Who lost Iraq?
This was predictable:
It hasnâ??t yet entered our political debate, but Barack Obama is on course to become the president who lost Iraq. This could be a sleeper issue that does great damage to his bid for reelection, as the man whose case for leadership rested on opposition to the war may become the man who engineered a tragic and devastating â??endâ? to it.This is the natural result of nearly three years of an American policy focused on abandoning rather than securingâ??disowning rather than building onâ??our hard-won gains. Even by the antiwar presidentâ??s own reckoning he had inherited a success in Iraq. â??From getting rid of Saddam, to reducing violence, to stabilizing the country, to facilitating elections,â? Obama told American troops stationed in Iraq in May, 2009, â??you have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country. That is an extraordinary achievement.â?
Since then, he has failed to keep that achievement on track. In March 2010, when parliamentary gridlock effectively froze Iraqi politics, Washington barely lifted a finger to ensure progress and guide the country toward a favorable outcome.
That's Commentary's Abe Greenwald. I agree with Greenwald that Iraq's trajectory is troubling. But it has been troubling since the U.S. invasion (and it was pretty awful before then). But for the "Obama lost Iraq" script to be intellectually honest, there needs to be an accounting of how Iraq could have been "won." Greenwald doesn't provide one. Kenneth Pollack does:
The reason that Iraqi politics fell apart so quickly is that few Iraqi leaders have internalized the patterns of behavior conducive to democracy, and Iraq lacks the kind of strong institutions that would compel them to behave properly without that internal moral compass. The reason they behaved well during 2008â??2009 was that the combination of the new security created by the surge and the greater American involvement in Iraqi politics had imposed a new, external incentive structure on Iraqâ??s politiciansâ??in effect, forcing them to act like good democratic leaders. Once that pressure began to be removed in 2010, so too did these externally imposed incentives. Not enough time has passed since the ouster of Saddam Hussein for a fundamental change in the psyches of Baghdadâ??s political eliteâ??let alone the emergence of large numbers of new, better politicians. Not surprisingly, Iraqâ??s many bad leaders are going right back to behaving badly.Whatâ??s more, without that external American pressure, Iraqâ??s top politicians have largely abandoned their willingness to make difficult compromisesâ??on anything from the countryâ??s hydrocarbon revenues to the conduct of its security services to the very nature of Iraqi federalismâ??to enable broader progress. The result has been political paralysis.
So what we have here is essentially a few months of Iraqi leaders "behaving well" and much more time - before and after 2008-2009 - when they were behaving badly. It's possible that further conditioning of aid and patient mentoring by their American betters would whip the Iraqis into shape, but it's also possible that the limits of American leverage would have eventually be revealed. It's also worth stepping back and highlighting not just the difficulty of what Pollack is proposing - micromanaging Iraqi politics so that multiple disparate factions behave themselves in a manner acceptable to American bureaucrats - but that the reason we face a choice between doing that and facing a resumption of Iraq's civil war is because the prior administration thought invading and occupying the country was a good idea. If anyone "lost" Iraq, it was them.
