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February 6, 2007
John Burns on Iraq
John Burns, Iraq reporter for New York Times, spoke with Tim Russert the other day on Meet The Press. I haven't been able to find the transcript on the MSNBC site, but a snippet was posted on The Corner. I think you'll agree that what he has to say is interesting, coming as it does from someone at the Times
Russert: John, was it possible for our policy makers to truly understand the way Iraqis would have reacted? The judgments made here were that when we went in we would be greeted as quote, "liberators," to quote Dick, Vice President's Cheney's phrase, that they were prepared, in effect, to take governing into their own hands, that they were so upset and had been so downtrodden by Saddam Hussein that they would embrace democracy and rise up, almost immediately.Burns: Well first of all, I think, again, to be fair, the American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it. It lasted very briefly, it was exhausted quickly by the looting and the astonishment and puzzlement and finally anger of Iraqis that nothing, or very little was done to stop that. I think that to be fair to the United States, when I speak as a citizen of the United Kingdom, I think that the instincts that led to much that went wrong were good American instincts: the desire not to have too heavy of a footprint, the desire to empower Iraqis.
But, and I think that the policy makers in Washington, and to be on honest with you the journalists also, to speak for myself, completely miscalculated the impact of 30 years of violent, brutal repression on the Iraqi people and their willingness, in President Bush's phrase, "to stand up" for themselves, to take authority, to take risks. Why did we who, people like Rajiv [Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post] and myself who were there under Saddam, why did we not fully understand that? I think it's because we were extremely limited by the Saddam regime as to where we could go and who we could go and speak to and what we wrote about mostly — certainly I can speak for myself — was what was most palpable and accessible to us which was the terror, it was real.To that extent, I suppose you'd have to say people like myself enabled what happened, the decisions made here to go into Iraq and I'm not going to apologize for that. I've been to, I think many of the world's nastiest places in a 30 year career as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and Iraq was, by a long way saving only North Korea, the nastiest place I've ever been. It was a truly terrible place and what I think we were transfixed by was the notion that if you could remove this of carapace of terror and you could liberate the Iraqi people, many good things would happen.
We just didn't understand, and perhaps didn't work hard enough to understand, what lay beneath this carapace which is a deeply fractured society that had always been held together, since the British constructed it, by drawing geometric lines on the map — Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia in the 1920s — a country that had really always been held together by force and varying degrees repression. The King, King Faisal, is remembered, the King who was assassinated in 1958, as a kind of golden era, but even that is really, was not really a parliamentary democracy. It was still basically an autocratic state and I think we needed to understand better the forces that we were going to liberate.
And my guess is that history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done, except to impose its own repressive state with half a million troops, which might have had to last ten years or more, nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring.
emphasis added
So in the end were we simply naive going into Iraq? Perhaps we were too intoxicated by ideas of spreading democracy. Works such as Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy have been very influential on the right in recent years. Scharansky was right in that totalitarian societies are brittle, and that most people who appear to love Big Brother in fact do not. What he and all of us missed was the power of the forces balled up inside of Iraq, the forces that Burns spoke of with Russert. The Soviet Union had "cooled" since the time of Stalin; imagine if we had somehow been able to liberate it in 1950. Who knows what forces that would have unleashed?
There is now no doubt we missed how much Iraqi society was broken. I remember reading Andrew Sullivan say just this in the months after the invasion, when it became clear that the aftermath would not go as smoothly as we had hoped.
So if the left wants to make fun of us for hoping that we could turn Iraq into a better place in short order so be it. Strange, this criticism coming from those who all during the Cold War attacked US foreign policy for supporting "authoritarian" regimes over "totalitarian" ones. I wrote a few weeks ago that George Bush's foreign policy is more in line with what the liberals said they wanted, he just carried it to it's logical conclusion.
