George W. Bush’s horrific, deadly blunder: Would Saddam Hussein be better than Iraq’s new hell?
Eleven years, and so much death, misery and destruction later, Iraq’s best outcome looks like the one Bush upended
Foreign policy, at least the American kind, is like a stone thrown into a pond: The ripples outward go on and on. You have to think about the tragedy now unfolding in Iraq with this in mind.
It is tempting to say the surge of horrifically righteous Sunni armies southward from the Syrian border is unbelievable except that you cannot: It is all-too-horribly believable. The rings of sectarian violence — including mass murder, if news reports prove correct — are the predictable consequence of decisions made during the Bush II years. This mess has American signatures on it in indelible ink.
Since we are at it, as those ripples are circular, we now come full circle in Iraq. No one wants to say it, so let’s say it here: The project now, best outcome, is to reassemble the Iraq of Saddam Hussein — uneasy with itself, brimming with animosities, but whole. This is the Iraq George W. Bush set out to destroy — purposely but without purpose, if you see what I mean. He did, swiftly. And now by any other name we want it back.
There may be other contenders, but this looks to me like the bitterest moment so far in our century.
First thought. What under the sun are the families of the 4,000 fallen Americans saying to themselves as everything their sons, daughters, siblings and spouses gave their lives for, or thought they risked their lives for, comes to absolutely nothing? The grandest illusions cannot hold in the face of the headlines now.
Make that second thought. First goes to the Iraqis who have survived untold deaths around them and the loss of homes, communities, jobs, educations, health and altogether their futures. This must mean most Iraqis by now.
In 11 years, our nine-year war has created a nation of destitutes, exiles and wanderers. It is a kind of death in life — worse (might as well say this, too) than many things Saddam was guilty of. And the truly incredible stares at us: There may be worse to come, if the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria lives down to the word of its leaders so far.
What are our policy cliques and the makers of the intellectual mulch fertilizing them — the think tank set, the professors, the journalists and so on — going to take from this stunning turn in Iraq’s misfortunes? This is the question now, even as the facts on the ground move at a speed that startles everyone, including the ISIS armies pressing toward Baghdad.
If the past is any guide, Washington is almost certain to proceed toward the same goals with minor variations in strategy, true. This promises senselessness piled atop itself.
But it is important to consider the lessons, even if the likelihood of Washington learning any is slim to nonexistent, because the renewed crisis in Iraq strips bare the bankruptcy of standing American policies in the Middle East.
Post-Cold War Washington has just hit a wall, and it is important to recognize this. The Middle East happens to be the locale, but others await.
The project the Bush administration defined when authorizing the invasion of spring 2003 was to democratize the Middle East. Iraq was to be the cornerstone of this strategic effort. It was neo-Wilsonianism in very pure form, and as such fated from the first to fail. It is hard to see how people such as Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration’s quintessential nation-builder, can any longer argue the prospect of even marginal good.
But there is a positive side to this debacle, and I say this having chicken-scratched to find one. It is that the thought of a fundamental rethink stands to gain adherents in high places. I admit this has to go in the fat, rarely disturbed file marked “Best Outcomes,” but I stay with this: No new idea has ever been other than far-fetched, this by definition. Were it perfectly realistic, it would not be new.
My fondest hope is that one of our very oldest ideas now teeters near collapse. I have already mentioned it: It is the evangelism named in the last century (and hatched by a Presbyterian minister’s son) as Wilsonianism. Put this in the past and we will instantly make the world none other than safer.
There is a lesson here that draws from the more recent past. I have taken to naming it the Tito Thesis.
Remember Marshal Tito? He was a distinguished anti-Nazi German partisan and went on to govern Yugoslavia from 1953 until his death in 1980. He was commonly demonized as another East European despot, but in the upper reaches it was understood to be more complex. Tito stood among those flawed giants of the independence generation: Mossadegh, Sukarno, the four “Ns,” as I call them — Nehru, Nasser, Nyerere, Nkrumah. He stood up to the Soviets as well as the Americans, and his true sin, as with the others, was his insistent non-alignment.
Tito was tough when he had to be, which was often. But he kept Yugoslavia Yugoslavia, primarily by making sure all the bitter communal animosities were balanced in the sharing of power. Anyone who had no taste for Tito might look to what came after him and consider the man again.
The thesis is simply stated, then. Strongmen are sometimes strongmen for a reason, and they are not to be fooled with capriciously, and certainly not without a thorough analysis of what is likely to follow.
Take the Tito Thesis to Iraq and where does it land you? This is bitter indeed, especially at our moment, but it forces reconsideration of Saddam. I know no one inclined to apologize for his numerous cruelties against the Kurds and the Shiite majority, among much else. But he kept Iraq Iraq, under the Ba’athists’ secular ideology (a variant of Nasserite socialism).