If a legitimate attempt had been undertaken to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 war, would that have led to a stable, more prosperous Iraq? There was a coalition provisional authority led by Paul Bremmer, but power was handed back to the Iraqis about a year later. It seems that no real attempt was made to rebuild Iraq during that time. What if the USA had done something similar to what was done in Japan from 1945 through 1949? Douglas MacArthur was essentially the ruler of Japan during that time, and he reformed the Japanese government and wrote their new constitution. He also instituted several other reforms that led to Japan becoming a modern democracy. Would an attempt to rebuild Iraq along those lines, with the effort led by an administrator who had a legitimate interest in rebuild the country the way MacArthur was interested in rebuilding Japan, have met with any success? Given the current conditions in Iraq, it’s hard to see how things could have gone any worse.
As you say, it’s hard to imagine anything worse than what happened.
So, yeah, sure. Some longer-term mentoring, some power-sharing diplomacy to bring in the Kurds and Sunni, better care of the oil infrastructure, and things could have been less awful.
I don’t think anything the U.S. could have done would have made things nice. To really build a working nation would probably have taken ten years of an occupation government and very gradual devolution to autonomy, with the U.S. maintaining a veto even after independence was nominally granted. (“We’ll reduce foreign aid payments if you do that” is a nice informal veto.)
The mideast had deep cultural roots going back over many many centuries, in all its many factions that work against having a peaceful stable government. Any hope of building a stable peaceful government would require at least the passing of all the current generation.
The United States (or whatever other nation-builder) would have to occupy the region for that long, and raise a whole new generation of young-uns trained in the ways of peace. That is, “brainwashed” from birth, as the occupied people would certainly call it. Their whole entrenched culture would have to be suppressed over a 60-year period of “cultural genocide”.
That would never be allowed to happen.
Furthermore, even if that were tried, it wouldn’t work. See next post for my thoughts on that . . .
I think a decent job was possible. There’s no reason Iraq in 2003 was in any worse shape than Japan or Germany in 1945. I’m not saying we could have (or should have tried to) turn Iraq into the United States of Iraq. But I think we could have built a stable country.
I don’t think it would have required a long term American presence either. Once stability was achieved, I think it would have been largely self-sustaining. I think the Iraqis, like most people, would prefer to live in a stable society.
I went to college for a year in Honolulu, where they require Wold History instead of U. S. History. Out of the whole class, ONE lesson really leaped out and stuck with me:
Peoples’ indigenous cultures are really really tenacious!
We studied, among other things, those various medieval empires that evolved, flourished, and died over the centuries. One of them (I forget which … Carolingian? Whatever) made a concerted attempt, over several hundred years, to suppress and exterminate all the regional languages and cultures over a very wide territory that the empire encompassed.
Native languages, native costume, festivals, local religious customs, and so forth, were all suppressed. The culture and language of the central controlling nation was imposed throughout the empire. This went on for several hundred years, over multiple generations.
It still didn’t work. Eventually that empire fell. The peoples in the various regions began to re-assert their independence. The local languages began to reappear, as well as all the local customs, local dress fashions, festivals, etc. Somehow, the people kept the memory of all those things alive and taught their children over many generations. When the empire fell, all that stuff began to come out again.
That’s why it would never work even if we somehow tried the same thing in the modern-day middle east.
How much money did the US throw at reconstruction in Iraq? I thought it was in the tens of billions. How was that not a legitimate attempt?
Because it mostly consisted of recruiting people with no prior experience but plenty of loyalty to ideology to set up an Objectivist’s paradise, and those tens of billions of dollars just…disappeared. Evaporated. Liquidated. Seriously, there were pallets of American greenbacks that simply walked off, with no accountability for what happened to them.
I find most of the comments so far quite baffling.
Iraq was a functioning country. The major problems were the crippling sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, and Saddam’s despotism. Both these problems should have evaporated with the successful invasion. Iraq had a large trained professional class, and organized security forces. Peace and prosperity weren’t guaranteed of course, and great care was needed, but good results should have been achieved. Instead the Bush Administration did almost everything completely wrong.
The immediate problem was security. The U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army, forbade Iraqi security forces from operating, and instructed U.S. soldiers to take no action as factories, museums and records halls were looted. “Freedom is messy” was Rumsfeld’s jovial non sequitur response to that tragedy.
Management of government operations should have been turned over to Iraqis; I think the highly-respected moderate Shi’ite cleric Ali al-Sistani should have been appointed acting chief of state and asked to supervise reconciliation. Instead all the top positions were given to … Americans, with an Iraqi-born ex-pat who’d bamboozled the Bush Administration as liaison. Moreover, the Americans chosen to lead reconstruction were not experienced Middle East hands, but young Republican idealogues. They danced into their offices not with textbooks on Iraq or even the specialty of the department they were to head, but rather writings of Schumpeter (“Creative Destruction”), Ayn Rand, etc. Iraq was deliberately made a laboratory for experimenting with right-wing economic ideas. It was a sickening spectacle.
With the Iraqi economy already in trouble before the invasion, destruction of factories because Rumsfeld thought “freedom needed to be messy” and mismanagment by the country’s leaders – who now didn’t even speak Arabic but got their credentials at Young Republican golf clubs – Iraqi unemployment became an enormous problem. So … America ensured that the much needed work would be awarded to American contractors who hired Americans and other favored non-Iraqi nationalities.
The post-invasion was mismanaged so idiotically that by comparison the decision to invade was merely imbecilic.
I can’t offer a detailed prescription for how the aftermath in Iraq should have bneen handled. But a very good approximation would be to take every single decision of the U.S. authorities and do exactly the opposite.