Is Burns right that there was nothing we could have done to prevent the self-destruction of Iraqi society? I don't know. If he is right, then the justification for invasion is that an alternate future with Saddam in charge would have been worse than the present situation, or what it might turn into. I think that the idea that we had Saddam bottled is wrong, and we may well make Iraq into a success. But in the final analysis the answer is unknowable. We can't rerun history using different variables.
Posted by Tom at February 6, 2007 8:02 PM
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John Burns' Revisionist Whitewash Comments Took My Breath Away
"My guess is that ..the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done,...would have effectively prevented this (present) disintegration." (JOHN BURNS)
The Generals were forbade from writing a comprehensive post war plan under threat of being fired.The State Department's 15 Volume post-war plan and analysis was effectively trashed.
Since day one of the Iraq fiasco my mind frequently offers up what I call the "Einstein Exception." All time is relative. Whether the mission in Iraq was to install a friendly government by force thusly cementing a US presence in hydrocarbon central or to vanquish a threatening regime it makes no difference. What makes a difference is that the amount of time available to plan a successful liberation was in no way constrained. The speed at which the invasion was executed, which precluded comprehensive post-war planning, was itself the greatest element of incompetence.
I strongly argue that John Burns' argument is therefore null and void.
(reference below to post war planning debate)
RUMSFELD FORBADE PLANS FOR POST WAR IRAQ.Original news report, Daily Press, Virginia.
Paraphrased, General Scheid said that preparing a Phase 4 Plan as to handling the aftermath of defeating Saddam was not allowed, not even to be discussed on punishment of being "fired."A Phase 4 Plan would have tipped Congress and the public that Iraq would be or could be a very murderous multi-year extended engagement. Rhummy et al apparently considered that they could only tell the voters more palatable news that we would be warmly welcomed and that it would be a short engagement if no one planned for or was even allowed to outline the obvious and known probable downside contingencies.The message, again paraphrased, was "Shinseki's honest estimate of troop needs and all normal post occupation planning are (to use a good fascist word) verboten. The lie that the Iraq mission will be easy, complete with flowers from the liberated, will be sold to the public and we do not want any negative scenario planning documents to see the light of day.""The book "Assassin's Gate" tells the same story, i.e. that the State Department could not get a direct charge for preparing a post invasion plan and what was prepared by way of Phase 4 by the Army, de facto, never saw the light of day.To summarize: the leadership of the United States prevented our entire Military and each and every one of our now dead or disabled troops the benefit of a normal, complete and required invasion plan in order that their hyped story for the public would not be subject to "smoking gun" evidence that they fully knew of the issues embodied in the maelstrom of post invasion Iraq.Thousands of our troops and tens of thousand Iraqis are now dead in the service of deliberate and malicious lies. I can not remotely imagine the searing anger and bitterness a parent might feel if their child was now dead due to this act of calculated incompetence.
Posted by: Craig Johnson at February 8, 2007 3:04 PM
--But in the final analysis the answer is unknowable. We can't rerun history using different variables.--
This is exactly right, and why even paying attention to this type of stuff is hardly worth while. The real task at hand is what to do with the fractured society we are trying to keep together. Do we go for the surge, to try and repress years of pent up aggression and rage to keep the violence under control, hoping the inept leaders will come up 'with a political solution'? Or do we follow the Biden plan, acknowledging Iraq was a creation of the Brittish colonial period and was held together by tyranny, just like the Yugoslavia, which has seperated into ethnically based nations after a period of 'ethnic cleansing' and civil war. The reality on the ground is best explained in the NIE, which really goes beyond the simplified definition of a 'civil war' in describing the current complex conflict in Iraq. The reality is that Sunni, Shia, and Kurds are kicking each other out of their own enclaves, and consolidating power in their respective regions. Iraq is no more. This is the reality we must face, instead of rehasing and revising history in order to either blame Bush or try to make excuses for his failings.
Do we continue to pour lives and money inot the mess that is Iraq, or do we take a hard look at the reality of the situation in Iraq, realizing the hope for a democratic Iraq has been replaced with the reality of dealing with a country that is splitting apart due to internal sectarian violence.
