Jesse comments on the post-Saddam aftermath:
Long-Term Impacts Of The Capture
1.) The terrorist/Iraqi insurgency: Now, we’ll find out whether they’re fighting for a Saddam Restoration or against American occupation. While I certainly hope it’s the former (and that a speedy trial of Saddam set up over the next couple of weeks where his various horrific crimes are read in front of him, and he’s summarily locked up and interrogated lawfully until he dies), I fear that it’s much more the latter.
I think in the short run, we will see two results. First, the so-called ‘dead-enders,’ those Ba’athists and Saddam loyalists, will probably step up their efforts to create chaos, so I would not be surprised to see a small uptick in the frequency and ferocity of incidents. That should taper off, in very little time.
Second, the people are now no longer going to be afraid. Before, when they talked about Saddam, reporters frequently noted that there was still a sense of fear because Saddam was at large. That is gone, and I expect Iraqi’s will help the coalition more, and begin to quickly turn against the foregin jihadis/insurgents.
Third, the manner in which Saddam was captured, without even putting up a fight, might mute resistance. The emperor has no clothes.
2.) The hunt for WMD: Given the extent to which Saddam was apparently deluded about his own WMD program, I highly doubt he’s going to have any useful information.
I sure hope Jesse is wrong. I believe that WMD was one of many reasons justifying this war, and I have been horribly upset with our inability to turn up WMD. I believe it may be the greatest intelligence failure of my lifetime. I want to know where the WMD are, if there were any.
3.) The reconstruction: Its progress depends in large part on the insurgency. If there’s still one next year, the capture of Saddam, while a huge morale boost, if there’s still an anti-American (rather than pro-Saddam) opposition effort, we’re talking about the tip of the iceberg rather than the base.
I expect an international coalition will be involved with a large-scale reconstruction effort within 6 months.
4.) The PNAC plan: As we can see from Bush’s stance on Taiwan upsetting the “one China” balance, our ability to democratically remake the world through war isn’t going to work the way Bush or the neocons have planned. It’s going to be at least a year and a half in Iraq (provided the power transfer goes as planned in July, which I doubt) – these adventures, regardless of how ultimately successful or justified you believe them to be, are harder and take longer than those in charge plan for. It’s simply not a coherent or tenable policy in the long term.
Not sure what to make of this statement, as it is based on a bunch of ‘ifs.’ The one ‘if’ remains- ‘if’ power is turned over to a reformed Iraq in a timely period (1-3 years), as far as I am concerned, the PNAC crew was right.
Bryant
Second, the people are now no longer going to be afraid. Before, when they talked about Saddam, reporters frequently noted that there was still a sense of fear because Saddam was at large. That is gone, and I expect Iraqi’s will help the coalition more, and begin to quickly turn against the foregin jihadis/insurgents.
This is my biggest if, I think. I believe you’re absolutely right about the pending absence of fear, but I don’t know what’s going to happen as a result. As I see it, there are two possibilities. Your scenario is one; the other is that the Iraqi people (or the Sh’ia clerics, say) decide they no longer need America around to defend against a pro-Saddam coup. I’m not even going to try to predict which is more likely.
jesse
John – my fear is that we’ll see that uptick, but levels won’t *lower*. I don’t think this is a fight for a Saddam renaissance, as I said – I think this is a group of disparate anti-American forces from within and outside Iraq who are fighting against the occupation and for control of post-reconstruction Iraq.
And my worry with Saddam is that it’s been a pretty consistent line from all of his scientists that they either destroyed WMD or else they lied and said they built stuff that they never did.
WRT the rebuilding – I’d love a true international coalition within Iraq. To tell the truth, if we could have gotten that when we went in, I very likely would have supported the war. When I weigh the costs of fighting someone I didn’t believe was a threat to America against the benefits of having done it, I believe that the war would have been justified if it had been an international effort to free Iraq rather than what the Bush team portrayed as a basically unilateral effort to secure America from international terrorism. If we were going to fight the war on terrorism, Iraq was not the place to do it. As a humanitarian effort, I believe that we went into it wrongly, without the proper support, without a good plan, and without a vision of what it actually took to rebuild a country from a dictatorship.
I believe the danger in Iraq, after the fall of Saddam, wasn’t (and isn’t) pro-Saddam forces, but instead anti-democracy forces, who don’t need Saddam as a rallying point – it just helped them.
