Between surrender and stupid: Regressing toward the mean in a post-Iraq world
As the world’s attention is focused on the disaster in Iraq, let’s take a moment to mourn the last remnants of Syria’s non-extremist, secular rebels, who are facing their final extermination in Aleppo. To Syrians who risked everything for a future worth living in, it’s academic now that Hillary Clinton privately agreed with what I said back in 2011 (last item), when I called for us to arm moderate rebels there. Clinton now says she warned that if we didn’t, extremists would devour the country and its neighbors. Indeed, it seems that for the next several years, Hezbollah will be the most progressive force in Syria.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.
As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events. [The Atlantic]
I hope Syria’s sacrifice will not be for nothing, and that it will be a useful lesson one day, when we have to confront the same question in North Korea. (Yes, this post will eventually turn to the question of North Korea.) I’m grateful enough for Clinton’s acknowledgment that for the moment, I’ll avoid the question of whether I really believe her.
What Clinton is saying about the uses of American power — now that the effect of withdrawing it from the world is so manifest — is also a necessary correction of our post-Bush over-correction. In retrospect, most of us would agree that invading Iraq was a terrible, costly error. And as is so often the case, however, many of us took the lessons of Iraq to extremes, and came to view American power as the real problem there, as opposed to the terrorism that found opportunities in the nationalist reaction to our invasion.
I hope that this back-backlash will cause serious reconsideration of the isolationism that has thrown the world into the greatest outbreak of malignant anarchy since 1975, just as it has discredited the idea that the direct application of U.S. force is the default solution to foreign policy problems.
She responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing (of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its opposite, a focus on withdrawal.
“You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” she said. “One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.”
If this helps us regress toward a mean in that’s neither “stupid shit” nor surrender, that’s immensely important. It’s also good that Clinton is acknowledging that ISIS is too great a direct threat to our own security to ignore, just because we’re all so completely tired of thinking about Iraq. We may not be interested in Iraq, but Iraq is interested in us. ISIS may be enough of a threat to justify a re-invasion, but that doesn’t mean that a re-invasion is the best way to defeat ISIS.
“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” she said. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”
Also belatedly, President Obama is acknowledging that, too, and showing some initial signs of a coherent response to that threat.
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The problem I suppose I have with Hillary Clinton saying this is the same problem a lot of other people have — that fact that she was the Secretary of State when the seeds of these disasters were sown. It will be hard for Clinton to distance herself from them now, as she prepares the battle space for her run for the presidency. The rise of ISIS and the collapse of Iraq are, respectively, the greatest national security and foreign policy fiascoes since 9/11. And when ISIS devours Jordan, our only real Arab ally in the Levant, it will be a fiasco wrapped in a catastrophe inside a disaster.
If Clinton objected so much to those policies, why didn’t she do what Robert Ford (the ex-ambassador, not the crackhead mayor) did and resign? Perhaps she calculated that it would have been no good for her resume to do a Sarah Palin and quit mid-term (in retrospect, her resume might have been better off if she had). Another answer may have something to do with Clinton’s belief that Bashar Assad was a reformer. Fantasies are persistent things.
As welcome as Clinton’s words are in the abstract, her awful record on foreign policy, both in the analysis and execution, robs them of credibility. As you’ve probably heard somewhere, she (and her successor, John Kerry, both) voted for the invasion of Iraq, which we can all agree we would not have done that had we known then what we knew by the end of 2003. But by that time, our national conversation about Iraq had become a re-litigation of what was already irreversible. It seemed to presume the existence of a DeLorean and a flux capacitor, and that withdrawal was an “undo” button we could simply click.
By 2004, however, the question wasn’t what we should have done, but how to salvage the disastrous situation we were in. Were we prepared to abandon Iraq to Al Qaeda’s most bloodthirsty franchise? By then, “undo” wasn’t an option, and immediate withdrawal would have compounded the disaster beyond calculation. Some of those who voted to invade argued that the war was already lost (it wasn’t, as we now know). Those who voted for the invasion and then advocated withdrawal were now 0 and 2. Ironically, these politicians have been forgiven for their misjudgments, while those who were merely 1 and 1 — who voted to go in but argued against walking away — haven’t been.
Much of the Congress seemed to shift toward abandonment out of naked opportunism, notwithstanding the profound and lasting security consequence that would have followed. Clinton joined that camp in 2005, and called for withdrawal. That made her 0 and 3, and in due course, she’d be 0 and 4, when she became a vocal opponent of the Surge.
