Kaplan is correct to point out the faulty assumptions made by administration realists in the post-war administration of Iraq. But he is incorrect not to say that many of those assumptions were generated by the neocons.

This is a serious problem - one must balance one's assumptions about the right foreign policy to pursue with the capability of those in power to pursue it. It should have been fairly clear to the foreign policy community at a variety of points that the individuals in power did not have the ability to execute on the grand schemes they put forward.

The democratization of the Middle East may in fact be the only long-term solution to the terrorism problem, but it's always been odd that the people who pushed a unilaterist militarized approach to democratizing the Middle East had such a legacy of failure in the past, from overestimating Soviet strength in the 1970s to pursuing Central American anti-communist disasters and supporting Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s to overestimating the threat posed by Iraq and its WMDs in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Discussing the appropriate foreign policy to pursue without a critical examination of those who would be tasked to pursue it seems to have left a substantial portion of the public discourse in a moral and practical fantasyland.

Everyone involved in this (as well as myself im willing to admit) vastly underestimated the resources, energy, and attention democratizing Iraq would require. Imo Bush tried to do it on the cheap, money, troops, and focus wise. Whether that was because of simple optimism or to try to save up political influence is immaterial at this point. I dont blame anyone for the underplanning (announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh), but not realizing the mistake in the last year is not acceptable. Its not so much the money or the troops, its the focus that is the problem. We went to war, the war wont end until a stable democratic Iraq is built, or we give up. But we forgot that you cant always dictate just how much war you are gonna have your hands full of. We got more than we bargained for, which is fine, but we are way to slow to make up for it. When good men are dying, it is _immoral_ not to turn our entire national will to the quickest, best outcome. Can anyone honestly claim we've done anything remotely like that? Aside from the poor soldiers and their families, who has this war touched? We owe them better, we owe the Iraqis (who like it or not are now our responsibility) better, and we owe ourselves better. Freedom is never free, and rarely cheap. We need maximum effort or immediate retreat.

Well said.

you might want to replace "fiend" with "friend," however.

Dan, is the identification of Sec. Rumsfeld as a "realist" Kaplan's, or yours?

In fact Rumsfeld has a very long record dating back to his tenure at the Pentagon in the Ford administration. You can see him throughout in contact with genuine foreign policy realists. But in the 1970's and again in the current administration he allied himself with and empowered neoconservatives. Absent Rumsfeld's patronage and support it is highly unlikely that people like Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle would have been able to exercise as much influence on Iraq as they did.

The neoconservatives were mostly wrong in the 1970s, too.

With respect to democratization, Kaplan finds common ground with critics of neoconservatives by claiming that the flaw in the administration's strategy in Iraq was in the implementation: not enough troops, not enough security, not enough money spent on the right things and so forth. There is something to that, a point I can't concede without adding the caveat that if "not enough troops" was a problem in May 2003 sending more troops in June 2004 does not fix it. When some trains leave the station they are well and truly gone; some opportunities once lost cannot be recaptured.

But concessions and caveats aside, both neoconservatives and their critics are fooling themselves by not recognizing the tremendous difficulties involved in transplanting a highly demanding form of government like representative democracy in the midst of a backward, inferior Arab culture -- one that in this case had been in addition badly traumatized by decades of rule that owed as much to Soviet as to Arab traditions. Critics of neoconservatives don't have any different assumptions about democracy in the Arab world than the neocons do, they just think the neocons fouled up the implementation -- by, again, not sending enough troops, or not involving the UN soon enough, or something else. Their criticisms risk just replacing the neocons' mistakes with new ones if we do not consider that our assumptions about democracy may be mistaken.

It is perhaps obvious that I believe they are. And Iraq is not the first place our mistaken assumptions have led American policy in the wrong direction. Beginning in the first Bush administration the American government strongly backed Boris Yeltsin's efforts to bring capitalism and democracy to Russia without humiliating unrepentant Russian Communists by demanding that the whole Soviet Communist legacy beginning with state ownership of land be repudiated. As we are now seeing, only such a repudiation had any chance of creating private forces capable of resisting a renewed attempt by the center to reimpose dictatorship -- a dictatorship we in the West can deal with on certain things, to be sure, but in no meaningful sense a democracy.

