Someone intelligent and capable would have reached out to the people, to paint them a picture of the way their country and their lives could be and given them a good picture of what that would look like. He would have let others in the country advocate for their alternatives. And after a month or two, a vote would be held over which solution to go with.
In Japan, it’s not so much that MacArthur was wonderful as that the Japanese were pretty willing to go along with it. That MacArthur and his men behaved reasonably certainly fed into that, but just being nice isn’t sufficient to bring people around to your world view.
And in order to go forward, you need to have the support of the people. They need to understand the end-goal and why it’s worth it.
For example, you can’t just tell people to be less racist. That sort of thing is deeply ingrained and you aren’t going to convince people to get over it. But you might be able to convince people to keep their racism to themselves and pass as little of it on to their kids as they can.
But the people need to know, going forward, that that’s the expectation and part and parcel of every other change that is going to happen when they vote. And they need to understand why it is a change that’s being requested and what it has to do with improving the lives of their children.
People aren’t idealistic for themselves, but they can be for the next generation. Someone who had understood that, given a couple of decades to change things, might have been able to accomplish something. But the Iraqis would have had to have been behind it before it would even be worth making the attempt.
It’s pretty likely. The Bush admin and the Pentagon didn’t really see themselves as having to do any nation building in Iraq in the first place. Some planning would’ve been better than none.
Some posters already documented a lot of the problems.
One big reason for the immediate security cluster fuck was a lack of troops. But having 400-500k troops in country wasn’t politically feasible, or sustainable. The “looting” wasn’t just fancy stuff like museum artifacts or weapon caches. Office buildings were stripped to the walls, anything copper was ripped out, loads of files and records went poof, and machines were taken apart piece by piece. A lot of the money spent on reconstruction was fixing the damage done by the lack of security in the aftermath of the invasion.
To take up the slack after dismissing the Iraqi army we rushed the training of new Iraqi troops. They weren’t competent and were riddled with corruption, organized crime, and so on.
Could’ve used the help of the international community a lot more. Bush admin didn’t particularly care for them.
There was widespread Iraqi unemployment and discontent, so we handed out the reconstruction jobs to American contractors. What actual construction was done was often ad hoc, without consulting the Iraqis for what they needed, riddled with waste and corruption and poor planning and a lack of documentation (Who spent what where? What are logbooks?). You would need some over arching organization to manage the oversight of something of this scope instead of a bunch of random agencies working at cross purposes. As far as I know we still don’t have anything like that, so I don’t know how it could’ve been easily changed in the past even if they wanted to.
I’ve forgotten most of the details of the problems with our political solutions, but I remember we seemed intent on crapping on the Sunnis as much as possible.
Entire books have been written on the failures to fight the insurgency. It was years before there was even a coherent counter-insurgency strategy, or until officials admitted it was a popular movement and not just a bunch of dead enders or former regime members. Until then, it was mostly the army playing whack a mole.
Ok, that wasn’t clear to me because the post you were responding to ended with “Democrats deserve criticism for handing Bush such power in the first place. But it’s misleading to say that they voted for the war.” So I (mistakenly) took your post to be suggesting that Democrats in Congress generally did not oppose the war, when about half of them did.
That surprises me, but I don’t have anyone in particular in mind so it might be my faulty memory.
OK. I have great respect for the Democrats who voted NO.
One thing we can be sure of is that if Clinton, Kerry or Edwards had come out against the war, before it started, we’d have heard of it loud and clear during the 2004 campaign.
And who did they use for this counter insurgency?
The shia militias. Led by the man who had organised the El Savadoran Death squads.
It was here that the real sectarian violence started. I firmly believe that before this part of the fuck-up a secular nation of Iraq was still very much possible.
Well, I’ll give you the fact that you said “possible”. so that’s hard to argue with. Possible, yes. Likely, no. Civil Was has been the norm throughout history when nations are being built. I see nothing special about Iraq that would put it outside the norm, and everything that would put squarely inside that norm.
