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| Volume XII, Fall 2005, Number 3 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Understanding Iraq, by William R. Polk. HarperCollins, 2005. 222 pages. $22.95,
hardcover.
Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, by David L. Phillips.
Westview Press, 2005. 292 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
Robert Dreyfuss
National-security writer Rolling Stone and other magazines; author, Devil's Game:
How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt, 2005)
It's comforting to think that, if the Bush administration's senior officials had had William R.
Polk's Understanding Iraq available to them in 2003, perhaps, just perhaps, the entire Iraq misadventure
might have been avoided - thus making David L. Phillips's Losing Iraq unnecessary.
Certainly, there is a link between the administration's failure to understand Iraq and its current,
drawn-out defeat therein. However, it is far more likely that the facile assumptions, rosy scenarios
and misconceptions that guided Washington in planning Operation Iraqi Freedom, if planning is
the right word, would have resisted even the most hard-headed pre-war analyses of Iraq. Indeed,
there is plentiful evidence that they did. Still, we are indebted to these two authors for thoughtful,
well-written and easily digestible accounts of how and why things went so awfully wrong in Iraq.
Though both books are likely to be read mostly by specialists and those with a particular interest in
the region, they both deserve a wider audience.
This is especially true of Polk's primer on Iraq. Its subtitle is "The Whole Sweep of Iraqi
History, from Genghis Khan's Mongols to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the
American Occupation." Polk served as President Kennedy's Middle East adviser, and he has been
involved in U.S. policy in the Arab world as an academic and as a participant for half a century. If I
were planning to invade an Arab country, Polk is probably the first person I'd call. But the Bush
administration launched Project Iraq under its own peculiar Catch-22: If you understood Iraq, if you
had a grasp of its complex realities, you were pretty much against Bush's scheme for war. Therefore,
you were branded untrustworthy, and you were excluded from any role in planning it. As a
result, those left over to do the planning were, by and large, Iraq know-nothings. Needless to say,
Polk - who is retired and living in France - didn't get a call.
Polk's book is a tour de force that takes readers on a wild ride through history. From the
invention of farming in 6000 B.C. to the development of cuneiform and the written word to the
Code of Hammurabi, from the rise of Islam to the golden age of Harun ar-Rashid, he walks us
through the development of Iraq. Bit by bit, he shows us how the mosaic that is Iraq emerged over
time, weathering the devastation wrought by the Mongols and the never-ending Persian-Turkish
war waged on Iraqi soil. But the real lessons for American policy come in the section called "British
Iraq," where the follies of Churchill, Sir Percy Cox and their jolly good colleagues are recounted at
length.
Polk provides a thumbnail history of England's bungling and brutality that ought to be
chillingly instructive for American war managers. The Iraqi insurrection against the British in
midsummer 1920 began at a time when London had 133,000 troops in-country, almost precisely the
same number Washington has there today (though the population of Iraqis was one-seventh what
it is now). During the subsequent resistance battle, the British lost 1,654 killed, just short of the
1,800-plus U.S. service members killed since 2003. Winston Churchill, who drew up Iraq's borders
and who is often credited with knowing something about the region, is revealed by Polk to have
been plagued with a "profound ignorance of Iraqi affairs that has marked high-level discussion of
them ever since." Polk quotes Churchill thus, in a letter to a Colonial Office aide during the Iraqi
revolt:
Let me have a note in about three lines as to [King] Feisal's religious character. Is he a Sunni with
[Shia] sympathies or a [Shii] with Sunni sympathies, or how does he square it? What is [his father]
Hussein? Which is the aristocratic high church and which is the low church? What are the religious
people of Karbala? I always get mixed up between these two.
Someday, no doubt, similar comments from President Bush will turn up in the future presidential
library, if indeed Bush was informed enough to know that Iraq was even so divided among
Sunni and Shia. Polk notes that the ersatz Iraq constitution that the British imposed in 1922 "was
almost exactly copied by the 'constitution' American authorities worked out with their Iraqi
appointees in 2004." He describes how the British built up the Iraqi army as the "arbiter of political
life" in Iraq during the 1930s, and he recounts how British repression in Iraq forced Iraqi nationalism
increasingly to adopt a fundamentalist Shiite cast led by radical clergy. Decades of British
mismanagement are expertly summarized, from crushing the peasantry with debt and taxes through
the bloody suppression of striking oil workers. Then Polk takes readers through the emergence of
"Revolutionary Iraq," showing how Arab and Iraqi nationalisms took root. In just a few pages, he
deftly records the struggle over Iraqi oil, from the earliest conflicts with the British-controlled Iraqi
Petroleum Company in the 1950s to the sudden nationalization of IPC by Saddam Hussein in June
1972. "Nationalization of the IPC was perhaps the most popular move Saddam ever made," writes
Polk. "It is difficult for foreigners, particularly modern Americans, to understand how bitter the
Iraqis were about foreign domination."