Democracy is hard. It is highly demanding not only of government officials but of ordinary citizens. Some cultures are not developed enough to handle it. I suppose we also must acknowledge the possibility that cultures able to handle it at one time may lose that ability, but for now let us just be wary of betting all our chips on one hand, resolved that only freedom can defeat terrorism. That may be true over the course of centuries, but we are not living our lives over such a time span, and need to be aware of the costs of assuming that because we think something must be true that it therefore is.

". It is only through appreciating the nuances of alternative points of view that one can hone one's own arguments and policy proposals -- and I don't think a lot of neocons do this all that much. "

Priceless, just freaking priceless. Dan, its not even 'nuance'. We aren't at the level of slight details. They can't process anything that might interfere with their beliefs.

I was an ardent supporter of the Iraq war, and though I had always considered myself a realist I found myself caught up in the fervor of democratizing Iraq. Needless to say, I feel chastened by events. I think it's difficult to pin down one way we went wrong--but the initial error of over-optimism has been compounded repeatedly by security issues.

I think the Iraq war demonstrates that our understanding of democracy is not as full was we would like it to be. In addition to the conflation of liberation and democratization, I think there was a lack of consideration for liberalization. For too many, I believe, it was enough to look at Iraq and see it as relatively secular state and think that that was enough to allow its people to easily transition to democracy. This interpretation, too, was factually wrong because it rested too much upon Saddam's rule prior to the first Persian Gulf war. The rule of Hussein during the 1990's increasingly used the language and imagery of Islamic fundamentalism to maintain the Baathist grip. In short, faced with the problems of the embarago and a wrecked economy, Saddam simply looked south and copied the Saudi playbook: keep your population under control by focusing their discontent into radical religion. We see this legacy now in the role of the clerics in the resistance to the US. Not only are they now serving as the main impediment to security (which cannot be overlooked in democratization--I think it is telling that the two birthplaces of modern democracy, Great Britain and the US, enjoyed enhanced security because of geographical obstacles to foreign invaders), but they are a significan roadblock the necessary liberalization that must occur.

Thus, not only did the Iraq possess the problem of never having a democratic tradition, nor a culture with any sense of the necessary liberalism for democracy, Saddam's policies of the last ten years have created a population that is many ways less ready for democracy than it was ten years ago. It is useful, too, to look at skeptics of Russian democratization. There, it was pointed out, the Reformation and Enlightenment never took place, so the Russia's participation in key events in Western liberalization never occurred, and it jumped headlong into an industrial age out of an essentially medieval one. Russia in 1991 looked favorable to many nonetheless, but to compare Iraq to it is unsettling: I think we'll be very fortunate, at best, to have an Iraqi government that approaches the benign despotism of the seemingly endless Putin presidency.

The end point, then, is that creating democracy in an area that has not, in most respects, begun to liberalize is a challenge, to say the least. Couple that with the fact that most basic set of security concerns are not being met, and it becomes easy to be pessimistic about Iraq. My new goal for Iraq: an unsteady procedural democracy that has security guarantees from the US/UN long enough to allow for an ingraining of democratic values into Iraqi culture.

“Needless to say, I feel chastened by events. I think it's difficult to pin down one way we went wrong--but the initial error of over-optimism has been compounded repeatedly by security issues.”

I remain optimistic. The biggest threat is not from the former Baath members, but nihilistic Islamists. We must remain patient and try to remember that Iraq is a nation of an estimated thirty one million people. Daily suicide bombing attacks murdering a dozen people are horrendous. Still, they represent a tiny fraction of the total population. Saddam Hussein was responsible for far more deaths. The economy is improving and there does seem to be a consensus by the three major groups to stay the course. Also, the new President Ghazi Al-Yawar is fantastic. I’ve seen him on TV handling hard question. He is truly brilliant---and committed to democracy and secularism.

I must also respond to the disappointing poll numbers. Are they legitimate? Was the poll taken in a responsible manner? OK, allow me to be blunt and consider the worst case scenario. We must remember that the Arab culture is one of childish immaturity, scapegoating, and self pity. This is why we must do everything in our power to encourage these people to opt for the 21st Century. We must be patient as if they are unruly teenagers. Our very lives and those of our loved ones depend on it.

What is truly disgraceful is that the difficulty of occupying Iraq was known before the war. Here's an Army War College study published in February 2003:

The longer a U.S. occupation of Iraq continues, the more danger exists that elements of the Iraqi population will become impatient and take violent measures to hasten the departure of U.S. forces

3 months later, Bremer came up with a 5 year plan that he had to scrap by November because of the increasing violence. Many of the problems we're facing now were predicted in that report.

