Larry Diamond, a fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq early this year. He has published an evaluation of the CPA’s work and Iraq’s prospects: Larry Diamond, What Went Wrong in Iraq, Foreign Affairs Sept/Oct 2004.
After coming home for a brief break in April, Diamond was too discouraged over the work of the CPA to return: Stanford expert says Iraq spinning out of control San Francisco Chronicle 04/25/04.
I thought I would take the bullet points of Kerry’s September 1 speech on the Iraq War that I summarized in an earlier post and see what in Diamond’s Foreign Affairs article related to them. The bullet points below in bold are taken in order from that earlier post. The parts in italics are quotes from the Foreign Affairs piece.
* No plan to win the peace
But Washington failed to take such steps [to provide adequate troop strength], for the same reasons it decided to occupy Iraq with a relatively light force: hubris and ideology. Contemptuous of the State Department's regional experts who were seen as too "soft" to remake Iraq, a small group of Pentagon officials ignored the elaborate postwar planning the State Department had overseen through its "Future of Iraq" project, which had anticipated many of the problems that emerged after the invasion. Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners assumed that Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as liberators. With Saddam's military and security apparatus destroyed, the thinking went, Washington could capitalizeon the goodwill by handing the country over to Iraqi expatriates such as Ahmed Chalabi, who would quickly create a new democratic state. Not only would fewer U.S. troops be needed at first, but within a year, the troop levels could drop to a few tens of thousands.
* Not enough troops for a successful occupation/countinsurgency
Many of the original miscalculations made by the Bush administration are well known. But the early blunders have had diffuse, profound, and lasting consequences-some of which are only now becoming clear. The first and foremost of these errors concerned security: the Bush administration was never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq. From the beginning, military experts warned Washington that the task would require, as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress in February 2003, "hundreds of thousands" of troops. For the United States to deploy forces in Iraq at the same ratio to population as NATO had in Bosnia would have required half a million troops. Yet the coalition force level never reached even a third of that figure. (my emphasis) …
In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after the war. But doing so would also have required different kinds of troops, with different rules of engagement. The coalition should have deployed vastly more military police and other troops trained for urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace maintenance and enforcement. Tens of thousands of soldiers with sophisticated monitoring equipment should have been posted along the borders with Syria and Iran to intercept the flows of foreign terrorists, Iranian intelligence agents, money, and weapons. (my emphasis)
* Poor response when insurgency appeared
Even though insufficient forces were deployed to Iraq, much more could have been done with them to build security and contain the forces of disorder before the handoff. Unfortunately, not only did the CPA lack the resources for the job, it also lacked the understanding and organization. The effort to create a new Iraqi police force, for example, withered from haste, inefficiency, poor planning, and sheer incompetence. Newly minted Iraqi cops were rushed onto the job with too little training, insufficient vetting, and shamefully inadequate equipment. Although most had uniforms (of a sort), they lacked cars, radios, and body armor and were often outgunned by the criminals, terrorists, and saboteurs they faced. As vital symbols of the new Iraqi state, the police also quickly became "soft targets" for terrorist attacks, and coalition forces did too little too late to protect them.
* Too few international allies
Part of the problem was that both [CPA administrators] Garner and Bremer never comprehended how Iraqis perceived them. Throughout the occupation, the coalition lacked the linguistic and area expertise necessary to understand Iraqi politics and society, and the few long-time experts present were excluded from the inner circle of decision-making in the CPA. Thus the coalition never grasped, for example, the fact that, although most Iraqis were grateful for having been liberated from a brutal tyranny, their gratitude was mixed with deep suspicion of the United States' real motives (not to mention those of the United Kingdom, a former colonial ruler of Iraq); humiliation that the Iraqis themselves had proved unable to overthrow Saddam; and unrealistic expectations of the postwar administration, which Iraqis expected to quickly deliver them from their problems. Too many Iraqis viewed the invasion not as an international effort but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers, and this evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraq's former overlords. …
The U.S. occupation officials also had a serious legitimacy problem with the international community. Having invaded Iraq without UN Security Council authorization or the support of most other democratic publics in the world, the United States was unable to convince many countries to take a meaningful role in the occupation, something that could have blunted suspicions of the coalition.
Even with that handicap, the UN did establish a fairly significant mission in Baghdad with the arrival on June 2, 2003, of Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of its best, most experienced peace-builders. Despite the UN's questionable reputation in Iraq (a legacy of its involvement with the sanctions program), de Mello and his team were respected by Iraqis and quickly grasped the need for much more substantial Iraqi participation in postwar governance, including the need for the early establishment of an Iraqi interim government.
Unfortunately, the UN's impact on the CPA never extended beyond a few cosmetic changes. This was due in part to the tragic events of August 19, 2003, when terrorists (probably al Qaeda members working with former Baathists) blew up the poorly protected UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing de Mello and more than a dozen other UN staffers and ultimately driving the UN out of Iraq. The attack was one of the worst tragedies the UN has ever suffered as an institution and will shape its thinking about and engagement in conflicts for many years to come.
* Too few Iraqi allies
But June 30 [2004, the deadline for turning over nominal sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government] was viewed skeptically by the Iraqi public, much of which was deeply suspicious of everything the United States said and did. And the plan had a more serious problem. From the very start, Ayatollah Sistani denounced it because the transitional parliament it envisaged would not be directly elected. Most Arab Iraqis (Sunni and Shiite) were unhappy with this element and feared that the caucus system proposed for elections would give far too much initial power to groups (such as the GC and the various local and provincial councils) that the CPA had appointed. To be fair, the problem was a complicated one. When it crafted the plan, the CPA had tried to vet it informally with Sistani through an intermediary. But as often happens when one works through intermediaries, the signals became crossed, and the CPA thought that Sistani had consented-perhaps because the ayatollah (a careful scholar) had not been able to study the plan in writing and so did not grasp the features that would later cause him to denounce it.
