Tim Lambert linked some prewar Iraq War casualty predictions collected by John Hawkins in early 2003:

If we go into Iraq, how many casualties do you expect to see (on the side of the US and our allies)

John Hawkins: “Probably 300 or less”
Charles Johnson:“Very few”
Henry Hanks: “Less than 200″
Laurence Simon: “A Few hundred”
Rachael Lucas: “Less than three thousand”
Scott Ott: “Dozens”
Glenn Reynolds: “Fewer than 100″
Tim Blair: “Below 50″
Ken Layne: “a few hundred”
Steven Den Beste: “50-150″

Fester and Hilzoy have passed these on as well.  Good fun is had by all.

Having begun blogging only at the end of January 2003, I wasn’t surveyed.  I did, however, predict on February 24 that “victory in Iraq will be swift and relatively bloodless.”  I don’t recall whether I actually blogged my casualty predictions but my internal working estimate was the same as Hawkins’ – 300 or fewer American troops killed.  I figured, basically, that it would be “Desert Storm times two.”

We’re now at something like 4326 American troops dead.

Then again, I wasn’t counting on a multi-year occupation during which we fought against multiple insurgent groups while trying to democratize Iraq.  I presumed, as did Don Rumsfeld and others, that we would topple Saddam Hussein’s government, install an interim government, and elect a permanent government within some short period.

That’s the war I supported and still wish that’s what we’d done.

________________________________________

Digressions:

1. The more interesting finding in Hawkins’ poll is this:

Will a human baby be cloned in 2003?

Yes: John Hawkins, Charles Johnson, Henry Hanks, Laurence Simon, Rachael Lucas, Scott Ott
No: Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair, Ken Layne
N/A: Steven Den Beste

So far as I’m aware, none was cloned in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, or the first half of 2009.  It’s remarkable how excited people were at this prospect.

2.  OTB was a decidedly different blog in the early days.  Few of my posts in February 2003, my first real month of blogging, were as long as the Digressions section of this post.

James Gordon Meek has a very interesting two-part story on how FBI Special Agent George Piro successfully interrogated Saddam Hussein.  Shockingly, it does not involve waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, nudity, or German shephards.

The FBI prides itself on “rapport-based” interrogations that have a high success rate for yielding confessions from the likes of 1993 World trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and CIA headquarters killer Mir Aimal Kasi. There was no “ticking bomb” scenario with Saddam – just inherent political pressure – so the interrogation proceeded carefully and cautiously over months.

The strategy involved executing a subtle emotional attack, digging out Saddam’s soft spots and exploiting them. Prick his ego.

Saddam had revealed little, so far – and neither had Piro – other than stating he remained in Baghdad until the day before his capital fell to American-led forces in April 2003. He said he instructed his henchmen in a final meeting, “We will struggle in secret.” After fleeing Baghdad, he gradually dispersed his bodyguards one by one to avoid drawing Coalition forces’ attention. Saddam had evaded capture for nine months, until U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer made his famous exultation in December 2003: “Ladies and gentleman, we got him!”

Piro asked if Saddam ever used body doubles, as was widely believed. “No, of course not,” he scoffed. “This is movie magic, not reality.”

But as the fourth interrogation began on Feb. 13, Saddam wanted answers from Piro.

“Let me ask a direct question. I want to ask where … has the information been going? For our relationship to remain clear, I want to know,” he demanded. Piro replied that he was a “representative of the U.S. Government” and told Saddam many U.S. officials saw his reports, and that readership “may include the President of the United States.” Saddam seemed pleased, commenting that he did “not mind” if the interviews were published.

Much more of Part 2 at the link. See Part 1 here.

Via Meek’s Counterterrorism Blog post.

Like James Poulos, “I like the Iranian reformers more than I like the mass politics of solidarity by symbolism.”

As such, I’m sympathetic to John Cole in thinking that the rabid coverage of the Iranian election controversy by enthusiastic American bloggers who know next to nothing about Iran is overblown.  (I include myself in the decided non-expert on matters Persian category.) He’s right that many of us got carried away with the “Democracy, whiskey, sexy” bit during the heady days after successfully toppling Saddam Hussein before all hell broke loose in Iraq and that some of that vibe is apparent now.

