Buckley was the first person I ever read on politics. Now he is writing:
A geographical division of Iraq is inevitable. The major players are obvious. It isn’t plain how America, as an outside party, could play an effective role, let alone one that was decisive, in that national redefinition.
I take it he means other than for the Kurds, whom we can continue to protect. Jane Galt offers her mea culpa on Iraq, and questions who was really the smarty-pants. I wrote in her comments:
While I too was "tricked" about WMDs, that was not my key mistake. My key mistake was to think that if we could lead a regime change in a country as messed-up as Haiti without touching off a civil war, that we could do the same in Iraq. These power transitions seemed to have worked OK numerous times in the past (though Haiti hasn’t gotten better it would have gotten worse), but of course it didn’t go very well this time.
Dan Drezner surveys his own mistakes. Matt Yglesias gives perhaps the best ongoing coverage of the U.S. political situation.
Regardless of what Victor Davis Hanson tells us we should do, it seems obvious what we will do, namely a near-complete pull-out with a buffer reserved for the Kurds and some bases and perhaps the selective use of air power. The next question is this: if the new Iraq really is a breeding ground for terrorists who will strike abroad, as many anti-war critics have suggested, under what conditions would we later re-up our military involvement, and for how long? I don’t have a good answer, and perhaps I "don’t deserve to be listened to" on this, but I would like to hear what the superior predictors have to say.
Man, you are just too cool. And let me beat the crowd in wishing you a happy birthday, still two days away.
Another post demonstrating why this blog is so good. And happy birthday!
“I don’t have a good answer, and perhaps I “don’t deserve to be listened to” on this, but I would like to hear what the superior predictors have to say.”
I was a “superior predictor”, but right now, I don’t feel any elation. Great, I was right, and a few hundred thousand people are dead, the middle east is breeding even more terrorist than before, our crediblity is shot, and we’ve spent tons of money.
As for what to do, I think the time for good answers is long over. We’re looking at answers in the least catastrophic range. The Iraq war is one of the times where risk of ruin based analysis would have been very helpful.
So what are the REALISTIC options? We can stay or go.
IF we stay, there are several plans we could implement. We could partition the country – politically infeasible due to oil deposit locations. We could essentially control Bhagdad only – turns the rest of the country into a blood bath for our supporters. We could give up Bhagdad and control parts of the rest of the county – turns the biggest city in the country into a shooting gallery.
My prefered plan is to abandon Iraq except for small provinces easy to control with 1/4 of current forces, move 1/4 of forces to Afganastan, build infrastructure over the next decade and bring the rest home. The tactics for the forces in Iraq is to build AND protect infrastructure, like water plants, power plants and such.
What is the strategy behind this plan? Our long term strategy is for the hearts and minds of the 85-95% of the population who just wants to live in peace. There will always be many nuts who hate us. We can’t win against them as the costs of killing them are too high, we can only make it socially unacceptable for them to express their anger in violence against us. Right now, it is acceptable for them to express their anger against us in violence. For this violence to be acceptable, a large portion of the population has to be sympathetic to this urge. We will never be able to stop them as long as it is socially acceptable.
So the logical thing to do is make small, but easily connectable islands of peace and prosperity and easy living in areas of the country that are already disposed to like us. Structure this so that the people that live between these islands have huge incentives to get with our program. Let them invite us into their lands. This will take at least 2-3 to be begin making the smallest progress and that we are going to be there for the next 40 years. On top of that, it probably won’t work.
Note this plan turns most of the country into a bloodbath, and I am aware that I am dooming many 10s of thousands people, if not more, to their deaths. Its a horrible plan, but it is the least horrific option we have right now.
I think when we eventually pull back or pull out, as the case may be, shockingly little will change. We will discover just how little our presence has meant and how ineffective it has been.
I’ll accept all of that except the conviction that William F. Buckley is a smart guy. Buckley is a perpetual sophomore who loves parading the arcanae that he picked up last night. He’s cuter and more charming about it than George Will, but smart is something else.
Julian Sanchez has a characteristically excellent rejoinder to Megan’s post – scroll to “In Defense of My Retroactive Smugness”
http://www.juliansanchez.com/notes/index.php
When we listen to the prognostications of superior predictors are we just assuming that past performance predicts future success?
What if they were right for the wrong reasons?
Do they have any good stock tips?
I hate the hand-wringing over Iraq. It’s the worst feature of the blogosphere, bar none. When you hear the stories of most of the soldiers who are over there, they think/know they are making a difference. They are sober about the problems they face. It goes from the generals all the way down to the soldiers. Their re-up rates are too high to suggest they think they are being defeated or can’t eventually carve out a decisive victory. They’re pay is too low and the economy too good at home, and the support for soldiers too strong for a single one of them to voluntarily re-up. And yet they do. I think that’s a very important piece of information to take into account, and reflects judgments of individuals closest to the situation.
