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| Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq , by Larry Diamond. Henry Holt and Company, New York 2005. 335 pp. Notes, Acknowledgments and Index to page 369. $25.00, hardcover.
Michael Rubner
professor of international relations, James Madison College, Michigan State University
In mid-November 2003, Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza Rice, his close friend for nearly 20 years and former academic colleague at Stanford University, asking him to go to Baghdad and help the American occupation authorities bring democracy to Iraq. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of political science and sociology (by courtesy) at Stanford, Diamond thought at the time that the war had been a “strategic miscalculation.” He nevertheless accepted Rice’s invitation because he believed that “if we failed there, Iraq would become what it had not been before the war: a haven for international terrorism and possibly a direct threat to America’s national security.”
Why Iraq might become a base for “international terrorism” and why a post-Saddam Iraq sans weapons of mass destruction could pose a “direct threat” to America’s national security are important questions that are never addressed in this volume. Curiously and ironically, Diamond’s ostensible rationale for going to Iraq is as puzzling and unconvincing as the Bush administration’s justifications for the policies that Diamond so cogently shreds to pieces throughout the volume.
Squandered Victory is essentially two books rolled into one: a personal memoir of a policy insider whose firsthand experiences as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under L. Paul Bremer III in Baghdad serve as a basis for a devastating critique of the overall American policy toward Iraq before, during and after the war. In a memorandum that he prepared for his face-to-face meeting with Rice in mid-December 2003, three weeks before he left for Iraq, Diamond pointed out that the transition plan that had been announced by Bremer in mid-November was problematic because it relied too heavily on the CPA and the Iraqi Governing Council, two bodies regarded by many as lacking legitimacy. Diamond argued that participation in the drafting of the new Iraqi constitution and in the selection of the interim national assembly ought to be broadened. He also maintained that the legitimacy of the transition process would be enhanced by renewed involvement of the United Nations.
A few days later, Diamond sent another memorandum to Rice and Robert Blackwill, her principal assistant for Iraq, in which he stressed the need for a broader inclusion of the Sunnis in the transition. The memo included a prescient warning: “If these Sunni rejectionist forces remain outside the process, they will seek to undermine it through violence.” With one notable exception, these suggestions fell on deaf ears in Washington. Sometime in early January 2004, Paul Bremer was ordered by the White House to cease his adamant opposition to UN involvement in the transition. A short while thereafter, a UN technical mission headed by Lakhdar Brahimi arrived in Baghdad and successfully worked out a compromise proposal with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani regarding the timing and mode of elections of the Transitional National Assembly (TNA).
Upon arrival in the Green Zone, the garrisoned enclave in central Baghdad that served as the headquarters of the CPA, Diamond began advising the Iraqi drafters of the interim constitution. At great personal peril, he also traveled outside the Green Zone and participated in a broad range of activities intended to educate Iraqis about democratic principles and institutions. The campaign to help implant democracy in Iraq included holding seminars with university students, conducting face-to-face dialogues and town meetings, lending assistance to nascent political parties, training and supporting new nongovernmental organizations, and undertaking mass-media campaigns.
Diamond played a prominent role in the vast civic-education campaign that the CAP launched in March 2004 to sell the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the interim constitution, to the Iraqi people. He notes with frustration that, in dialogues with Iraqi opinion leaders in Tikrit, Baghdad, Basra, Nasariyah and Hilla, he found himself explaining American positions regarding transitional procedures that were less democratic than those preferred by his Iraqi interlocutors. For example, while most Iraqis preferred an elected constitution-making body, Bremer insisted on an appointed body. Likewise, while the Iraqis wanted direct elections for local governments, Bremer insisted on “an opaque, convoluted process for choosing an interim government.” Diamond also found it “bizarre, disturbing and politically unwise” that the United States insisted that only a simple majority in the transitional assembly would be able to ratify a treaty, given the two-thirds qualified majority requirement for treaty ratification by the Senate in the American Constitution.
