Iraq 10 Years Later (3): Why the Neocon Theory behind the War Failed

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Here are part one and two of this post.

The arguments below expand on my second recent JoongAng Daily op-ed on the Iraq war.

My first post on the Iraq War asked if academic IR had any responsibility to slow the march to war.

The second tried to formulate what the   neoconservative theory of the war was, because many of us, in retrospect of a conflict gone so badly, desperately want to un-remember that there really was a logic to the war, that it was at least somewhat intellectually defensible, and that a lot of us believed it. We may want to retroactively exculpate ourselves by suggesting it was just W the cowboy acting ridiculous, or a neocon hijacking of the policy process, or Halliburton oil imperialism, and all the other reasons so popular on the left. And some of that is true of course.

But it ducks the crucial point that the war was popular until it flew wildly off-the-rails, which in turn revealed the staggering incompetence of the Bush administration to act on the neocon logic the country had embraced by March 2003. In short, I argued that the Iraq invasion was not about WMD, preemption, or democracy, although that rationale was played up in the wake of the failure to find WMD. The real neocon goal was to scare the daylights out of the Arabs and their elites by punching one of their worst regimes in the face, thereby showing what was coming to rest of the region unless it cleaned up its act, i.e., crack down on salafism and liberalize so as to defuse the cultural extremism that lead to 9/11. (Read Ajami saying in January 2003 that the war is ‘to modernize the Arabs;’ that’s about as a good a pre-war summary of this logic as you’ll get.)

So what went wrong?

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Iraq 10 Years Later (2): What was the Neocon Theory behind the War?

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This post is in three parts; here are one and three. I published a laymen version of the following arguments (part two) in my recent JoongAng Daily op-ed.

My first thoughts on the war’s ten year anniversary are here. There I asked if there was any defensible theory behind the war, anything that might explain what why we launched the war, because weapons of mass destruction were not really the reason. Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted they were just a pretext to rally the country behind the invasion. And it wasn’t really about pre-emption either; Iraq was hardly a looming military threat in 2003. So here’s my guess of the real neoconservative logic. I should say up front, I do not endorse this rationale. I’m just trying to lay it out what I think neocons were saying to each other in 2002:

The Iraq invasion was to serve two purposes. 1) It was to be a demonstration strike against the Arabs. Gulf anti-western pathologies lead to 9/11, so the Iraq invasion was a warning to Arabs, and Muslims generally, to never to attack the US like that again. As Cheney put it in the film W, ‘don’t ever f— with us again.’ 2) It was to be a hammer strike to break the frozen, horribly dysfunctional Arab political status quo which generated those pathologies; this would force the region toward democracy it would never attain on its own. This thinking was summarized in the widely used expression at the time, ‘drain the swamp.’

A lot of people will (and did) accuse the neocons of orientalism, racism, and US hegemonic arrogance. Nevertheless I’ve always thought this neocon argument was somewhat convincing to most Americans, especially the GOP. I’ve always thought it was the horribly botched execution of the war (‘fiasco’), not the idea itself of ‘draining the swamp,’ that cost the invasion American public opinion support. I also don’t think the neocon argument was ever properly made to the US public, probably because it sounds both orientalist and hubristic. This is not the sort of argument the Bush administration could make out loud; WMD was much easier to sell and far more direct, as Wolfowitz noted. But I think if you read neocons like Kristol, Krauthammer, Gerecht, or Podhoretz, as well as high profile area experts like Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, or Bernard Lewis, or the right-wing thinks-tanks that supported the war (AEI, Heritage, Foundation for Defense of Democracies), this is what you heard. (For example: this, this, this, this, or this). I once participated in the FDDs’ terrorism fellowship program, and this was pretty much the line we got.

So you may not like the argument, but at least there is one. The war cannot just be dismissed as US imperialism, an oil grab, or a PNAC/neocon cabal, which I think was too often the default position on the left, especially in Europe, during the war. Opponents should rebut this and not just stick to deriding W the swaggering cowboy, fun as that may be.

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Iraq 10 Years Later (1): How Culpable is Academic International Relations?

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This post is in three parts. Here are two and three.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the war this month. I’ll be teaching it in the next few weeks at school because of the decade anniversary (March 20). To my mind, it is the most important geopolitical event, for the US, possibly the planet, since the USSR’s collapse. It also pre-occupies me to this day, because I initially supported it, and didn’t really turn against it until 2008/09. I had students who told me, late in the war, that I was the only instructor they knew who still supported the invasion. Finally, I gave in, and accepted the by-then conventional wisdom that the war was a ‘fiasco.’ I will argue in my next post in a few days, that there was in fact an at least minimally defensible argument for the war, but the execution of it was so awful, disorganized, mismanaged, and incompetent, that any moral justification was lost in the sea of blood and torture we unleashed.

The whole episode became just shameful, and regularly teaching and conferencing with non-Americans these last few years has made this so painfully clear. My students particularly are just bewildered to the point of incredulity. Again and again, the basic thought behind the questions is, ‘what the hell happened to you people? 9/11 made you lose your minds there?’ *sigh* (NB: when Asians ask me about guns in the US, the ‘what the hell is wrong with you people?’ bafflement is the same.)

