The only way would have been an actual occupation with the US army acting as the country’s police force. After doing that for a few years then you could start replacing the army with trained Iraqis to police the country and finally elections once the whole country was pacified.
The problem is that it would have cost alot more both in money and soldier’s lives than the American people would have put up with and would have been too politically unpopular to maintain. The US forces would have been recalled too early and then the civil war would have started just a couple of years later.
The overly pessimistic comments in this thread (from Cheney-Rove apologists who want to pretend that their malice was not to blame?) ignore that
[ul][li] a large majority of Iraqis wanted peace and would be happy to embrace Shi’ites and Sunnis alike as fellow citizens. It is estimated that well over a quarter of Iraqi marriages were mixed marriages between Sunni and Shi’ite.[/li][li] After many decades of existence, Iraqis felt like they were citizens of a uniformed country, Iraq. (I’ll ask those arguing differently why the U.S. hasn’t fractured between Baptists and Presbyterians.)[/li][/ul]
The U.S. or U.N. might have had a role to play early-on, to encourage reconciliation and forgiveness. But the idea that Iraqis couldn’t police themselves seems like racist prattle. Much of the strife that developed initially was caused by U.S. malfeasance and incompetence.
Well, people with genuine insight say the stupidest thing was to disband the army and the de-Ba’athification policy - like they were all Nazis. Ffs, you had to be a Ba’athist to survive.
With the professional middle class utterly gone the country collapsed like a body without a skeleton - just a pile of mess on the floor. And then those same people inevitably turned against you, with everyone else.
The Americans had no idea and they got rid of everyone who did.
Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone because it’s complete nonsense.
Basically, no. Nothing would have worked. We know that Arab Spring was coming (in retrospect), and had we done left Iraq alone it most likely would have devolved eventually into Syria or Libya, especially if Saddam had finally shuffled off which would have happened sooner or later…or when he finally lost his iron grip.
The only thing I can think of that MIGHT have worked is devolution…break Iraq up into fiat sub-states run by the majority locals. At least 3 states, a Kurdistan, a Sunni and a Shia Iraq. This would have had it’s own (massive) headaches, but it’s the only thing I can think of that MIGHT have had any change of working at all. At least we know that the Kurdish part would have worked anyway, and the others might not have devolved into civil war and sectarian violence in the same way it in fact did.
But I think that ‘real nation building’ was a pipe dream in Iraq from the get go, just as it’s been in Afghanistan. We don’t really, even today, understand all of the factions or factors that stress any of these fiat built states or what it really takes to build a stable nation state in that area. I think that nation states can’t be projected from the outside but have to be built from the inside by the people who live there. Fiat constructs such as most of the states in the region are only as stable as the leader and the leaders faction and their ability to impose order on the chaos by any means possible. To give Iraq a Saddam level of stability the US and other allies would have had to resort to Saddam methods to keep a lid on things for the short term, and we wouldn’t and couldn’t (nor shouldn’t) do that. And in the long run it would still all fly apart anyway.
No, YOU’RE wrong.
Ah…a well reasoned and thoughtful rebuttal. 
There absolutely is a reason; Iraq isn’t really a nation. It was a STATE, but one with no clear sense of nationhood. The countries that make up the Middle East are to a large extent drawn up without any regard for who lives there.
Japan and Germany were legitimately nations, filled with people who primarily identified as Japanese or German. Iraq is nothing of the sort and never has been; indeed, one could make a pretty good argument it wasn’t even a single state in 2003, since the Kurdish part of the country was effectively functioning as a separate entity. It was held together by the force wielded by its leader, not any sense of nationhood. One the twine holding it together was cut, that was it.
There was nothing like that in Japan, no internal force pushing Hokkaido away from the rest of the country or anything like that. Nor was there anything like that in Germany; it was cut up because its conquerors chose to do that.
That is bullshit. The 1920 uprising against the British as well as 1942 was informed heavily by Iraqi nationalism.
