Iraqis? What Iraqis?
by digby
Marc Lynch has a great piece in Foreign Policy pointing out the odd fact that nobody who’s talking about the Iraq anniversary has bothered to ask the Iraqis what they think about it. Interesting, no?
And it’s a problem:
Myopia has consequences. Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. Most profoundly, the American filter tends to minimize the human costs and existential realities of military occupation and a brutal, nasty war. The savage civil war caused mass displacement and sectarian slaughter that will be remembered for generations. The U.S. occupation also involved massive abuses and shameful episodes, from torture at Abu Ghraib Prison to a massacre of unarmed Iraqis in the city of Haditha. The moral and ethical imperative to incorporate Iraqi perspectives should be obvious.
The habit of treating Iraqis as objects to be manipulated rather than as fully equal human beings — with their own identities and interests — isn’t just ethically problematic, it’s strategically problematic. It helps to explain why so many American analysts failed to anticipate or to prevent the insurgency, why the political institutions the United States designed proved so dysfunctional, why Washington drew the wrong lessons from the Anbar Awakening and the surge, and why so many analysts exaggerated the likely effects of a military withdrawal.
Take the Anbar Awakening, which is widely considered a turning point in the war. The decision by key Sunni tribes and factions within the Sunni insurgency to turn against the more extreme al Qaeda factions took shape in 2006, long before the “surge” had been conceived, decided upon, or implemented. To their credit, some key American military commanders did manage to grasp what was happening, and were flexible enough to cut deals with groups who had recently been fighting against them. But American troop levels and strategy did not cause the Awakening.
But strategic narcissism meant that the lessons drawn from Anbar too often were about counterinsurgency strategy rather than about responding effectively to local political and social developments. In the U.S. political debate, the Awakening and the surge were conflated in highly misleading ways. Washington obsessed about troop levels and the strategies of U.S. generals, perhaps because those were among the few variables they could control. But that action bias slid all too easily into the analytical conceit that troop levels and American strategy where what mattered, rather than the shifting balance of power, interests, identities and expectations of the Iraqi political forces themselves. That misreading — making U.S. strategy rather than local conditions central — in turn led to the misapplication of COIN to a quixotic surge in Afghanistan, where none of those local factors were present. It predictably failed.
Let’s not let a little failure get in the way of a ripping tale of All American know-how. I’m sure we’ll be doing the same thing for quite some time. The bipartisan national security consensus says that we may have blundered in the beginning, but we recovered nicely and perfectly executed the dismount. Too bad it’s bullshit.
Lynch concludes with this:
Want to understand what went wrong in Iraq in all its complexity and chaos? The Internet is full of Iraqi academics, journalists, NGO leaders, and political activists with interesting perspectives on the invasion. It might also be useful to hear from the refugees, the displaced, and the families who lost everything. They will disagree with each other, have little patience for the pieties of American political debate, and refuse to fit comfortably into analytical boxes. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, we should be hearing a lot more from them — and a lot less from the former American officials and pundits who got it wrong the first time.
No kidding.
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