As for the realist fad, I don't think it matters what our elites call themselves anymore -- their intervention privileges will be revoked, and they won't be allowed to play in anymore sandboxes, like Syria or Iran.

Honestly, I don't understand how people who call themselves conservatives can believe that our gov't is too incompetent to regulate our economy, but can nevertheless remake entire regions of the globe in our image.

It's worth quickly pointing out that from a strategic point of view, even the current mess in Iraq is better than what preceded it. Prior to the invasion, I said that even if all we manage to do is reduce Iraq to a mess similar to Somalia, that's still preferable to having a well-organized Ba'athist dictatorship with the full resources of a state. The concentration of power in Hussein's hands had to be dissolved before the sanctions came down; everything else is gravy, though naturally there is a moral obligation to try to build a working society there.

Of course, Iraq is nowhere near the mess that is Somalia (or the Balkans, for that matter). It's fair to say that more troops would have been better (as would more equipment, and more money -- but was this available at the time? Not a rhetorical question; I really don't know). But it's ridiculous to call the whole thing a failure less than two years after the Ba'athists have been removed. Building up a country is not accomplished at microwave speeds. Even the U.S. itself was something of a mess for a few years after gaining independence, to say nothing of the state of affairs in Western Europe after World War II.

But as far as I'm concerned, the invasion was a rousing success: the most dangerous Arab government removed, any notions of Hussein as latter-day Saladin wiped out, and all at a military death rate barely above peacetime accident levels. One can argue about just how well the post-invasion period was handled (and there's no disputing that it could have been handled much better) -- but that's a wholly separate discussion.

Excellent piece. But those who argue more troops can't fix it now are mistaken. It never was going to require vast troop strength to send Saddam and his army packing. We knew that from the 1991 war. The Iraqi conscripts, unlike the Baathist core, had no reason to fight, indeed every reason to allow a swift and relatively painless victory to the coalition forces.

But to win the peace was always going to require a huge security forces commitment: to secure the oil infrastructure, restore order and relative safety to civil society and protect the reconstruction.

Al-Zarqawi and the Baathist diehard officers perceived correctly that the thinly spread US forces would not be able to do any of this properly. Since the hardcore abandoned the field early in the war, they were able to preserve what are undoubtedly enormous caches of materiel and weaponry.

The amazing and incompetent decision to actually disband the Iraqi armed forces, merely to purge them of Baathists, has had the catastrophic consequence of creating a vast reservoir of trained and resentful outsiders, most already armed, for the recruiting sergeants of Saddam, Syrian and iranian MI, al-Qaeda, etc.

Rumsfeld to Bremer, the postwar construction of a democratic Iraqi state has been so badly undermined as to suggest that civil war is likely rather than merely possible. I fear that even if Bush should depart the scene, John Kerry has no coherent strategy to mend what is so badly broken.

Lets not make assumptions on the utility or desirability of democracy when our current problems can be laid at the door of poor execution. Law and order is a prerequisite for democracy, as our lessons with Russia should have taught us. Our failure to instill order has cost us, even if it was well intentioned.

the article can be accessed for free by non-subscribers on Andrew Sullivan's Web site

Some people in the Bush administration have likened post-war Iraq to Germany after WWII. I think that's in many ways a very silly comparison.

But given that supposedly smart people are allowed to make such a silly comparison, let me suggest a different comparison that I think is at least a little less silly:

Iraq is in some ways like Germany after WWI.

What triggered this thought was actually reading about al-Sadr telling his "Mahdi army" to be a bit more civil and to accept the new government for now. Hitler did something quite similar after the failed Beer Hall putsch and his temporary imprisonment. He decided to work within the system and told Roehm and the SA to keep it down for a while.

al-Sadr may see a similar opening here - by falling back into the system, he might actually be more likely to survive now and then seize power in the future.

I don't think comparing al-Sadr to the early Hitler is out of line. Hitler was a nobody in the early 1920s, his rise to power is one of the literally most incredible historical events of all time. If anything, al-Sadr is much better positioned to seize power than Hitler was after WWI.

Also, given that Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is still popular reading in that part of the world, I wouldn't be surprised if al-Sadr actually was proud of a Hitler comparison.