Cheering from afar is harmless enough and if it makes you feel good to adorn your apparel and websites green, by all means do it.  It’s no less silly than wearing your favorite team’s jersey while you drink beer and watch them on TV.

But revolution isn’t a spectator sport.  Demonstrators are getting killed in Iran in outrage over what they believe was a stolen election.  Sadly, those deaths will likely be in vain, in that the mullahs will continue to rule and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will probably stay president.

The United States will stand by and do nothing.  We’re not going to dispatch our military to affect regime change to support the Green Twitter Revolution, or whatever the hell we’re calling it.  Nor should we.  This is the Iranian people’s fight.

Stacy McCain offers a rejoinder to those of us queasy about the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in his first month in U.S. custody.

Look, we hanged Saddam Hussein and sent the 101st Airborne to kill Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay. What is “waterboarding” compared to violent death?

Who could possibly give a crap about the “rights” of terrorist scumbags like Abu Zubahdah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? Their “rights” would not have been infringed if they had gotten a 9mm slug through their skulls the day they were captured. Excuse me for not being surprised that, having mercifully allowed Abu and Khalid to continue breathing, the CIA doesn’t treat these vermin like guests for Sunday dinner.

He follows with a delightful hypothetical scenario in which President Robert Stacy McCain sends terrorist suspects for some Texas justice while simultaneously working down the national debt.

What surprises me here is Stacy’s absolute confidence in the competence — nay, infallibility — of the federal government.

“South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker tell The Telegraph that they got a signed picture of Saddam Hussein from some Iraq Marines.

During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam, who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the move South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as the boyfriend of Satan. He was also regularly depicted in a similar manner during the TV series.

Question: Does this constitute torture?

President Bush made a surprise farewell visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, suffering the indignity of having an Iraqi journalist hurl his shoes at him but being greeted warmly by American troops.

Sudarsan Raghavan and Dan Eggen for WaPo:

In Iraq, Bush said the conflict “has not been easy” but was necessary for U.S. security, Iraqi stability and “world peace.” He hailed a recently signed but still controversial security pact as a sign of impending victory. “There is still more work to be done. The war is not over,” Bush said, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki next to him. “But with the conclusion of this agreement . . . it is decidedly on its way to being won.”

Just after Bush finished his remarks and said “Thank you” in Arabic, an Iraqi journalist took off his shoes and threw them at Bush, one after the other. Throwing a shoe at someone is considered the worst possible insult in Iraq and is meant to show extreme disrespect and contempt. When U.S. forces helped topple a statue of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein after rolling into Baghdad in April 2003, jubilant Iraqis beat the statue’s face with their shoes.

[...]

Bush was not injured and joked about the incident minutes later: “If you want the facts, it’s a size 10 shoe that he threw. Thank you for your concern; do not worry about it.”

He fared a bit better in his visit to the 18th Airborne Corps (via Jim Hoft):

It’s an odd juxtaposition. The shoe thrower, “identified as Muntadar al-Zaidi, a reporter with the Cairo-based al-Baghdadia television network” was, according to colleagues, “kidnapped by Shiite militiamen last year and later released.” His resentment over the war, then, is understandable; the degree to which it’s representative of Iraqi public opinion is unclear.

American troops, especially those deployed into a hostile fire zone, are going to be thrilled to see their commander-in-chief and their enthusiasm is to be expected. Their unanimity is also, of course, a function of the chain of command, so one shouldn’t read too much into their vote of approval.

It’ll be interesting to see which attitude is more prevalent, say, ten years from now. While falling far short of its original objectives of creating a shining Arab democracy that would create a chain reaction throughout the region, we’re on a path to pull back much of our troop presence and turn security over to the Iraqis. It’s not inconceivable that Bush will be considered a heroic figure at some point in time, despite an invasion which spawned a bloody conflict.

