For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.
