Misunderstood Mistakes

Glenn links Taranto, who says this about Iraq:

No philosophical breakthroughs have occurred over the past decade to render the moral and legal justifications for the war untenable in retrospect. Thus the only test it can be said to have failed is an empirical one: that things turned out badly. To say so may seem obvious, but it begs the question: Badly compared with what?

Things are not so bad today that one can say with anything approaching certainty that they would be better if Congress had voted down the authorization to use force in 2002, or if President Bush had declined to avail himself of it the following year. It is not difficult to imagine a counterfactual scenario in which Saddam Hussein is still in power and things are worse than they are today. It is easier still to imagine one in which things are bad enough that those who supported war in 2002-03, having lost the political debate, feel as justified in saying “I told you so” as those who opposed it do today. All we know–all we can know–is what happened; might-have-beens are by definition speculative.

James is one of the clearest thinkers around today, and this column is no exception, but one might quibble that perhaps it doesn’t quite extend its scope far enough — as he says, the initial invasion was very successful, but the pathologies of Iraqi society and degradation of Iraqi institutions were generally underestimated.  What’s too often forgotten is that the U.S. was also too sensitive to criticisms of “imperialism,”  and this criticism led to the disastrous “light footprint” (aka “let the Iraqis solve their own problems”) strategy which fostered insurgency until Bush courageously doubled down on Petraeus’ COIN surge in the face of withering polls and won a war prominent politicians were calling “lost” (and as a direct result today Iraqi lives are far better than in 2002, e.g. GDP has quintupled, basic services like water and sewage have been extended to millions, basic press and voting rights are no longer unknown, etc).

That is to say, problems tended to flow less from misplaced confidence in American force, and more the oikophobic tendency to overrate “the other” and underrate America.  I remember well the antebellum cautions of prominent Arabists like Juan Cole, who were arguing (in all seriousness) that the U.S. would never allow Iraqis to vote, and war critics generally were overwhelmingly of the opinion U.S. troops were the problem.

The number of commentators who predicted both a virulent sectarian insurgency and its quelling via the COIN surge strategy is vanishingly small indeed.  I certainly can’t count myself among the prognosticators so perspicacious– but I do like to think I can learn from the past.

None of this bodes well for feckless oikophobe Obama.

As Acemoglu has shown, good institutions are virtually impossible to develop even in the best of circumstances, to say nothing of ab initio. The neglected lesson of Iraq and the Arab Spring is that if American troops hadn’t stood up a constitutional government in Mesopotamia, either terrorists or Baathists would be running the place today and Iraqi lives would be no better than in 2002.

That’s not to argue we should try to stand up a new government in Syria… or Libya, or Iran, or Egypt, or North Korea, or anywhere else.  But it’s important to understand that the spectrum of choices between half-measures and nothing aren’t likely to produce appreciably different outcomes — but could have very different costs.