“Who Lost Iraq?”: The Iraqis Did, With An Assist From George W. Bush
It is becoming increasingly likely that Iraq has reached a turning point. The forces hostile to the government have grown stronger, better equipped and more organized. And having now secured arms, ammunition and hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from their takeover of Mosul — Iraq’s second-largest city — they will build on these strengths. Inevitably, in Washington, the question has surfaced: Who lost Iraq?
Whenever the United States has asked this question — as it did with China in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1970s — the most important point to remember is: The local rulers did. The Chinese nationalists and the South Vietnamese government were corrupt, inefficient and weak, unable to be inclusive and unwilling to fight with the dedication of their opponents. The same story is true of Iraq, only much more so. The first answer to the question is: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lost Iraq.
The prime minister and his ruling party have behaved like thugs, excluding the Sunnis from power, using the army, police forces and militias to terrorize their opponents. The insurgency the Maliki government faces today was utterly predictable because, in fact, it happened before. From 2003 onward, Iraq faced a Sunni insurgency that was finally tamped down by Gen. David Petraeus, who said explicitly at the time that the core element of his strategy was political, bringing Sunni tribes and militias into the fold. The surge’s success, he often noted, bought time for a real power-sharing deal in Iraq that would bring the Sunnis into the structure of the government.
A senior official closely involved with Iraq in the Bush administration told me, “Not only did Maliki not try to do broad power-sharing, he reneged on all the deals that had been made, stopped paying the Sunni tribes and militias, and started persecuting key Sunni officials.” Among those targeted were the vice president of Iraq and its finance minister.
But how did Maliki come to be prime minister of Iraq? He was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert Tom Ricks called “the worst war plan in American history” — the administration needed to find local allies. It quickly decided to destroy Iraq’s Sunni ruling establishment and empower the hard-line Shiite religious parties that had opposed Saddam Hussein. This meant that a structure of Sunni power that had been in the area for centuries collapsed. These moves — to disband the army, dismantle the bureaucracy and purge Sunnis in general — might have been more consequential than the invasion itself.
The turmoil in the Middle East is often called a sectarian war. But really it is better described as “the Sunni revolt.” Across the region, from Iraq to Syria, one sees armed Sunni gangs that have decided to take on the non-Sunni forces that, in their view, oppress them. The Bush administration often justified its actions by pointing out that the Shiites are the majority in Iraq and so they had to rule. But the truth is that the borders of these lands are porous, and while the Shiites are numerous in Iraq — Maliki’s party actually won a plurality, not a majority — they are a tiny minority in the Middle East as a whole. It is outside support — from places as varied as Saudi Arabia and Turkey — that sustains the Sunni revolt.
If the Bush administration deserves a fair share of blame for “losing Iraq,” what about the Obama administration and its decision to withdraw American forces from the country by the end of 2011? I would have preferred to see a small American force in Iraq to try to prevent the country’s collapse. But let’s remember why this force is not there. Maliki refused to provide the guarantees that every other country in the world that hosts U.S. forces offers. Some commentators have blamed the Obama administration for negotiating badly or halfheartedly and perhaps this is true. But here’s what a senior Iraqi politician told me in the days when the U.S. withdrawal was being discussed: “It will not happen. Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that its No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.” He reminded me that Maliki spent 24 years in exile, most of them in Tehran and Damascus, and his party was funded by Iran for most of its existence. And in fact, Maliki’s government has followed policies that have been pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian.
Washington is debating whether airstrikes or training forces would be more effective, but its real problem is much larger and is a decade in the making. In Iraq, it is defending the indefensible.
By: Fareed Zakaria, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 12, 2014
“The GWB Created Sectarian Hornets’ Nest”: Only Two Words For Neo-Con Critics Of Obama Iraq Policy, “Brazen Chutzpah”
It takes completely brazen chutzpah for Neo-Con Republicans like John McCain to criticize President Obama’s policies in Iraq — especially as Iraq once again falls into sectarian civil war.
These are precisely the people who kicked open the sectarian hornets’ nest in 2003 when they invaded Iraq and unleashed years of civil war that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees.
