Nicely laid out piece. I whole heartedly agree. Iraq is Bush’s responsibility.

A couple of nice paragraph from my local newspaper mirrors your thoughts (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/columnists.nsf/ericmink/story/5CC638150F7C3BC5862570C90037BEA3?OpenDocument&highlight=2%2C%22eric%22+AND+%22mink%22)

it reads:

“Even assuming it ever was possible to create democracy in Iraq by force, the Bush administration blew its chance through a long string of miserable decisions: It rejected voluminous advance planning done by the State Department for a post-Saddam Iraq, disregarded military projections of force levels needed to maintain order, dismissed accurate CIA analyses of likely post-war ethnic and tribal conflicts, disbanded the Iraqi army, under-equipped U.S. troops and installed a hapless-to-corrupt provisional governing authority.”

“Does the president think he gets a mulligan for such pervasive ineptitude?”

“There are consequences. Ironically, they are mostly the same boogeymen the administration conjures as the consequences of pulling American troops out of harm’s way: civil war in Iraq, further instability in the Middle East, increased vulnerability to Islamist terrorism worldwide, the loss of U.S. credibility.”

“By any reasonable measurements, all these have already taken place, and they are of Bush’s own making.”

However I can’t resist the opportunity to add on to this and your analysis.

First, I would make this point: at the time that he went to congress asking for authority to deal with Iraq, the American public wanted the Democrats and the Republicans to unify behind the President to give him the authority he needed to address Islamic Extremism. This was a perfectly sound instinct on the public’s part if not for Bush being President. Had Gore been President, Afghanistan would be a model prosperous islamic democracy right now and Iraq would still be a useful check on Iranian intrique in the Gulf and Levant (including Isreal). The public wanted a unified response to the threat of Islamic Extremism. Bush sensed this, grabbed for the power by thrusting it before congress. Congress gave the Public wanted, what Bush wanted, enhanced authority to go to war. Under our system of Government the President gets enhanced powers during war time. The lust of power and greed was too much for him. The power was delegated to Bush, he alone owns what he did with it.

Thus Bush leaves a larger mess on the world’s hands than he did when arbustco bellied up. As bad as Bush’s failure is in Iraq, it is small compared to the large failure in overall foreign policy.

I have a law degree from Washington University and a B.A. in Economic Geography from Univ. of Az. My main iterest was/is Nation Buidling, my main area study concentration in Georgaphy was the Middle East.

I would like to reinforce your points by something I learned from Nobel Laureate and Economic Historian Douglas North while attending Washington University School of Law and then add some points on nation building that demonstrate the historic lost opportunity of the Bush adminstration which is almost criminal.

“Institutions are based on belief systems/ideology. Belief systems are based upon the collective experience. Institutions only change when experience dictates that that which is believed is wrong or not working across the breadth of a society.”

You can’t just march into a country and chop off its totalitarian head and expect it to grow a democratic one. There has to be an historical social convergence towards democracy. This is not advanced physics, it’s really just basic civics – which apparently they don’t teach anymore.

And I know conservatives like to point out that Japan and Germany had dictatorship et al. But before they had dictatorships they had functioning democracies, established by internal forces, that for different reasons lacked the constitutional checks against an ultra conservative movement’s takeover (not unlike what is happening in America right now).

To further reinforce your point concerning the geopolitics of the region. The cold hard geopolitical fact is, Iraq will close ranks with its Shia neighbor next door, Iran. (That is one of the reasons why Bush the elder left Saddam in power – as a check on Iran). Another likely outcome is all out civil war in which Iraq still might become an Iranian satellite, of a larger war between Turkey and Iran over the left over pieces in Iraq.

And it is worse than Vietnam. Vietnam had little strategic value. When Iraq becomes an Iranian satellite, Iran/Iraq condominium will control nearly as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Nothing will stand between them and there combined populations of nearly 100 million from staring down Saudi Arabia and its 20 million people, along with the other postage stamp states of the Gulf – especially 2 million people in Kuwait who will be surrounded on three sides by the Iraq/Iran condominium with oil reserves nearly as great as Iran or Iraq’s. Furthermore nothing will stand between Iran and Israel but tiny, barren and minute Jordan. There were sound geopolitical reasons why Bush the elder left Saddam in power. A Saddam led Iraq that was hostile to Iran was a barrier that prevented Iran from asserting influence throughout the Gulf region and the entire Mid-East east of Suez. When Iraq becomes an Iranian satellite the whole balance of geopolitical power will change.