Hence, the post title purposefully implies that the invasion was a bad idea. But to be fair, that should be the first question: what, if any, arguments at this point can be mustered to defend the war? IR should try to answer this seriously, because I’m all but positive that the journalistic debate will be not be driven by the state of Iraq or US foreign policy today, but by the high personal reputational costs faced by so many pundits supportive of the war. It would not surprise me at all if folks like the Kagans, Krauthammer, or Thomas Friedman miraculously found that the war was worth it after all. McNamara-style mea culpas only happen at the end of a career (so I give Sullivan and Fukuyama credit for theirs on Iraq). But academic international relations (IR) should be more honest than that.

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‘Rodman-gate’: Can ‘Useful Idiots’ please Stop Shilling for North Korea?

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Studying North Korea inevitably means people ask me pretty outlandish stuff. People have asked, if the North really believes long hair is bad for socialism, if that goiter on Kim Il Sung’s neck made him crazy, if Kim Jong Il’s platform shoes meant that he liked disco, and if North Korean women are good looking because a food shortage would mean everyone is slim. (I presume that last one is a reaction to obesity epidemic in the US.) So I tried to avoid this latest outbreak of Norko bizarreness with Rodman. But people keep asking me, so here a few thoughts to the effect that: no one should shill for NK – ever.

Call it yet another chapter in the history of clueless foreigners getting lost in and manipulated by North Korea – what Lenin used to call ‘useful idiots,’ knaves from the West who defended the Soviet experiment, blissfully ignorant of the camps. Who knows what to make of that utterly weird photograph of Rodman in bling and Kim Jong Un dressed like Mao. There are so many contradictions in there, it’s not even worth unpacking.

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My Comments to al Jazeera TV on Park GH’s Inauguration as SK Prez

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Despite the fact that Donald Rumsfeld supposedly wanted to bomb al Jazeera during the Iraq War as a jihadi propaganda machine, I have to say I find it a pretty good news source. It’s got a great documentary hustle that lazy incumbents like CNN don’t, and its Middle East coverage is far more balanced and fair than most Americans think.

Anyway, the vid is my quick thoughts on Park Geun Hye’s inauguration as South Korea’s new president. The quick sum: she can’t follow through on making Korea ‘happier’ unless she takes on the vested interests, especially the chaebol, central to her political coalition. I don’t think she can do that, and, honestly, I’m not even sure she wants to. So I would not expect anything big at home in her term; the right, the elderly, and business in Korea like the status quo, and they’re the ones that put her in office. And certainly, the social democratic policies of ‘economic democratization’ kicked around last year won’t happen meaningfully. That’s my prediction at least. I’ll have more in a few days when my contribution to a foreign ‘Korea analyst’ forum on PGH is published in the Korea Times.

For my previous TV appearances, go here.

5 Biggest Strategic Errors of the Emperor: a Contribution to Spencer Ackerman’s ‘Battle of Hoth’ Debate

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You can’t defeat a rebellion with counter-insurgents like these

 

Technically, I am supposed to be on vacation, but I couldn’t miss this.

An international relations theory website I also write for has gotten into an excellent debate with Wired’s Spencer Ackerman on the Empire’s blown opportunity to stamp out the Space Vietcong Rebellion at Hoth. William Westmoreland spent 5 years trying to nail down the VC in set-piece battles where US firepower could be brought decisively to bear and end the Vietnam war. Here was the Emperor’s similar chance, but Darth Vader and Admiral Ozzel blew it (mostly because the Empire’s officer corps was filled with grandstanding self-promoters, as Ackerman rightly points out).

But as the respondents noted, the larger context does a better job explaining why the Empire’s massive advantages seem to fail repeatedly (Yavin 4, Hoth, Bespin, Endor), beyond just the poor tactical leadership at Hoth. The larger strategic context is counterinsurgency, and obviously the Emperor spent too much time cackling in the Senate to watch The Battle of Algiers. So here are the five big structural problems in the background:

1. Trusting the Bloated, Showboating Navy to do Counterinsurgency

Navies are big, blunt instruments with hugely expensive platforms vulnerable to swarming, as at Yavin and Endor, and only useful for large, ‘target-rich’ enemies. They scream national vanity, and they’re terrible for hunting rebels. Why does the Empire need a massive, and massively expensive, fleet after the Clone Wars? Probably because the army was staffed by clones – genetically-designed to be dull-witted – who couldn’t push their bureaucratic interest, while the navy had lots of fully human, showboating egos like Tarkin’s Death Star council.

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My Comments to BBC TV about yesterday’s North Korean Nuclear Test

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That would be the finest academic haircut in all of Asia… 😦

 

I spoke this morning on BBC’s Asia Business Report on the North Korean nuclear test. My quick take is:

Yes, it was a terrible idea, but no, it is not surprising. Nuclearization takes time and ‘practice,’ so these sorts of tests are expectable. This one was about half the yield (size) of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima, so they’re getting pretty good at this now. I’m continually astonished at how a near-third world state under heavy embargo nonetheless pulls this off. Wow. What are we missing?