It’s much less likely that Bush’s image will be rehabilitated at home. It’s quite likely that, contrary to what most of us expected even a few months ago, that Iraq will be a footnote to his legacy and the financial crisis — which happened on his watch even if it’s not his fault — will be what he’s remembered for.

Glenn Greenwald notes that Joe Klein has changed his mind in the last five-and-a-half years about President Bush’s now infamous flight suit gambit.

• Now:  “The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.”

• Then: “[T]hat was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day.”

Says Glenn,

People who regret their mistakes and learn from them should be welcomed and encouraged.  But a vital aspect of what happened over the last eight years is the role the media — our leading media stars — played in glorifying and venerating George Bush, and that can’t be re-written or forgotten. Truly learning from one’s mistakes — as opposed to wet-finger-in-the-air abandoment of  previously revered leaders when they are revealed as failures and lose their power — requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment of one’s own role in what happened.

But Klein’s role in Bush donning a flight suit and congratulating the crew of the Lincoln was . . . to watch it happen and give his instant impressions.

At the time, the publicity stunt was almost universally perceived as brilliant political theater.  We had, with the loss of fewer than 200 American troops and in record time, toppled the government of Saddam Hussein and were met by cheers.  Bush’s approval ratings were in the 90s.  Over time, the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner began to seem like a cruel joke, as the mission morphed from regime change to counterinsurgency and stabilization of Iraq.  That mission is still not accomplished all this time later and it has cost an enormous amount of treasure and more blood than anticipated.

Although the war has largely faded from the national consciousness, with some even calling the current stalemate “victory,” Bush’s presidency is almost universally thought a failure.  Even moments of triumph are, through that lens, viewed cynically. Of course, every move Bush ever made was horrendous, all his appointments incompetent buffoons, everything that went wrong his fault, and everything that went right sheer happenstance.  That’s just the nature of the presidency.

None of it, in any event, is Joe Klein’s doing.

German Bundeswehr army soldiers of the ISAF monitor a valley during a mission near Kunduz, Afghanistan on September 26, 2008. (REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch)

Over at New Atlanticist, I discuss “Obama’s Afghanistan Plan,” noting that actually achieving results will prove far more difficult than criticizing the Bush administration.

My main criticism is of his continued harping on catching Osama bin Laden:

[I]t would be ironic indeed if a Democratic successor to Bush seriously made tracking down a single terrorist a high priority.  Outgoing Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean caught a lot of flack when he said that the capture of Saddam Hussein would have little practical impact on our success in Iraq, he turned out to be absolutely right.  Putting bin Laden’s head on a stick — or capturing him and subjecting him to the indignity of an international criminal tribunal — would be enormously satisfying but have approximately zero impact on either stabilizing the region or combatting international terrorism.

The main cause for hope:

The good news, though, is the talk of a “regional approach.”  While it’s just silly to say that the Bush administration is still treating Pakistan and Afghanistan as separate issues, they certainly seemed to do that far too deep into this process.  Certainly, Obama will be much more likely to bring Iran and Syria into the mix.  Whether he can ultimately be successful is another question entirely.  But it’s certainly worth trying.

The bottom line:  “Will Obama make the same mistake as the current president in not setting achievable goals for the mission?”

Saddam’s supply of yellowcake has been secretly sold to a Canadian energy firm and flown safely to Montreal.

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program – a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium – reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” – the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment – was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

[...]

While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called “dirty bomb” – a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material – it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment.

[...]

Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts. Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Daniel De Groot notes that “this uranium a) was not weapons grade and b) was well known to the UN and IAEA and was being stored legally by Saddam’s government. It was legally in Iraq according to international law.” Barbara O’Brien adds, “The critical point is that Saddam Hussein couldn’t do anything with this uranium because he lacked the equipment and technology to enrich it. So it had been sitting around for years in drums sealed by the IAEA. No nuclear program.” Here’s an extensive listings of IAEA Key Findings on Iraq’s Nuclear Program, listing extensively the materials we knew about before the invasion.

I’d add that the key line from the AP report is, “There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991.” So, while Joe Wilson may have lied about many things, the movement of yellowcake from more than a decade before his infamous fact finding trip isn’t evidence of a new one.

