Iraq: 'Regime Change' Was Our Downfall

Great Debates
1

It’s funny when you think about it, really. All the assorted war aims and justifications that we argued about four years ago, but it was the least controversial goal, the one effectively hidden in plain sight, that prevented us from a quick, easy exit.

Regime change.

It was never given as the reason we were going to invade, but if we were going to invade, to cleanse Iraq of WMDs and whatever else we were going to do while we were there, then of course we were going to remove Saddam from power.

We argued invasion - yes or no? - every which way. But nobody argued against ‘if invasion, then bye-bye Saddam.’

And nobody in the Administration made more than a passing suggestion, quickly squelched, that we’d simply replace Saddam with some high Ba’athist general who could command the allegiance of the Ba’athist army. Nor was there a lot of debate over whether we should do that. That was perhaps the only sort of ‘regime change’ that would have allowed us to just hand over the keys to someone else, and skedaddle. Yet there was little if any discussion at the time that that option was one the Administration had apparently foreclosed, and what that meant.

So we knew ‘regime change’ would mean American responsibility to oversee a transition to a new government. Didn’t matter whether the new government was ‘one Iraq under Chalabi’ or a representative democracy, or what: we’d have to oversee that transition to a new government that could look out for itself.

We’re still overseeing that transition. The government still can’t run Iraq by itself. That’s why we’re still there, 44 months after ‘Mission Accomplished.’

2

You’re forgetting Ahmad Chalabi, The Man Who Will Never, Ever Be King. He was packaged, anointed, and publicly displayed. Remember him sitting in the special box with Laura at the State of the Union Address? Remember how he was personally ferried into Iraq with a couple hundred armed “bodyguards”? How the tighty righty press fawned over him? A statesman, a secularist, with anti-Saddam credentials as long as your arm.

He was the plan. Pop out Saddam, install Chalabi, and the light sweet crude will flow, and flow, and flow. Shites and Sunnis and Kurds will dance around the Maypole singing “Kumballah”, and a statue of George Bush will grace downtown Iraq, garlanded by flowers…

We were so much older then, we’re younger than that now.

3

Did not! He’s right there in the second-to-last paragraph of the OP.

I mean, who could forget Chalabi? It would be more unforgivable than forgetting Adnan Khashoggi.

True dat, especially the last paragraph.

But wishful thinking aside, we’d have had to prop up Chalabi for awhile too, so we’d still have been in Iraq in the summer of 2003 when things started to go south, and we’d still have been stuck with the responsibility for restoring security to a level where Chalabi could govern.

4

I’m struggling to understand the debate topic. Regime change in Iraq had been the official policy of the US government since Congress passed that resolution in 1998:

What was it exactly that prevented us from a “quick, easy exit”? We didn’t capture Saddam until about 9 months after the invasion. Had we gotten out when the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner was raised, wouldn’t the most likely outcome have been Saddam returning to power?

5

Actually, that was exactly the original plan, as formulated by Colin Powell’s State Department in February 2001 at a secret meeting in Walnut Creek, California; and it was more or less what General Garner was planning to do after the invasion. But the neocons at the Pentagon ended up getting their way, and Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer.

6

Gosh, no.

Saddam Hussein held onto power only by virtue of being the top dog to start with. He was the target of a lot of plots. The precariousness of his position is, in fact, what drove him to invade Kuwait in 1990, and what made him so paranoid and brutal.

Saddam Hussein behind the apparatus of state was a scary thing. Saddam Hussein starting over, not so much; he would not likely have survived another climb to the top, and to be honest I think there’s a good chance he would have taken the opportunity to escape to a place that might have offered him safety, possibly Syria.

7

True dat, but only in 2002 did it become the policy of the U.S. government to change the regime ourselves, as opposed to encouraging an internal coup or whatever.

Oh, and remember that just because it’s in GD, it doesn’t have to be couched as a debate. As the forum description says, “For long-running discussions of the great questions of our time.”

Under what scenario? As we actually played it, even if Saddam had been killed and his body identified the day the statue toppled, there would have been no government to speak of in Iraq but ours; it would have been a monumental act of irresponsibility to just pick up and leave.

But suppose we turned things over to a top general who had the support of the army. We might have had to leave a force of 10,000 or so at our Baghdad Airport base to help knock off Saddam if he resurfaced, but on the whole we could have left the governance of the country to the general.

8

The question about Powell is really, was he ever more than a fig leaf to begin with? And Garner was never given any assets to work with, or any real power, to begin with. Also, Garner was going to hold elections as quickly as possible, so it sounds like Garner was headed in contradictory directions.

9

OK.

OK.

Yes, I agree.

How is that “regime change”? Were there any “top generals who had the support of the army” that weren’t hand picked by Saddam and deeply entrenched in the Ba’athist party? If you read the “regime change” policy I linked to, it talks about the goal of a pluralistic, democratic society in Iraq, not just changing one dictator for another.