Posted by: jason at February 8, 2007 4:43 PM
Thank you for your comments, jason. I just thought the interview interesting and worth putting up. I just haven't had time recently to do more in depth analysis of the current situation in Iraq. I've been planning one and will get it up eventually.
And as you also know, I'm not one to dwell on the past. What's done is done. Rather than snipe over past mistakes, we need to look ahead and see what we can do to salvage the situation.
This is one reason why, unlike some on the right, I don't obsess over what President Clinton might or might not have done better. Did Sudan offer him OBL and did he refuse? Maybe, but I don't really care. I don't blame Clinton for not doing more on terror, and I'm not going to start sniping now.
Can you post more info on the Biden plan that you mention? I'm getting the impression that it involves splitting up the country. I did read the NIE, or more precisely skim through it, and it was very interesting though depressing. You are right in that what is going on is a lot more complex than the term "civil war" implies.
As for Craig Johnson, if he wants to entertain himself by trolling around and leaving comments such as the one above so be it. I don't have time to waste on him.
Posted by: Tom the Redhunter at February 8, 2007 9:00 PM
Here are the core items from Biden's website:
1. Establish One Iraq, with Three Regions
* Establish three largely autonomous regions with a strong but limited central government in Baghdad
* Put the central government in charge of border defense, foreign policy, oil production and revenues
* Form regional governments -- Kurd, Sunni and Shiite -- responsible for administering their own regions
5. Drawdown US Troops
* Direct U.S. military commanders to develop a plan to withdraw and re-deploy almost all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2007
* Maintain in or near Iraq a small residual force – perhaps 20,000 troops – to strike any concentration of terrorists, help keep Iraq’s neighbors honest and train its security forces
http://biden.senate.gov/newsroom/details.cfm?id=264909&
These are ideas to work from. 2-4 are silly, political mumbo-jumbo about reconstruction, new jobs, and sharing oil revenues. Nice if they work, but they have failed to date (in all aspects except wasting tons of money). Power remains spotty, the frigging government is rife with corruption, and Bremer's testimony explained how we wasted 360 tons of cash flown into the country on wooden pallets, and it we have little to show for it. As the a columnist at the Conservative Voice said, "If you had lived in Bremer’s combat boots while in that dreary palace, you would have handed out billions, too. After all, it was your hide or the mobs stomping you into pulp."
The question remains, how much more cash do we need to spend to ensure our people holed up behind layers of security in the 'Green Zone' don't get "stomped into pulp?" Let's be realistic. We have backed an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq since Gulf War I. As a result, northern Iraq has been stable under Kurdish rule (and Pesh Merga militia protection) for at least 10 years. We protected them with the no-fly zone under Clinton, and we flew missions with impunity in the north. Yes, it was part of the fruitless sanctions, but the Kurds essentially control their own security, and the north is relatively stable.
The Sunni regions (like al Anbar) support their fellow Sunni Al Queda buddies, and we will continue to kick the crap out of them, like we do in the Taleban controlled regions of Afghanistan. This will be an ongoing process, involving covert operations, like our recent actions (using proxy forces and target attacks with powerful forces) in the horn of Africa. The Shia reality is the most troubling. I suspect they (since they are already cut from the same cloth as the Iranian Shia fundamentalist regime) will form even closer relations with Tehran, including the southern regions of Iraq, which hold key Shia religious sites. Of course, the Chaldean Christians in Iraq really get the short end of the stick. Any news your read about Chaldean Christians in Iraq shows with depressing realism how we have utterly failed to create anything close to a civil society in Iraq.
http://www.aina.org/news/20070116185601.htm
The question that remains is how do we prevent ethnic cleansing. Iraqi's themselves are leaving the country or fleeing to ethnic enclave.
Posted by: jason at February 9, 2007 2:13 AM