The Washington Post has a heartbreaking article which might as well be titled “The More Things Change…” regarding our current “progress” in Fallujah:

[Col. Faisal Ismail al-]Zobaie, 51, knows the nature of the men in black masks. He is a former insurgent. Now, as the police chief, he has turned against the insurgency, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. military showcases Fallujah as a model city where U.S. policies are finally paying off and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the region to promote the rule of law and a variety of nation-building efforts.

But the security that has been achieved here is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown five years ago. Even as they work alongside U.S. forces, Zobaie’s men admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.

In the city’s overcrowded, Iraqi-run jail, located inside a compound that also houses a U.S. military base and U.S. police advisers, detainees were beaten with iron rods, according to the current warden. Many were held for months with no clear evidence or due process. They were deprived of food, medical care and electricity and lived in utter squalor, said detainees, Iraqi police and U.S. military officers, who began to address the problems three weeks ago. Last summer, the warden said, several detainees died of heatstroke.

In Zobaie’s world, to show mercy is to show weakness. In a land where men burn other men alive, harsh tactics are a small price to pay for imposing order, he said.

“We never tortured anybody,” he said. “Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture.”

The article goes on to describe exactly what life is like in Fallujah today:

Fallujah today is sealed off with blast walls and checkpoints. Residents are given permits to enter the city. All visitors and their weapons are registered, and police check every car. The U.S. military has divided the city into nine gated communities, each with its own joint security station staffed by U.S. troops and Iraqi police. It also has been buying the loyalties of former Sunni insurgents, paying them $180 a month to join a neighborhood force that works with the police.

Those tactics have damped down the violence. Shops stay open longer, streets are clogged with traffic, and soccer fields brim with children and young men. But for many residents, Fallujah remains a shadow of its former self. “The city is like a big jail,” said Abu Ahmed, a well-known doctor who asked that his nickname be used because he has treated people who were brutalized by Zobaie’s men.

Zobaie ordered imams at mosques to stop preaching in support of the insurgency and against American troops. The mosques have long been a breeding ground for insurgents. Sheik Abu Abdul Salman, an influential 67-year-old imam, didn’t like Zobaie’s order. “He’s worse than Saddam Hussein,” Salman said.

When Zobaie heard of the remark, his voice rose in anger. “Sometimes people are just saying that I did this, I did that. . . . Okay, I tell them, ‘Where were you when al-Qaeda was running this city?’ “

And the end result that Zobaie is working for?

Zobaie has asked the U.S. officers to help obtain more aid for the city from the regional and central governments. Already, the U.S. military is employing street cleaners, building schools and putting up $9 million worth of solar street lights. But some U.S. officers question why insurgents once determined to kill them have so quickly embraced them.

“Every time they talk to you there’s an agenda,” said Miller, the captain who works closely with Zobaie. “You have to figure out what they want right now. If it is this easy, it begs the question: What are we giving them that we don’t know that we’re giving them?”

What Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq’s current leaders are not strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: “No democracy in Iraq. Ever.”

“When the Americans leave the city,” he said, “I’ll be tougher with the people.”

Read the whole article, because what I’ve left out is the American blase attitude towards life in Fallujah today. Not that I blame them. The military simply lacks the resources and political support to build institutions in Iraq that could one day lead to a more liberal state. So instead, in the name of “security”, we’re building up a totalitarian state in the middle of Iraq. Sure, Zobaie is anti-al-Qaeda, but I’ll bet that Saddam Hussein would have been, too, if we’d paid him enough.

Taking a page from Christopher Hitchens’ book, Jim Henley admits that he was right on the Iraq War.

Predicting ahead of time that a given war is a bad idea isn’t particularly hard, frankly. It’s a bimodal choice (War/No War) and wars are almost always “bad” in some sense that would be defensible down the road even if the political objectives used as justification for the war are achieved. Getting it right for the right reasons, though, is much harder and Henley did that.

His prescription for doing so in future cases, though, is a mixed bag.

War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually. Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime. War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time.

