Squandered Victory : The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq

Squandered Victory : The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq Larry Diamond Date: 26 May, 2005   —   $16.50   —   Book product page Rating:

In late 2003, Condoleezza Rice sent Larry Diamond to Iraq as part of L. Paul Bremmer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to help the Iraqis create a democracy. His book clearly and concisely details the failure of the Bush administration to create a free-market liberal democracy in Iraq, describing the process as a downward-spiraling chain of cause and effect, "One damn thing follows another."

Diamond tells the story of his experience in Iraq, and follows the chain of failure and dwindling options through the election of Iraq's transitional assembly in January, 2005, asserting, "The first step the United States took made it difficult to bring democracy to Iraq, because it brought a military and political occupation as the instrument of liberation." The invasion and occupation of Iraq without any international legitimacy was the "original sin," but Diamond contends that alone wasn't enough to doom our efforts.

The second fundamental mistake was our inability to secure Iraq, "...we cannot get to Jefferson and Madison without going through Thomas Hobbes. You can't build a democratic state unless you first have a state, and the essential condition for a state is that it must have an effective monopoly over the means of violence."

Peppered throughout the book are first-hand accounts of soldiers, high-ranking officers, CPA officials, the author, and even L. Paul Bremmer himself and Gen. James Garner before him asking President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for more troops to seal Iraq's borders and stabilize the country -- all requests were denied.

Even when faced with a growing insurgency without enough troops to combat it and maintain order; even when Iraqi confidence in the CPA plummeted with each car bombing and attack; even when foreign fighters, arms, and money were pouring across the country's unsecured borders, Secretary Rumsfeld and other senior administration figures blithely insisted that we had sufficient military presence.

And in fact, the denials were politically motivated. Diamond describes Rumsfeld as denying a request for several thousand more military police "because it would have prompted a further call-up of reserves," and Diamond's own request to Bremmer for more troops was rebuffed as "not politically possible." To his credit, Diamond doesn't mention that these requests were made during an election year, but there's no escaping the fact that sending a significant number of new troops to Iraq would have undermined President Bush's election campaign assurances to American voters that everything was fine in Iraq.

There are plenty of other links in the chain of failure -- the inability to disarm the militias, disbanding the Iraqi Army, police, and governing bureaucracy, not understanding the power of Ayatollah Sistani, etc. -- but one in particular stood out for me.

Diamond criticizes CPA chief, L. Paul Bremmer, for not relinquishing more political control to the Iraqis sooner. At the beginning of the book, I believed the problem was just the opposite -- that Bremmer should have held tighter control until Iraq was not in danger of electing an Iranian-backed Islamist government (like MacArthur in post-WWII Japan) -- but Diamond makes a good case.

Diamond believes we should have held local elections ASAP as that would have relieved the pressure from Iraqi opinion leaders for immediate national elections long enough for democratic principles to really take hold. These elected local leaders could have been cultivated to run nationally against the predominantly expatriate leaders (those who had been in exile in Iran and the West) who actually ended up in power. We can only speculate on how well that would have worked, but it would certainly have been better than adhering rigidly to an arbitrary timeline for elections guaranteed to put Islamists in power.

Diamond includes a "What Went Wrong" chapter that details the lessons we should learn from Iraq. The sad part is that the lessons aren't new. Every mistake we made is one that was made in previous nation building operations, from the need for legitimacy to the need for security to avoiding ill-timed elections. Diamond doesn't use the word "squandered" lightly, and in fact, describes the lack of planning and support for the Iraq operation as "criminal negligence".

There are plenty of soldier's stories coming out of Iraq, Diamond's book is the story of Iraq's political battles. I highly recommend it if you want to understand the hurdles Iraqis face as they try to rebuild their country after decades of misrule and war.