Mea Culpa, Conservative Style: Not good for anyone

It's usually nice to hear "I told you so." I especially love it when a pea cocking desktop warrior like Richard Perle admits he was wrong (see these exerts from a Vanity Fair article). But when good people like David Brooks give up, I start to give in to despair. As an open-minded and intelligent man I always viewed in him the best of America. He is well read without being effete (he loves the NFL and Proust), he has an intuitive understanding of theory but never takes his eyes of the messiness of the real world. Cool, funny and still a complete geek. Basically encompassing the duality and oxymoronic quality that make America so endlessly fascinating and confusing.
If Americans such as he are giving up on Iraq... God save the Iraqis and the whole Middle East because this could get very ugly.
I hate the US military occupation, I hate the Dept of Defense planning bureau, and I hate the cocksure attitude of Pres Bush in front of unspeakable violence and unimpeachable facts.
At the same time I cannot square these attitudes with a push for an immediate American withdrawal. The emerging consensus in the American center seems to be "we opened up a can of worms we didn't understand, we should get out and let them figure it out."
Unfortunately for the Iraqis "figuring it out" means letting fearsome militias roam their streets and kill civilians with impunity. "Figuring it out" means the collapse of even the hope of central authority. "Figuring it out" means a rivalry ridden and unstable Shiite theocracy in south. "Figuring it out" means the Kurdish north being used as a terrorist base against Turkey. "Figuring it out" means setting back al-Anbar (the Sunni Arab west) several centuries with clan warfare, al-Qaeda havens and a medieval and arbitrary justice system.

All of these trends are already on the march in Iraq and the question the American political class has to ask itself is "Is abandoning ordinary Iraqis to these trends the best we can do?"
I believe it's not, I still believe America is better than that (as it turns out I may be a slow learner). But my opinion is irrelevant and more and more of the relevant people think nothing more can be done. The policy papers with bold new ideas have disappeared and been replaced with articles resembling the one below; long excuses on why its OK to let Iraqis (and some foreigners) butcher Iraqis in hope that someday, somebody will take power and provide stability. Saddam 2.0 or even Ho Chi Min 2.0 - anything or anybody is better that this.
Well Iraq is not Vietnam. Today's Iraq is not 1970s Iraq. There is no large politically integrated armed force ready to take over. Iraq today resembles 1990s Somalia and if left to its own devices it will disintegrate, just like Somalia did, and ooze problems into the rest of the region for years to come .




Same Old Demons
By DAVID BROOKS

Policy makers are again considering fundamental changes in our Iraq policy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Kedourie’s essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.”

Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.

“Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine,” Kedourie wrote.

And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution.

Kedourie described “a country riven by obscure and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath.” He observed, “The collapse of the old order had awakened vast cupidities and revived venomous hatreds.”

In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”

The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”

At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.

The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option.

Today Iraq is in much worse shape. The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration. This latest descent was initiated by American blunders, but is exacerbated by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise for the common good, even in the face of self-immolation.

The core problem is the same one Kedourie identified decades ago. Iraq is teetering on the edge of futility. Perhaps a competent occupation could have preserved it as a coherent entity, but now the Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion.

Partitioning the country would be traumatic, so after the election it probably makes sense to make one last effort to hold the place together. Fire Donald Rumsfeld to signal a break with the past. Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad.

But if that does not restore order, if Iraqi ministries remain dysfunctional and the national institutions remain sectarian institutions in disguise, then surely it will be time to accede to reality. It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable — the clan, tribe or sect.

A muscular U.S. military presence will be more necessary than ever, to deter neighboring powers and contain bloodshed. And the goals will remain the same: to nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.

But the boundaries may have to change. The war was an attempt to lift a unified Iraq out of its awful history, but history has proved stubborn. It’s time to adjust the plans to reality.