So what went wrong with the US plans for establishing a client state in Iraq? When historians look back on Iraq, they may well point to two key decisions: the first was to not go through the tried and true method of instigating a coup by military officers friendly to the US, and then after making the decision to mount an invasion, making the fateful decision in the immediate aftermath to disband the Iraqi army and the Baathist administrative structure that was running the country.

With the army and the Baathist structures still in place, it might have been possible to maintain order and stability in those crucial first few weeks after the invasion, to provide the Iraqi people with the day-to-day security they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein but without the political repression. Then once an orderly transition was achieved, it may have been possible to hand over power to a client Iraqi government that would allow the US considerable influence, but without the Iraqi people feeling that they were being directly dominated by a foreign power.

But once the Iraqi military and administrative structure was summarily dismantled, like Humpty Dumpty it could not be put together again. With the levels of anarchy and civil war rising as a result of this power vacuum, this leaves the US in the current mess where it can neither stay nor leave without appearing to lose.

So who was responsible for that disastrous decision to disband the army and the Baathist structure? The actual order was given by Coalition Provisional Authority leader L. Paul Bremer but it seems like this was too big a decision to have been made on the fly by someone at his level. One has to suspect that it was signed off at the highest levels of government, at least by Rumsfeld and Bush, and going all the way up to Cheney.

But it has long been established that no one in this administration admits to any mistakes. We have never been told what they might have done differently knowing what they know now. With an almost religious certainty they insist that they made the right calls all the way down the line.

But this is belied by the fact that the rosy predictions of success in Iraq have proven to be tragically wrong. Consider these predictions, all made in 2003 prior to the war’s commencement:

* Feb. 7, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

* March 4, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a breakfast with reporters: “What you’d like to do is have it be a short, short conflict. . . . Iraq is much weaker than they were back in the ’90s,” when its forces were routed from Kuwait.

* March 11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars: “The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.”

* March 16, Vice President Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . (in) weeks rather than months.”

Now that things have started to go terribly wrong, those who enthusiastically supported the war and still think it was a great idea initially placed the blame on the media or the feckless allies of ‘Old Europe” like France and Germany for not bailing the US out its mess (the latter being a curious charge since those countries predicted that invading Iraq would be a mess) but those attempts did not gain any traction.

Now they have split into two camps as far as assigning blame goes. There are those who say that the administration has bungled the conduct of the post-invasion occupation and now blame Rumsfeld and even Bush. (See here and here.) But others cannot bring themselves to turn on their idols, so their fingers are being pointed at either the Iraqi or American people.

The Iraqis are being blamed for being ungrateful wretches who are actually going to the extent of attacking the very troops who overthrew Saddam Hussein. Some of the people who blame the Iraqis are even calling on the US to teach especially the ungrateful Sunnis a lesson by throwing all its support to those Shia forces that are engaged in killing Sunnis. Of course, this kind of shallow thinking overlooks the fact that many of the Shia (such as the followers of Muqtada al Sadr) are also hostile to the US presence and have carried out attacks on the US. Also the Shia tend to be friendly towards Iran so backing the Shia forces actually strengthens Iran in the region, which is hardly consistent with the grand goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the first step in a sweep through the Middle East that had Iran as the next target.

Those advocates who suggest that since the Iraqis are so ungrateful the US should simply encourage them to kill each other also ignore the enormous debt that the US owes the Iraqi people. The US helped Saddam Hussein come to power and actively supported him during the time of his internal repressions and in his tragic war against Iran. The US instigated and controlled the sanctions against Iraq from 1991 that reduced Iraq from a prosperous and advanced society to an impoverished one by the time of the invasion in 2003, resulting in the deaths of an enormous number of Iraqis due to the lack of food and medicine and other basic services. And the US has now, by its invasion in 2003, created conditions of anarchy and lawlessness and an additional huge number of deaths, as was seen by the Lancet study.

Those who are snarling at the Iraqis and calling for them to be punished for their ingratitude remind me of the psychology of people who take out their rage on their helpless pets or on infants who don’t stop crying. There is something about seeing oneself as being very powerful and yet not being able to get others to do what you want them to do that drive some people into an impotent rage and lash out destructively.

The other tack that is being taken is to blame the American people. This has happened before, during Vietnam. When wars don’t go well, it is tempting for those in power to say that it is because the people did not support it enough. The war was a great idea, the political and military leadership was perfect, but the people somehow let them down.