Of course the current Iraqi government bears a great deal of the responsibility for the current breakdown in security. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in Friday’s Washington Post:
The prime minister and his ruling party have behaved like thugs, excluding the Sunnis from power, using the army, police forces and militias to terrorize their opponents.
The Sunni insurrection that began in 2003 was finally tamped down by General David Petraeus when he engineered power-sharing arrangements between the Shiites and key elements of the Sunni community. Prime Minister Maliki has systematically abrogated many of those deals, reneged on commitments and created the conditions where Sunni insurgents have real sympathy among many in the Sunni population.
That is why the Obama Administration has insisted that increases in U.S. military assistance be conditioned on major changes that help create a political system inclusive of all of the elements in Iraqi society.
Remember that Maliki came to power as a result of the decisions of the Neo-Cons in the Bush Administration who intentionally dismantled all vestiges of Sunni power — including the Iraqi Army and bureaucracy — shortly after the invasion.
And, most importantly, the invasion that unleashed the sectarian civil war was sold to the American people as a quest to eliminate Sadam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction — and as a means of destroying his non-existent links to Al Qaeda.
How ironic that the Neo-Con invasion itself created the conditions that allowed Al Qaeda-inspired organizations like Al Qaeda in Iraq — and now the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) — to become viable forces in the country.
Now, Neo-Cons like McCain are calling on the President to “bring back” the Bush team “who knew how to win.” Unbelievable. The people who led us into the Iraq War have no business even commenting on foreign policy — much less managing it. In fact, any self-respecting television network should simply ignore anything they have to say, since they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in half a century.
The Iraq War will ultimately cost the American taxpayers trillions of dollars. It caused the collapse of our international reputation. It costs hundreds of thousands of lives — including 4.500 American soldiers, and it wounded and maimed hundreds of thousands more. And the Iraq War unleashed simmering sectarian conflicts that had existed for centuries throughout the Middle East.
Now those sectarian conflicts have spilled over into an awful civil war in Syria and are part and parcel of international tensions throughout the region. And these “geniuses” should be brought back to manage Iraq policy?
Oh, they say, President Obama should have been a tougher negotiator when it came to maintaining a residual force of training personnel in Iraq. But that ignores that the Maliki government refused to agree to conditions that every other country in the world provides for Americans who are stationed on their soil. The fact is that Maliki did not want American troops to remain in Iraq because he is entirely beholden to the Iranians who did not want any residual American troops in Iraq.
But that, of course, is beside the point where most Americans are concerned. The vast majority of Americans didn’t want to maintain a residual force of American troops in Iraq either. They wanted to end America’s involvement in the Iraq War — and do not want American troops to be sent back to Iraq or any other war in the Middle East.
In fact, Republican attacks on President Obama because he “didn’t finish the job” in Iraq run head-long into the buzz saw of American public opinion. It is completely out of touch with the views of ordinary Americans.
The main reason why President Obama is now faced with having to do everything he can to help stabilize the situation in Iraq — short of sending back American troops — is that the Republican Neo-Con gang kicked over the sectarian hornets’ nest with their pointless invasion and macho military adventurism in the first place.
Remember President Bush’s “mission accomplished” on the carrier deck back on May 1, 2003. That was over a decade ago. The mission was “accomplished” only if the goal was to destabilize the Middle East, cost America trillions of our treasure and kill and maim hundreds of thousands of human beings.
The people who conceived and executed the invasion of Iraq don’t deserve to be given the authority to run a lemonade stand, much less U.S. foreign policy.