Yes, there’ll probably by a UN resolution, but no, it won’t have any real bite. The reason is China. There’s a near consensus now in North Korea studies that China is the key here. China is the reason sanctions don’t work – because the Chinese don’t enforce them. And it is China that politically enables these childish North Korean stunts by not attaching any real costs of aid or diplomacy to them. That said, one of the reasons for all these NK hijinks is to keep the Chinese out of their business. We all assume the nukes are aimed at Seoul, Tokyo, and LA, but they’re also a nice deterrent to Chinese domination. The nukes signal that even though NK is now an economic satellite of China, it will never be a political one. NK will not become China’s East Germany.

The real question for the future then, is how the democracies among the Six Parties (SK, Japan, the US) can walk China back from support of NK. How do we get China to stop obsessing about retaining NK as a ‘buffer’ against the democracies? How do we get Beijing comfortable with Southern-led unification? When that happens, then Beijing will drift from the North, and the possibility of collapse becomes much more real. But that is probably one to two decades away. Yes, this drama will go on and on and on…

For my travelogue on my trip to North Korea, go here.

The video is simply my phone recording our home TV, so the quality is not so hot. Also, if you’re wondering my eyes are wandering all over the place, it’s because BBC does not provide the image back to the interviewee when you’re on Skype with them. So I am sitting there just looking at nothing – my desktop maybe – trying to find something to do with my eyes. Ah well…

On Vacation for awhile – Here’s Some New Year’s Reading – See you in March

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I break from blogging twice a year, but try to compile a good list of relevant articles I’ve found over the past few months. See you in about a month. Enjoy:

August

The Atlantic runs lots of good stuff on NK it seems to me: this on how NK impossibly continues to survive and this on how just about every NK watcher has wrongfully predicted its collapse.

Mixin Pei’s important piece on why China’s rise is overrated. My own sense of this is that Pei will be proven right in the next 10-15 years, but not sooner. China’s demographic, ecological, and corruption caps strike as growing worse, not better.

A nice piece from the FT on Korea’s biggest company – too bad no one wants to plumb the far-too-close relations between the chaebol and the ROKG Continue reading →

USC-CSIS Conference on Korean Unification (3): DPRK ‘Sovereignty’ is a Sino-Russian Fig-Leaf to Slow Unification and Check US Power

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Here are part one and part two of this post. I spoke last Tuesday at a USC-CSIS conference on Korean unification. I learned a lot, and it was very good. If you’re interested in unification, start here with the primary report on which the conference was based. The principal investigators said a final wrap-up report will come at some point, and I’ll put up that link when it arrives.

My comments below are on the papers presented on Tuesday about neighboring states’ reactions to Korean unification. These papers aren’t publicly posted yet, so all the comments might not make sense. But in the interest of completism, I’m putting this up to round out my thinking on this excellent unification project. (For my earlier thoughts on dealing with NK, try this; for my travelogue of my trip to the DPRK, try this.)

My big beef with these sorts of conferences on NK – I go to a lot – is that inevitably outsiders, especially Chinese scholars, start laying down all sorts of guidelines, restrictions, parameters, etc. for unification, as if it’s our right to muck around in this thing. I can understand the national interest in doing so. But we shouldn’t have the temerity to try to legitimate our muddying of the waters in what is really an internal family affair. It would also help a lot if the Chinese would stop talking (not so much at this conference, but definitely at others I’ve gone to) about how Korea needs to respect its wishes, because China is big and important now, post-2008 Olympics. I heard one guy once even say that China is now the ‘veto-player’ on unification. That’s true of course in realist sense, but that sorta cockiness infuriates Koreans who’ve really soured on China in the last decade. I see the same kind of emergent Chinese bullying on unification that Southeast Asian littoral states see on the South China Sea. So I try to call that out whenever it seems necessary.

Anyway, here on my thoughts on Japan, Russia, and China’s role in this thing.

USC-CSIS Conference on Korean Unification (2): ‘One Country, Two Systems’ will not happen

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CSIS Korea ProjectHere is part one of this post. The following will make more sense if you start there.

I noted that I am participating, today in Seoul (attend if you can), in a USC-CSIS project on Korean unification. This is the final ‘phase’ of their Korea Project on unification.

I thought I would post my thoughts on the USC-CSIS Phase II report (available here) which provided all sorts of suggestions for reconstruction. It’s required reading if your area is Korea and NK, but I actually disagree with a fair number of the analogies to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think Germany is a better model for what will happen here, and I think a ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement like in greater China is nearly impossible given the extraordinary deep ideological divide, which is also existentially necessary for NK to demonstrate why it must be a seperate, poorer Korean state. So it’s either implosion or stalemate.

Anyway, the rest of my thoughts are after the jump. Having read the CSIS report is not a prerequisite to understanding my arguments, but it would help.

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