It’s how the money was spent. I don’t have a cite to back this up, but my guess is that a lot of that money probably ended up in the hands of corrups Iraqi officials rather than for the benefit of the Iraqi people overall. Isn’t that why ISIS was able to succeed in Iraq? The people in the Sunni areas felt that the Shia dominated government wasn’t being run to help their part of Iraq. If the USA had done a better job of selecting a government run for the good of all Iraqi’s instead of corrupt officials like Ahmed Chalabi, I think things might have gone better.
Wasn’t nation building also something that Bush explicit said he wasn’t going to do, and instead they wanted to turn the job of governing back to the Iraqis as quickly as possible? I think an American general with knowledge of the area might have done a better job looking out for the welfare of Iraq as a whole than the Shia dominated government that Iraq actually got.
This is what I was trying to get at in the OP. General MacArthur was highly educated about Japanese society, and expertly managed the reconstruction of that country. What if we had sent someone like him to rebuild Iraq, instead of the Bush and Rumsfeld cronies and corrupt Iraqi politicians we actually got? I think things could have turned out a lot better. Of course I am not an expert in the Middle East, and have no idea who might have had the qualifications to be a modern day MacArthur for the Iraqis, but I assume that if Bush had actually tried, he could have found someone with the proper qualifications.
$9 billion American just…walked away. Nobody STILL knows what happened to it. Bremer’s Provisional Authority was basically the right wing’s fantasy dream of remaking a country run on Randian principles, and we see how it turned out…
One thing that might have helped would have been direct oversight in rebuilding the country rather than contracting everything out to corporations that often proved incompetent and/or wasteful during reconstruction. If you are going to nation-build, have a New Dealer not a noeliberal do it.
One should also never forget that to nation build one should not destroy more than necessary, many have pointed at the big blunder of the disbanding of the Iraqi army and police.
I still wonder how some lessons from history were forgotten so completely, when WWII ended Japanese troops were used by the allies to keep a police and army presence in the nations that the Japanese had conquered, Louis Mountbatten even commanded 35,000 Japanese troops in Indonesia. (It remained a controversial move but it prevented a lot of chaos then.) In Germany Patton also used a good number of former Nazis to organize and rebuild.
Of course eventually those forces were removed or denazified as soon as possible, IMHO to succeed the US should had told no to Chalabi but he was already set for the job of our designated leader, the disaster and his fall from grace eventually prevented him from being our local dictator.
Alas, what we got was an experiment done to see how effective we could be after disbanding the very group that could had keep order. It failed. Add to that mix the willingness to counter the growing insurgency with men that helped develop the death squads in Central America, men like Negroponte and James Steele just made things worse with their “pacification” efforts that only increased sectarianism and eventually led to what we see with ISIS running around.
As fucked up as the post-invasion was, I’m not convinced we could have built an Iraq Nation. Is here any precedent of Sunnis Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds living together, even remotely harmoniously, in a democratic state? Without a strong central government, the country falls apart. What would a strong central government look like without some sort of Strongman in charge?
Well, there’s Iran. Though a smallish Sunni population in a Shia state.
No. iraq was like Yugoslavia, and artificial nation built by external forces (Sykes-Picot 1919). Only a brutal dictator could hold it together. When we removed that dictator, chaos and dissolution were inevitable.
The major difference between Japan and Iraq is obviously that Iraq had been a fragile state for decades before the invasion. It had been ruled corruptly by a minority that rejected political inclusion in favor of applying arrest, torture and death to those who opposed it.
If you wanted to rebuild the Iraqi state into any kind of more modern institution, it necessarily meant tearing down some of that Baathist power base. Did it go to far? Obviously. The security forces should have been reformed instead of disbanded… but that would not have guaranteed that the security forces would have remained functioning. If you went through any military and fired all (or most) of the generals and promoted majors and colonels to to leaders, things would get screwed up to some degree or another.
To put it another way, what had to happen in Iraq was not simply reconstruction of rebuilding things that we bombed, but some degree of revolution because the old institutions just couldn’t work without a reign of terror to support them. And this should have been plainly obvious to anyone who thought about Iraq for more than fifteen seconds before the invasion.
Japan, on the other hand, was nothing like Iran. It was authoritarian, yes, but the legitimacy of the government did not depend on power being centralized in one cabal that would reach out like an octopus to seize power in many other sectors of society. Quite the opposite, Japan was, and still to a significant degree is, a highly interconnected society where the links between the government, heavy industry, finance, and many other sectors are deep… almost too deep. Reconstruction there was more about pointing that whole apparatus in a slightly different direction, as opposed to having to fix the weak and crumbling basis of the entire state.
TLDR: Iraq was too fucked up to fix, just like Syria is today.
I personally have my doubts that Iraqi society was really ready for democracy either; I don’t think it’s something you can generally have imposed on you, unless your society is one that already has the people’s loyalty, and you can set up voting as a sort of civic duty. (i.e. postwar Japan).
I always have had the impression that Iraq was essentially a fiction imposed on a bunch of disparate tribal groups who loosely fell within certain religiously defined boundaries, and the people’s loyalties were to the tribe, the sect, and somewhere third or later, to Iraq. That just won’t work for democratic institutions- there has to be a higher degree of loyalty and faith in the state, the rule of law, and in the democratic process for it to work.
I agree with just about everything you wrote here.
My only disagreement would be that al-Sistani would almost certainly have refused to serve under the Americans, in this or in any other capacity. When Bremer did try to approach him, Sistani famously brushed him off: “You’re American, I’m Iranian,” he said. “Why don’t we let the Iraqis decide how they want to run their country?”
While Iraq was created from three erstwhile Ottoman provinces; Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, the concept of Iraq is a pretty old one, and Mesopotamia as an entity (the land between the Tigris and Euphrates) goes back to the founding of civilisation.
An analogy might be drawn with Italy.