Gauging Success of Failure in Iraq

To decide whether something was successful or not, one needs to understand the objectives it was supposed to accomplish. A continuing problem in historical analysis is that objectives are often multiple, vague, or equivocal, while apologists sometimes seek to modify the objectives after the fact. For example, the United States lost the War of 1812, and lost it decisively, in terms of the original objectives of the War Hawks, such as Henry Clay, who wanted to annex Canada. One of the results of the Treaty of Ghent was the end of impressment of sailors from American ships. So, after the war, publicists spread the notion that our objective had been to end impressment, and we had. Ipso facto, we won the war! In fact, the British had agreed to terminate the Orders in Council authorizing impressment before they received word of the American declaration of war.

That sort of equivocation has consequences. Because American history texts tended to go along with the notion that we had won the War of 1812, the Richard Nixon’s assertion that he refused to be the first U.S. President to lose a war had some credibility. In fact, Jemmie Madison was the first U.S. President to lose a war (and, one might argue, Jefferson Davis was the second), so Mr. Nixon’s point wasn’t as valid as he liked to think. Valid or not, it did help to prolong the Vietnam war. In one of the great cases of such equivocation, assertions by right-wing German politicians that the German army had won World War I, and that victory had been given away by left-wing (Jewish) politicians, led to the rise of Hitler.

In the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Steve Simon’s article “The Price of the Surge: How U.S. Strategy Is Hastening Iraq’s Demise,” is ostensibly a straightforward critique of the infusion of additional U.S. soldiers into Iraq in 2007-2008. In reality, Mr. Simon is establishing a basis for blaming the “loss” of the war in Iraq on the surge. Because of the way the surge has developed, Simon asserts, its successes are largely due to the “bottom-up” developments of better relations between Sunni tribes and the U.S. forces, the withdrawal of Shiite militias from active combat, and the reduction of friction between groups through “ethnic cleansing.” All of these are, according to Simon, threats to the development of a strong, unitary Iraqi state. As he says, “A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctably weaken the prospects for Iraq’s cohesion over the long run.”

Simon assumes throughout that weakening the central Iraqi state is bad, and that the model that should be followed is that of subordinating the tribe and sects to the state. He asserts, and I’m sure he is correct, that there will be some negative effects of encouraging these centrifugal forces. On the other hand, Simon at no point adduces any evidence that a strong, centralized Iraq is, in fact, the goal of U.S. policymakers or military commanders. It may be true, for example, that strengthening the tribes against the state will weaken the center. But lessening the burden of the center on the tribes may make life tolerable for those tribes, so that they will remain in a (weakly) united Iraq. They might not so readily submit to a strong center dominated by Shiites. Similarly, restoring strong central authority over the three Kurdish provinces is likely to exacerbate, rather than relieve, stresses between the ethnic groups. In brief, a weakly centralized Iraq may be more stable in the long run than an attempt to impose a strong central government on a disunited populace.

The surge appears to have succeeded, not only in “reduc[ing] casualties in the short term,” but in demonstrating that a decentralized approach to Iraqi governance is more workable than attempting to clothe an emperor in Baghdad. I could point to parallels with the American experience before the Civil War, when the slave states were willing, if not content, to remain in a weak Union, but felt themselves force to secede at the prospect of a stronger central government. Moreover, whenever I hear someone lament that Iraq will be weak and disunited, I think to myself that the last time we had a strong central government in Baghdad, it attacked its neighbors in Iran and Kuwait. Would a failure to achieve a powerful Iraqi government really be a sign that we had lost the war?