This whole ordeal is part of the reason why I think Bush needs to go next year, even if you supported the war in Iraq. The kind of leadership that he’s shown has, to me, become a long-term inability to provide for American’s stature in power in the world in exchange for a short-term satisfaction of ideals that he later prevents himself from actually accompishing through his own actions. (In short, his purported zeal for democracy through American force prevents him from accomplishing that goal beyond the first time or two that he does it.)
(By the way, is it possible to increase the size of this comment box? I put a sentence up, and it fills up the whole thing!)
cameron
It will be interesting about what the situation on the ground will be after this good news.
The insurgentcies will grow, I think. If they were part of a Saddam coup, they will still fight for Saddam(I don’t think this is the case), if they have nothing to do with Saddam and only using the theory as cover, they will come out more into the open.
However, all the Iraqi’s who have held back in taking part in really changing Iraq for the better because of fear of Saddam returning will come out in droves.
We will see how these two effects cancle/balance out each other.
Andrew Lazarus
1. I think the Iraqi factions are (and have been for some time) likely to end up in a civil war. I’ve viewed Lebanon as the model. The capture of Saddam is a blow to his Ba’ath faction, and we might see a diminuition of anti-American attacks now that they’re in no rush to evict the Americans and move on to the civil war phase. But I’m pretty sure the Ba’ath resistance was operationally independent of Saddam long ago, and as for who’s attacking us in Mosul and Kirkuk, I have no idea. I’m pretty skeptical of the “silver bullet” theory of anti-terrorist warfare.
2. I don’t expect Saddam to turn over any WMD.
3. I don’t think the international coalition (I assume you mean one with Europe, not Fiji and Uzbekistan) has been held up by the failure to capture Saddam. It’s been held up by the failure to agree on the structure for restoring sovereignty and on economic issues. These MIGHT go away, but no sure thing.
4. As you can tell from point 1., I find the PNAC plan romantic and over-optimistic. Obviously, they can’t yet be proven wrong.
Norbizness
Going further on Bryant’s point: the flip side of “Iraqis afraid to act out for fear of Saddam” would be a power vaccuum (real or perceived) in which competing interests try, in a very non-democratic fashion, to assert themselves.
Kathy K
The emperor has no clothes.
I think that is the biggie here. Most Americans (and westerners in general) severely underestimate the impact that showing a ‘hero’ subjecting himself willingly to such humiliation will have.
The Iraqis were dancing in the streets. Saddam’s supporters in other countries have just had their illusions shattered.
I don’t share Nor’s pessimism. Iraqis remind me a lot of some people I knew from the ‘last days’ of the Soviet Union. Rest assured they aren’t easily fooled.
Matthew Stinson
I didn’t understand this part of Jesse’s post at all:
“As we can see from Bush’s stance on Taiwan upsetting the ‘one China’ balance . . .”
All Bush did was reiterate the one China policy of Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton. If we assume that balance = status quo, then the only factions upsetting the balance are the Taiwanese themselves.
Jon H
I think the question is, is there a bad-ass in the Baath party who would be willing to take advantage of the power vacuum.
The obvious candidates would have been SH’s sons. But they’re dead. But is there someone else?
Dean
Some of the other obvious candidates were high-valued playing cards—and have also been captured.
The problem, Jon H, is that anyone who tries to step into that position:
1. Needs to have a fair bit of info about the Ba’athist structure that remains (probably harder to obtain, what w/ all those American and coalition soldiers running around); and
2. Will immediately become the next target.
It’s not clear that it’s worth it, especially if you need to spend a lot of time being vulnerable simply accumulating the info in the first place.
CadillaqJaq
Jesse posts: “If we were to fight a war on terrorism, Iraq is not the place to do it.”
Where else but Iraq? Maybe in New Zealand or northern Canada? Iraq is the perfect place to fight terrorism. It’s smack in the middle of several contries and entities that harbor or promote terrorism, namely: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Iran and nearby Afghanistan.
A war on terrorism with the end result being a democratic Iraq is an indisputable “in-your-face” action toward a large contingent of terrorists. Far better there than here.
Andrew Lazarus
Wouldn’t this suggest we invade Israel? Just kidding. Well, maybe not. That’s a pretty amazing standard for wars you have there.
The PNAC plan to neutralize the Muslim world from our base in Iraq is certainly ambitious, but that doesn’t make it either feasible or wise. We don’t have the ability to occupy three or four of these countries at once, so we’d better concentrate on a system to set up governments instead. Given that we rely on the dictators in Pakistan and Egypt to SUPPRESS a population that is more anti-American than the government, that’s a very tall order.