Deconstructing Iraq

With Obama days from an announcement on how he plans to proceed in Afghanistan, it’s worth looking at what Peter Galbraith had to say about the other, even greater Bush-era debacle, Iraq. His 2008 book Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies looks like a rush job (if someone edited it, you can’t tell) designed to the hit the bookstores in time to influence last November’s election.

Turns out Obama didn’t need Galbraith’s searing indictment of Bush as having ‘lost’ Iraq, but it’s a wonderful primer on ideology-driven incompetence as practiced by the Christian/neocon Republican coalition. But there’s a nagging question in the book that Galbraith doesn’t answer nor even ask.

Galbraith is an old foreign policy hand who worked for Congress, Bill Clinton (as ambassador to Croatia), the UN in East Timor and most recently the UN again as the number 2 guy ‘monitoring’ the massively fraudulent Afghan ‘election’ that President Karzai stole last August. He had the integrity lacking among his bosses to say that the emperor had no clothes, for which he was summarily canned.

We don’t yet know the inside skinny on why the UN went along with this farce, but the logic of a heavy, back-room American role is compelling. Obama has since accepted Karzai’s action and continues to treat him as a legitimate head of state despite the embarrassment (worsened by Galbraith’s honesty), apparently because Obama has decided that the alternative—calling it quits—would be worse.

Galbraith’s review of what happened in Iraq is particularly timely because it cuts through last fall’s laughably crude electoral demagogy and describes the losses already achieved by Bush’s non-policy: enormous strengthening of Iran; de facto break-up of Iraq into two confessional (Shiite and Sunni) enclaves and one virtually independent state (Kurdistan); direct alliance with the original enemy (ex-Baathists) against Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia; intervention on one side of the ongoing intra-Shiite battles for power.

At the heart of Galbraith’s criticism of Bush is his conclusion that the stated policy goals—strengthening U.S. interests in the region—were set back by the attempt to conquer Iraq. That seems beyond debate now, but Galbraith never attempts to ask the obvious: then why did they do it?

I suppose that’s not his job as a policy wonk and advocate, and it is always tricky to enter the swamp of speculation on other people’s motives. But if doing what they did weakened the United States and directly undermined their stated goals, what were the real ones?

My own answer would point to the permanent war-making state and the internal pressures to generate profit-making opportunities. Just as Wall Street did not intend to subvert capitalism and nonetheless tempted itself into chasing the bubble’s short-term gains until it nearly did so, I suspect that belief in the trillion-dollar war was carried along by own momentum. Nine-eleven made the idea of war hugely attractive; in hindsight human agency seems almost secondary.

[Addendum] Too bad that a smart guy like Galbraith couldn’t have kept his business affairs out of his professional work and now is discredited by the huge profits he’s about to obtain from his investments in Kurdish oilfields. The fact that he doesn’t realize how bad it looks for a diplomat to pump for Kurdish independence and simultaneously have a financial stake in it might be part of his non-answer to the above unasked question.