The opener — “War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually.” — is quite right. Because we have an awesome conventional military advantage over any conceivable opponent, too many people think war is an easy call and should be the first best choice for dealing with bad foreign policy situations. It isn’t.

That said, the extreme conclusion — “Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime.” — is unjustified. The United States has never fought a war that couldn’t legitimately be called a “war of choice.” Without having chosen war, however, we would not have achieved our independence, ended slavery, of defeated European fascism. Wars are almost always tragic and they seldom produce a short-term gain that exceeds their toll. Sometimes, though, they’re worthwhile.

Had I known what I know now about Iraq’s WMD program, I wouldn’t have supported the invasion. Democracy promotion is not a reason to chose war. The goals we set out to achieve were worthwhile but the odds of reaching them were so slim that it wouldn’t have been worth the cost in blood and treasure to try. Sometimes, though, longshots pay off and, had we managed to quickly replace Saddam with a stable, democratic government, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.

The pop psychology of “War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying” strikes me as unworthy of the piece. To be sure, the clinical nature of televised high tech warfare can seem too much like an action movie. And it’s easy to cheer when a building thought to contain Saddam Hussein gets hit by a missile. But it’s silly to suggest that we chose wars for the thrill of it.

The closer — “Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time.” — is essentially just a restatement of the opener. Yes, we should be more skeptical of bold claims of quick, easy victories. Yes, we should be more demanding of answers on exit strategies and contingency options. Yes, we should be skeptical of hype and fight against the emotion of the moment.

I’m not absolutely sure that doing those things would have stopped us from going into Iraq five years ago. We had been, as Jim himself was reminding people more than five years ago, in a state of war with Saddam’s regime since August 1990. There was a longstanding, bipartisan consensus that he was a bad actor, trying to development nuclear weapons, and needed to be removed from power. Despite more than a year of public debate leading up to the war, we ultimately concluded, as evidenced by sweeping votes in both Houses of Congress, that war was our best option.

The initial aim of war — the removal of Saddam’s regime — was achieved much more easily than all but the most naive proponents believed. It was the post-”major combat operations” transition phase that went horribly wrong. That might have happened even if we had done everything right, which we decidedly did not. The planning was inadequate, critical decisions were bungled, and the strength and size of the ensuing insurgency grossly underestimated.

None of the failures in the stabilization operation can be attributed to the lust for violence, the sense that war was business as usual, or the manipulation of Karl Rove and company. Mostly, that’s a combination of hubris and the sweet but misguided sense that people everywhere are just like us and that, liberated from their oppressors, they’ll immediately transform into Sweden.

As part of a retrospective commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens admits to having been right all along. He does, however, reject the premise of the question.

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath Party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger’s faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.

If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam Hussein, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favor in our nation’s capital at the precise moment when he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favor until the very moment when he decides to “engulf” his small Kuwaiti neighbor. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam’s regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, “lied into war.” We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him.

This is all true, of course. History isn’t a series of discrete events but an interwoven tapestry of actions and reactions. At the same time, though, it’s rather silly to pretend that things didn’t change dramatically with the decision to invade in 2003.

Regardless, Hitchens argues that, while the reasons for war have been “overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself,” he nonetheless thinks the good has outweighed the bad.

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya’s (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region’s keystone dictatorship.

This is all right so far as it goes. And we can’t know what evils would have occurred had we not entered. But we’re at least partly to blame for those which have happened following our invasion. Tens of thousands of innocents have died. While large numbers of al Qaeda terrorists have been killed, so too have many been recruited; I’m not sure that anyone knows how the balance sheet has come out. And Iraq is in danger of becoming a failed state.

Reconciling this is difficult, as Hitchens admits:

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam’s immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

That’s the question, really. Hitchens is a liberal interventionist rather than a neoconservative but their policy prescriptions amount to the same thing.

I’m very much in the Colin Powell “You broke it, you bought it” school. Given that we toppled Iraq’s regime and set out to create a model Mesopotamian democracy, we’ve got a responsibility to keep trying so long as there’s some hope of success. I disagree, however, that we have a responsibility to attempt to right every wrong that exists around the world.