10

That said what kind of regime change they wanted. Certainly replacing Saddam with one of his generals would have been regime change, especially after we went out of our way to associate the evil of Saddam’s regime with Saddam and his sons. You know, the rape rooms, the feeding people into giant shredders, all that.

Even today, the wingnuts say that Saddam was far more vicious than your ordinary, run-of-the-mill strongman, and to whatever extent they’re right, the odds are good that Saddam’s successor wouldn’t be as vicious. Also probably not as successful in staying in power, given the length of Saddam’s tenure. And besides, we could probably deal with Saddam’s successor: he’d owe something to us for putting him in power, and we’d want to pretend he was not too terrible, since we put him there.

Presumably, one of the conditions for choosing him would be to do the thorough WMD inspection that Saddam supposedly didn’t let us do pre-war. But you can’t win 'em all. :wink:

11

Well, that’s an interesting idea, but I’m just going to say I disagree. Congress didn’t authorize the use of force in Iraq just so that one of Saddam’s “top generals who had the support of the army” could be installed by us in his stead. I’ll bow out of this thread and see if anyone else has something to add.

12

I’m doubtful, RT. Our record, vis-a-vis installing strongmen, is one of the most shameful facts about American foreign policy over the decades. In short, I believe that if we truly believe in freedom and representative government we shouldn’t be in the habit of installing and supporting people who will deny those things to the people of other nations.

Really, I wholly agree with some of the neo-con goals such as spreading democracy and open governments and such in the world. To believe in them for myself and not believe in them for others is, in my opinion, hypocritical in the extreme. And I hate hypocrisy with every bone in my head.

On the other hand, the neo-cons are, to my mind, so astoundingly naive politically (both overseas and here in the US) that their hopes and plans were doomed. Proper political calculations are required in this sort of thing.

  1. Will the people in the country support democracy or will pent up tensions take some time to wear out. If so how long?
  2. Will the American electorate (not the people!) have the patience to go through that ‘working itself out’ sort of thing?

Those are just two basic political questions that need to be asked before starting this sort of adventure. They should come BEFORE plans for military invasion/occupation planning/choosing of a proconsul/etc. They should come first because without sufficient support from the citizens of the occupied and occupying nations none of the rest will end happily.

Or, in short, they acted on wishes and fucked up.

13

I completely agree. But how likely were we to install someone demonstrably worse than Saddam?

I believe in that too. But I also believe we should act within our capabilities.

The thesis of this thread is that our President’s decision to engage in regime change more complicated than replacing Saddam with a general was what got us sucked into a quagmire. I wasn’t intending to debate the morality or immorality of installing a general in power. Only that, given that we invaded, our decision not to immediately hand power over someone immediately capable of maintaining himself in power, was what directly led to our still being in Iraq all these years later.

But I contended then that even a Saddam is better than a Hobbesian anarchy. Defending that proposition isn’t difficult, given the way things have turned out.

They’re not merely neocon goals; they were liberal goals well before the neocons decided they were pro-democracy after all.

The difference is means. Liberals realize there’s a limit to what we can do militarily. As I said four years ago, if we want to do a military humanitarian intervention, there are better places. In Burma, for instance, there was an elected government waiting to be installed; all we’d have had to do is go in, clear out the junta, and hand it over to Aung San Suu Kyi and the elected parliament. In that case, a military intervention could have restored the political solution the Burmese had chosen for themselves. Or in Darfur, we could have prevented an estimated 300,000 deaths since 2003.

But in Iraq, the most we could realistically do was maintain the no-fly zones, and give what surreptitious help we could to any dissident groups. Or if we were to invade, immediately hand things over to a general whose rule would probably not last nearly as long as Saddam’s.

Me too. But I think you get the idea.

It was far worse than that, really. They didn’t know enough about Iraq to even get to your first question. And of course, Bush didn’t care about the second.

14

My guess is because we hadn’t locked up Iraq’s oil for western petroleum corporations yet. Mebbe Bush will start urging for an immediate withdraw after this bill gets through…

15

We could easily have installed a general who promised free and fair elections in the near future. We might well have gotten a general who would hold elections, and no doubt find himself elected in a landslide. What we wouldn’t have is a true democracy, where the Shia would take over right away. I suspect some degree of brutality would be required to keep the lid on things, but mostly against those we don’t like anyway. If the guy knew what he was doing, we’d have a regime just brutal enough to be stable. If not, we’d have the situation we have now. Maybe in time some sort of power sharing could be worked out. Maybe not.

The situation today is the worst case in this scenario. No matter how many died, they did have elections. :rolleyes:

I do agree with you that Bush et al. were so removed from reality that this scenario was extremely unlikely, and that they would only accept the unrealistic definition of regime change you linked to.