American people are unlikely to have an appetite for such ventures.  Indeed, it is a strategy that should appeal only to masochists.

Diamond leaves no doubt that he is a tepid, highly selective critic of the Iraq mission.  “The final, overriding lesson of America’s misadventure in postwar Iraq is not ‘don’t do it’ but ‘don’t do it alone,’ and ‘don’t do it with an imperial approach.’”

Woe to us all if those are the lessons that we take away from the Iraq debacle.  America’s invasion and occupation of that country was a fool’s errand from its inception.  The notion that better planning, more international support, and more efficient execution would have produced success is nothing more than a comforting delusion.  If policymakers follow Diamond’s advice, America will repeat the Iraq folly in another locale within a few years.

Squandered Victory had the potential to be the definitive indictment of Washington’s Iraq mission.  Unfortunately, it is merely an anemic version of the kind of book that is badly needed. 

 

[Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, by Larry Diamond (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt & Company) 384 pp., $25.00]