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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
War hawks Brooks, Kagan and Kristol admit that Bush has blundered in Iraq. Plus: A new CEO for the CIA, and recruiting "wild Christian warriors."
Apr 21, 2004 | Between the intense media coverage of the contentious 9/11 hearings and weeks of violence and upheaval in Iraq, April has not been a good month for the Bush administration on the publicity front. There is little doubt that Americans' perception of the situation in Iraq -- the mission there far from accomplished -- will be key at the voting booth this November. It can't help President Bush's cause that some of his most die-hard backers are increasingly turning against him.
In Saturday's New York Times, conservative commentator David Brooks aired a striking change of heart in a column titled "A More Humble Hawk." In light of mounting unrest and a spike in U.S. casualties (as of Tuesday evening, at least 100 soldiers have been killed in action since April 1), Brooks conceded, "The first thing to say is that I never thought it would be this bad" and "I did not appreciate how our very presence in Iraq would overshadow democratization." Though with cautious words, Brooks faults the Bush administration for more than a failure of imagination.
"Let me describe my attitude toward the Bush administration. Despite all that's happened, I was still stirred by [Friday's] Bush/Blair statements about democracy in the Middle East. Nonetheless, over the past two years many conservatives have grown increasingly exasperated with the administration's inability to execute its policies semicompetently."
Such "semicompetence," Brooks argues, should have included more money and manpower.
"When I worked at The Weekly Standard, we argued ad nauseam that the U.S. should pour men and matériel into Iraq -- that such an occupation could not be accomplished by a light, lean, 'transformed' military. The administration was impervious to the growing evidence about that. The failure to establish order was the prime mistake, from which all other problems flow.
"On July 21, 2002, my colleague Robert Kagan wrote the first of several essays lamenting the administration's alarming lack of preparation for post-Saddam Iraq. Yet the administration seemed content to try nation-building on the cheap."
Even though hard-line hawks urged a U.S. invasion of Iraq with or without U.N. support, Brooks now slams the administration for not heeding his neoconservative friends' advice about building a coalition for the reconstruction.
"Many of us also assumed, wrongly, that the administration would launch a fresh postwar initiative to globalize the reconstruction effort. My friends at the Project for the New American Century urged the U.S. to go to the U.N. for a reconstruction resolution, to build a broad coalition to aid rebuilding and to establish a NATO-led security force. That never happened."
In the end, though, Brooks still argues that Bush sees the big picture clearly -- that everything will work out as soon as Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and the multitude of other rival ethnic factions in the region embrace a new kind of enlightened nationalistic unity.
"Despite all this -- and maybe it's pure defensiveness -- I still believe that in 20 years, no one will doubt that Bush did the right thing ... This time, unlike 1920, say, Iraqis can see a panoply of new and thriving democracies. They have witnessed Iran's horrible experience with theocracy. Once the political process moves ahead, nationalism will work in our favor, as Iraqis seek to become the leading reformers in the Arab world.
"We hawks were wrong about many things. But in opening up the possibility for a slow trudge toward democracy, we were still right about the big thing."
Writing in the April 26 issue of leading neconservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, editors William Kristol and Robert Kagan are more blunt about the administration's deep policy problems.
"While we certainly do not hold the administration responsible for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, it is clear that there have been failures in planning and in execution, failures that have been evident for most of the last year. Serious errors have been made -- and made, above all, by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The recent violence in Iraq has confirmed that the level of American military forces has been too low to accomplish the president's mission ever since the invasion phase of the war ended last April ...
"Close observers of the conflict in Iraq, civilian and military alike (military, of course, speaking off the record), say that at least two additional divisions -- at least 30,000 extra troops -- are needed in Iraq just to deal with the current crisis. Even more troops may well be needed to fully pacify the country. And it would be useful to have as many of those troops as possible there sooner rather than later.
"The shortage of troops in Iraq is the product of a string of bad calculations and a hefty dose of wishful thinking."
Smarter, more robust military planning, argue Kristol and Kagan, could have helped prevent everything from the widespread looting and destruction of Iraqi infrastructure to the rise of terrorists and organized factional militias. Whereas neocons like Kristol and Kagan had close ties to Pentagon policymakers before the war, it's striking that now they are all but calling for Rumsfeld's head.
"Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld famously talks about preparing for the 'unknown unknowns.' Yet the present crisis was hardly unforeseeable, and Rumsfeld did not ensure that the military was prepared to deal with it. He failed to put in place in Iraq a force big enough to handle the challenges at hand. That is a significant failure, and we do not yet know the price that will be paid for it.
"The question is whether Rumsfeld and his generals have learned from past mistakes. Or rather, perhaps, the question is whether George W. Bush has learned from Rumsfeld's past mistakes. After all, at the end of the day, it is up to the president to ensure that the success he demands in Iraq will in fact be accomplished. If his current secretary of defense cannot make the adjustments that are necessary, the president should find one who will."
