When Did We Lose Iraq?

The Times has two articles on political scientist / dot.com millionaire / film director Charles Ferguson and his new movie about Iraq, "No End In Sight".

From the first article:

Mr. Ferguson was explaining how he came to write, direct, produce and finance “No End in Sight,” a sharply critical documentary about the planning and execution of the American occupation of Iraq that opens tomorrow in New York and Washington.

...

But unlike many of the earlier Iraq films, which tell their stories through the eyes of soldiers, “No End in Sight,” examines the planning of the American occupation through interviews with some of its principal players like Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin L. Powell, and Barbara K. Bodine, the former ambassador to Yemen who ran central Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad in early 2003.

The end product is a mathematically precise indictment of the Bush administration’s strategy for stabilizing postwar Iraq. Mr. Ferguson, a San Francisco native who describes himself as socially liberal but a centrist on issues of military policy, said he was initially “very, very sympathetic” to invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Compared with other administration officials depicted in the film, President Bush gets off fairly easy. Mr. Ferguson reserves his harshest judgment for Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time; Paul D. Wolfowitz, his deputy; and L. Paul Bremer III, the former administrator in Iraq. Mr. Ferguson zeroes in on their decisions during the first few months of the occupation, which he asserts was a make-or-break moment that the Americans ultimately bungled.

Mr. Ferguson said all three men declined his requests for interviews.

The same ground is covered in the movie review:

Mr. Ferguson, a former Brookings Institution scholar with a doctorate in political science, presents familiar material with impressive concision and impact, offering a clear, temperate and devastating account of high-level arrogance and incompetence.

If failure, as the saying goes, is an orphan, then “No End in Sight” can be thought of as a brief in a paternity suit, offering an emphatic, well- supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows and in journals of opinion: Who lost Iraq? On Mr. Ferguson’s short list are Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer III. None of them agreed to be interviewed for the film. Perhaps they will watch it.

...Mr. Ferguson’s focus turns out to be fairly narrow. He does not dwell on the period between Sept. 11, 2001, and the beginning of the invasion that overthrew Saddam Hussein, nor does he spend a lot of time chronicling the violence that has so far taken the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers and marines and tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis. Instead, most of the movie deals with a period of a few months in the spring and summer of 2003, when a series of decisions were made that did much to determine the terrible course of subsequent events.

It is important to note that Mr. Ferguson’s principal interlocutors were not, at the time, critics of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq but rather people who had, often at considerable professional cost and personal risk, committed themselves to fulfilling those policies. They include Barbara Bodine, a diplomat with long experience in the Middle East; Paul Eaton, an Army major general; Seth Moulton, a lieutenant in the Marine Corps; and Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who served as head of the Organization of Recovery and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq.

That agency, set up to rebuild and stabilize Iraq after the invasion, soon gave way to the Coalition Provisional Authority, directed by Mr. Bremer, who took over in May 2003. Already, according to the eyewitnesses interviewed in “No End in Sight,” terrible mistakes had been made. Looting and other early manifestations of disorder were more likely to be met with Rumsfeldian aphorisms — “Stuff happens”; freedom is “untidy” — than with appropriate tactical responses. And then, once the provisional authority assumed control, orders came down to purge the bureaucracy and the civil service of all members of the Baath Party and to dismantle the Iraqi military. As Mr. Eaton and Mr. Garner tell it, the last policy was especially disastrous and was arrived at and carried out precipitously and without discussion.

Mr. Ferguson seems to have taken a side in a great divide - was the initial invasion realistic in the sense that the long term goal of a stable and democratic Iraq was achievable, and was it only mismanagement of the post-liberation reconstruction of Iraq that was botched?  Put another way, has this been a failure of conception or execution?  I had links to some discussion of this last January but I am certain historians will debate this for decades.

And for today's purposes, let's recall the recent Times/CBS poll showing rising public support for the concept of the initial invasion.  That might suggest growing support for the notion that the key errors were made in the reconstruction.

I assume the political implications are obvious - if the war was never winnable, we may as well stop beating our head against a wall.  On the other hand, if the war was winnable at the outset, then maybe the errors can be fixed and the war still "won".

Obviously, one might argue that whether or not the war was winnable in May of 2003, the cumulative errors have made victory impossible now.  However - if the war was never winnable, then the war supporters were complete idiots (or at least, wrong - I still don't feel completely idiotic).  If the war was winnable at one time, then, well, it was someone else's fault.

And on that point - I am not sure why Bush gets a pass in this movie.  It was Bush's job to know whether the reconstruction planing was getting the proper attention, focus and coordination; if Rumsfeld was putting too much effort into the invasion planning and not enough into the reconstruction phase, Bush should have re-directed his effort.

MORE:  Let's hear from the well-regarded Phillip Carter of Intel Dump:

[The movie] presents the history of the Iraq war in clear, sober, and vivid footage, and makes a compelling argument that we are past the point of "winnability" (whatever that means) today in Iraq.

...Dr. Ferguson clearly makes an artistic judgment to focus roughly 2/3 of his film on the run-up to the war and its early aftermath in 2003. This reflects his political judgment, as explained afterwards during Q&A, that the events and decisions during that timeframe set the stage for what would come. His movie barely covers the 2004 assaults on Fallujah and the Abu Ghraib scandal, and omits mention of the 2005 elections, the Maliki government, and the 2006 Samarra mosque bombing. I'm not so sure that I agree with this; I think the window of opportunity in Iraq stretched into 2004, and that it really didn't slam shut until the disastrous response to the sectarian violence incited by the February 2006 bombing of the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra. But the movie does a good job of explaining the early sins of the occupation, and arguing that these put us on the wrong path from the start.

So, in his view failure was of execution rather than conception.  I'm glad to hear it.

Comments

[kim]

If we lose Iraq, it was lost on the playing fields of the NEA.
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[kim]

News from Paki....Bhutto's back.
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[M. Simon]

What is forgotten is that Clinton reflected the times and the American people.

Bill was said to always have his finger in the wind.

So what happened from Jan '93 to Jan '01 was what America wanted (mostly).