A week from today, as Iraqis wake up on the morning of Thursday, July 1, the Coalition Provisional Authority will have ceased to exist, power will have transferred to an interim indigenous government, and Paul Bremer, the country’s viceroy for the previous 13 months, will have packed his bags and slipped back to Washington and private life.
What does the report card say?
The justification that the Bush administration advanced for invading Iraq — and advanced it to the point of litany on the eve of war — namely, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that his regime collaborated with Al Qaeda, has long been discredited by facts on the ground. Now Washington has fallen back on saying that the overthrow of the tyrannical Iraqi dictator should be justification enough in and by itself.
The invasion turned into a quagmire, and the promised payoff to Iraqis, of a transformed society imbued with social justice and freedom, into a chimera.
Iraq is not Afghanistan, where Washington had low expectations — destroying the Taleban and denying Al-Qaeda safe haven there, with no pretense at nation-building. In Iraq, however, the US embarked on a grand, hubristic project whose end result was to be no less than the transformation of the political, judicial and constitutional life of the Iraqi nation, and with it potentially the entire Middle East.
It did not, alas, work out that way, and it is doubtful that these lofty reforms will see the light of day following the transfer to Iraqi sovereignty next week or even following the full elections that will take place at the end of 2005.
The mess that the US has wrought in Iraq — a mess that in the first heady days after the fall of Saddam’s regime it clearly had not anticipated, as it had not anticipated the challenges it was about to face in a country that may not, after all, have been responsive to John Lockian liberalism — was brought on by the unilateralist posture of the neocon ideologues in the administration. It was all going to be, they said, a “cakewalk.”
Many American, as well as Arab, commentators have attributed the failure — for failure it is — of the American venture in Iraq to the ignorance by these folks of the culture, history and traditions of that distant land.
Not true.
These neocons are a smart, well-informed, not to mention ruthless, cabal of ideologues who knew what they were doing and what they were getting the US into.
They were not ignorant, they were arrogant, contemptuous of those lowly Arabs in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Academic expertise and political agendas are two different things. In commenting on that chasm, Ian Buruma wrote in the New Yorker last week: “Misguided imperial aggression has regularly been advocated by experts of formidable erudition.”
The advent of democratic reform to Iraq would’ve been welcomed by the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, but not when it is prompted by the zeal of men claiming to wish them well while they drank from the same poisoned well as the likes of Ariel Sharon, that remarkable “man of peace.”
Ideas suggested by these folks become suspect by the very fact that they suggested them.
The Iraqi people see little improvement in their lives, no end of violence in their cities, and expect no meaningful change to be introduced by a new interim government that is yet to gain credibility in their eyes. A bleak picture indeed.
The CPA will formally go out of business by next Thursday as sovereignty is transferred to the transitional government, and Paul Bremer will return home to work on his memoir. But will that sovereignty be genuine or will it mask continual American under-the-table control of the political destiny of the Iraqi people?
And will Paul Bremer return in the triumph he no doubt will claim for himself on the lecture circuit, or will he be identified as a grand colonial master whose brash and haughty approach to governing the country was the cause of its current woes?
“We blatantly failed to get it right,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who served as adviser to the occupation authority, told the Washington Post last Sunday. “When you look at the record, its impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity.”
And when you look at the report card, the grades are dismal.
