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COPYRIGHT 2006 Professors World Peace Academy
In planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, did the United States seek to take advantage of historic ethnic and sectarian differences in the country? Of various political game plans for postwar Iraq, was divide and dominate the preferred approach? While attributing a level of Machiavellianism, sophistication, or conspiracy approach to the Bush administration that it may have been incapable of, why is it that most of Iraq's ethnic and sectarian leaders believe that the U.S. strategy was indeed intended to be divisive? If that is not the case, were American policy-makers genuinely oblivious to Iraq's ethnosectarian fault lines and could they have inadvertently become enmeshed in them?
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Divide-and-rule strategy is fraught with risks. Most often associated with the imperial strategies of classical Rome and the British Raj, divide-et-impera conceals assumptions, calculations, and logic that may not apply to all contexts. If the United States in the twenty-first century has embraced imperial ambitions and international hegemony--or if under the Bush administration it has merely blundered into becoming an "incoherent empire" (1)--is divide-and-rule strategy its game plan? Is Condoleeza Rice's idea of "creative chaos," which the U.S. creates and then manages, really a postmodern term for divide and rule? Given that a classified U.S. military report from October 2006 traces Iraq's steady descent into chaos, (2) has the rise in sectarian violence in Iraq been connected to a creative chaos policy?
Western military interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq were interventions in states with pre-existing ethnic and sectarian cleavages. If we accept official discourse, the objectives of these interventions were peace-making and nation-building. But if we lend credence to the perceptions of people on the ground, these were exercises in fragmenting already divided societies; presumably the interests of intervening powers were furthered by these actions. Their objective was less direct rule than domination or control.
In examining game plans, creative chaos, and Western interventions, I focus on Iraq--a country at war with both foreign occupation forces and itself. The first question is whether the U.S. entered Iraq with a game plan, that is, a political strategy to make military intervention work. I then turn to the possible game plans the U.S. could have adopted. Given that military intervention has deepened rather than weakened ethnosectarian divisions, the intriguing question becomes whether that was the game plan all along. Following from this is the issue of whether fragmenting Iraq was part of a more general objective of fragmenting the Middle East. If that was the game plan, what accounts for the U.S. facing an unexpected outcome: dividing but being defeated?
GAME PLAN OR NOT?
Did the Bush administration have a game plan--a political strategy--for Iraq?
Some observers say no
According to Larry Diamond, summarizing a number of other scholars' conclusions as well as his own experience as Secretary of State Rice's "democracy delegate" to Iraq, the U.S. invaded the country "without a coherent viable plan." (3) Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, concurred and blamed the U.S. President: "Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush's shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time." (4) The Washington Post's military correspondent Thomas Ricks concluded that the emphasis on military planning for taking Baghdad was at the expense of developing a grand strategy for post-invasion rule. "It is difficult to overstate what a key misstep this lack of strategic direction was." (5)
Top military leaders have also criticized the absence of a post-invasion plan. In November 2004 the four chiefs of the U.S. armed services testified to the House Armed Services Committee that while they had adequately planned for combat operations, evidenced by the quick advance to Baghdad, the U.S. government did not place enough effort into planning for peace. (6)
The Bush administration may not have developed a game plan for Iraq in the belief that it was not needed: Iraqis would welcome Western coalition forces which had overthrown Saddam and they would themselves establish a new pro-Western political system. In turn, neocons who sold the Iraq invasion to Bush were convinced that U.S. military might was enough to shape the country's future whichever way the administration chose.
Some observers--as well as most Iraqis--argue that there was a game plan
The closest approximation of a game plan was the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, which generated thirteen reports addressing different aspects of Iraq's postwar future. By the time it was completed, it added up to over 2,000 pages. The Project anticipated that Iraqi exile groups would be involved in the new government of a unified Iraqi state. Two factors undercut the acceptance of this Project as the game plan: 1) Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ignored it, and 2) Project head Ryan Crocker contended it was never intended to be a postwar plan. (7)
To what degree was U.S. intelligence involved in shaping a game plan?
Before the war, the intelligence community on its own initiative reviewed the problems that any post-invasion authority in Iraq would likely have to face. Two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council--an independent group advising the director of central intelligence, predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict. (8) The assessments suggested it was unlikely that Iraq would split apart after an American invasion but there was a good chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with one another. The reports warned of a political culture that would not provide fertile ground for democracy and predicted a protracted, difficult, and turbulent transition. As a worst-case scenario, the reports indicated that prolonged instability could lead to civil war.
There has been a wide-ranging debate on the role of intelligence in the Bush administration's decision-making on Iraq. (9) Brent Scowcroft, Richard Clarke, and David Suskind inter alia have written about the administration's determination to invade Iraq whether intelligence reports supported this policy or not. (10) Paul Pillar, who as National Intelligence Officer for the Near East from 2000 to 2005 represented the intelligence community's senior Middle East analyst, contended that in the run-up to the invasion the Bush administration disregarded the community's expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its case. (11)
If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had one policy implication, Pillar claimed, it was to avoid going to war, or if war was to be launched it was to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is noteworthy about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq, then, is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policy makers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions of recent decades.
Since the Bush administration felt it knew better than the intelligence community about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it would seem logical that the administration would have chosen a political game plan best suited to eliminating the threat and creating a viable new political system. What game plans were there to choose from?
WHAT WAS THE GAME PLAN?
Whatever the game plan may have been before the 2003 invasion, it had to be modified in the light of subsequent political and military developments in Iraq. The original game plan--if there was one--had to be made functional and responsive to changing circumstances. It is likely that some combination of the following plans was applied in Iraq at different times.
Nation-building (aka Democracy Lite)
There is an ironic domestic twist to U.S. interventions in Iraq as well as Afghanistan--President Bush's enmeshment in nation building. As a presidential candidate in 2000 he had vowed not to get involved in this tricky business. During a debate with Democratic Al Gore at Wake Forest in October 2000, Bush pledged "absolutely not" to engage in nation building. Yet after faulting Clinton for getting the U.S. involved in such activity in the former Yugoslavia, Bush followed suit in a number of countries. (12)
Nation-building entails everything from ensuring public safety and providing running water, transport, and schools to creating national institutions that become the focus of identification for a society. The Bush administration's nation-building efforts since 2001 also include drafting constitutions, forging national coalitions, and hammering out accords with ethnic, regional,...
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