Fareed Zakaria opens Our Last Real Chance with a bit of Iraqi history:
In early June 1920, Gertrude Bell, the extraordinary woman who helped run Iraq for Britain, wrote a letter to her father on some ‘violent agitation’ against British rule: ‘[The extremists] have adopted a line difficult in itself to combat, the union of the Shi’ah and Sunni, the unity of Islam. And they are running it for all it’s worth … There’s a lot of semi-religious semi-political preaching … and the underlying thought is out with the infidel. My belief is that the weightier people are against it?4I know some of them are bitterly disgusted?4but it’s very difficult to stand out against the Islamic cry and the longer it goes on the more difficult it gets.’ In fact, the ‘agitation’ quickly turned into a mass (mostly Shia) revolt. British forces were able to crush it over three long months, but only after killing almost 10,000 Iraqis, suffering about 500 deaths themselves and spending the then exorbitant sum of 50 million pounds. After the 1920 revolt, the British fundamentally reoriented their strategy in Iraq. They abandoned plans for ambitious nation-building and instead sought a way to transfer power quickly to trustworthy elites.
What about the American occupation?
America has gotten thousands of things right in Iraq. It has repaired roads, opened schools, provided food, built hospitals and introduced local self-government across the country. But nation-building ultimately succeeds or fails on the basis not of engineering but of politics. And Washington has made crucial political mistakes. Those errors, alas, have jeopardized the heroic work of thousands of American soldiers and civilians.
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The history of external involvement in countries suggests that, to succeed, the outsider needs two things: power and legitimacy. Washington has managed affairs in Iraq so that it has too little of each.
The US is trying to occupy Iraq “with one half to one third of the forces that its own Army chief of staff thought were necessary.”
It has often been pointed out that the United States went into Iraq with too few troops. This is not a conclusion arrived at with 20-20 hindsight. Over the course of the 1990s, a bipartisan consensus, shared by policymakers, diplomats and the uniformed military, concluded that troop strength was the key to postwar military operations. It is best summarized by a 2003 RAND Corp. report noting that you need about 20 security personnel (troops and police) per thousand inhabitants “not to destroy an enemy but to provide security for residents so that they have enough confidence to manage their daily affairs and to support a government authority of its own.” When asked by Congress how many troops an Iraqi operation would require, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki replied, “Several hundred thousand” for several years. The number per the RAND study would be about 500,000.
Further, the occupying forces (understandably) put their own safety clearly ahead of the Iraqi people’s, isolating themselves from the population at large and only patrolling briefly in armored vehicles, not on foot. Frequent foot patrols provide order and friendly relations with locals; we’ve learned the same thing about policing in American cities.
Now the American administration is trying to Iraqify security — in a hurry. Barely trained locals can’t replace American professionals though.
Read the whole article.