I get the feeling that the commanders and the soldiers all know about Iran’s and Syria’s roles in the insurgencies, and see them more as a pain in the ass that they have to tolerate because of politics rather than a serious threat. So long as we’re there, nobody is going to mess with us in any serious way. We might as well be there now for no other reason than to project power and keep the region stable.
My prediction is that we’ll continue to stay the course. The surge is mostly a PR move. As the factions get tired of blowing each other up, greater order will be established. We’ll continue to take historically low (but still sad) casualties. The Presidential election of 2008 will surprise everyone. The Dems will not nominate a candidate who will change course. Hillary, for example, will see an opportunity to execute the reconstruction “the right way” and won’t cut and run. The Repubs will nominate Jeb Bush, John McCain, or Rudy Guilliani, all strong supporters of winning.
Pulling out would be to leave the region in turmoil, and the most important part of “turmoil” is the last three letters. So it won’t happen. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
A couple years back, I actually went and thought up a plan to salvage Iraq. The Kurds got their own country in all but name, protected by US materiel useless in cities, in exchange for contribution of troops that speak the language, know the people, etc. Hardcore Shia and Shiites get their own regions. Arms flow to militias is intercepted and alternately destroyed, replaced with fakes, tagged with a tracking device, and rigged to explode when fired. I came up with ways to play the tribes fighting us against each other. I came up with ideas for realizing the opportunity in the chance to create a government from scratch knowing what we know and the technology we have now. I had a whole ton of things.
What we got is years of such incompetence as hiring interpreters that are double agents, having national guard recruits wait in line outside in open areas even as they’re getting car bombed, and creating policy that leads to Abu Graib situations for no good reasons. And now, well, now it is too late. I don’t think it can be salvaged.
What’s a worst case scenario, you ask, srp? Troop deaths climb rapidly. Islamic extremists with oil money decide to fund Iraqis who want to use Bush’s strategy of “fighting them over there” leaving the US dealing with terrorists using mortars on stadiums and fourth of july celebrations, shooting up shopping malls on black friday, modifying drug dosage data in hospitals, and hijacking an oil tanker to run it into a NY or CA harbor. China converts its dollars to Euros, leading to rapid dollar devaluation as investors panic. OPEC and Chavez stop selling oil to the US. Use your imagination.
Not saying that would happen. But a continuation of Bush-level incompetence would make such events…not unlikely.
SRP brings up that favorite throwaway line of the neo-cons, to wit “panicky defeatism.” If we re-examine what our goals in Iraq were stated to be, they were:
1) Overthrow Saddam – done
2) Destroy WMD stockpiles and programs – Oops, None there, so we created to take its place
3) Create a Democratic state with a stable government that is a beacon for the Middle East. Most people have concluded this is now wholly unrealistic, probably was from the get go.
So what exactly do SRP et al think our continued presence there actually accomplishes? The only logic in continuing to throw good money (and lives) after bad in this situation is political, and domestic politics at that. However, if ramping up the forces a little allows the Administration to create enough semblance of order to permit them to exit w/o having to admit defeat, then I say “bring it on.” Worked in Vietnam after all.
Smart man? I don’t think so.
Here’s part of what Buckley wrote:
Is it a strain to send more troops to Iraq?
No. A country of 300 million has resources insignificantly depleted by the proposed increase in troops.
Yes, there would be sacrifices. Mr. Chairman, I am not going to spend 10 seconds describing the anguish of the families of soldiers wounded or killed, which does not diminish that anguish. We are talking in clinical language. Hospitals don’t pause to bemoan the deaths that occur on their premises. America has been at war in Iraq for nearly four years. No sacrifice of a corporate character has been asked of the American people. Taxes haven’t been raised, gasoline hasn’t been rationed, passports haven’t been recalled.
Life in free countries produces victims in every field. In the past four years, 3,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq. In the same period, about 170,000 Americans have died in car accidents, and about 1.6 million have died from tobacco-related illnesses.
So we shouldn’t worry about the casualties, because people die in the hospital every day. We shouldn’t worry about the $10-15 billion a month in direct costs, because there have been no tax increases and we can just borrow it. Somehow, to him, this makes it costless.
This is your idea of a smart man? Look, Buckley is a talented and successful promoter of right-wing ideas. He is an engaging speaker. As a thinker he is not much.
Re: Martin
2) Destroy WMD stockpiles and programs – Oops, None there, so we created to take its place
Stockpiles of operational WMDs, no, but they did have stockpiles of low enriched uranium in their facility in Tuwaitha. We finished taking that away sometime in 2004, I think, though, and took all the documents from their nuclear weapons program too (leaving aside, for the moment, that Congress stupidly released them on the internet shortly after), so apart from our ongoing efforts to comb the desert for anything they might have hidden away, we were pretty much done with this goal by the end of 2004. Whatever new government arises in Iraq is going to have to start from zero as far as amassing and refining uranium goes (as far as nuclear know-how and engineering schematics, they can probably just import those from our friends in Pakistan). That’s assuming we got almost everything, at least. There might be buried treasure, but hopefully it’s just as hidden for future governments in Iraq as it is for us.
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