Iraq - Still, In Fact, Going On
- Thread starter padraig (u.s.)
- Start date
I'm a big fan of Newlines. Best essays on the Middle East. Just wish I had time to read them all.Download this report:
A Thousand Hezbollahs: Iraq’s Emerging Militia State - New Lines Institute
This intelligence briefing provides extensive, never before reported details on how Iran-linked Iraqi militias are creating a new order to dominate a strategic region of the country that connects Iraq and Syria.newlinesinstitute.org
Where is he? Do we know?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Either exploring the outer reaches of human consciousness using the superpowers he gets from not drinking, or on a multi-week booze bender, would be my guess.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Incredible. An admission of guilt, or least a mistake? Bizarre, indeed.
shakahislop
Well-known member
started reading a new book about iraq, on the academic side written by an american academic historian. just getting into it but the start of it is a description of saddam hussein, his personality and his actions. pre-2003 iraq is a bit of a mystery so its good, by which i mean it helps me understand what happened later, to fill in the blanks and get a sense of what the US government and foreign policy world had been dealing with with regard to iraq prior to the decision to invade. there's a bit of a psychological interest as well, in the abuse and trauma that saddam experienced in his childhood, and how that would have shaped him.
the thing i still don't understand at all is why they thought they would be able to do it successfully. i mean i get why they believed so strongly that it was important to change the government in iraq, but why they believed they had the ability to do it is still hard to understand, partly given the benefit of hindsight but mostly given that presumably they should have expected to face the insurgency that they did. the 90s and 00s really do seem to have had a pretty different structure of feeling, mood, belief in a certain kind of possibility in the west. i suppose one answer is that they didn't really care if iraq ended up in fragments as long as they were able to reshape the middle east and access to energy resources along with it, but i've never found that convincing.
the thing i still don't understand at all is why they thought they would be able to do it successfully. i mean i get why they believed so strongly that it was important to change the government in iraq, but why they believed they had the ability to do it is still hard to understand, partly given the benefit of hindsight but mostly given that presumably they should have expected to face the insurgency that they did. the 90s and 00s really do seem to have had a pretty different structure of feeling, mood, belief in a certain kind of possibility in the west. i suppose one answer is that they didn't really care if iraq ended up in fragments as long as they were able to reshape the middle east and access to energy resources along with it, but i've never found that convincing.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
it's both an interesting and important question that I feel like I can take a stab at, at least in a historical sense
tldr: hubris and ignorance
I think the basic answer isn't that the neocon clique didn't care - it's that they legitimately thought they would go in and topple Saddam and Iraqis would be so happy and grateful that they'd turn into ersatz Americans complete with a functioning liberal democracy and the Iraqi equivalent of mom (presumably just mom), apple pie and baseball. the planners and executors of the Vietnam War had essentially the same delusion. in both cases that democracy-building was a side effect of the main geopolitical goal - respectively, containing communism and reshaping ME/access to energy resources - but still an important secondary casus belli, if only for the way that Americans need to see themselves. the Romans had a silly and elaborate ritual for basically pretending to openly declare war against an enemy without actually telling the enemy - in their case it was to do with ensuring divine justification, but they're about concocting a narrative by which you tell yourself that you're on the right side, that your goals are not merely to conquer and take.
you'd think Vietnam would've cured American policymakers of this delusion, that everyone wants our way of life if only given the opportunity. especially people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who saw that policymaking and its failures up close as rising natsec apparatchiks. clearly it didn't, so the question becomes, why not? one big reason is a different delusion, that of post-Cold War Pax Americana, the lone superpower, fed by a string of relatively low-cost and "successful" interventions - Panama, Haiti, and of crucially/of course, Iraq I. even failures like Somalia were on too small a scale to disrupt the narrative. this is what you're talking with different "belief in a certain kind of possibility". at the same time you have the conspicuous failure to intervene in Rwanda, which reinforces the argument for "humanitarian" intervention.
another reason that I'm less sure about but suspect and would make sense is lack of true area expertise in the State Dept, another similarity to Vietnam. in that case essentially every area expert on East and Southeast Asia had been purged for reporting honestly on conditions in late 40s China (i.e. the "who lost China?" nonsense) combined with early McCarthyism, people like John Paton Davies, John Fairbank etc, so that when JFK et al were considering war there was no infrastructure of expert knowledge to inform their decisions. you can't just create something like that out of thin air, it takes years of people getting that expertise through graduate training and hands-on experience. in the case of Iraq, American natsec, geared toward USSR etc for so long, only really started focusing on the ME after 9/11. two years isn't nearly long enough. the necons were ill-informed and arrogant enough to not understand their own ignorance.
lastly, the insane, catastrophic decision to impose hardline de-Baathification, the impact of which cannot be overstated. it more or less destroyed any chance of post-invasion Iraq becoming a functional, stable society. my understanding is that was essentially a rogue decision by Wolfowitz, Bremer, etc under the guidance of Rumsfeld - exact responsibility being hard to determine bc everyone hardcore CYA'd as soon as it become clear what an incredibly stupid idea it was, but in any event they didn't consult at all with intelligence or other security people. the fact that they did that will never not blow my mind.
that's my 0.02 anyway. there are other reasons I'm sure but I don't think that's a bad general picture.
