The sport of extreme optimism, or how we can win in Iraq

From the pages of Time Magazine comes a Christmas tale of anarchy, death and destruction leavened with a dose of Frank P. Church. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, or at least a confederation of elves prepared to stand in for him, or if not exactly a confederation and not exactly prepared (and not exactly elves), at least potentially so (excepting the elves).

A few months back Time hired Real Clear Politics blogger Tom Bevan on the theory that the magazine’s readers were clamoring for a right-of-center voice to balance the liberal rantings of Andrew Sullivan. The sharp-eyed Bevan spotted a column by retired Colonel Ken Allard in the San Antonio Express-News citing a press briefing by the outgoing commander of US troops in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli. We’ll call this connection Tinkers to Evers to Chance, but you can substitute “Not A Freakin’ Prayer” for “Chance” if you like.

What got Bevan’s attention was Allard’s praise for Chiarelli, whom Allard calls a military genius (he quotes Swift to back him up). What Chiarelli said that Allard found so revelatory is that Iraq needs not more US troops but the integration of civil and military efforts from the US, aimed at providing reconstruction aid and rebuilding civil and social institutions along with providing security, and a willingness from Iraqis to set aside their religious and partisan disputes. Not 130,000 more troops, in Chiarelli’s view, but 130,000 more jobs. Which is smart thinking, because we don’t have 130,000 more troops; might as well go with the jobs.

You might be asking yourself why no one thought of this before, but that’s what sets genius apart from the rest of us: faced with the challenge of putting toothpaste back in the tube, the genius doesn’t sit around swearing like you or I might do but instead invents a machine to travel back in time to the moment before we squeezed. Yes, those thrilling days of yesteryear before the White House and Don Rumsfeld opted to avoid planning for the occupation in favor of this:

3ID (M) transitioned into Phase IV SASO with no plan from higher headquarters. There was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring the judicial system was operational. In retrospect, perhaps division planners should have been instructed to identify and address these issues earlier, given the likelihood that higher would not provide such information.

That’s from the after-action report written by the Third Infantry Division, the first US troops to reach Baghdad during the invasion. “SASO” stands for “stability and support operations,” and “higher” stands for Tommy Franks at Central Command. The whole paragraph stands for “Thanks a lot, you bunch of bloody-handed derelict morons.” You can search military literature for a long time before you’ll find a collection of captains and colonels coming that close to calling their ultimate boss a homicidal airhead.

Allard finds it convenient to blame the lack of diplomatic, civil, military and private sector coordination on diplomats, civilians and the private sector, all of which he believes have resisted the president’s blandishments.

Chiarelli didn’t say so, but the fact is that three years after invading Iraq, we are principally engaged there with only a single element of state power: the Department of Defense. Not Agriculture, Justice, Commerce or the rest of the interagency gaggle. Put aside the failure of Bush 43 to mobilize the country: To this point he hasn’t even persuaded the rest of the government that this fight means applying the collective might of the United States.

Apologies to Swift, but for the interagency stay-at-homes to be a confederacy, they would have to be much better organized. And how is the vaunted American private sector contributing its expertise? Forget about it — except for Halliburton, KBR and the rest of the defense contracting crowd.

Allard’s confederacy is Swift’s confederacy of dunces against which genius, in the person of Chiarelli, stands starkly defined. It’s a tribute to the age of lowered expectations that someone who more or less proposes a solution for mitigating the bloodbath when the same approach was proposed in considerably more detail before the invasion, with the aim of avoiding the bloodbath, by the people Allard scorns as dunces, and was then discarded by the actual dunces, qualifies as a genius in anyone’s eyes. Say what you will about Colin Powell, which is probably something along the lines of “that mack-daddy wimp knew it was crap all along and never said a damned word,” but he invested a great deal of time and resources in the Future of Iraq Project, which among other things brought together military experts, diplomats, academics, exiled Iraqis and representatives of the legal and private sectors who all collaborated to produce a detailed, multi-volume plan for preserving the valuable elements of civil society under Saddam and replacing the disastrous elements with new ones.

Unfortunately, military planners didn’t learn of the project until a month prior to the invasion. When they did learn of it, and tried to hire one of the coordinators to work with Jay Garner, the first US proconsul in Iraq, the appointment was blocked by Rumsfeld and his gang of demented underlings. (For more on this and links to some interesting if belated institutional press coverage, see this post from May of last year.)

All of this is academic, of course, not least because peacekeeping and nation-building on the scale envisioned by Powell’s planners requires sufficient troops to keep the peace while the new institutions are installed. The rule of thumb for peacekeeping is 20 troops per 1,000 civilians, which for Iraq works out to a bit more than 500,000, which we didn’t have in 2003 absent a near-total mobilization of the Guard and Reserves, and which wouldn’t have been allocated even if we did have them because loading that many troops into the country would have been too inelegant for the administration’s tastes and would have inferred the potential for a troublesome future.

What we didn’t have in the way of troops in 2003 is even less available now, and now we don’t have sufficient equipment for them anyway because everything we own is either getting blown up or beat up in Iraq or sitting in repair depots, and we’d need even more of them because it’s actually a bit more difficult to keep the peace in a country where there is none.

Allard is a military man, so he knows about the lack of available troops, which makes his support of softer alternatives much easier to arrive at. He’s also a pundit, which makes his failure to recollect, or his rank dishonesty in ignoring, that his near-confederacy of dunces was all lined up and ready to go before the invasion and was not only not the object of presidential persuasion but was actively and deliberately and with precision and great joy spat upon, understandable if not forgivable. Pundits are like that: they fall off the turnip truck, bounce to their feet and promptly hitch a ride on the next one to come down the pike. (For this reason you should never drive behind a turnip truck, lest you mow down a tumbling pundit and find yourself accused of incivility.)

Bevan’s enthusiasm for Allard’s once-removed epiphany is the product of unlimited credulity, another essential pundit characteristic. He says that “Allard has been a frequent critic of the administration’s handling of the war and of Secretary Rumsfeld, and the fact he’s “startled” at the idea we can still win in Iraq I take as a good thing.” In fact it’s double-good, because not only is there sudden evidence of light at the end of the tunnel, there’s yet another opportunity to both seize on something that will never ever happen and to blame someone else — those bureaucratic nitwits whose inaction has doomed us all — for the miracle that wasn’t.

A common theme among frustrated war supporters is that we should all forget about how we arrived at this point and focus on solutions, which is evidence that both stupidity and cowardice are viral, but which to a limited extent has some merit: we should ship everyone who brought us to this point off to Guantanamo, something we can now do without accusation or judgement (or impeachment?), and try to come up with some sort of non-catastrophic resolution undistracted by the incessant natterings of people who are wrong about everything all the time and whose sole expression of creativity is in finding new ways to be wrong about the same old thing.