Two days ago, Charles Ferguson, director of the Iraq-doc "No End In Sight," was on public radio in New York discussing his work on a book that will extend his film’s findings. His conclusion, he told host Brian Lehrer, was that the decisions the U.S. made in the months following the invasion in the spring of ’03 were the most calamitous decisions in 50 years of American foreign policymaking.
The decisions made after the invasion. Ferguson seems determined to prove that if the Coalition Provisional Authority had not deBaathified the civil service, dismissed the Iraqi army, and so forth, everything would have been hunky-dory in Baghdad. Two of his latest assertions are that martial law should have been declared during the period of looting after Baghdad fell, and that Bernie Kerik, who was brought in to police Iraq, didn’t know Arabic and had been given a task way "above his pay grade." There were others who could have done the job, Ferguson said, without naming names.
I wonder who. The problem with this Monday-morning quarterbacking is that it originates from people who are a, trying to justify their support for this terrible war, or b, trying to rescue the principle of armed intervention to end dictatorships in foreign lands. Even assuming Ferguson falls into the second and more innocent category, his argument is flimsy. Of course the management of Occupied Iraq was mishandled, but who truly is capable of managing such matters competently? No one. Just ask the Israelis. Where is the compendium of know-how about how to administer a crippled state not your own in the postcolonial era? The U.N.; it is the only place that can halfway pull off such tricks; and it refused to sign off on the Iraqi debacle, with good reason. Ferguson was sneering in his comments about Bernie Kerik. But Kerik is an experienced American police chief. Can you think of an Arab police chief who would have done the job?
The chaos in Iraq was inevitable. In his book Dying To Win, Robert Pape has shown that occupations in which occupier and occupied have religious differences result in suicide bombing. Then there are the local politics. No matter what Ferguson says about martial law or de-Baathification, the U.S. was removing a minority sect, Sunnis, from power and thereby creating an instant sectarian struggle for power. If the CPA had kept the Iraqi army intact, or sent in the Rockettes, the same insurgency would
have eventuated, and neolibs would now be talking about how that
was the worst decision ever made.
There is no good way to do this. That is the lesson of Iraq. The United States cannot and should not invade sovereign dictatorships to impose democracy.