Whether or not al-Sadr - or someone else similar to him - will eventually turn Iraq into a new terrifying dictatorship I do not know nor do I want to predict it. But are we even doing anything at all to prevent it? Aren't we going to see "Mission Accomplished II" in just about two weeks?

Just as WWI was won and then the peace was lost in a terrible way, the Iraq war has been won militarily, but now the peace might be lost and lead, in years to come, to much worse events than we ever feared.

Just as WWI was won and then the peace was lost in a terrible way, the Iraq war has been won militarily, but now the peace might be lost and lead, in years to come, to much worse events than we ever feared.

This is true. Of course, it's true of just about any military action ever undertaken.

And conversely, leaving Hussein in power might also have led to worse events than we ever feared.

It's all a matter of odds and consequences, and the job of a government is to weigh those and make a decision based on its best guess. My best guess -- not to be confused with whatever was thought at the White House -- was and is that leaving Hussein in power was the more dangerous course of the two.

As a side note, the lost peace after World War I need not have resulted in the atrocities of World War II. Had England and France not been bamboozled by progressive notions of "peace in our time," Hitler could have been removed from power before the first gas chambers were built.

It is impossible to predict what might happen, several steps in advance. The reasonable thing to demand is that our government(s) respond to events as they unfold. Leaving Hitler in power was a failure to do so, brought on by idiotic progressive notions of "peace" and "understanding" through the League of Nations. Leaving Hussein in power would have been a similar failure. Now that Hussein is gone, the question is what to do next. As gw says, we can still foul this up -- but that's not news, and it's not a justification for leaving Hussein in power to begin with.

E. Nough, I hope that you are right, I really do.

But when you write ...

This is true. Of course, it's true of just about any military action ever undertaken.

... why doesn't that make you pause and think that perhaps war was the wrong approach?

Saddam was no Hitler. In the 80s and then in 1990 he was armed and dangerous (which was partly our own fault), and letting him have Kuwait could have been seen as a parallel to the ill-fated appeasement politics of Chamberlain in the late 1930s, yes.

But we didn't let him have Kuwait. He was repelled and then contained by sanctions. Not the greatest solution, for sure, but what we have at our hands now is potentially even worse.

You also said:

It is impossible to predict what might happen, several steps in advance.

Well, but isn't that exactly what the neocons were assuring us they were doing? David Thomson keeps talking about his domino theory and the resulting bright future for the still backward Arab world.

War, torture and humiliation are not exactly the most likely path to a bright future and lasting peace. Is that really so hard to understand?

Excellent point to keep in mind qw.

"Saddam was no Hitler"

Ah, but Hitler was only Hitler in hindsight. By the time one realized just how big a threat something is, its often too late. Pragmatism suggests removing a declared and active enemy from the board as quickly and decisively as possible, while the resources are available. We'll never know what circumstances could have led to a resurgent Hussein, and I'm glad for that.

Hi gw,

... why doesn't that make you pause and think that perhaps war was the wrong approach?

I thought I made that clear in my post: because I thought leaving Hussein in power was the more dangerous course. In order to change my mind on this subject, I would have to believe that Hussein had become peaceful and not just free of WMD, but also unlikely to stockpile WMD in the future, after the sanctions were dropped -- a born-again non-interventionist. Nothing in either his history, his rhetoric, or his behavior at the time made me think so.

Saddam was no Hitler.

As Mark mentioned earlier, Hitler was no Hitler, so to speak, until his invasion of Poland. The parallel I see with Saddam isn't so much about appeasement, but rather with letting Hitler get progressively stronger and stronger, instead of quashing him while he was weak and overplaying his hand. France could have re-invaded Germany with minimal losses as soon as the Armistice was violated. It would have been trivial, and World War II and all its consequences (the Holocaust, Soviet domination of Europe, etc.) need not have happened at all. Instead, shying away from a small war, France and England got a really, really big one.

In the 80s and then in 1990 he was armed and dangerous (which was partly our own fault), and letting him have Kuwait could have been seen as a parallel to the ill-fated appeasement politics of Chamberlain in the late 1930s, yes.

But we didn't let him have Kuwait. He was repelled and then contained by sanctions.

To me, this is still inadequate, anymore than it would have been adequate to call a truce with Germany as soon as the Wehrmacht was pushed back to Armistice borders. Unless you remove a clearly expansionist dictator, you are only delaying the inevitable.

