Writing of Wrongs

Was the War in Iraq Doomed From the Start?

It may be too early to tell whether the 2003 war in Iraq will benefit or hurt Iraq in the long term, but its short-term consequences are already grim -- grim enough to warrant a debate about whether they were inevitable or the result of stunning ineptitude. Those who believe the project was doomed from the start argue that only the politically naive and the historically illiterate could have contemplated constructing a working democracy out of the ruins of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. A moment's reflection on the problems that generally accompany violent regime changes, especially those triggered by outside forces, or a passing acquaintance with Iraq's history, including the United Kingdom's attempt to pacify the country in the early 1920s, should have chastened even Washington's most eager advocates for intervention. No region offered a more forbidding setting for experimentation with democratization than the Middle East, with all its ethnic and cultural divisions, and no country within the region held less promise than Iraq, brutalized as it was by decades of oppression, wars, and sanctions.

But if, somehow, a relatively orderly, prosperous, and democratic Iraq ever emerges from the current chaos, the pessimistic assumption that societies can never escape the constraints of their pasts will be firmly refuted. Indeed, in some lights it looks as though the Bush administration set up the reconstruction of Iraq as a scientific experiment to see if its alternative, radical, and much more optimistic hypothesis that a fundamental transformation was possible could survive the most demanding test; it seems to have gone out of its way to make the project as difficult as possible. Advisers and observers who warned early on of the hazards of occupation and argued that such a bold undertaking called for special efforts were disregarded and often derided. Instead of mobilizing the whole U.S. government to ensure that the hard questions were asked and answered, the principal figures in the Bush administration made a determined effort to ignore available expertise, including serious preparatory work by State Department officials and others. The people whose opinions were sought were chosen on narrow grounds, and they often were quite ignorant or were acting out of self-interest. Iraqi exiles who claimed that the liberated people of Iraq would cheerfully cooperate with the U.S. occupation were taken far too seriously.

To the Bush administration's cavalier assumption that Iraq could be transformed without any extraordinary U.S. efforts, other offenses can be added: the divisive diplomacy that accompanied Washington's rush to war, which tarnished the invasion's legitimacy and then limited international support for an extended occupation; the Pentagon's refusal to commit more troops for postwar reconstruction when so few had won the war; inadequate training, in both doctrine and skills, to help U.S. soldiers transition from combat to peacekeeping; disregard for the prospects (and the consequences) of the looting and disarray that followed the fall of Saddam's regime; the decision to disband the defeated Iraqi army; the failure to fully appreciate the implications of excluding former members of the ruling Baath Party from key administrative posts; the inability to foresee the public relations disaster and the ethical morass that would inevitably result from treating Iraqi prisoners in ways reminiscent of Saddam's methods. The list is not exhaustive.

ENDS AND MEANS

As he explores the war's intellectual and political origins in The Assassins' Gate, George Packer shows how advocates of toppling Saddam failed to address, or even acknowledge, the problems that would arise from installing a new regime in Iraq. He describes the consequences of such poor preparation in a series of dispatches from Iraq, where he traveled several times between 2003 and 2005 as a reporter for The New Yorker.

Packer was not the only observer at the time to have convinced himself that the overthrow of such an obnoxious regime and the attempt to build a working democracy in Iraq were noble causes. Like many liberals, he acquired during the 1990s a belief in the virtues of occasionally using force to make the world a better place. Humanitarian interventions, such as those carried out in Bosnia and Kosovo, had sought to alleviate suffering and promote human rights, with varying degrees of success.

In the case of Iraq, Packer was also inspired by the burning idealism and intellectual courage of the exiled Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya, a strong advocate of intervention. Packer recognized all that was wrong with the buildup to the invasion: it was "rushed," he writes, "dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances." And the war was not waged to promote human rights and democracy. But it could bring good, Packer believed: "I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world." The intensity and moral energy of this enthralling book derive from Packer's twin roles as a liberal supporter of the war and a chronicler of its disappointments, and from his dual commitment to a noble cause and the reporter's craft.