Stephen Colbert quotes and then hilariously satirizes those who takes this route, saying: “American people, you are losing this war. . .American people, you should be ashamed! The President went off and bit off a big piece of the Middle East, and like an eagle, brought it back to the nest, and he’s regurgitating it into your mouths. Why won’t you swallow? When history looks back at the actions of this president and the decisions he made regarding this war, you will go down as the most incompetent American public of all time.”

Blaming the American public for defeat in Iraq by citing their lack of support does not really make sense since the loss in public support for wars (In Iraq as in Vietnam) usually occurs after the military campaign has gone sour. But what this argument seems to be hinting at is that even though the war is currently going really badly, so badly that the American public is fed up with it, there is something new that could be done that would dramatically change the tide of events, but cannot be put into practice because the public will not support this new push. The problem is that this brilliant new idea, often dramatically described as “one last shot” or “turning point” is never quite specified or is so outlandish (“Triple the number of troops in Iraq” or “Drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq/Iran so they know we mean business” or “Round up all the militants and throw them in prison or kill them”) that it falls outside the realm of reality. Pushing for ideas that are not likely to be accepted enables its advocates to position themselves to avoid blame since they can then say that if only their idea had been followed, the war could have been won. Keeping alive the vague idea that other options exist enable the warmongers to delude themselves that theirs were the right decisions, but were foiled by poor execution or lack of will.

The brutal reality is that there are no good options left in Iraq that would constitute a ‘victory’ in the sense that the Bush administration envisions. And this brings us to the current options that are being floated to ‘turn things around’ in Iraq.

Next: The battle for rhetorical supremacy

POST SCRIPT: Iraq petition

Here is an online petition that you can sign that calls for an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

One of the things that always puzzled me about the Iraq war was the decision that was taken immediately after the fall of Baghdad to disband the Iraqi army and send them all home. This was a radical break with past US policies because the standing armies of other countries have always been the key element of past US attempts at changing the governments of other countries.

It is no secret that the US military industry provides a vast amount of the hardware for foreign armies. A large fraction of the warplanes, tanks, ships, armaments, and the other paraphernalia that foreign armies love to accumulate are sold to them by the US. On one level, this can be seen as a huge taxpayer subsidy to the defense industry. Much of the US taxpayer provided ‘aid’ to other countries (and this also applies, on a smaller scale, to other major weapons suppliers such as Britain and France) comes in the form of funds that are designated for weapons purchases that have to be bought from the aid ‘donor’ countries. So essentially much of US taxpayer ‘aid’ money ends up with US defense contractors, by being used by the foreign military to purchase US-made weapons.

But there is more to this transaction that just money and weapons transfers. When a foreign military purchases US weapons, it allows the US to build links between the foreign armies and the US military. Their officers need to be trained to use the weaponry and so form links with US trainers, to the extent of coming for regular visits to the US (such as to the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA) and having US military and defense contractors visit those countries. The net result of such exchanges is the building of close relationships between the US and the foreign military, and this allows the CIA to relatively easily penetrate their ranks and either recruit agents or identify people they think would be sympathetic to US interests.

Having such links is valuable when the government of that country does things that the US strongly disapproves of because then the US can use those friendly officers to engineer a coup against the government and take over the reins of power. Since the military culture is to follow the command structure, the presence of a senior military person taking over the government enables the government to marshal the armed forces in support and crush any opposition to the coup by using brute force. The backing of the armed forces enables them to immediately take over the newspapers and radio and TV stations, arrest or kill opposition figures, and impose martial law and curfews until they have consolidated power over every aspect of that society.

This is what happened in Iran in 1953 when President Mossadegh was overthrown and Reza Pahlavi (the Shah of Iran) was brought in to rule, in Vietnam in 1963 when Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown by the military, in Indonesia in 1965 when President Sukarno was overthrown by General Suharto, and in Chile in 1973 when President Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet, just to name a few of the more recent cases. Many of the military officers who supported Pinochet were graduates of the School of the Americas.

This was such a smoothly working system that it is not clear why it was not repeated in Iraq when Saddam Hussein went against US interests. After all, Hussein himself had achieved considerable power (though not the leadership) as a result of a coup in 1968, and finally took over in 1979 after forcing the 1968 coup leader (and later President) Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr to resign. There is evidence that Saddam Hussein was himself supported by the CIA from the early 1960s until the first Gulf War in 1991.