It's worth pointing out that after Hussein's expulsion from Kuwait, inspections revealed that his nuclear program was much further along than previously thought. We got lucky: he was dumb, and overplayed his hand. Had he actually developed nuclear weapons, as he clearly intended in the 1980s, he'd be untouchable, and could dominate a highly strategic region. The risk of this was far too great, and the consequences unacceptable. Those were the calculations that motivated my support for invading Iraq and removing Hussein from power.

. He was repelled and then contained by sanctions.

Not very well, and the sactions were falling apart, thanks to his sponsors Russia and France. I doubt the sanctions regime would have outlasted Hussein and his two sons. Again, in order to support the status quo, I had to believe that (a) the sanctions were working and Hussein had no WMD programs, despite his games with the UN; and (b) that sanctions could be maintained and remain effective indefinitely. Neither of these seemed likely to me, nor do they now. This is to say nothing of the enormous political costs of the sanctions -- i.e. keeping troops on Saudi soil, al-Jazeera showing dying Iraqi children, etc. -- going on indefinitely. Simply put, sanctions were not a sustainable policy. Which left only one choice of action: remove Hussein from power.

Not the greatest solution, for sure, but what we have at our hands now is potentially even worse.

I don't think it was a solution at all. At best, delaying the inevitable.

As for "potentially even worse," just about anything can lead to something "potentially worse" or "potentially better." Weighing Iraq descends into Somalian chaos vs. Hussein becomes a nuclear power with half the world's oil at his disposal, I'll take the former. (Though obviously I believe we should try to prevent this, out of concerns both practical and moral.)

I believe you were suggesting that al-Sadr might become a new dictator, and pose danger to the world again. That obviously would be bad, but he'd have quite a job putting his power together out of the current chaos, and if he got too rambunctions, he could be dealt with the same way Hussein was. Not very pretty, but a succession of weak dictors is better than one strong, expansionist tyrant.

Well, but isn't that exactly what the neocons were assuring us they were doing? David Thomson keeps talking about his domino theory and the resulting bright future for the still backward Arab world.

Possibly. I'm not real big on describing entire ethnicities as "backward," though I do think that Arab societies (note the plural) have a lot of deep-rooted cultural and structural problems. I also think it's irresponsible and unrealistic to promise that they will become full democracies. Nonetheless, I don't concede your implication that they are too "backward" for democracy -- you could be right, of course, but you are just as likely to be wrong. Anyone who guaranteed success is an irresponsible fool, no doubt; but at least this gives the Iraqis a chance, and I fail to see why they shouldn't have it. (Regardless, having removed Hussein by necessity, we owe them at least an opportunity to put their country right.)

War, torture and humiliation are not exactly the most likely path to a bright future and lasting peace. Is that really so hard to understand?

Torture is absolutely unacceptable, and will lead to nothing but suffering.

But I'd like to know why you think war can't lead to a lasting peace. If anything, history proves that a decisive victory is much likelier to lead to lasting peace than lots of small skirmishes where all sides are roughly even in power.

Whatever the consequences of this invasion, I'm pretty sure there would be no peace or security as long as a Ba'athist dictator who thought nothing of gassing entire villages could be allowed to develop new WMD. Now that he is gone, we still may not get lasting peace, but at least we'll know the civilized world has the advantage in any conflict. Which I'm afraid is the best we can hope for -- we're certainly not going to get anything better through more useless paperwork at the UN.

There's just one problem with your analysis Dan. The realist school never claimed that they were able to improve things in the middle east. The realist school of thought has only and ever attempted to create a reasonable 'cost of doing business' by containment, keeping the lid on things, and perpetuating the status quo through client states. The neocons on the other hand did claim to be able to improve things. While that claim is yet to be judged finally, the initial evidence isn't good or else the Bush team itself wouldn't be running screaming back to realism.

Whatever the proponents of democratic liberalization have to say here, the conclusive evidence of Bush's own policy apparatus - such as it is - is that he's turned to realism. His rhetoric is still that of a visionary Wilsonian progressive stance, but his actual deeds are pragmatically limited in their ambition and scope.

And the problem with the Realist tactic is that when it fails it fails catastrophically, as we saw on 911. Worse it reinforces the conditions and attitudes that create the danger instead of addressing them in any way. Bush to his credit cut the Gordian knot. Whether he has the courage to accept the cost for that is another matter. The jury, I think, is still out.