While there’s no question that there was a humanitarian argument for going to war in Iraq and that it comprised a key element of President Bush’s speeches to the nation and the international community, that wasn’t the argument that carried the day. The nation simply wouldn’t have supported invasion absent the fears of Saddam building of weapons of mass destruction and using them against us or our friends or selling them to our enemies.

In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the U. S.-led and mostly U. S.-conducted invasion of Iraq and removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein, there have been a number of articles in the New York Times and elsewhere that have an odd sort of synergy to them. For example, there’s this interview from the Times of London with a former military officer under Saddam Hussein who continued his fight against the Americans after the fall of Saddam’s government, but changed to fight alongside the Americans when he found Al Qaeda in Iraq to be the greater threat:

“I could not tolerate or accept how they were working [Ed. Al Qaeda in Iraq], so in the end I fled to Syria. I felt quite disappointed with the way that the resistance had become.” After only a week Mr Abdullah returned to Iraq and took his family to Baghdad, where he used his car to work as a taxi driver. Leaving al-Qaeda meant that his life was in constant danger. Twice gunmen tried to shoot him and he was forced to move house four times.

Still opposed to the US military and increasingly against the Shia-led Government of Iraq, Mr Abdullah dreamt of starting up a fresh resistance. But in late 2007 he was approached by two uncles and a cousin who had joined a new security movement, which was established by Sunni Arab tribes who had turned against al-Qaeda in Anbar province, once the heart of the insurgency. The concept – arming local people and charging them with security for their neighbourhood – appealed to Mr Abdullah even though the group’s members, which number at least 90,000, were under the payroll of the US military.

“I started to feel that the Americans were better than the Iraqi Government at that moment. I still look at them as occupiers. My feelings towards them have not changed. But my main concern is to stop the Iraqi people’s suffering,” he said.

Hat tip: Ed Morrissey

You can see a similar sort of thing only in reverse in the writings of Shi’ite Iraqi blogger, Hammorabi. Here’s part of a pretty typical post of his from early 2004:

Thanks to GWB the junior who liberated the Iraqis from Saddam regime and thanks to the Americans who supported that. The coalition soldiers who were killed in Iraq are Iraqi martyrs. This doesn’t mean that we accept occupation but we consider it as liberation and we hope there will be a system to give birth to full democracy, after which the coalition forces will go back to their homes and loved ones safe and with flowers and friendship forever. Iraq will need the American support even after that. We think what happened to Saddam regime is the will of God by the hands of the US and its allies. The new Iraq will be a member in this coalition.

That continued as long as the American forces were seen as the agency of Shi’ite hegemony. When Americans began going after Shi’ite militias as well as Sunni, his tone changed abruptly to what it is now:

In Iraq though the American direct genocide started in 1991 when the war-criminal George W Bush waged its war against Iraq the actual interferences were started many years before that and since the Iran Iraq war when the USA and the West supported that war. Indeed the American genocide is another kind of major Terrorism. Not to forget the genocide of the UN sanction which was lead by the USA which killed at least one million Iraqi children.

From the point of view of at least one American soldier serving in Iraq, the surge is working. Sgt. Anthony Diaz writes:

The efforts being carried out by Iraqis, the coalition and nongovernmental organizations focus on essential services, economic development and reconciliation. Restoring services such as electricity, a dependable sewage system, trash collection, and access to fuels and potable water are at the top of the agenda. Initiatives to bring all of these services to a satisfactory level have met with some success. The local economy has benefited from the lull in violence. Market areas that were once desolate are teeming with life, consumers are out and shops are open. Coalition initiatives to develop local market councils and provide micro-grants and micro-loans to small-business owners are providing a much-needed economic spark to Baghdad’s neighborhoods.

The troop surge has contributed more soldiers to this small but critical area of Baghdad. But the building of the Adhamiyah wall, coupled with the sea change in the population’s attitude toward the coalition, also contributed greatly to the decline in violence. And our squadron’s ability to capitalize on these changes has been equally powerful. Building a local security force has been a slow, painful process. The people’s change in attitude toward the coalition has led to more citizens providing soldiers with information on crime suspects and potential locations of roadside explosives and weapons caches. All these things have shaped the successes we are seeing daily.

