Bunch of closet Republicans the lot of you! (ETA: Now, he probably DOES think I am, so you should probably not put me in that list)
To be charitable to up_the_junction, I believe the point was that the Bush administration is often criticized on two grounds: one, they launched an unnecessary and misguided war; two, afterward they handled nation-building incompetently.
If, however, there was no realistic way the Bush administration could have handled the nation-building part more competently–the topic of this thread–then according to up_the_junction the two criticisms ought to just collapse into the first one.
I’m not saying I agree with this point of view–nation-building in Iraq was never going to be a shining success, but nor did it have to be bungled quite so badly–but that’s what I believe he, or she, is saying.
Well, here’s the thing. I think that there is nothing the US could realistically have done to do ‘real nation building’ wrt Iraq. I think that the best thing we could have done (besides the obvious ‘stay the fuck out’ of course) would have been to split the country up and give regional autonomy, basically devolving Iraq in the process…and I think THAT would have been a failure as well. However, what Bush et al did was a TOTAL cluster fuck, IMHO. There are degrees of how fucked up the situation could or would have been, and assuming any other president was idiotic enough to launch the invasion that doesn’t necessarily correlate to the total fuckup we got…which is squarely, 100% on Bush’s shoulders.
So, I think that you can acknowledge that the US couldn’t have built a viable nation (singular) out of Iraq regardless while maintaining the blame for the fuckup we got on Bush and his merry men. I grant that MMV, but I think up_the_junction, assuming that’s his point after cryptic one word or one liners that don’t really say anything really meant what you said, is basically wrong.
Sure, but how many years did it take the various people of Italy to start thinking of themselves as being Italians first and say… Piedmontese second, as opposed to vice-versa?
Richard Parker’s saying the same thing I’m trying to say, but better. Essentially unless the concept of Iraq as a secular state had the support and loyalty of the people, democracy was more or less bound to fail- the minority groups would always try and break off, instead of playing within the system.
This is complete speculation on my part but I think there’s a big reason why you can’t compare Japan or Germany after WW2 to Iraq. Simply put, the Japanese knew they were beaten, they knew their own system was wrong, we not only blamed their rulers but we blamed their people, culture, everything. They had an incentive to change. “Be less like old Japan because they were shits”.
In Iraq, we came in to free the people on a humanitarian mission, so to speak. We said Saddam was bad, but the people were good. Once beaten, what motivation to change their habits do ordinary Iraqis have? Most could just say they weren’t part of the system, that they were oppressed by it, and go on pretending they weren’t the problem. With this mindset, there was no way the US or anyone was going to convince them to change.
The only way nation building would have worked was if we went into Iraq, destroyed everything, told them their whole country and people were rotten to the core, and we were going to come in and remake them. We’d have to close the borders to make sure terrorists and Iranian influence doesn’t get in (unlike in Japan who wasn’t surrounded by friendlies desperate to keep Japanese influence alive).
I’m not seeing any nation coming out of that except maybe one that looks like North Korea. Can you fill in some of the details of how you get from “you are all rotten to the core” to “I’d like to buy the world a coke”?
This is the spin the Democrats have used. Since 40% of house democrats and 58% of Senate Democrats, including Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, and Biden, voted for the war then the fault could not be in the decision to go to war but rather the bungled occupation.
No. Just a bunch of people who have a rather poor understanding of the region and its complexities.
Lets just to clear up some issue here.
- The name Iraq was well attested from since the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia (and probably existed even before that). Its basically the name for the region South and East of Anatolia and between the Tigris and Euphrates.
- The idea that there was no sense of “Iraqiness” is also false. The idea of a region between the two great rivers has existed since the dawn of civilisation. That pride has existed aomgst the people there for millenia and still exists. Which is why the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown by a Kurd. Which is why the nominally Sunni Saddam, lionised the Kurd, Salahuddin.
Which is also why tens of thousands of Shias, fought for Iraq against, Shia Iran.
- Of course the US did in fact promote avowedly secretarian people in its time in Iraq, former exiles like Maliki.
My thesis is that a sense of Iraqiness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a stable democratic state combining multiple powerful groups with diverging ethnic and religious identities.
That sense also has to be secular, co-extensive with the nation-state (more or less), and supported by the other preconditions for secular (or at least pluralistic) democracy. I am indeed a rank amateur, as you point out, but to my understanding Iraqi national identity is not exactly co-extensive with modern Iraq and not exactly secular or pluralistic. But even if were both of those, the really key factor is the third one: other preconditions for secular (or at least pluralistic) democracy. Egypt doesn’t have that, which is a big reason why democracy there failed miserably, and they are much more homogeneous than Iraq. Turkey has it, barely, and benefits from strengths of national identity and history of secularism. Tunisia is probably right on the cusp of having it–I’d say they have a 50/50 shot of stable democracy over the next decade. I don’t think Iraq is even close to Tunisia on that measure, much less Turkey.
But I could also be completely wrong, and would appreciate further education.
I’m not sure what you mean by secularism. By most definitions, Iraq was a secular state under Saddam.
I think we can all agree on this: regardless of whether or not success was possible, there certainly could have been a better attempt made.
It’s easy to have a secular non-democratic state. You just need one guy with a bunch of guns. It’s much harder to have a secular democratic state. That takes secular nationalism and the various preconditions in civil society that support and stabilize such an effort.
