The Mess-o-potamia and The Matryoshka

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

George Bernard Shaw

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

Groucho Marx

March 28, 2006

Dear Friends,

Take your choice: Shaw or Marx. Both have it about right.

As March comes to a close, and we begin Year IV in Mesopotamia, the country finds itself hostage to the appalling bad judgment and flawed leadership of an errant Administration that has fallen short on one too many Constitutional responsibilities.

To paraphrase the question that Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1980, ask yourself: Is the country better off today than it was four years ago? Three years ago? Last year?

Not you, but the country?

By almost any measure, the answer is no.

It’s a lousy place for a great nation to find itself, but here we are and what’s most maddening is that we have only ourselves to blame, that is, if you hold to Shaw’s dictum.

During last Tuesday’s press conference, the President said that decisions about leaving Iraq would be made by “future Presidents and future governments of Iraq,” leaving the distinct impression that his timeline is 2009 and beyond, and that he is fresh out of alternatives that might shorten the American involvement and the country’s entrapment.

"I'm going to make up my mind based upon achieving a victory, not based upon polls, focus groups or election year politics,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

No one asked what victory might look like, of course. That would have been rubbing salt in the wound.

But just for the record, here’s TMR’s perspective, informed by taking Yogi Berra’s counsel: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

“Victory in Iraq” is a fantasy, the possibilities for which vaporized during the weeks and months following the fall of Saddam’s statue, and far too much since then – tactically and strategically -- has sealed that door shut.

Few credible observers would put victory and Iraq together in the same sentence – from recent converts like William F. Buckley, Jr., and lapsed neocon, Francis Fukuyama, to an army of former military brass, ex-GI’s, scholars, practitioners, and citizens of all stripes who long ago understood that victory had become illusory.

Inexplicably, the President and his war cabinet disregarded a body of scholarship that clearly demonstrated the essentiality of providing security in the aftermath of a major conflict and the toppling of a tyrannical government. And worse, when it could have made a difference in the outcome, they failed to marshal the resources of the world’s only superpower to provide that basic security, including the provision of acceptable levels of electricity, clean water, and sewage.

The consequences of that costly, historic set of misjudgments are irremediable, and account for one of the most profound political miscalculations and acts of management negligence of the modern presidency.

As violence escalated, and American and Iraqi casualties spiked, the Administration waged a war at home, engaging in divisive rhetorical combat to rally their political base and to obfuscate the facts on the ground.

In the process, they dug the hole deeper at enormous cost to America and Iraq, despite Saddam’s removal.

Pressure mounted for the President to articulate a vision of victory, a clear, consistent message about the national interest, and a sound metric to define when the U.S. role would conclude.

But, the trouble with this Administration isn’t that it hasn’t had a vision, a message or a metric; it’s that it’s had too many.

And that brings us to Matryoshka:

A Matryoshka doll . . . is a set of dolls of decreasing sizes placed one inside another. A set . . . consists of a wooden figure which can be pulled apart to reveal another figure of the same sort inside. It has in turn another figure inside, and so on. (courtesy, Wikpedia)

For three years, the country has watched as the Bush Administration moved from one doll to the next: another day, another doll; a new reality, a new narrative. Its Iraq strategy could be called the Matryoshka strategy.
.
You’ll recall the first dolls – the WMD doll; the mushroom cloud-and-Niger yellowcake doll; the direct link to Al Qaeda doll; and of course, the Saddam doll.

In May 2003, armed with the Saddam doll, the President landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in that memorable Mission Accomplished moment -- demonstrating just how profoundly off-base the Administration was about the scope and complexity of the task in Iraq.

And then came the dance of the dolls.

Saddam was gone, the Iraqi Army had folded, but something else was looming up on the landscape -- looting.

Explanation?

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said. "They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

“Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said. (CNN.com)

Fatefully, the Administration turned a blind eye to the first rumblings of sectarian violence, seeing instead the kind of juvenile looting that occurs during urban riots or natural disasters here at home.

Out of the ashes of looting came the various factions of sectarian violence that plague Iraq to the present day -- simplistically interpreted and explained as the work of “terrorists” through the forces of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Time for a new doll.

We were fighting in Iraq because it was the central theater in the global war on terror. Here’s the President on September 12th, 2003 before a gathering of troops at Georgia’s, Ft. Stewart:

“Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. All who serve understand what this fight is about. Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places, so that our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in our own cities.”

Prior to 2003, there had been no terrorist attacks in Iraq, but by 2004, Iraq had become a Mecca for terrorist and insurgent activity. So, the objective was to kill them off.

As the kill count went up and violence was visited upon many parts of the country, new facts emerged about the composition of the insurgency – not just al-Zarqawi and his Al Qaeda alliance, but indigenous Sunni’s and disenfranchised Ba’athists, as well as militia factions -- Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, Wolf Brigade, Badr Group, a host of other smaller insurgent organizations, and even Kurdish peshmerga.

So, the bad guys weren’t all the same.

Time for a new doll and a new message.

Now it was time for the Wilsonian narrative: the U.S. was in Iraq to make the Middle East “safe for democracy” – a domino-in-reverse theory, in which Iraq would become the first domino to stand up, followed by others for whom it would serve as the model in the region – Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, even Palestine.

We could spend an entire winter at Davos debating that thesis, but just as soon as a few faint signals of democracy were heard, along came the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, electoral victories for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and a rolling back of some promised reforms, and the continued sectarian violence in Iraq.

And that brings us back to the present, and to the doll du jour – the Victory doll.

In case you missed it, here’s the Administration’s view of how victory will unfold, articulated in its November 2005 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq:

• Short term: Iraq is making steady progress in fighting terrorists, meeting political milestones, building democratic institutions, and standing up security forces;

• Medium term: Iraq is in the lead defeating terrorists and providing its own security, with a fully constitutional government in place, and on its way to achieving its economic potential.

• Longer term: Iraq is peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.

It’s comforting to imagine that Iraq will move through three tidy stages to take its place among the stable democracies of the world, but it is folly or worse to act on that credulous belief. And particularly because it is the prophesy of an Administration that has gotten it wrong on almost every single aspect of this war.

Instead, it recalls Ernest Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises. and an exchange in the closing chapter between the narrator, Jake Barnes, made impotent by a war injury, and the love of his life, Lady Brett Ashley:

"Oh Jake", Brett said," we could have had such a damned good time together."

“Yes . . . Isn't it pretty to think so.”

Victory in Iraq? Pretty to think so. But that doll died a long time ago.

Comments

[Robert G. Schwartz]

Great meeting you today at Haverford. Nice piece of writing! Bob