[…]

Even the Iraqi army has taken a turn for the better here. Not long ago its troops were seen as an obstacle to reconciliation and were accused of arresting locals without evidence, only to request ransoms for their release. There are still occasional incidents of graft and abuse, but now Iraqi troops provide security and make efforts to build rapport with the populace.

Contrariwise, at Democrats,com Bob Fertik writes:

March 19 marks the 5th Anniversary of Bush’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq – yet there is no end in sight.

The costs so far are staggering: 4,000 young Americans killed, tens of thousands maimed… 1 million Iraqis killed, millions maimed… $562 billion in tax dollars stolen from our children… $3 trillion cost to our economy through veterans care, weapons replacement, higher oil prices, and the collapsing dollar. All that in just 5 years!

We elected a Democratic Congress in 2006 to bring our troops home, but they keep giving Bush blank checks. Incredibly, Congress will soon vote on another $102 billion blank check.

Yesterday the New York Times published a collection of reflections from nine notables, a number of whom were substantially involved in the decision-making that’s brought us to where we are now. They’re short and well worth reading. John Cole’s reaction to these short pieces was so intemperate I won’t quote it here. The finger-pointing self-pitying tone of many of the pieces got my Irish up (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!) and I summarized the entire collection as “Who Knew?” To his credit (and virtually alone in this respect) Anthony Cordesman accepts some of the blame for the poor analysis on the part of the experts on Iraq.

There’s a point that I think we really need to get our minds around: we’re going to have troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Sens. Clinton, McCain, and Obama are all running on that. Check the current deployment to Iraq. The current number of U. S. troops in Iraq is roughly 160,000 and it’s my understanding that includes about 20 combat brigades. President Bush has already announced plans to withdraw about a brigade per month (it’s what’s logistically required).

If Sen. Obama becomes president in 2009 and holds firm to his plan to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq (not necessarily what will happen as Samantha Power got in part of her hot water for noting), he’ll be following President Bush’s plan, showing the same talent for putting lipstick on a pig that President Clinton had, baptizing a policy that he’s opposed rhetorically, claiming it as his own, and announcing a transformative breakthrough. At the end of the withdrawals we’ll still have 60,000 to 80,000 troops in Iraq.

The picture at right, of Iraqi President Talabani Prime Minister Maliki and Iranian President Ahmadinejad, was taken on President Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Iraq, the first ever by an Irenian leader:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailed a new era in relations with neighbouring Iraq as he began the first visit by an Iranian leader to Baghdad yesterday.

His presence, intensely controversial among many Iraqis, marks a watershed in relations between the two countries, which fought an eight-year war in the 1980s that left as many as one million dead.

“This is a new page in the history of the relations between the two countries,” Mr Ahmadinejad – who fought in the Iran-Iraq war himself – told a joint news conference with Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president.

“We have the same understanding of things and the two parties are determined to strengthen their political, economic and cultural co-operation,” said the Iranian president.

He expressed his delight at being able to visit Iraq now that Saddam Hussein, Iran’s arch-foe, had been deposed.

“A visit to Iraq without the dictator is a truly happy one,” he said.

The picture and the visit have caused quite a bit of comment in various sectors of the American political blogosphere and the commentariat, generally, with some bloggers who favor an immediate withdrawal of our forces from Iraq pointing to the state visit and chortling and some who believe our troops should stay expressing dismay.

I know that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons (I think that’s the most likely explanation for their behavior myself).

I know that Iran has been accused of, at the least, supplying those who are setting shaped charge IED’s that are killing American soldiers.

But I honestly don’t see grounds for either cries of vindication or chagrin.

The nominal leader of the largest Shi’ite majority country in the world is paying an historic state visit to the second largest Shi’ite majority country in a part of the world in which tribal, ethnic, and sectarian bonds are as important as or more important than national or ideological allegiances. The countries share a long border and closer ties would benefit the people of both countries and trade in both countries. The countries share any number of interests including large Kurdish minorities.

