Decline and Fall

As someone who once supported the Iraq War, I am keenly interested in those who have come around as I have. I'm also interested in those who have proposed actual solutions to that fiasco, instead of standing around making "Dubya's an idiot" jokes. (As much as I enjoy those.)

Robert F. Kaplan's cover story in the latest New Republic is a great example of giving a cogent account of the things that have worked and the things that haven't in our mess o' potamian project. He's also a fan of General Petraeus, and cites the progress made in Ramadi as a case-study in how to win, or at least not lose, the battle for hearts and minds. One of the big problems over there is the Baghdad-centric mindset of the war's strategists:

The problem in Iraq has never been a lack of military capability. The problem has been confusion--at the top--over how to use it. There has always been a self-defeating tautology at work in the management of this war: The absence of guidance from Baghdad encourages commanders to innovate, but it also means their innovations aren't elevated to the level of guidance. Lacking a framework for fighting the insurgency, one brigade confines itself to a city's edge, another blasts its way through, and a third finally gets it right. Across the country, the pattern repeats itself over and over. Hence the awful question mark that may double as the epitaph of the U.S. enterprise in Iraq: What if there were one true path all along?

As much as I am apalled by the Bush Administration's unwillingness (or, rather, unwittingness) to learn from the lessons of Tall Afar, Mosul and Ramadi, that doesn't mean those lessons can't be learned. I wish we had never attempted to rebuild Iraq, but now that we're there, it would be nice if we managed to leave without making the world unambiguously worse.

Labels: Bush, GWOT