Of course, you never really know how well, or how poorly, the path not taken would have turned out. If Saddam had not been deposed, what would he have done next? Would Iraq, after being pacified in 2010, have collapsed all around our residual force, leaving it vulnerable? My favorite counterfactual is this: Would Saddam Hussein have survived the Arab Spring? If Assad and Qaddafi couldn’t survive it, it seems likely that Saddam, who hadn’t controlled all of Iraq’s territory since the 1980s, would have fallen, too, at least in southern Iraq. If the U.S. didn’t support a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq, Iran certainly would have. Iraq has been inherently unstable since its creation. That’s why it was, and is, so difficult to stabilize.
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Clinton wasn’t much better as an executor of foreign policy. As Secretary of State, she was responsible for the nomination of human wrecking ball Christopher Hill as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, and ultimately, for the failure of the SOFA negotiations. (By nominating Hill, Clinton also implicitly approved Bush’s disastrous Agreed Framework 2.0 with North Korea.) Now, Clinton says that withdrawal was “a mistake” — albeit a mistake she assigns exclusively to the Iraqi government — and expects us to forget that she had called for withdrawal in 2005, opposed the surge in 2007, and quietly basked as her boss, the President took credit for withdrawing from a country that had largely been pacified by 2010. That postured Clinton to either take credit or distance herself in 2016, depending on how things worked out.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Clinton analyzed the problem correctly, and really had argued for a residual force behind the scenes in 2010. That might add a point to her score if she’d been a Senator, but that doesn’t work for a sitting Secretary of State who is responsible for translating analysis into execution. Score that as you will, but I score it 0 and 5, giving Clinton an almost perfect record of being wrong about Iraq. It may well be that the first time Clinton has gotten Iraq right was this month, when she supported President Obama’s decision to bomb ISIS before it reached the gates of Irbil and slaughtered tens of thousands of Yazidis. Granted, that’s a reversal of what Obama had said years ago, but it’s a reversal for the better, so let’s let it go.
Today, Clinton talks as if she’s learned something from the last year, but as a diplomat, she often failed to understand the importance of power and leverage to successful diplomacy. She bears significant responsibility for the failures of the Russian re-set, the non-existent pivot to Asia, and most unforgivably, Obama’s failure to support young Iranians during the Green Revolution. Despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden, at least one senior intelligence official is questioning the narrative that Al Qaeda is in decline, and even if it is, it’s being replaced by something even more dangerous.
The most charitable interpretation this allows is that Clinton was wholly ineffective at getting the President to follow her advice and executing sound policies. The least charitable explanation is that she’s trying to triangulate away from the disasters she did so much to create. Policy views that triangulate under the influence of polls are inherently post hoc and reactive. But reinvented hindsight is no substitute for the capacity to anticipate and avert crisis.
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The greater lessons here are about the importance of American power (by which I seldom, but sometimes, mean military power) in preserving peace. You may not like the idea of projecting it globally — particularly if you’re an American — but now that we have a mouthful of the alternative, we don’t much care for the flavor of it. If there are some lessons to be drawn from Iraq and the post-Iraq years, I think they are these.
– First, diplomacy without the backing of power is useless against psychopaths (see Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China’s quiet Yamamoto-style rampage across the Pacific Rim).
– Second, we should not threaten to use force without making some intelligent calculations about how we can use it successfully (see Syria and “red lines”).
– Third, we should be less restrained in our use of soft power (see, e.g., targeted sanctions and information operations against North Korea and Iran) and more restrained in our use of hard power (see, obviously, Iraq), which is always costly in money, world opinion, and lives.
– Fourth, when we do use hard power, we should apply the minimum amount of American power directly, and — barring a direct and imminent threat to the U.S. or a treaty ally — leave wars of liberation to the liberated (see Libya).
– Fifth, when a President uses hard power, his first responsibility is to maintain the national consensus for concluding its use successfully (see Vietnam, Iraq, and even Libya).
– Sixth, when hard power results in the fall of a hostile regime, we can’t absolve ourselves from the reconstruction of that nation out of a general distaste for “nation building.” If you think nation building is costly, consider the eventual costs of nation-unbuilding. (See, again, Libya, or Afghanistan circa 1990.)