I think an official state visit is better than lobbing bombs or poison gas at each other as they did in the 1980’s. And then there’s the quip “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” (attributed variously to Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli but which seems to have been original to Mario Puzo).

Perhaps someone can explain it to me. Why is this a bad thing?

I’d like to bring an article in the Hoover Institutions’s publication, Policy Review, A Moral Core for U.S. Foreign Policy by Derek Chollet and Tod Lindberg, to your attention. In the article the authors note that

…after two successive presidents of opposite political parties (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) have argued that spreading American values is itself a vital interest, there is growing skepticism in many quarters about whether trying to do so is worth significant costs, or even a true interest of the United States at all. Facts matter, and after several difficult years of pursuing a foreign policy framed as a fight for American values, more are wondering whether the sacrifice is worth it.

It’s an idea that cuts across the political spectrum from Left to Right. For Democrats although political opposition to President Bush is certainly one of the factors informing a reexamination of “spreading American values” as an important factor in U. S. foreign policy, it isn’t the only factor.

But liberal skepticism is more than structural or institutional — it is also internal to the debates among different camps within liberal politics. The history of the past seven years — and the consequences of a policy perceived as driven more by values than interests — has been sobering for a number of left-leaning members of the foreign policy establishment. Many supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the same reasons that they supported confronting Saddam Hussein during the Clinton years. And many applauded President Bush when he talked about the importance of democracy promotion. Yet now that the costs of such policies are apparent — whether in terms of political capital, U.S. global prestige, or blood and treasure — many in the foreign policy elite have become more cautious, scaling back ambitions and endorsing more realistic goals.

And it isn’t only the political opponents of George W. Bush who are reexamining the policy but members of his own party as well:

Six years later, neoconservatives again find themselves largely on the outside looking in as many mainstream Republicans seek a return to the kinds of policies then-Governor Bush articulated during the 2000 presidential campaign: a foreign policy based on humility, skepticism about the United States ’ interests in “nation-building,” and the limited applicability of American values to regions like the Middle East.

The article then enters into an extended examination of the hypothetical foreign policy of “Acirema”, the world’s dominant military power, based solely on national interest narrowly construed. Touchstones of our current policy including alliances, our relationship with Israel, nuclear defense policy are examined in turn:

Disband NATO, abandon Israel, destabilize China, welcome wars when useful, disregard genocide, and wage preemptive nuclear war? While such views are consistently found in certain small segments of the political spectrum, there is, thankfully, no plausible passageway from America to Acirema.

and they find the notions of a values-free foreign policy alien to our national character:

But the United States was founded not as a “values-free” rational calculator of what’s good for No. 1, but as a nation embodying certain values or principles that justified rebellion against its lawful sovereign. While, to this day, the United States has been accused (often with justification) of failing to live up to the values of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has never been able to or seriously attempted to expunge those values from all consideration in the conduct of domestic or foreign policy.

The bulk of the rest of the article consists of a discussion of what values a revitalized American foreign policy that’s cognizant of American values might include

• Standing against the conquest of territory by force.
• Defending liberal regimes.
• Promoting liberal governance.
• Balancing prudential considerations and principle.
• Enforcing the “responsibility to protect.”
• Addressing global hardship.
• Strengthening alliances and institutions.

It’s less than a week before “Super Tuesday”, when an enormous proportion of the delegates of both parties who will be voting to decide the presidential candidates of the two major parties will be elected themselves. In the seemingly interminable campaign season, the principles underlying our foreign policy bid fair to be overwhelmed by the policy details being presented in stump speeches.

Withdraw from Iraq? Increase the size of our military? Increase the strength of our alliances? Bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians? All of these are specific action items that might be undertaken in a foreign policy rather than constituting a policy themselves. Action items like this and the policy that drives them ideally should spring from a coherent national consensus. Take a look at this article and, whether you agree with it enthusiastically or disagree with it vehemently, I’m sure you’ll take away something useful in forming your own views of what direction our foreign policy should be moving in.