In the face of Sistani's criticism, the CPA was initially inclined to move forward anyway, on the theory that one man should not be allowed to veto a process. The GC supported the plan (after all, it would have had a significant role in selecting the caucus participants), as did other Iraqi groups working with the CPA. But a political confrontation over the plan started building in Iraq, and it became clear that the United States could not referee a dispute involving itself.
On this point, see also his discussion of the important Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) and the tensions this brought out between the Shi’a and the Kurds, in particular.
The tension between the Kurds’ aspirations for an independent state (in name or in practice), on the one hand, and the interest in a unified Iraq on the part of the Arab Sunnis and the Shi’a in Iraq as well as most neighboring states hasn’t received a lot of publicity in the US press. But it may be the basis of a much bigger explosion of conflict (i.e., full-blown civil war) as the scheduled January elections approach.
* Failed to insure the most basic civil order and security after the initial combat phase
U.S. troops stood by helplessly, outnumbered and unprepared,as much of Iraq's remaining physical, economic, and institutional infrastructure was systematically looted and sabotaged. And even once it became obvious that the looting was not a one-time breakdown of social order but an elaborately organized, armed, and financed resistance to the U.S. occupation, the Bush administration compounded its initial mistakes by stubbornly refusing to send in more troops. Administration officials repeatedly deluded themselves into believing that the defeat of the insurgency was just around the corner-just as soon as the long, hot summer of 2003 ended, or reconstruction dollars started flowing in and jobs were created, or the political transition began, or Saddam Hussein was captured, or the interim government was inaugurated. As in Vietnam, a turning point always seemed imminent, and Washington refused to grasp the depth of popular disaffection. (my emphasis)
I would note here that Diamond’s statement about the well-financed and organized nature of the post-conquest looting is something that made me curious. Is there evidence that this was planned, organized resistance by Iraqi military and Fedayeen? Or was the organization more in the nature of criminal gangs?
* The situation in Iraq is going badly
It now seems unlikely that the weak and besieged new Iraqi government will have the will or capacity to enforce the demobilization plan. In fact, the new Iraqi state is caught in a Catch-22: to be viable, it must build up its armed forces as rapidly as possible. But the readiest sources of soldiers and police are the most powerful militias, which will probably allow their fighters to join the new military only if their command structures remain intact. Thus, if the fledgling Iraqi state hopes to truly defeat the militias, it may have to go to war with itself. That seems hard to imagine. Yet if Iraq tries to hold elections while the militias remain intact (in one guise or another), the campaign is likely to become a very bloody and undemocratic affair. Candidates will face assassination, weaker political opponents will be run out of town, and the electoral machinery will be hijacked by those with the most guns.
Even if the security situation improves enough to allow elections to go forward on time, Iraq could still get into further trouble if it follows the UN's recommendation and uses a national-list system, apportioning seats in parliament on the basis of nationwide voting, since this would give the big regional and religious parties an added incentive to inflate their numbers through force and fraud. Should that occur, the biggest winners will be the best-armed and most-organized forces-the Kurds in the far north and the Iranian-backed Islamist parties in the Shiite south. The American occupation could wind up paving the way for the "election" of an Iranian-linked Islamist government in Baghdad. …
Because of the failures and shortcomings of the occupation-as well as the intrinsic difficulties that any occupation following Saddam's tyranny was bound to confront-it is going to take a number of years to rebuild the Iraqi state and to construct any kind of viable democratic and constitutional order in Iraq. The post-handover transition is going to be long, and initially very bloody. It is not clear that the country is going to be able to conduct reasonably credible elections by next January. And even if those elections are held in a minimally acceptable fashion, it is hard to imagine that the over-ambitious transition timetable for the remainder of 2005 will be kept. Nevertheless, the end of occupation and the transfer of authority to an interim government on June 28 offered at least a chance for a new beginning. And there is no alternative to this transitional program that does not involve one awful scenario or another: civil war, massive renewed repression, the establishment of a safe haven for terrorist organizations-or quite possibly all three. (my emphasis)
* Bush ignored the best advice on the war
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call for a much larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous promises to give the military "everything" it asked for, that such requests would not be welcome. No officer missed the lesson of General Shinseki, whom the Pentagon rewarded for his public candor by announcing his replacement a year early, making him a lame-duck leader long before his term expired. Officers and soldiers in Iraq were forced to keep their complaints about insufficient manpower and equipment private, even as top political officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) insisted publicly that greater military action was necessary to secure the country.
* Bush and Rummy let Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora
* Kerry would not have gone to war in Iraq when Bush did
* Our troops in Iraq are inadequately supplied
* We need to get realistic about the GWOT (global war on terrorism)
* We need better intelligence on terrorism than Bush’s administration has provided
These last five points are not specifically addressed in Diamond’s Foreign Affairs article, which largely restricts itself to the Iraq War and the work of the CPA.
His article is yet another reminder of the dangers of unilateralism. The Bush Republicans didn’t want to have to bother with allies. But, as Diamond notes, the power fantasies behind this approach have tremendous risks of their own:
The obsession with control was an overarching flaw in the U.S. occupation from start to finish. In any postconflict international intervention, there is always a certain tension between legitimacy and control. Yet for most of the first year of occupation, the U.S. administrationopted for the latter whenever the tradeoff presented itself.
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