explaining iraq:
...most Iraqis agree with the tens of thousands of Shia who marched in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of its fall. They chanted: "Death to America" and "Leave, Occupier! Leave!" They know that the original motivations for the invasion no longer matter. Well over a million Iraqi citizens are dead or wounded. Between half and three quarters of the population is unemployed. More than a hundred thousand have been driven from their homes. The national infrastructure is in ruins; security is non-existent; the dinar has no value; crime is rife; oil production has sunk below pre-war levels; one third of the population lacks decent drinking water; and one quarter of Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition. No one suggests any longer that the sacrifices were "worth it": Iraq has been labeled among the top five "failed states" and "the most dangerous place on earth" by the United Nations.
(...) Consensual support existed for the invasion of Iraq that derived from consensual assumptions. Unless these assumptions are brought to light, most likely, "pragmatic" liberals will again endorse pulling the trigger once the next set of nitwits come up with their next plan to export democracy and human rights through the barrel of a gun. That is what makes it necessary to consider the mainstream arguments for why the debacle took place. Four positions have been articulated in terms acceptable to the political mainstream –- the same mainstream that brought us the war and greeted it with such acclaim in the first place. Each of them will be discussed in turn.
[argument #1]
(...) The most widely held view for the failure in Iraq concerns the incompetence of those running the military enterprise. That this interpretation should be so popular only makes sense since it simply recapitulates arguments already made familiar toward the close of the preceding debacle: the Vietnam War. The refrains echo: not enough troops were employed, equipment was shoddy, and too much emphasis was placed upon air power.
(...) This kind of argument is content to suggest that the plan was good and that, merely, the execution poor. It assumes that the great bulk of the Iraqi public was just waiting for an introduction to American "values" and ready to embrace the invaders as well as their puppet regime. None of this, of course, was the case. For all the talk of "integrating" former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and the Sunni chieftains that gave it support, this view of events gives little attention to the long-standing ethnic divisions and religious tensions among the masses of Iraqis. It also essentially ignores what might be termed the "sociocide" -- the complete destruction of the social infrastructure and its norms -- that the invaders perpetrated in Iraq. Or, to put it a different way, this interpretation is content to concentrate upon the United States and its ability (or inability) "to get the job done" while the price paid by the Iraqis fades from view.
[argument #2]
(...) The second mainstream interpretation of the debacle in Iraq is based upon the failure of the American intelligence apparatus or, better, the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration. The now famous "Downing Street Memo" of 1 May 2005, minutes of a meeting taken by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft -- whose veracity is now generally acknowledged -- makes clear that Rumsfeld and his friends understood the difficulty in presenting "a good case" for war.
(...) Yet information contrary to that offered by the mainstream media and the bulk of the official intelligence community was all over the web in the months preceding the war. Democrats fearful of bucking the nationalist trend simply did not listen to experts like Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Mohamed El Baradei. In reality, whatever the degree to which official and mainstream intelligence was manipulated, critical information was easily available for those willing to seek it.
(...) Opposing the war was not very difficult: it demanded courage and a willingness to see clearly rather than "more information." No one asked what interest a secular regime headed by Saddam Hussein would have in making cause with Islamic fundamentalists. No one wondered how it was that a nation spending $4 billion dollars a year on the military would pose a threat to another nation spending more than $400 billion dollars a year. No one questioned how 30,000 bombs could be dropped on Baghdad in the first week of the war with only a few hundred casualties as a consequence.
[argument #3]
(...) Interpretation number three rests on the claim that the debacle ultimately derived from the refusal of the United States to turn over power to the Iraqis –- or, better, the "right" Iraqis -- quickly enough. But then the idea that "if only we had trusted the right people" -- is also an old refrain in imperialist circles. It highlights the arrogance of those "insiders" who substituted arbitrarily selected personal testimony –- or, better, simple gossip -- for knowledge of real conditions. This argument has been forwarded in various venues by neo-conservatives like Richard Perle. It is also the position now taken by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, a completely corrupt businessman later accused of acting as a double agent for Iran, who was virtually anointed by the Bush Administration to lead the new Iraqi government. Had friendly politicians like Chalabi been given power quickly, so the argument runs, Iraqi and American interests could both have been served.