To me it is likely that a civil war would had taken place anyhow, but putting guys like Negroponte and James Steele to “pacify” the region just as they “pacified” Central America did make things worse, it is like to the metaphor a poster made early about knocking down a hornets nest, and then thinking that taking off your clothes in that situation was another good idea after hitting the nest.
A theocratic state is non-democratic by definition, but you can have a democratic state that is not a theocracy but is also non-secular–in which political parties compete to see whose religious vision will govern the country, religious decrees are issued by top government officials, and/or there is little or no freedom of religious practice.
Every country and circumstance is different, but secularism (or at least non-sectarianism) seems to be a significant factor in stability of democracies that have pluralistic populations with competing power bases.
And, again, my larger point is that there are a lot of preconditions to successful stable democracy. They don’t just emerge naturally. They are built up through culture and custom over time. Tunisia, for example, is probably benefiting from its French colonial history and principles of French secularism, toning down somewhat the public’s interest in electing political parties that will implement a distinct view of Sharia law, say, not shared by everyone.
Which was aided and abetted by American guns… or more accurately, the US just stood aside and said tsk tsk, while avowedly sectarian exiles lile Maliki and now Abadi took over and acted as they did. It would be like if the Chinese occupied the US and put the KKK in charge.
I still recall reading about one Iraqi stating that US soldiers started asking people if they were Shia or Sunni, which Saddam’s men never did.
Let’s be clear about what you’re arguing. I think it is that the U.S. was generally supportive of sectarian violence, and it wouldn’t have started in the first place if the U.S. had been a better occupying force. Is that about right?
While Bush was still rattling his sabre before the invasion I watched a professor of Middle East studies explain to anyone who cared to pay attention on C-Span why Iraq was a mess. When pointedly asked about the prospect of invasion she just shook her head and said that she couldn’t comment on that because that wasn’t her thing…and then she couldn’t help herself but to say that it would have to be an enormous effort.
Years later I always remembered that an underpaid professor from some small eastern college knew much more about the situation in Iraq and was better able to assess the military prospect than the Bush Administration.
The one good thing to come of this was that the american people decided not to go to war in Syria. people like John McCain were clamoring to bomb Assad’s army-but people realized that this would mean another Iraq-style (unwinnable, useless) war.
While Iraq, used to dictatorship, would surely have growing pains under a fledgling democracy, the comments in this thread implying that American malfeasance and incompetence had little net effect are way way off the mark. Parts of the documentary make that clear. The insurgency started in response to the foolish disbanding of the Army; the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison caused insurgency to explode. At one point, Sunnis and Shi’ites were united against the U.S. occupation.
Especially amusing in the documentary was a meeting at Camp David. Bush found the discussions of strategy too tedious, and apparently thought the key was to “look into the eyes” of the new Iraqi P.M. Nouri al-Maliki. Unbeknownst to all but a few of his advisors he snuck off from Camp David in the middle of the night and when their conference resumed in the morning joined them with a shit-eating grin by video from Baghdad where he’d looked into Maliki’s eyes. (“The President got a real kick out of this joke he’d played on his cabinet. The only problem was that he’d completely defeated the objective we had, which was discussions within the U.S. team about a new strategy.” And with opposition to the U.S. ocucpation a major theme among Shia, Bush’s public blessing of Maliki was hardly useful.)
Whether or not the US was supportive of secretarian violence is irrelevant (I don’t think they were FWIW) the polices they pursued and implemented, the people they promoted and the manner of their actions meant that it would happen.
It was also full of exiles who knew sweet fuck all about the country circa 2003 and were able to get their own people in positions of power and influence. With the inevitable consequence.
So if the U.S. had selected more inclusive people, there would not have been sectarian violence in post-war Iraq? And that Iraqis would have rallied against AQI rather than having been further provoked against each other?