Thursday, 04 September 2003

Rude Awakening. The more I think about it, the more I realize that demobilizing the Iraqi army was a big, big, big mistake. Huge. We're talking about a "lose the 2004 election"-sized blunder here. Everything was going reasonably well up to that point; everything since has been the clock striking twelve, ballgowns becoming rags, and the neocon carriage turning back to a pumpkin. Demobilizing Iraq's army was the kind of mistake that only a True Believer could make, someone who accepted without question the belief that Iraq would magically transform into an oasis of democracy: All we needed to do was throw out Saddam, hold another one of those loya jirga thingies, put our good buddy Ahmed Chalabi's name in the hat, and voila! Instant democracy. No need to keep 375,000 uniformed Iraqis loitering around in our post-war Garden of Freedom.

But, now that we've belatedly realized our armed forces are overstretched and were ill-prepared to be an occupying army (as opposed to being a liberating army, which we're very good at), and that we could use an extra quarter-million troops to help maintain law and order… the decision to demobilize is looking worse by the day. For those of us who supported the war to topple Saddam, but reserved judgement on Team Dubya's grandiose post-war visions (and who thought the neocons completely botched the pre-war diplomatic effort), these are trying times: Nobody wants to see America fail (well, nobody here, anyhow), but our current course of action is starting to face long odds. Unless we quickly devise and execute a real plan to transform the Middle East into a model of peace and prosperity, the neocon pipe dream will turn into ash.

First, we need to select or elect Iraq's interim chief executive. So far Iraq's new rulers have all the authority of a high school student council, and Principal Bremer is doing little to change that; the council is stacked with exiles, and so utterly adrift that it can't even choose a leader. A nine-person rotation is not a leader: It's a recipe for having no leadership at all. Frankly it would have been better if the neocons had installed their pet Iraqi, if State had gotten to pick their favorite, or if Bremer had simply insisted the council elect a single leader for at least six months. Hamid Karzai didn't have the private army that normally accompanies an Afghan ruler, but his selection was absolutely necessary to the formation of a new Afghan government; until the Iraqi people have a similar interim leader, their voice in the reconstruction effort will be muddled and dispersed.

Second, we need boots on the ground. Ideally these would be Iraqi boots, from the rank and file of Saddam's ex-army; we went out of our way to keep them alive, which makes it doubly inexplicable that we aren't engaging them to guard buildings, rebuild schools, free up our troops to do what they were trained for—fighting and killing—and maybe even rotate a few people home. Iraqi troops are far less likely to be targets for terrorist bombs and bullets; if the terrorists have to target "collaborators," instead of killing Americans, they'll be turned in by Iraqis that much more often.

The next-best option is to get help from our NATO allies, Pakistan, India, or other nations whose armed forces are better configured for peacekeeping missions than ours; armies stacked with military police, civil affairs teams, and translators will be put to better use in post-war Baghdad than our point-of-the-spear combat troops. (This may require that Bush eat crow in front of the United Nations, and admit that he was in the wrong on several points in the pre-war debate—not least among them that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the established order, and that the "doctrine of preemption" is a dead letter now.)

Third, we need to declare our intentions. Bush's defenders have a schizophrenic view of his declarations on the international stage, claiming that his "Axis of Evil" speech calling out North Korea was visionary and inspiring—and, simultaneously, that Bush's failure to press Saudi Arabia is a sign of his cleverness and pragmatism. You can't have this argument both ways, though: Either Bush should have let Korean dogs lie while we were taking care of Iraq, or he should have put the Saudis on notice months ago. Kicking one hornet's nest and tiptoeing around the other suggests that Bush is driven by personal relationships with foreign leaders, not by the application of a consistent policy principle.

If our goal is truly to remake the Middle East in our democratic image, then it's well past time Bush made that argument and let the chips fly, instead of trying to justify the invasion with bogus WMD claims and iffy Al Qaeda links. Saddam Hussein was an evil despot, and it's good that we're rid of him—but that doesn't explain why we're still in Iraq. Mullah Omar is still crouching somewhere in Afghanistan, and that didn't stop us from calling the bulk of our troops home. Bush needs to articulate a plan for Iraq that has tangible, visible steps toward democracy, ones that any independent observer can verify, and deliver a realistic timetable for implementing it. "Democracy in Iraq by 2005" is a decent campaign slogan, really; "Vietnam II: This Time We Stay" is not, no matter how much the neocons want to rewrite that ending.

I don't think our Iraq situation is unrecoverable just yet, but I'm increasingly skeptical of Team Dubya's ability to see it through: We're still talking trash in diplomatic circles and playing chicken with France at the United Nations, as The Washington Post's David Ignatius artfully puts it. Bush is scheduled to speak at the U.N. later this month, when the General Assembly opens on September 16th; let's hope that he says (and then does) the right things.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:00 am. comments.