And personally, the only thing I want to hear from any of them is an apology.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, June 14, 2014
“Obama To Iraq, Your Problem Now”: Ultimately It’s Up To The Iraqis, As A Sovereign Nation, To Solve Their Problems
In his State of the Union address, in January, President Obama said, “When I took office, nearly a hundred and eighty thousand Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq.” It was a boast, not an apology. The descent of Iraq into open civil war in the past week has not, to judge from his remarks on Friday, fundamentally changed that view. He did grant that it was alarming that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, “a terrorist organization that operates in both Iraq and in Syria,” had made what he delicately called “significant gains” in Iraq. (That is, it has taken control of more than one city.) He said that he wasn’t entirely surprised—things hadn’t been looking good in Iraq for a while, and we’d been giving the government there more help. “Now Iraq needs additional support to break the momentum of extremist groups and bolster the capabilities of Iraqi security forces,” he said. After all, as he put it, “Nobody has an interest in seeing terrorists gain a foothold inside of Iraq.” But there were limits: “We will not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq.”
Speaking from the South Lawn, Obama argued that this was not just a matter of what the American people would accept, or the limits of our capacity to make sacrifices for humanitarian goals. It’s more that he doesn’t see the point. As he sees it, after all our investment of lives and money—“extraordinary sacrifices”—the Iraqis have not been willing to treat each other decently, and until they do our air strikes won’t help. “This is not solely, or even primarily, a military challenge,” he said, and went on:
Unfortunately, Iraqi leaders have been unable to overcome, too often, the mistrust and sectarian differences that have long been simmering there.… We can’t do it for them. And in the absence of this type of political effort, short-term military action—including any assistance we might provide—won’t succeed.… So the United States will do our part, but understand that ultimately it’s up to the Iraqis, as a sovereign nation, to solve their problems.
The Iraqis, from Obama’s perspective, have all too many problems that are not his. The hesitation here is the sense that the problems are ours, too: we did invade the country, setting off an upheaval in which, alongside American losses, an even greater number of Iraqis were killed. But the Administration, as Dexter Filkins has written, has been thoroughly frustrated with the government of Nuri al-Maliki, which is dominated by members of the country’s Shiite majority, and has moved against its Sunni population. It is not a simple matter, if it ever was, of the people we really like (and who like us) against the ones who don’t. (Try factoring in the role of ISIS in fighting the Assad regime, in Syria, and our possible shared interests with Iran in Iraq, and you’re left with a chalkboard of squiggly equations.) One question to emerge from our wars is our susceptibility to a certain sort of blackmail by regimes we support: without me, there is Al Qaeda and chaos. When Andrea Mitchell, of NBC, asked Senator John McCain, who had been railing against the Obama Administration’s decision to withdraw troops in Iraq, whether Maliki could really be persuaded to change his ways, McCain replied, “He has to, or he has to be changed.” How that would be accomplished was, as always in Iraq—a land we seem to associate with the granting of wishes—left unclear.
Obama talked about intensive diplomacy; he mentioned all the options his military planners were looking at, and suggested that he’d take his time looking at them. He called this moment a “wake-up call” for the Iraqi government: “As I said before, we are not going to be able to do it for them.” And then, in case anybody had missed the point:
We’re not going to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a situation in which while we’re there we’re keeping a lid on things and, after enormous sacrifices by us, as soon as we’re not there, suddenly people end up acting in ways that are not conductive to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country.
Last year, Obama sat down for several interviews with David Remnick, the editor of this magazine, in which he made clear how profoundly he did not want to be dragged. Remnick wrote, of their conversation, “I pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.”
Obama replied, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Given that ISIS now controls cities in Iraq and trenches are being built around Baghdad, “jayvee” may not have been the word that he was looking for; it strikes one as a severe underestimation. Looking at the rest of what Obama said, though, it seems that the analogy he was looking for was just out of the frame: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” It’s a matter of kind, not capacity: if Albert Pujols puts on a Lakers uniform, that doesn’t make him Kobe Bryant.
Speaking with Remnick, Obama applied that notion specifically to Iraq: “Let’s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.”
In other words, the horribleness of what is happening can be granted; so can the extreme Islamism of those horrible actors. That still doesn’t, per se, make it “a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.” (And those two elements—the threat and the wading—are clearly linked in the President’s calculations.) Obama, in his interview with Remnick, went on:
You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there. You have failed states that are just dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and criminals are trying to gain leverage or a foothold so that they can control resources, populations, territory… . And failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement—all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security. But how we approach those problems and the resources that we direct toward those problems is not going to be exactly the same as how we think about a transnational network of operatives who want to blow up the World Trade Center. We have to be able to distinguish between these problems analytically, so that we’re not using a pliers where we need a hammer, or we’re not using a battalion when what we should be doing is partnering with the local government to train their police force more effectively, improve their intelligence capacities.
“Failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement—all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security”; but brutally meandering wars, and all that stuff that goes with them, have an impact, too. When Remnick asked Obama if he was “haunted by Syria,” the President replied that he was “haunted by what happened,” but added, “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war.” Last month, in a speech at West Point, “haunted” was the word Obama chose when talking about his surge of troops in Afghanistan: “I believe America’s security demanded those deployments. But I am haunted by those deaths. I am haunted by those wounds.”
It cannot be absent from the President’s calculations that, just two weeks ago, he had to accept the resignation of General Eric Shinseki—a man he clearly liked and admired, not least for his insistence, a decade ago, that the enterprise in Iraq would be a bit trickier than George W. Bush let on—because of the dysfunction of the Veterans Administration. We’d never got around to adapting the V.A. to the needs of young men and women whose lives had been shaped and, in too many cases, shattered by their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. All Obama could say was that he’d brought them home. That was all, really, he wanted to say.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, June 13, 2014
“The Wars Not Fought”: The Doors Into Hell Are Many, The Exits However Are Fewer
We owe Mother Jones, the magazine, a public service nod for a graphic tour last year of all the countries that John McCain has wanted to attack. Spanning the globe, the fist-first senator has called for violent regime change in more than half a dozen nations, ranging from all-out ground invasions to airstrikes to arming sides in endless sectarian conflicts.
The map of McCain’s wars is worth considering as a what-if had the would-be vice president Sarah Palin and her running mate in 2008 prevailed. McCain continues to play quick-draw commander in chief to this day. He said he’d send troops into Nigeria “in a New York minute,” to rescue the girls kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, even without permission of the sovereign country. And just after President Obama’s speech Wednesday at West Point, McCain lamented that America’s young men and women were not still in the Iraqi city of Falluja.
Yes, Falluja — where tribal militias loyal to one warped religious tenet or another continue to slaughter each other with abandon. It’s a hard truth for a country as prideful as the United States to accept, but most Americans have now concluded that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake. Obama, at least, has tried to learn something from it.
Al Qaeda was never in Falluja before the American invasion. They have a stronghold in Falluja now, for which McCain blames the withdrawal of United States troops. Think about that: it’s not our fault because we opened the doors to the factions of hell; it’s our fault because we withdrew from hell.
As Obama tries to pivot from foreign policy by bumper sticker, McCain and an intellectually bankrupt clutch of neocons are trying to present themselves as the alternative. Dick Cheney, the warrior with five draft deferments, is in this diminishing camp, calling Obama “certainly the weakest” president in his lifetime. But both McCain and Cheney are outliers, blustery relics with little backing in either party. Only seven percent of Americans expressed support for even considering a military option after Russia forced Crimea into its fold. That’s a sea change in sentiment from 2001, or even 2008.
The nation’s future military leaders embody this shift. The biggest response from the cadets at West Point came when Obama said, “you are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.” They cheered.
But all of that is not to let Obama off the hook. His big foreign policy speech was flat and passionless, with no central vision. The fault may lie with this particular moment in world history. The Cold War was easy to frame. The War on Terror was as well, at least at first. Now, things are more muddled. How do we help the newly elected government of Ukraine? If we aggressively arm one side in Syria, what happens if they turn out to be religious extremists who want to put women back in the 9th century?
Obama didn’t specifically say so, but the guiding principle for this era of nuance and shadows may be no more complex than this: Stay out of wars of unintended consequence.
“Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint,” said Obama, “but from our willingness to rush into military adventure — without thinking through the consequences; without building international support and legitimacy for our action, or leveling with the American people about the sacrifice required. Tough talk draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.”
Is that weakness, or wisdom? Well, neither. But it’s a realistic reaction to the hard fact that the last 50 years have produced the three longest wars in American history. And it’s a pitch-perfect reflection of where most Americans are today.