So why did the US not go back to its old playbook and find a cadre of junior and senior Iraqi officers who were friendly to the US to stage a coup against Hussein? One possibility is that they tried to do this and failed. It may be that Hussein, himself a protege of the CIA, knew only too well how it operated and was able to ferret out those officers whom he perceived as potential threats and eliminated them.

Another possibility is that the US was after bigger fish this time and that it was not really that concerned with Iraq itself except as a gateway to the grander prizes of Iran and Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Installing a puppet leader in Iraq via a military coup would merely give it control over that country’s oil supplies but would still leave Iran under a government the US did not control, Saudi Arabia in the hands of a friendly but unstable oligarchy, and Egypt with a future that was uncertain once the current strong man Hosni Mubarak dies or is overthrown or leaves office.

The ultimate goal may have been to achieve control over all these countries and though them the entire Middle East. At least this was the vision presented to the Defense Policy Board, “a committee of foreign policy wonks and former government officials that advises the Pentagon on defense issues,” that was headed by leading neoconservative Richard Perle in 2002 when it was briefed on this grand world view by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand corporation analyst who used to work for Lyndon LaRouche.

So perhaps it was this vision of Middle Eastern dominos (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt) falling one by one to US power and influence, giving the US total control of the world’s major oil reserves, and at the same time neutralizing all the potential threats to Israel, that led the US to abandon its old policy of coups to change disliked regimes and go for the big invasion of Iraq as a dramatic show of US power. This would also explain why the attempts to form a broad UN military coalition for the invasion of Iraq (like that done for the first Gulf war in 1991) were so half-hearted. This long-term strategy was meant to establish exclusive US control of the Middle East in order to control the destiny of rival economic powers, and thus having other major powers come along for the invasion of Iraq would not be desirable.

It is probable that this heady vision of remaking the political map of the world led the Bush administration to indulge in wishful thinking, to actually believe that they would achieve a quick victory in Iraq and be greeted as liberators, and that a grateful Iraqi public would welcome them and quickly set up a new government friendly to the US that would allow the US to maintain a huge military presence. With the crippling sanctions dismantled, the US would then be able to use Iraqi oil revenues to create a prosperous country, and that combination of US military power and rapid improvement in the lives of the Iraq people in a stable country with relatively free political structures would be the trigger for the people in neighboring countries to realize that they could have something similar. They would then also rise up against their own governments, confident that the massive US presence in nearby Iraq, along with the other major regional power Israel, would support them and deter their governments from retaliating with a brutal crackdown.

All this is admittedly speculation on my part, though not without evidence. But one can see how it could be a heady brew to a visionary with particular a type of ideology, such as the neoconservatives. Such ‘big picture’ people tend to see things in terms of the grand sweep of history. They are almost always so convinced and entranced by the magnificence of their own vision that they think that others will immediately embrace it too, and they do not want to listen to naysayers who see potential problems. They feel that they are on the crest of a wave of history that will sweep away all opposition, both domestic and foreign.

But if this surmise of mine is true, then that plan ganged seriously agley, as the poet Robert Burns might say.

Next: What went wrong with the grand plan?

Now that the Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] has been delivered with great fanfare, there is a curious sense of anticlimax as various people ponder what is to be the next step in Iraq. As I suspected it would, the White House distanced itself from the report’s recommendations since it essentially repudiates the premises of its current policy.

It seems clear to me that what we are going to witness in the near future is not any substantive changes in policy but we will see changes in rhetoric, in the way that the war is packaged. Hence it is probably a good time to closely examine the rhetoric of the debate.

The president speaks repeatedly of not willing to listen to the defeatists and says that the US will stay until “victory” is achieved and “the job” is completed.
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In the previous post, I suggested that as the competition for resources becomes more acute, it is likely that military force will be increasingly used in a brutally transparent manner in order to maintain the current inequalities in consumption rates. This was not simply a guess on my part. It is based on historical precedent.

In 1948, George Kennan of the US State Department wrote what has since become a famous memo outlining in frank and stark terms what he saw as the main issue facing the United States in its newfound post-world war II role as the dominant economic and military force. He was officially writing about Asia but his analysis extends beyond that.
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