More Thoughts on Iraq

Posts on NRO's "The Corner" Here,
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here on the new Iraq constitution.

My thoughts:

Andy McCarthy is technically correct that during a time of war, the victors have a right to make certain that Iraq's new constitution reflects their interests even at the expense of the will of the people (i.e. we can force a secular constitution down their throats). The problem is that it would be difficult to enforce.
Part of the reason why we are unwilling to stand up more and demand certain things from the Iraqis is because we don't have the forces to keep control of the country; it's not necessarily moral posturing (e.g. what right do we have to enforce our politics on them), but practical necessity (we need to make concessions to the fundamentalists because we don't have the strength to threaten to put them down if they decide to join the insurgency). Part of the problem here is that the people planning the war were overly optimistic about the Iraqis embracing western political values. Therefore, no one prepared for this contingency.

Moreover, due to the propagnda war, there is moral posturing involved. The extent to which we exercise our prerogative as victors to determine Iraq's rules is also the extent to which it becomes harder to maintain that this is an occupation rather than a liberation.
In other words, there has been a whole lot of talk about how this is not an occupation (an how silly it is for people to call it that) and about how we are letting Iraqis decide how to run their own affairs. Granted, we could demand thaat they enshrine women's rights and separation of mosque and state in their constitution, but to do so we have to give up the fabntasy that we are a liberating force allowing the Iraqis to live their own lives and to admit that we are going to force them to be what we think they should be. they can change the policy, but then they have to change the rhetoric.

Finally, I think that Andy McCarthy's suggestions as to how the war ought to have been run also has a lot of flaws. For one thing, I don't think that we could effectively atttack Syria or Iran without ultimately needing to invade and ocupy these countries. And I don't think that such an invasion would be any more successful than the one in Iraq. In other words, we'd be facing a long-term occupation requiring >500,000 troops. The neocons would probably retort that the insurgency in Iraq gets most of its strength from Iran and Syria, so if we attacked them, we wouldn't have any insurgency in any of the countries to worry about (i.e. expand the war and the need for troops diminishes), but this is rubbish. Definitely, there is an indigenous insurgency in Iraq and there would also be one in Syria and Iran.

Finally, the suggestion by McCarthy that we should have had a government-in-waiting all ready to install before we invaded Iraq sounds good, but I doubt it would have improved things. Any government we installed would probably be run by Ahmad Chalabi or Iyad Allawi, and would have little more legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis than the American regency under Garner or Bremer. All that would have accomplished would have been to move up the "transfer of sovereignty" a year and a few months. As this transfer accomplished absolutely nothing, I doubt that moving it up would have helped.

Unless of course, McCarthy was simply echoing the common neocon sentiment that things would be better if we had put Chalabi in charge. Considering the concerns about Chalabi's loyalties and honesty, I think that the Pentagon's plan of setting up a government by installing him could have gone much. much worse than what actually happened. In other words, given our options for whom to install, I don't think that an early installation of an Iraqi government (composed largely of exiles) would have benefitted us.

In short, unless we are willing to commit a whole lot more troops or start really cracking down on Iraqis, I don't think we have much of a choice but to accept a much less liberal government than we would like. Nor is there much, if anything, that we could have done after the initial invasion that would have altered this.

That is all.