This is simply the result of incompetent ideologically driven foreign policy. This whole scenario is quite dangerous and there is slim to no chance for strategically positive outcome, especially without a massive influx of American or Allied troops and even so it would depend upon competence coming out of United States policy makers which is definitely not in the offing.

The lost opportunity:
A better case for building democracy in a Muslim country was in Afghanistan itself. Afghani’s have a culture that was known for its good humor, flexibility and informality. It also had an established tradition of a constitutional monarch with an indigenously consultative assembly body, the Loya Jirga (spell? an millenium old tradition). Furthermore catastrophic problems emerged in Afghanistan only after a coup that removed the monarch – only serving to elevate the moral authority of the monarchy in Afghanistan. Finally, western history shows that democratic institutions evolve out of feudal or quasi feudal institutions (the reason has to do with intuitiveness both personal and societal).

If a nation’s institutions can be aligned into a feudal monarchy then the evolution to parliamentary democracy becomes almost a “connecting of the dots” (collapsing hundreds, if not thousands of years of history) along the well known path followed by almost every other functioning democracy, including Japan, (but excluding our own – we are an exception that perhaps proves the rule you might say.)

It would have been much easier for the Western Allies, lead by the United States, to build on these traditions. The warlords could have been coerced by a combination of threats and payoffs, into trading in their armies for constitutional entrenchment of inherited positions of prestige and title owing fealty to the monarch (as all warlords in western history eventually did or lost their titles, prestige and wealth) becoming Dukes, Barons or Counts, or a muslim alternative Emirs or Sultans.

Meanwhile around them constitutional parliamentary assemblies could be fostered drawing on the experience of the Loya Jirga, with a combination of a national assembly and local assemblies reporting, respectively to the King and the local war lord turned Emir.

The United States for the most part ignored this possibility of building on indigenous traditions that were intuitive to the local population, and instead pursued a Presidential model for Afghanistan that threw out the King. The reason appears that it allowed them to put their man Karsai in the head of state position. The King, in his 80s in 2002, was good enough to open a Loya Jirga for the first time in decades that then handed power over to Karsai. The nations of the world stood ready and waiting to contribute billions of dollars to Afghanistan’s development. You can imagine if, instead of invading Iraq, we gave Afghanistan a hundred billion dollars for development, just where they might be today. It has to be one of the greatest lost opportunities in history. But there has been a lot of that these days.

A functioning democratic Afghanistan would have had a ripple effect too, where it is needed most. Pakistan, pinched between a successful functioning democracy in India and Afghanistan would have more indigenous social pressure to evolve democratically. Like wise, Iran, pinched between democracies in Turkey and Afghanistan would have had, perhaps even more pressure to evolve. Afghanis and Iranian speak the same basic language. Generally speaking, Iranians consider themselves to be the oldest and thus the most civilized and advance people in the region, and as befits such an attitude, there is a strong urge to evolve politically.

An Iran pinched between two functioning Islamic democracies, one of which their hillbilly cousins in Afghanistan, would have had enormous pressure to liberalize and democratize. The result of this liberalization would have been a continuous block of Asian Islamic Democracies from Istanbul to Calcutta. Bengla Desh would be next, and Thailand and Malaysia are almost there, leaving Burma the only anomaly in a band that would stretch from Greece to the Phillipines and Australia. Under this scenario functioning democracy would be the norm and autocracy or tyranny the exception.

This would leave the vast majority of thw worlds Muslims living under functioning democracy and enormous pressure would then fall upon the Arab states. Here to there are plenty of opportunities for progress. Many states already have monarchs that could evolve into constitutional models. Many of the small emirites in the Gulf already are. Likewise the dictators could be cajoled, like their war-lord brethren into constitutional roles.

Finally there is the problem Islam inherits in integrating into the modern world. This again is another lost opportunity. If we were fully engaged in the war on terror as we were with the cold war we would become intimately familiar with this problem across all of academia. During the cold war, the government cajoled much of academia into studying aspects of the various fields that had to do with helping win the cold war. Engineers studied rocketry, physicist studied nuclear energy, the social sciences studied Russia, eastern Europe and communism. There are plenty of opportunities to draw on the more democratic notions and traditions that exist in Islam. What Islam needs, and what the world needs of Islam is a “Transcendental Islam” model.