According to Diamond, it was difficult to sell the TAL to the Iraqi public after it received the reluctant endorsement of the Governing Council on March 8, 2004. The document was criticized inter alia because it granted substantial powers to an unelected interim government appointed by the occupying authority, ceded substantial autonomy to the Kurds, was adopted without a meaningful national debate, and could not be easily amended. When Diamond urged Bremer to reopen the dialogue in the Governing Council in order to discuss amendments to the most controversial provisions in the TAL, his advice was ignored.
In early April 2004, as thousands of fighters took part in insurgencies in both the Sunni Triangle and the Shiite South, Diamond tried to convince Bremer that the transition would fail without a vigorous campaign against the militias. He urged that the Mahdi Army under Muqtada al-Sadr be ordered to disband and that their bases and training facilities be seized and dismantled. He further recommended that 5,000 Marines be sent to restore order in the South Central region. Bremer responded that he did not have the troops and that he was not free to act because high-level officials in Washington were averse to a confrontation with Sadr.
Not surprisingly, Diamond left Iraq on April 2, convinced that “someone needed to speak out about the drift in the American posture — the lack of troops, the lack of will, the lack of a clear plan to establish the minimum security necessary for a transition to any kind of decent political order.” Two days later, Sadr declared an all-out war against the American occupation and the totally unprepared CPA.
Squandered Victory contains a long litany of blunders that help explain how and why America’s encounter with Iraq has turned into a hopeless quagmire. Diamond places the blame for the early mistakes on “high officials of the Bush administration — including the president himself — who decided to go to war when we did, in the way we did, with the lack of preparation that has become brutally apparent.” Convinced that American troops would face limited resistance, win a quick victory, and be hailed by one and all as liberators, officials in Bush’s war council refused to consider any alternative options that would have slowed the mad rush to war in early 2003. The decision to invade Iraq was made without any effective plan to secure the peace in the aftermath of the war, a blunder that Diamond characterizes as “criminal negligence,” given the ample warnings about the potential for chaos that the White House had chosen to ignore.
Diamond blames Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for the decision to invade Iraq with a clearly inadequate force of 150,000. That decision reflected Rumsfeld’s mistaken belief that, after the Army’s swift defeat, other Iraqi security institutions would survive and that American forces would be augmented by adequate reinforcements from other countries. Rumsfeld was also averse to involving the armed forces in nation building. With plainly insufficient forces, the United States was unable to prevent the eventual collapse of public order, effectively seal the Iraqi borders to infiltration by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists, and undertake economic, civic and political reconstruction.
The author is also highly critical of Bremer, the civilian administrator of the CPA, whom he aptly describes as “an American viceroy in the tradition of MacArthur in Japan.” Bremer was essentially responsible for turning the American presence in Iraq into a formal and extended occupation, a process that generated strong Iraqi fears that the United States was intent on taking over the country in order to exploit its oil reserves. Diamond is especially critical of Bremer’s decisions in May 2003 to disband the 400,000-strong Iraqi Army and to dismiss from government service some 30,000 to 50,000 senior members of the Baath party. These moves instantly created an unemployed, angry and armed enemy and “purged from public life a broad swath of the existing elite.”
Diamond further laments that, under Bremer’s stewardship, the CPA was severely understaffed and poorly equipped to carry out its mission. He notes with regret, “We never had sufficient expertise on the ground — people who knew the country, its culture and its history, and who could speak its language reasonably well.” Because the CPA lacked enough armored cars and other forms of secure transportation, few civilian employees dared to leave the fortress-like Green Zone, thereby depriving themselves of direct contact with ordinary Iraqis.
The combination of ignorance and isolation reinforced what Diamond regards as the most reprehensible aspects of the American presence in Iraq: arrogance, lack of empathy and an inability to understand why an ever-growing number of Iraqis saw the Americans “not as liberators, but as occupiers, offending their national honor and pride even as we sought, sincerely, to help them.”
On the basis of America’s troubled quest to democratize Iraq, Diamond draws a number of lessons. First, it is impossible to erect a democracy without first securing a state that exercises effective control over the means of violence. Such effort, he notes, requires substantial investment of international resources, delivered in a timely fashion and sustained over a period of five to ten years at a minimum. Diamond further suggests that the U.S. government needs to reorganize itself to deal effectively with post-war reconstruction. Specifically, he proposes to elevate and transform USAID into a cabinet-level department for international development and reconstruction. Lastly, to be successful, future regime transformations from dictatorship to democracy would require an international mandate as well as a strategy that involves the indigenous population in reconstruction of their political, economic and social systems.