All of which brings Polk to the section called "American Iraq," culminating in the regimechanging
war against Saddam. Here, the sorry history of mendacity in recent U.S. Iraq policy is
painfully reported: how Martin Indyk and Samuel Berger used the "highly dubious" report that
Saddam tried to have ex-President Bush assassinated in Kuwait to attack Iraq; how serial fabricators,
including high Kuwaiti officials and Iraq National Congress exiles, misled Americans; and how
neoconservatives (analyzed at length at www.williampolk.com) rushed to war. Just weeks before the
war began, Polk visited Baghdad as a private citizen and met with Tariq Aziz, who cut off Polk's
suggestions about how to avoid war by telling him: "America has long since decided to attack Iraq
and nothing Iraq could do would prevent it." That, we know now, was exactly right.
In Losing Iraq, Phillips takes up where Polk leaves off. Phillips, now ensconced at the Council
on Foreign Relations in New York, was a senior adviser to the State Department during the period
before the outbreak of war in 2003, and he was one of the few U.S. planners who might have
actually known something about Iraq and the Middle East. He provides an insider's view, and he is
often perplexed, outraged, horrified or bemused by the goings-on among the Bush partisans. From
State's "Future of Iraq Project" through the stumblings of, first, Jay Garner and, then, Paul Bremer,
Phillips gives us a detailed account of how America insisted on invading and then losing Iraq.
From the start, Phillips roughly divides the administration into "neocons" and "so-called
Arabists," but he makes it clear that the neoconservatives get most of the blame for messing things
up. He begins his account with a fly-on-the-wall account of a raucous meeting of the Iraqi opposition
in Surrey, England, in September 2002, where a key aide to Vice President Cheney, Samantha
Ravich, is described as running the show. Present is the entire Iraqi National Congress-linked cast
of characters, from the mendacious Ahmad Chalabi to the suave Laith Kubba (who began his
political career "as a youth activist in the Shii Dawa Party") to the sly Kanan Makiya. Phillips does
a particularly good job in demolishing Makiya's holier-than-thou image, portraying him as
neoconservative acolyte of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. "They had finally found an Arab
who … supported Israel," writes Phillips. "In addition, Kanan befriended Cheney, to whom he
remained a confidant during the run-up to war in Iraq." As a proxy for Chalabi, Makiya threatened
to run to Cheney to tattle on U.S. officials, such as Ryan Crocker, who might have tried to break the
INC's lock on the inside track with the Bush administration. In turn, Ravich made sure that Makiya
and the INC were constantly given primacy of place. Phillips's book provides a host of such
details, which give readers an inside grasp of the administration's pre-war machinations. I found it
fascinating and invaluable.
Phillips rather hilariously describes the near-deification of Chalabi by the Pentagon. "Ahmad
Chalabi is like the Prophet Mohammed," one senior Defense official confided to Phillips. "At first
people doubted him, but they came to realize the wisdom of his ways." He ridicules Chalabi for
claiming to have a "vast underground security network" inside Iraq before the war, and throughout
the book the sheer incompetence and effrontery of Chalabi - even as he forges a pact with radicalright
Shiite Islamists and insists "our alliance with Iran is not temporary"- comes through on page
after page. Phillips writes that, airlifted into Iraq by the Defense Department after the fall of
Baghdad, "Chalabi's Free Iraq Forces acted more like Baathist thugs than liberators," looting and
pillaging.
All of the key mistakes by the U.S. occupation in Iraq, especially the radical de-Baathification
effort and the dismantling of the Iraqi military, are painstakingly detailed by Phillips, blow by blow.
"The Bush administration had committed one of the greatest errors in the history of U.S. warfare,"
according to Phillips. "It unnecessarily increased the ranks of its enemies." It is told with a you-arethere
intimacy that is missing from many other accounts of the war and the occupation. (Ultimately,
Phillips was kicked off the Iraq team unceremoniously by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense
for policy.)
An important weakness of the Phillips account is that, by spending so much time on Chalabi,
he neglects to analyze in depth the role of the ultimate (and apparently current) rulers of Iraq, the
Shiite majority, and such men as Ibrahim Jaafari and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim. Phillips doesn't really
explain much about how such fundamentalist Muslim ideologues were seen by U.S. officials before,
during and after the war. And he doesn't really tell us to what extent either the neocons or the
Arabists expected the advocates of Shiite political Islam to prevail. At one point, Phillips says that
he warned that the administration's errors in Iraq "would lead to what the Bush administration
feared most: the emergence of an anti-American Islamic regime in Iraq." But we don't get a sense of
what Phillips - or other government officials - were really thinking about all this.
Both Polk and Phillips are pessimistic in conclusion. "Is Iraq really lost?" asks Phillips. In
answer, he says that America's exit strategy "must be based on a sustainable outcome - not an
arbitrary timetable," and he insists that the United States "must stay engaged." Given the long
history of bungling that he describes, however, the choice may not be up to Washington. The
United States could be forced out of Iraq - that's what happens when countries lose wars - or it
may not be able to resist cutting and running, in other words, declaring victory and leaving. Polk is
more realistic. "The best America might gain, if the process could be drawn out for several years, is
a fig leaf to hide defeat," he writes. "The worst, in a rapid collapse, would be a humiliating evacuation,
as in Vietnam." In the end, Polk holds out a slim hope that internationalization of Iraq, including
an American decision to give up any idea of controlling Iraq's economy and oil output, might
make possible the country's transition to some uneasy stability rather than civil war.
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