Transcendental Islam might be arrived at by altering two Islamic attitudes: acceptance of separation of church and state and internalizing all notions of Jihad into the individuals spiritual struggle to grow towards God and inclusion of many of the Islamic traditions that fold neatly into this.

Mohammed himself said that there should be no coercion of religion. But in the seventh century no religious community was safe without political enfranchisement: he need only look at the struggle of Coptic, Monophysite and Nestorian Christians against Imperial Orthodox Christians in the east Roman Imperial provinces of Palestine, Syria and Egypt which he is said to have visited on caravans. As a result, in the seventh century, the functions of religion and state were often a function of each other and that logic was imbued into Islam. But if a state can effectively guarantee freedom of religion, or in Mohammed’s lexicon, religion free of coercion, then there is no need for combining state and religion. As long as there is freedom of religion than all “jihad” would then be the individual’s internal spiritual struggle to draw themselves closer to God. (In fact a person that exhibits external ‘jihad’, including hate, would be evidence of one losing their internal battle.) In such an environment, each religion will thrive on the strength, validity and moral authority in what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “supermarket of ideas”. Under this environment, I suspect, “Transcendental Islam” might prove to be surprisingly competitive.

All this suggests that the huge problems that exist out there were, and probably still are, solvable. But they have been made more removed by Bush’s troglodyte policies. Islam is still struggling and poorly understood. Afghanistan is a failing experiment. Karzai’s regime in Afghanistan controls Kabul and little else, war lords reign independent and are participating in the opium production and trade. Iraq is generating hatred and misunderstanding of the West and most especially the United States. And Iran has regressed politically and is exploring the nuclear option and could emerge to be an even bigger threat to the world’s oil source in the Persian Gulf and to Israel itself.

These are just some of the historic lost opportunities that a narrow small minded administration just totally missed and was oblivious to.

Another lost opportunity, after 911, was to create an anti-terrorist organization modeled on and in an expanded version of NATO. This is important. While not all NATO countries were democracies when they entered into it, they eventually all became democracies. This includes Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey. Now Imagine leveraging that model to fight Islamic Terrorism to include Russia and China and perhaps India. China, if pushed into a quasi-feudalistic model, is not as far from democracy as people sometimes fear. They just need a road map. I already outlined that earlier. Inside an enlarged NATO focused on terror, Russia, Belorus and Ukraine would all be on a path once traveled by Greece, Portugal and Spain. Imagine that: Functioning constitutional democracy from Galway to Shanghai.

I realize that I have vastly simplified things here. But, If only we had some competent people with a little bit of vision, we could be well on our way to a world that looks and functions a lot like International relations we see between Canada and the U.S. or almost everywhere in Europe. Instead we have a huge mess getting worse every day. And a ruling party that is bent on continuing in the wrong direction.

People don’t wake up and find themselves democrats. But nearby models of success make it possible. The success of American democracy in the first quarter of the 19th century meant that western Europe would end up that way too. The success in Western Europe impelled Japan and others outside Europe to evolve. We didn’t need to start out in Iraq. We should have gone for the low hanging fruit in Afghanistan, fruit that was thrust upon us, first. Success there could have been relatively inexpensive, loaded with moral authority, highly persuasive on the region with little violence or overt intrusion on the part of the United States, the west or the outside world.

Finally, Amy Chua, a law professor at Yale has written a remarkable book (World Afire) on the awkwardness of freedom thrust willy nilly on nations that have not evolved the necessary institutions for democracy and freedom to protect them from tyranny of the majority and dictatorship, terrorism and economic disparity. In his second inaugeral address, Pres. Bush suggested that justice emerges out of freedom. But history of common law provides the opposite view: a bias towards liberty emerge out of common law within the interest of justice. Which means that justice comes first then as a subset, and out of an interest of justice, comes freedom.

Churchill once said, of architecture: “we shape buidlings and they inturn shape us”. The same could be said of law as of architecture: we shape it and it shape us. Common law created a jurisprudence with a bias towards liberty, simply because such decisions were easier and less costly to enforce (out of efficiency). It seems likely that a political philosophy of liberty in Anglo-American societies only emerged after a legal doctrinal bias towards liberty was well established. When democracy is planted in nations out side the broader context of justice and fairness, then tyranny and mayhem of the worst kinds emerge. Without fairness, Liberty begets the tyranny and jurisprudence of “might makes right”.