(...) Unfortunately, however, this seemingly noble interpretation veils the desire by American imperialist policymakers to identify the interests expressed by their Iraqi friends in the political and economic elite with those of the Iraqi people. As it happened, Chalabi turned out to be a fraud: he had no support whatsoever among the Iraqi people and his party received 0.5% of the vote in the December 2005 elections. Left hanging is also a basic fact of political life in Iraq following the fall of Saddam: any set of leaders, friendly or not, would have had to face the lack of an army, a police force, a functioning bureaucracy, and a dilapidated infrastructure.
[argument #4]
(...) The fourth, and final, interpretation of why the war was lost is the exact opposite of the interpretation above. It suggests that the basic mistake lay in giving the Iraqis too much power too soon. This position also becomes a testament to the good intentions of the Bush Administration and its lack of ulterior motives in pursuing its course in Iraq. Of course, again, there is nothing new about this kind of claim when it comes to American foreign policy. Rumblings of this sort were heard as various puppet regimes of the United States fell during the Cold War and, again, especially when it came to the collapse of the South Vietnamese "republic." Ingratitude with respect to the "gift of freedom" that was bestowed upon the Iraqis by the United States, mixed with a kind of patronizing bigotry regarding the incompetence of the subaltern people in question, merge in this particular view of American interaction with the once colonized world. The classic line supporting this interpretation of what took place in Iraq was provided by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who wrote: "We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it."
(...) there is something profoundly misleading about claiming that the United States somehow gave too much autonomy to its puppet-regime in Iraq. Every meaningful strategic military decision since the fall of Saddam was made by the United States. Paul Bremer and his team of advisors attempted to introduce a free market by fiat. But this decision would help only the thousands of American contractors and the few huge corporations close to the Bush Administration, like Bechtel and Halliburton, whose "reconstruction" projects were mostly marked by incompetence and staggering levels of corruption. More than three thousand American soldiers have been killed and roughly ten times that many have been wounded, and the defense budget for 2008 will be close to $650 billion dollars. The war is now costing $2 billion per week and total costs will exceed what was wasted on the debacle in Vietnam. It beggars reality to claim that the United States would spend what will ultimately amount to $2 trillion without controlling the allocation of resources and the most important political and military decisions of the war.
(...) It would seem that the mainstream media has a great deal of trouble dealing with the American exercise of power and the world's view of American hegemony. What remains unexplored is the presupposition not only that the United States had the "right" to engage in a "pre-emptive strike," and lie to the entire world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and supposed threats to the national interest in order to justify its policy, but that the rest of the world was -- or, at least, should have been -- grateful for the decision of the American government to pursue such an action. Or to put it another way, taken singly or together, the reigning explanations of how Iraq was lost leave untouched questions concerning the arrogance of power and the implications of understanding the United States as an "empire."
(...) The supposedly singular tragedy of 9/11 -- as if no other country had ever experienced anything as horrible -- also served to justify a demand for vengeance against "the Arabs" and the exercise of military might to extinguish what remained of the "Vietnam trauma." Such celebratory nationalism and provincial paranoia inspired a belief that the new "enemy" -- a convenient replacement for the communists -- was motivated more by hatred for the "American way of life" and its "freedoms" than by the policies pursued by the United States in the Middle East. This, in turn, helped generate a climate of contempt for all critics of American policy and inhibited a serious assessment of the looming dangers attendant upon the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
(...) No less than during the build-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, once again, the American mainstream media is abdicating its responsibilities. Its explanations of what happened in Iraq have raised no meaningful issues and yielded nothing of value for reflecting upon future events. The pity is that such a discussion is all the more necessary given that American diplomacy -- if that word still has any meaning -- is basically attuned toward three options: threats, sanctions, and military force. Bombing along the borders of Syria and Iran has already taken place and "warnings" of possibly "drastic" action have been extended to the Sudan. The propaganda machine is ready to be revved up at a moment's notice and it is only due to the weariness of the American public induced by failure in Iraq, and the over-extension of American troops, that yet another military conflagration has not broken out.
(...) There remains the naïve underestimation of self-serving economic and geo-political interests influencing the formation of American foreign policy. There remains the inability to grapple with the celebratory nationalism and paranoia that have played such a strong role in the history of the United States. All of this, which is so steadfastly ignored by mainstream interpretations of events, provides the backdrop for what took place in Iraq. The failure of American policy is not a function of what transpired following the "occupation." The road to ruin began with the first lie, the first bombing, and the first steps that led to the invasion of Iraq.