Afghanistan was supposed to be a swift move to crush a regime that allowed terrorists to flourish — not 13 years, and counting, of nation-building. Vietnam was billed as a blow for freedom against global communism — not a 10-year military muddle in a civil war posing no threat to the United States. Iraq was going to be clean and quick — we’ll be greeted as liberators! — not eight years in one of the most ghastly places on earth, at a cost of more than $2 trillion and a loss of at least 190,000 lives on all sides.
Obama’s foreign policy is a lot like his economic policy. Give him credit for preventing something awful from happening. The financial collapse could have been truly catastrophic, save for the action the president and the Federal Reserve took in the first year following the meltdown. For that, history will be kind. The wars not fought by Obama are the alternative to John McCain’s map. For that, the verdict of the ages is less certain. After 50 years, what a war-weary nation does know is this: the doors into hell are many; the exits, fewer.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, May 29, 2014
“Media Atonement Day”: Media Response To Iraq War Anniversary, What Iraq War?
As you may have noticed—or rather, not noticed—few in the media paid any attention to last week’s 11th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, an event which had, oh, a few consequences. This seemed especially odd, and revealing, since US vets are still dying from their wounds and brain injuries and committing suicide in still growing numbers—not to mention the continuing toll in Iraq (more bombings killing dozens seemingly to mark the anniversary).
Last year on the 10th anniversary there was a good deal of coverage, which I guess we can’t expect for any year that doesn’t end in zero (see: Hiroshima). But still: almost no coverage or probing or re-capping at all? Perhaps the media are rightly still embarrassed by their performance in the run-up to the war, which helped make it possible…inevitable.
That makes it all the more important for them to re-visit their massive failures, especially with new calls for US intervention abroad. Consider how close we came to bombing Syria (or more) just a few months back, based on sketchy evidence, and calls from “liberal hawks” like Keller and Kristof to take military action there. And now: Crimea and the Ukraine. Maybe: Iran (still).
That’s why I like the idea proposed elsewhere of naming the anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, March 20, henceforth as “Media Atonement Day.” Well, I’ve tried to do my part by posting about 20 stories, items and videos here in the past ten days or at my Pressing Issues blog.
Will Media Atonement Day happen? Don’t bet on it. To illustrate, let me direct you to a piece written by the great Charles P. Pierce exactly one year ago. This followed a controversy over the Washington Post killing a piece they had assigned to me, reviewing media missteps in the run-up to the Iraq war and any later mea culpas. A couple of excerpts from his rant:
Before we begun, let us partially immunize ourselves with a dose of The Washington Post, the largest and deadliest blight ever to afflict elite political journalism. Last week, apparently, they engaged Greg Mitchell of The Nation to write a piece analyzing the performance of the elite political media in the run-up to the Iraq debacle. (The Post has spent the years since helping to launch the disaster giving jobs to a lot of the people behind it, including word-‘ho Michael Gerson and torture-porn enthusiast Marc Thiessen.) Mitchell turned in the piece and it was killed by the Post, a formerly great newspaper now sucking hind tit on the lucrative scam that is the educational-testing industry. However, the Post did run another piece arguing that elite political journalism did not suck as much pondwater as it has been accused of sucking….
And:
These are the people who publish Thiessen on torture, George Effing Will’s experiments with climate-change denialism, and Michael Gerson on anything. These are people who will publish any prominent conservative who can find a crayon. Here’s my broader analytical point — everyone associated with The Washington Post editorial page — and a lot of the executives on the news side, especially the ones that buried Walter Pincus’s great work back on A13 — are complicit in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and they should all have their heads shaved, the phrase “I fked up the world” tattooed on their scalps, and sent off to work in the wards at Walter Reed until they collapse from exhaustion. My insights are fairly well summed up by the phrase, “Shut the fk up forever.”
But it’s never too late to catch up with how the war happened and proceeded, and the media failtures, via my book, So Wrong for So Long.
By: Greg Mitchell, The Nation, March 21, 2014
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