The Iraq Milestones--Markers of What?

Remember what the Geek has written many times. The wars in Afghanistan and even more, Iraq are contests of political will. The opponents are not the men in the field carrying guns or planting bombs. The real opponents, the ones who count the most in the ultimate outcome of the wars are the populations of Afghanistan, Iraq and, perhaps most importantly, the United States.

The political will of Americans and therefore their "representatives" in Congress is dependent on several factors. Highest on the list are clarity of the goal, number of dead bodies, and the belief that we are winning.

For the moment the Geek is going to focus on Iraq since that is the locus of most debate as well as greatest losses, largest troop commitment, highest expense, and most expansive stakes.

How do we know if we're winning?

In a conventional war between regular forces using equivalent weapons, doctrine and equipment such as World War II or the Korean War, progress to victory can be measured on a map. If the wide, sweeping arrows showing advance favor our side over time, it is pretty evident that we are winning. If the lines showing where our and the enemy's forces are in contact stay stationary or nearly so over time, it is rather sure that a battlefield stalemate has developed which must either be broken by some bold new move, or shifted over to negotiation.

In wars such as we fought in Vietnam and are fighting in Iraq, there are no sweeping arrows. Nor are there lines of contact. Maps are no use.

So what do you use?

There are a number of alternatives. Some we tried in Vietnam such as the infamous body counts. Simplistic approaches such as counting corpses or even weapons captured proved to be both inaccurate and misleading. The body counts also showed themselves to be of hypnotic appeal to the media, politicians, and others seeking simple, dramatic ways to illustrate winning or losing.

Ultimately, the body count fetish was an important contributor to the self-inflicted defeat in Vietnam. That's the major reason the US military and government alike have downplayed it in Iraq.

Since it is undeniable that the ultimate responsibility for stability and peace in Iraq lies with the Iraqis, the idea of using benchmarks or milestones to measure progress to success was put forward by members of Congress and the Administration along with their academic advisers.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

On the surface, yes. It all depends on what the milestones measure.

Get a grip on this. The milestones are artificial. They are creations of American policymakers. They are, in short, made in America by Americans for ultimate American consumption.

This means the milestones may or may not measure anything that is at all relevant to the situation in Iraq. We didn't ask the Iraqis what they think should be measured, the goals they think they must attain. No. We decided what was relevant to them and their ultimate success.

As if that wasn't unfortunate and wrong-headed enough, our milestones were developed by the same type of great minds that really, really believed against all available evidence that the Iraqis would rise as one and embrace liberal, pluralistic, secular democracy and free enterprise the instant the repressive boot of Saddam was lifted from their necks.

The same type of great thinkers who really, really believed that Iraq was actually a fully functioning nation-state which groaned under a dictator. Yeah. Right. Dream on.

These milestones were created in the main by individuals who were not only culturally ignorant regarding Iraq but historically ignorant concerning the United States and how long it has taken us to become a reasonable facsimile of a liberal, pluralistic, secular democracy with a free enterprise economy.

Is it legitimate to expect the Iraqis who have no, repeat, no, real experience with anything approximating a democratic system as such is understood in the US to create one in a handful of months?

Of course not. The Iraqi society is deeply factional, intensely regional, and heavily oriented to the personalised. Just like ours for the vast majority of our history.

That's right. The US spent most of its first two hundred years as a factionalized, regionally oriented society where personal relations counted for far more than institutional ties.

We fought a war over regional loyalties. The old loyalties soldiered on in the supposedly defeated South for another century and some would argue they still exist today. The Confederacy may have been replaced by the States' Rights movement and the States' Rights movement by the Southern Baptist Convention, but a number of regionally identifiable threads run through them all.

There are other examples of long standing factional, regional, and similar divisions that run through American history from the get-go to the present day. The Geek doesn't have time to list them all, let alone discuss them. You can make up your own roster.

Why should the Iraqis be expected to do so much better than us in developing and installing a legitimate federal system particularly after we spent years either ignoring or deprecating the regional differences and tribal affiliations that are so much the warp and woof of Iraqi life?

They can't. Any milestone that purports to measure any progress toward turning Iraq into, shall we say, the Switzerland of the Mideast, is hallucinatory at best.

Then there are the milestones directed toward measuring the honesty, efficiency and capacity of the Iraqi government. Let's get a grip on that idea, measuring the honesty, efficiency and capacity of a government to understand and solve the real problems of the real people of the commonweal.

Maybe the best way to examine the notion is to apply it to our own Federal establishment.

Next post (if some politician doesn't torque me off first.)