– Finally, not all societies are equally ready for self-government. Some societies need transitional, benevolent authoritarians like Lee Kwan-Yew, Ataturk, or Park Chung-Hee to midwife it, to contain destabilizing forces while a society’s educational system and economy are rebuilt. Illiterate, ignorant, and unemployed people have a terrible record for self-government and often support the leaders that promise gratification in the form of revenge or redistribution. For an under-developed society, a transition to democracy is a process, not an event — a marathon, not a sprint. A benevolent authoritarian should gradually shift the weight of self-government onto the shoulders of a people as the people become prepared to exercise it. (Of course, for every Lee Kwan Yew there’s a Ferdinand Marcos, and for every King Abdullah there’s a Hosni Mubarak. The problem with authoritarians is that so few of them are really benevolent.)
What’s left to us now in Iraq? There is no national appetite for another large-scale ground war, and without popular support, invasion would mean defeat and further damage to our national power and credibility. That would further reduce the deterrence and leverage of implied force, and do further harm to our capacity to deter the next war. With the exception of advisors, forward air controllers, and Special Operations forces to train indigenous forces, the Army will have to sit this one out (yes, I know that F.A.C.s are Air Force).
Yet any sober-minded observer must agree that there is no option to leave ISIS in existence. We may not be interested in Iraq, but Iraq is interested in us. Either we fight them there or fight them here, and watch the costs to our own civil liberties mount as we evolve into a police state, a nation of metal detectors, petty despots in security guard uniforms, and plenary surveillance authorities. If there is a way to fight those who mean us harm without a massive deployment of American infantry, the advantages of fighting ISIS with a combination of air power and local proxies requires no elaboration.
Needless to say, limiting that fight to one side of the Iraq-Syria border is as pointless as treating half a tumor.
The one small bright spot in this tragedy is that we still have Jordan as an ally, and Jordan is one of our best geographical gateways to supporting Sunni tribes to resist ISIS, and eventually defeat it. Part of the reason ISIS has been successful is that its advance is reversing the unnatural borders Sykes and Picot drew a century ago.
Sunnis are never going to be comfortable being governed by Shiites or Alawites again. At best, Iraq and Syria can survive as nominal loose confederations in which the regions have their own flags and armies, just like Kurdistan has now. Over time, those regions can be managed toward gradual independence and reunification with their ethnic and religious kindred, into true nation-states. If a Sunni state in the Levant is now inevitable — or at least, if two strongly autonomous Sunni regions in the Levant are — then at least we have the past success of the Iraqi Awakening to model our next-best alternative on.
This is simply the least-bad alternative that’s left, of course, not a good one. Anyone who questions the difficulty of partitioning land between interspersed ethnic groups with centuries of hatred between them should re-read the history of India’s partition in 1947, or Yugoslavia’s in 1992. Invariably, partition will mean tyranny by each local majority, and will result in mass migrations across the new borders. In the short term, it will take good diplomacy and the empowerment of the most responsible leaders in each faction to minimize this.
Fortunately, there are already some signs that the Sunni tribes are resisting ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, if you’ve been reading the excellent daily summaries by the Institute for the Study of War. The departure of Nuri Al Maliki could also help make that plan plausible. President Obama and John Kerry deserve some recognition for engineering Maliki’s peaceful departure.
Our long-term objectives now should be to build and rebuild our alliances with the Sunni tribes of the Levant, to empower them to resist ISIS (both with arms and air support, if necessary), to influence them toward tolerating the religious minorities that will remain within their new nations, and to broker a settlement of their borders that does not become the next Bosnia. Those things will all be much, much harder than they would have been in 2009, of course, and they will take years to resolve. But it’s still a plausible alternative to a terrorist caliphate flooding the world with refugees and bus bombers.
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For years, Iraq cast a long shadow over North Korea. The people of North Korea are arguably unrecognized casualties of the invasion of Iraq, because since 2003, Iraq has paralyzed our North Korea policy. Iraq is the reason an exhausted and beleaguered Bush Administration spent its entire second term taking the path of least resistance against North Korea, deferring to Roh Moo Hyun, and quietly negotiating Agreed Framework II. Since 2004, the opposition to genocide in North Korea was mischaracterized as a pretext for an invasion of North Korea, despite the almost complete opposition to that idea by those of us who tried to keep the conversation about North Korea alive. Those of us who argued that the world would be a better place without the Kim regime had to argue past (perfectly legitimate, but often exaggerated) estimates of chaos in post-collapse North Korea.