One of the apparently unresolved contradictions in Squandered Victory involves the author’s rather optimistic assessment of the prospects for democracy in Iraq. At the outset of the volume, Diamond notes that Iraq currently lacks many of the preconditions identified by a vast body of scholarly literature as necessary for fostering a stable democracy: a reasonable level of prosperity, a strong middle class, relatively high levels of literacy, a productive market economy and a vibrant civil society. He further reminds the reader that Iraq has been torn by long-standing ethnic conflicts among the Kurds, who constitute approximately one-fifth of the population and have sought to maximize their political autonomy; the Shiites, comprising 60 percent of the population; and the Sunnis, a minority that has victimized the others under Baathist rule. In addition, he notes that Iraq had no prior experience with democratic institutions of governance.
Yet, in the final chapter, Diamond argues that Iraq could nevertheless become a democracy if it could meet three preconditions: the political arena must become much more inclusive, a balance of power must be established among the diverse ethnic groups, and Iraqi politicians and political parties must exhibit pragmatism and flexibility. Even if one were to agree with the author’s optimistic assessment that the Sunni groups would be willing to abandon their support for the insurgency in return for a political pact that would secure their most vital interests, it still remains unclear how an effective and fair balance of power can be established and maintained given the vast demographic ethnic imbalances, particularly between the Shiites and the Sunnis. Unfortunately, the other requisite socioeconomic preconditions for a stable democracy that were previously mentioned receive scant attention in the final analysis.
Shortly after returning to the United States in April 2004, Diamond sent a confidential memorandum to Condoleezza Rice in which he outlined several recommendations for containing the insurgency and stabilizing the situation in Iraq. He urged the president to publicly “disavow any long-term military aspirations in Iraq” and to establish a target deadline for withdrawing American forces in order to help assure the Iraqis that the United States had no intent to occupy their country indefinitely. He further stressed the need to formulate and proceed with a plan to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate the militias, and to support moderate, secular Shiites. Lastly, Diamond emphasized the need to reinforce the American military presence in Iraq with “significantly more troops and equipment.”
The memorandum concluded with yet another prescient warning: “If we do not develop soon a coherent counterinsurgency plan combining political and military, Iraqi and international initiatives, we will creep closer and closer to that tipping point, beyond which so many Iraqis sympathize with or join the insurgency that we cannot prevail at any bearable price.” Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Diamond never heard back from either Rice or Ambassador Blackwill.
In recent weeks, President Bush has made it abundantly clear that he is adamantly opposed to withdrawing American forces from Iraq under the duress of a deadline. So far, he has also failed to assure the Iraqi people that the United States has no intention to stay in Iraq indefinitely. On the contrary, by stating that American troops are in Iraq to ensure that it does not become a shelter for terrorists, to train Iraqi forces to defend their own country, and to help ensure that Iraq becomes a constitutional democracy, the president has in essence decreed that the American occupation of Iraq will be both extended and open-ended.
Echoing and supporting Mr. Bush’s stance, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a resolution on December 16, 2005, stating in the most ambiguous language imaginable that U.S. forces would remain in Iraq “only until Iraqi forces can stand up so our forces can stand down, and no longer than required for that purpose.” Without defining the meaning of the term “victory,” the resolution boldly states that “setting an artificial timetable for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq, or immediately terminating their deployment in Iraq and redeploying them elsewhere in the region, is fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory in Iraq” (Naples Daily News, December 16, 2005).
So far, the American-led invasion of Iraq has cost more than $200 billion and has caused the deaths of approximately 2,200 Americans and 30,000 Iraqis. Tragically, a thousand days after the start of the war, one looks in vain for a reasonable plan that would help to stop the senseless bloodshed and extricate America from what Diamond aptly describes as “one of the major overseas blunders in U.S. history.” That is why President Bush and officials on his national security team ought to read Squandered Victory, heed its warnings and carefully consider its prudent recommendations for change.
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