The general who toppled the monarchy in 1958, General Qassem, was born to a Kudish father and a Shia mother. Intermarriage in Iraq was extremely common.
Iraqi nationalism remained strong even in the first few years after the invasion, it was only after the passage of a few years that it broke on ethnic and secretrain lines.
It’s tough to have a stable country with three big groups with different ethnic and religious identities. The only real way you do it is to hold them together by force or develop a strong sense of secular national identity.
And secular nationalism is a tough task under any conditions. It’s especially tough in a region where it is associated alternately with colonialism and dictatorship, and when that same region is undergoing a religious revival since 1970 or so, and when that same region has extremely limited non-state secular social institutions and history.
It was naive in the extreme to think that America could come in and create those conditions, as many commentators at the time pointed out correctly.
It became fashionable to criticize Bush for the conduct of the occupation because there was such a successful movement to demonize criticism of the war generally and because there was a distinct partisan interest in blaming Bush’s management instead of the bipartisan decision to start the war. But the big fucking mistake was the decision to go to war. The rest was also done really poorly, but Iraq today is probably not much different than it would be if philosopher-kings managed the occupation from 2004 on.
EDIT: AK84 how do you objectively assess the strength of national identity? I’m interested in your contrary view, but I don’t see the events of 1920, 1942, or 1958 really contradicting the narrative I put in this post.
I disagree. Iraq is at least as legitimate a nation as Germany is. Iraq in 2003 had been a united country longer than Germany had in 1945. If Catholic Bavarians and Protestant Prussians could form a country together there’s no reason Shia and Sunnis and Kurds couldn’t.
It’s not the presence of religious divides, it’s the lack of some of the components necessary to have a secular state.
Secularism in Europe didn’t just emerge overnight. It preceded democracy and had deep roots. Where democracy precedes secularism in countries with multiple genuine power bases with different identities, you have big issues. See, e.g., Nigeria.
I guess the thing is, if there was nothing that could be done it exonerates the USA from at least something of what happened; you can say to yourself ‘Bush misled us all but after that there was nothing we could do anyway’.
So, in the end, almost nothing is the fault of the US people - we were just misled is all.
Good grief, it absolutely doesn’t exonerate Bush et al from a gods damned thing. Why would you think this???
eh?
But they didn’t, did they? They were thrown together by Britain.
Germany was united by Germans (and the concept of Germany as a nation precedes its existence as a unified state) and Germans wanted to be citizens of Germany. What we now called Germany was preceded by a number of political arrangements and coalitions called “Germany.” Heck, the Kingdom of Germany was created before William the Conqeror was born. The unification of Germany was something Germans came up with and wanted and did.
There is little similar sentiment in Iraq. Such Iraqi nationalism as has existed has always been subordinate to the concept of ARAB nationalism; it’s on that basis that Shia and Sunni cooperated in the 1920 revolt (which, tellingly, excluded the Kurds, who fought their own rebellion.)
No, this is incorrect to the degree it is hardly worth responding to. The invasion was not justified at all, but after it occurred, it is pure fantasyland thinking to believe that things would have been a lot better if we only tried a little harder.
If you whack a hornet’s nest with a stick, one should be pilloried for doing an extremely stupid thing, but nobody should have any illusions that one wouldn’t have been stung at all if they simply ran a little bit faster.
Yeah, and there were lots of mixed marriages in Sarajevo, too. There is no precedent in the Middle East for a peaceful coming together of ethnic groups after the elimination of a strongman. And civil war is the norm in nation building, not the exception. The US didn’t split between two different religions, but did split, and we had a horribly bloody civil war ourselves. There is nothing racist about thinking civil war is what happens when authoritarian states crumble. We see it happen all over the world. Once in a blue moon you get a Czechoslovakia, but that is very rare.
Pretty much what Ravenman said. Not to be snide, but what part of my reply didn’t you understand?? It seemed pretty clear to me, but obviously to you there is some disconnect.
Yes, we’re all just Cheney-Rove apologists. RickJay, Ravenman, Richard Parker, XT, and me. Big fans, all of us!!