Iraq made it fashionable to embrace the world’s most terrible regimes in the name of “stability” and “nonintervention.” (But of course, giving aid, trade benefits, loans, and diplomatic recognition are forms of intervention.) A few on the far left and the far right were willing to overlook the greatest crimes against humanity since the Khmer Rouge out of their wholesale opposition to American power, and actively supported the preservation of the regime. (I’ll stop calling these self-described non-interventionists “isolationists” when they stop calling everyone to the right of Jimmy Carter “neocons” without offering a more coherent definition of that term.) The very idea of democratization was equated with imperialism, or viewed as unsafe at any speed.
For the duration of the 1980s, to liberals, every foreign policy problem was Vietnam, and for the duration of the 1990s, to conservatives, every foreign policy problem was Desert Storm. If there’s any consistency to be drawn from the misuse of these analogies, it’s that analogies are useless when taken out of their cultural and policy context. Still, analogies tempt us because they fit on bumper stickers.
In the case of North Korea, the Iraq analogy was both useless and destructive. Korea has a culture without Iraq’s religious or ethnic differences. It is a culture that values unity, discipline, and homogeneity. Its work ethic borders on the fanatical, and that work ethic is responsible for transforming South Korea from one of the world’s poorest nations in 1953 into a global economic power in just 30 years. Unlike Iraq, Korea has a functioning infrastructure, government, and civil society that can be extended over North Korea. In Iraq, we were painfully unprepared to restore civil order, and no political grouping had legitimacy with all of Iraq’s regions.
There is also a warning for Korea in the example of Iraq. Like Iraq, Korea (particularly North Korea) is intensely nationalist, and often xenophobic. Koreans and Americans should be preparing plans that assume that U.S. forces will not occupy North Korea. A U.S. occupation of North Korea would be politically unacceptable to American voters, diplomatically unacceptable for China, and a potential source of rejectionism by Koreans on both sides of today’s DMZ. We should also be warning China that we would support indigenous resistance to a Chinese occupation of any part of North Korea.
This isn’t to deny the profound environmental, psychological, legal, and socioeconomic problems to be overcome. It is an argument that we ought to be mitigating those costs by preparing for them with diplomacy, information operations, and logistical planning.
The cost of regime collapse in North Korea will be high, but that collapse is inevitable in some form, whether it’s a coup that leaves the system intact but profoundly transformed, a mutiny that splits the country into warring regions, or an extended insurgency. There is no recent historical record of a regime like Kim Jong Un’s surviving; indeed, the survival of that regime to this day can only be explained by Korea’s cultural proclivity toward cohesion and obedience, along with the regime’s careful management of hunger, exhaustion, and mutual isolation.
The longer that collapse is delayed, the more costly the reconstruction will be, in financial terms for South Koreans, and in the dehumanization, death, and misery it will wring from North Koreans. Park Geun-Hye has often seemed to overlook the costs of reconstruction when she speaks of a “jackpot” in North Korea. “Jackpot” is an unfortunate term in this context, both for the risk and the frivolity it implies. Some argue that the costs of collapse will be high, while others argue say that the rewards will be high. They’re both right, only they’re each right about different phases of North Korea’s reconstruction.
Once the initial costs of recovery are paid, the two Koreas will complement each other both demographically and economically. North Korea’s young population will provide the work force and the spouses that aging, prosperous South Korea has begun importing from other parts of Asia. North Koreans will sustain their bodies on South Korean agriculture, and on imported food that will flow freely from the United States. North Korean mines will feed both South Korean factories, and refurbished or new factories in the North.
The jackpot will be China’s too. A united Korea will stimulate a historic economic boom in northeastern China, giving China’s rust belt free access to railroads leading to refurbished ports in Rajin, Chongjin, and Wonsan, and even Incheon and Busan. The new prosperity will help China absorb its excess of unemployed migrant workers, and offset a coming pension bomb as the population in Manchuria ages.
Other nations in the region, including Japan and Russia, will incur spillover benefits, as will the entire global economy. Korea, Japan, and the U.S. will incur a peace dividend from not having to deter and defend against North Korea. Global security will be rid of the single greatest threat to the world’s nonproliferation regime. And this does not even begin to speak of the peace dividend for the North Korean people, who will have work, food, freedom, and true peace for the first time in their lives. A vast reservoir of human potential will be untapped, even if the early stages of that change will be rife with crime, carpet-bagging, and other unsavory forms of profiteering. And it’s hard to see how they could be more unsavory than the profiteering in North Korea today.
Despite the high initial costs, by any objective measure, a world without Kim Jong Un will be an immeasurably better place within five years of ridding itself of him. It’s time to move beyond our co-dependence on the devil we know, or at least too often think we know.