craner
Beast of Burden
Archives of Pain: Kanan Makiya and the Politics of Iraq
That’s the hope I still have for Iraq — that it can rediscover its destiny as a richly various and pluralistic society, a meeting ground of all sorts of creeds and groupings. That’…
olivercraner.com
shakahislop
Well-known member
its not the first account i've read about it, maybe the third or fourth, but the panic and paranoia in the white house after 9/11 is quite incredible. its like their sense of what was possible in the world changed and they truly felt that america was under sustained attack by a powerful enemy. one of those states of exception where everything changes and things that were off the table became things that were overnight considered to be genuine threats or acceptable courses of action. believing that al qaeda could realistically bring chemical weapons into the US on a boat and set them off in a city. i suppose its quite a normal reaction to something as unbelievable as 9/11 happening, suddenly you are less confident in your sense of what can happen in the world. but what a profound weakness of personality too for such powerful people to have, to end up with such an inaccurate analysis of what was actually going on.
something happened on a psychological level with the US government i think. part of it was guilt and feeling responsible for not taking al qaeda seriously. it still seems slightly unbelievable but i really think this is why they lashed out at afghanistan, that and bloodlust. and then the us ended up having to spend 20 years figuring out what happened next after that impulse was satisfied.
something happened on a psychological level with the US government i think. part of it was guilt and feeling responsible for not taking al qaeda seriously. it still seems slightly unbelievable but i really think this is why they lashed out at afghanistan, that and bloodlust. and then the us ended up having to spend 20 years figuring out what happened next after that impulse was satisfied.
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shakahislop
Well-known member
“Tenet and Morell conveyed the information to the president day by day in meetings filled with anxiety. Morell would go to sleep in the early evening and get up at 11:30 p.m. to be at work at 12:30 a.m. He would review the threat matrix with colleagues at CIA headquarters. He would then meet Tenet at the Old Executive Office Building and they would walk over to the Oval Office to brief Bush at 8 a.m., often ruminating about whether they would get “hit” that day given the amount of threat reporting they were seeing. The president would then ask about threat number 5 or 6 or 17 or 46.”
sufi
lala
There has been precious little analysis of how participating in the wars in iraq and afg affected US & UK socially and politically in terms of general militarisation and 1,000s of military trained vets on the streets and opportunity costs of spaffing trillions on pointless violence and so on
shakahislop
Well-known member
its something i've noticed for years myself. the way that both those wars drew in all kinds of people. it's not that unusual to bump into people in the UK who have been to afghanistan in one capacity or another. it just went on so long, and there was so much money about. i was sitting on a stupa or something in kathmandu in 2014 and ended up chatting to a nepali geezer about his time in afghanistan as some kind of contractor. those wars really stretched out.
basically think the uk military guys are victims of those wars as well. probably a few people did like it or benefited from it. but they were particularly nasty conflicts to serve in i think. i don't know much about basra but being a uk solider in helmand just looks impossible to me, incredibly tense. and those guys have to deal with that forever. the war does come home in the end in that sense, in that there are as you say thousands of people who went to fight, many of whom are still dealing with that experience i think.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Really enjoying this - although you forgot to mention that the Victory Arch was made in Basingstoke:Archives of Pain: Kanan Makiya and the Politics of Iraq
That’s the hope I still have for Iraq — that it can rediscover its destiny as a richly various and pluralistic society, a meeting ground of all sorts of creeds and groupings. That’…
The Victory Arch – An interview with Joe Preston - Then There Was Us
The Victory Arch and its accompanying parade ground was opened on the 8th of the 8th, 1988 in Baghdad. It was commissioned by Saddam Hussein to commemorate the victory of Iraq over Iran although production began in Britain three years before the supposed victory. Based directly from casts of...
Edit: having read that, the arch itself has quite an interesting story.
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shakahislop
Well-known member
What comes through in this book is how scared and worried the lads making policy were. I'd almost say scarred. 9/11 really made them see monsters everywhere. I hadn't appreciated that they were genuinely worried about al qaeda getting hold of chemical weapons from the Iraqi government, or thier perception of saddam hussein being that that would be the kind of thing he would do.
The other thing that jumps out is the extent to which Bush and Blair saw the world in strong moral terms. That feels impossible now in the anglo world.
The other thing that jumps out is the extent to which Bush and Blair saw the world in strong moral terms. That feels impossible now in the anglo world.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
One thing I find hard to understand is why it wasn't more widely known, among people whose job was (or ought to have been) to know this kind of thing, that beyond their shared antipathy towards America and Israel, there was very little ideological common ground between the Ba'ath regime and AQ, and that bin Laden had quite openly criticised Saddam and his government as 'apostate'. But I suppose if someone is paranoid enough, they will naturally assume that any two of their enemies must be working together against them, even if all the available evidence suggests they hate each other's guts.
shakahislop
Well-known member
i think they knew, or at least, the people whose responsibility it was to know did know that, but that they nonetheless saw a risk there. what the book is saying is that al qaeda was trying to get these kinds of weapons from iraq, and that they didn't know whether saddam hussein would cooperate with them or not. the US government seems to have been really scared of al qaeda in 2002, scared of what they thought they were able to do. which in retrospect was actually not very much after 9/11, not nothing but not anything absolutely huge, if you discount the insurgency in iraq, which is probably best categorised as a different thing from international terrorism.
shakahislop
Well-known member
i think at the time they both really believed that they were doing the right thing, something that was in line with their morality.