But even more than secular/non-secular, the real issue is that stable democracy is hard. Most of the world hasn’t really figured it out. It’s much more fragile than we sometimes think of it. And the notion that we’d just waltz into Iraq and set it up was completely ignorant about how stable democracies develop.
A few years previously a more senior Bush led an invasion of Iraq and decided that the best strategy following the defeat of the Iraqi army was NOT to depose Saddam. Instead the US imposed controls on Saddams ability to wage war by rigorous economic sanctions and no-fly zones.
Yet a few years later Bush junior launches another invasion after deciding that Saddam must be responsible for 9/11 and is therefore a threat to the US and its allies. He is advised that following the defeat of the Iraqi army, its leadership should be disbanded and the country should be re-built in the image of modern democracy.
Had the geopolitics of the Middle East changed so dramatically in the years between the first and second Gulf wars for this radical new strategy was to be regarded as wise council?
What had changed rather suddenly following 9/11 was the political balance within the US itself. This gave the opportunity for a group of neo-conservatives to get their hands on the US national budget and embark on a hugely expensive War on Terror. Much of that spending would benefit the business interests of those same neo-cons. It was the excuse they needed to raid the cookie-jar.
This sort of thing happens from time to time in the US. The War on Drugs, War on Terror. I guess the next one will be a War in Cyberspace or something like that and the US will probably make another huge blunder that will sow chaos across the world while benefitting some self-interested political cabal within the US.
It could be so different.
Voting for the AUMF in 2002 was not an unconditional vote for war. It was a vote to authorize war if Pres. Bush determined that there was no other course available, which in light of what Hans Blix was telling him in early 2003 he could not possibly have determined in good faith.
Democrats deserve criticism for handing Bush such power in the first place. But it’s misleading to say that they voted for the war.
Yeah, that’s why so many of them protested so strongly when Bush did invade, or as the invasion became inevitable (ie, Feb and Early Mar in '03). Oh wait, not a single one of them did. Had they uttered a peep, I’d let them off the hook. As they didn’t, I think it’s perfectly fair to say they voted for the war.
Eh. That sense of “Iraqiness”, such as it was, didn’t count for shit. The Kurds, at 20% of the population certainly wanted and want their own homeland. And the Shiites started forming their own militias from the git-go. After decades of autocratic rule, it’s no wonder the Shiites wanted revenge against the Sunni Arabs. Same thing is going on in reverse in Syria.
Well, that’s a little misleading.
Twenty-one Democratic Senators and no Republican Senators voted against the AUMF. One hundred and twenty-six Democratic representatives (and 6 Republicans) voted against it. Democrats were essentially split down the middle and Republicans were united in favor.
I take your point to be that among the half of the Democrats who did support the war, most of them didn’t flip to opposing it until after things went sour in 2004-2005. I think that’s right (although I believe a handful of those who voted for the AUMF did say they did not support the invasion when it happened, at the time it happened).
Count me as one who thinks there is an Iraqi nationality. But then, what does that really mean? We can take most any country, and odds are very high that people will unite to fight an invader.
So, was the Iraqi sense of unity great enough to stop what basically amounted to ethnic cleansing of Iraqi cities? Sadly, no.
I don’ think it’s misleading, and to nit pick, one Republican Senator (Chaffee) voted against. I was specifically speaking of the Democratic Senators who voted for the AUMF. Yes, many voted against. Many principled Democrats, like Russ Feingold, not only voted against, but argued passionately against giving the president a black check. If you haven’t read his Senate speech leading up the vote, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.
So…
I don’t fully understand what you are saying. I’m sure there are Democrats who voted for the AUMF and who, once things went bad, claimed to have been against the invasion from the beginning. But I’ve searched and I can’t find anything from any of them in the run up to the war that said: * Hey, wait a minute. We voted for the AUMF to get the inspectors back in. Give them more time before you send in the bombs.*
Now, maybe I just didn’t look hard enough, but if there is any Senator who did that, then I’m happy to say the didn’t vote for the war. But Hillary and Kerry and Edwards and all the high profile Democrats who voted for the AUMF, I’m 99.9% certain they didn’t make a peep once the invasion was set to go.
Having said that, it’s still Bush’s war. He (and his administration) are the sine qua non of the Iraq War. It was their idea, and they pushed for it. But… many Democratic Senators voted for it. And those that did don’t get off so easily as saying, “well I didn’t vote for war”. The die was cast the day the vote happened. The only thing that would’ve stopped it was SH surrendering, and even then we’d probably have sent in troops to “stabilize” the region.
The point was that Japan and Germany were utterly beaten. We not only beat their governments, but we basically said their people were wrong and their country belonged to us now. We didn’t go in pretending like we were liberating the Japanese people from their evil emperor, we said their government needed to be remade. We didn’t turn over their government to friendly factions, we assumed full control over them. And most importantly, I think the difference was that we didn’t try to separate their government from their people.
If we had gone into Iraq and said that it was a bad country, that Saddam ruled a nation of murderers, and that we were going to destroy the government and take it over for a decade, instead of the half-assed way we tried, things would be more akin to post WW2. Don’t know if it would have worked out better, but it would have been closer to what we tried in the past