How Syria Is Like Iraq. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, September 12, 2013.
Kaplan:
I
supported the war in Iraq. It was an agonizing mistake. I made the mistake
because I did something a serious foreign policy thinker should never do: I
allowed my emotions to affect my thinking. My emotions were stirred by several
visits to Iraq I had made as a reporter in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein ruled
Iraq with the machinal, totalitarian intensity employed by Joseph Stalin in the
Soviet Union and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. Iraq under Saddam was like a
vast prison yard lit by high wattage lamps, in which everyone was watched all
the time, and everyone lived in absolute fear. I had my American passport taken
away from me by Saddam's secret police for ten days in 1986 while I was
reporting on the Kurds in the north of the country. I had tasted the fear with
which Iraqis themselves lived.
I thus
assumed for years thereafter that nothing could be worse than Saddam’s rule.
Following 9/11, I did not want to forcibly spread democracy in the Arab world
like others did; nor did I want to topple dictators per se. I wanted only one
dictator gone – Saddam – because he was so much worse than a mere dictator. He
was a tyrant straight out of Mesopotamian antiquity.
I was
wrong.
I was
wrong because of the following reasons:
- I did
not adequately consider that even in the case of Iraq, things could be worse.
Though, in 1994, I had written extensively and in depth about the dangers of
anarchy in the Third World, I did not fully consider how dangerously close to
anarchy Iraq actually was, and that Saddam was the Hobbesian nemesis keeping it
at bay. Saddam was cruel beyond imagining because the ethnic and sectarian
differences in Iraqi society were themselves cruel and bloodthirsty beyond
imagining.
- I was
insufficiently cold-blooded in my thinking. I did not fully consider whether it
was in the American interest to remove this tyrant. After all, President Ronald
Reagan had found Saddam useful in trying to contain neighboring Iran. Perhaps
Saddam might still be useful in containing al Qaeda? That is how I should have
been thinking.
- I was
thinking only two steps ahead, not the five or six steps ahead required of
serious analysis when the question concerns going to war. I wanted to remove
Saddam (step one) and replace him with another general (step two). As I said, I
had serious misgivings, in print, back then about democracy in the Arab world.
But I should have been thinking even more about the consequences of such a
newly empowered general not gaining control of the Kurds in the north, or of
the Shia in the south. I should have been thinking more of how Iran would
intervene on the ground with its intelligence services. I should have been
thinking more about how once Saddam were toppled, simply replacing him might be
a very complex affair. I should have been overwhelmed by the complexities of a
post-Saddam Iraq. I wasn’t sufficiently.
- I did
not consider the appetite for war – or lack thereof – of the American public.
The American public was in a patriotic frenzy following 9/11. I should have
realized that such a frenzy simply could not last. I should have realized that
there would be a time limit regarding how long public support could be
sustained for having boots-on-the-ground in large numbers in the Middle East.
World War I for the United States had lasted less than 20 months. World War II
for the United States lasted little more than three-and-a-half years. Americans
tired of the Korean War in about that same time-frame, and revolted against the
Vietnam War when it went on longer. The fact that I was emotionally involved in
toppling Saddam did not mean the public would be so.
-Finally,
I did not consider the effect of a long-term commitment in Iraq (and
Afghanistan) on other regional theaters. The top officials in any
administration – the president, secretary of state, and so on – have only a
limited amount of hours in a day, even if they work 70-hour weeks. And if they
are spending most of those hours dealing with the Middle East, America's
influence in the Pacific, Latin America, and elsewhere must suffer. America,
therefore, must be light and lethal, rarely getting bogged down anywhere: in
fact, I wrote and published exactly this – but in mid-2003, after the invasion
of Iraq had already commenced. I just did not foresee American forces getting
bogged down as they did. That was a failure of critical thinking. For the truth
is, nobody seeks a quagmire: a quagmire only occurs when people do not
adequately consider in advance everything that might go wrong.
On its
face, Syria resembles Iraq in much of the above. The supporters of robust
military intervention are not sufficiently considering how things could become
even worse after the demise of dictator Bashar al Assad, with full-scale
anarchy perhaps in the offing; how Assad might still serve a cold-blooded
purpose by containing al Qaeda in the Levant; how four or five steps ahead the
United States might find itself owning or partially owning the situation on the
ground in an anarchic Syria; how the American public's appetite for military
intervention in Syria might be less than they think; and how a long-term
commitment to Syria might impede American influence in other regional theaters.
The Obama administration says it does not want a quagmire and will avoid one;
but that was the intention of the younger Bush administration, too.
Of
course, each war or intervention is different in a thousand ways than any
other. So while I have listed some similarities in the ways we can think about
these wars, Syria will unfold in its own unique manner. For example, it is
entirely possible that the Obama administration will not get bogged down, and
that its intervention, if it still ever comes to that, will pivotally affect
the situation for the better by serving as a deus ex machina for a negotiated cease-fire of sorts. For the very
threatened use of power can serve as its own dynamic, revealing, in this case,
the limitations of Russia and Iran which were obscured as long as America did
relatively little to affect the situation.
The
problem, however, is that such a happy outcome in Syria usually requires a
finely calibrated strategy from the beginning. The Bush administration did not
have one in Iraq, evinced by the absence of post-invasion planning. And, at
least as of this writing, the Obama administration seems to lack one as well.
Instead, it appeared until recently to be backing into a military action that
it itself only half-heartedly believes in. That, more than any of the factors I
have mentioned above, is what ultimately gives me pause.