Again, this might be complex, but it is understandable by people who work in these fields. It is not physics, it is civics. Fairly basic civics at that.

For the sake of a few dollars and advancement of an archaic political ideology Bush forwent perhaps history’s greatest opportunity: to unite the entire world behind the cause of ending terrorism derived from Islamic Extremism. This is perhaps the greatest lost opportunity in history.

To quote Carl Berstein from a USA Today essay in May of 2004:

“… the United States is confronted by another ill-considered war, conceived in ideological zeal and pursued with contempt for truth, disregard of history and an arrogant assertion of American power that has stunned and alienated much of the world, including traditional allies. At a juncture in history when the United States needed a president to intelligently and forcefully lead a real international campaign against terrorism and its causes, Bush decided instead to unilaterally declare war on a totalitarian state that never represented a terrorist threat; to claim exemption from international law regarding the treatment of prisoners; to suspend constitutional guarantees even to non-combatants at home and abroad; and to ignore sound military advice from the only member of his Cabinet — Powell — with the most requisite experience. Instead of using America’s moral authority to lead a great global cause, Bush squandered it.”

If Bush really thought that Islam extremism was a real threat he would have crafted a strategy around the threat on the morrow of 911 – As Roosevelt did during WWII, as Truman did during the Cold War (containment first, conflict second [unlike Bush’s, conflict first, no containment, no alliances, no strategic shield, no strategic safety net and lots of cost]). The purpose of strategy is long term victory, maximum effectiveness with minimum risk, cost and lives.

There is no coherent strategy for dealing with Islamic extremism; we have the high cost/minimum effectivenes/maximum risk alternative. No strategy means that you have idiot ideas like invading Iraq. If he wanted to create a stable Democratic regime in the region he should have concentrated on Afghanistan where, for historical reasons, they were much closer to achieving such from the perspective of proto-democratic institutions (Loya Jirga and Constitutional Monarchy [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loya_jirga) and where we had every reason to be there.

The fact that there is no strategy means Bush & co. never took the threat of Islamic extremism seriously, meaning they used 911 for political purposes.

Michael Moore notwithstanding, Bush has never addressed his obvious conflicts of interest regarding the war on Islamic Extremism: namely his deeply entrenched background in the petroleum industry; his family’s deep relationship with the Saudis and the Bin Laden’s. Instead of going after Bin Laden in Afghanistan we went after an Oil despot in the Persian Gulf. None of which was in America’s best interest. Keep in mind, for $35 a barrel we could produce liquefied coal to replace petroleum.

Given that we can produce oil from coal, which we have a 10,000 year supply of, at only $5 a barrel more than OPEC is willing to sell oil to us, what are we doing in Iraq? Why are American’s dying in Iraq, especially when their/ournemy is in Afghanistan? Why don’t we have an energy policy that maximizes are strengths and minimizes our exposure?

In regard to the claim of congress having the same Intel as the president, it is just a blatant lie:

The following paragraphs come from Frank Rich’s column in Sunday’s New York times:

“A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had “issued increasingly dire warnings” about Iraq’s mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, “never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.” The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations and in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam’s fictitious African uranium).”

“Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, “President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.”

“The information was delivered in the President’s Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the “few credible reports” of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam’s antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran. ”

“What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution “had access to the same intelligence” he did. They didn’t have access to the President’s Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn’t have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

“The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it’s a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie?”

(From Frank Rich’s Sunday column in the NY times Sunday 27 November 2005.)

Given the size and scope of this debacle and the simplicity of deriving a more sound set of policies (the strategy for dealing with an ideological war was set up and established by Truman in the cold war: containment first, hot wars a distant second), One can only construe that indeed, something very sinister is afoot – why else has Bush’s actions been so wrong footed? When it wants to, like during elections, Bush can precide over crafty, if brutal, strategy and tactics. That they blew a once in history chance to guid the world towards peace and prosperity is truly mind boggling. Not since Judas handed over Jesus to the High Priests has a greater crime been commited.

This is truly a sad chapter in American and Global history. The world wanted one thing, the few men in the executive office of the United States wanted something else. The why of this is going to launch conspiracy theories galor – including why Bin Laden was allowed to get away.