It's a good piece, and you make an important distinction. But I don't understand how you can suggest that the only alternative laid out by lefties and Europeans was appeasement. I distinctly remember hearing calls for putting resources into resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict. (I've posted more on this here).

Putting aside the false dichotomy posed between bad idea or bad implementation (after all perhaps it was a good idea with good implementation but just a tough nut to crack), let's say it was a good idea, bad implementation as the article suggests. One suggested antidote is more boots on the ground. I have never read a serious discussion of what this would have done to US casualty rates and what higher rates would have done to public support for the war. I am reminded of the American walking through the Baghdad market shortly after the end of major combat operations. Someone walked up behind him and blew his brains out. With an American GI on every street corner, I submit we would have seen a lot more of these types of attacks. Would we be saying today that we should have pulled the GIs out of the cities and be training Iraqis to do their own policing as we have been doing?

Just because things are not going well does not imply there was some silver bullet to make things go better. I am greatly encouraged that despite the insurgency and the polls that say that large numbers of Iraqis view Americans as occupiers rather that liberators (there are worse things), that there have not been mass demonstrations of ordinary Iraqis asking the Americans to get out. I think that is significant.

I don't really see the logic in saying that more troops in Iraq would have led to higher casualty rates. If we had more troops, presumably we'd have better security, so attacks would be more difficult, and some of the insurgents might have been discouraged. I don't think that there's a lack of targets for violence over there right now.

Nice essay, Dan. I find it hard to disagree with it.

450,000 troops to pacify Iraq?

Look -- I am no miltary stratergy expert, but even I know that there is no way to secure that kind of manpower commitment for Iraq with our current armed forces, and there was no way to secure it. Nor is either candidate talking about that level of troops. I think Kerry has promised an extra 40,000. Nor will any European force ever add up to even 100,000.

I think, when we talk about ineptitude and incompetence with the Bush adminsistration, we are mostly talking about one very big and very bad decision -- the attempt to do Iraq on the (somewhat) cheap. This country, and the world, was not sufficiently motivated in 2002 to provide that kind of troop support. If Bush had not convinced himself that 115,000 troops would do the job, we would not have gone in. Because to do so would have meant the draft, lots of military spending, and a few less of those oh so important tax cuts.

And I am going to express some real disappointment in our leaders and our public intellignsia and -- at the risk of sounding like Eric Alterman -- even our news media. There was lots of talk about the need for war. And none about the cost of doing what we said we were going to do.

There was a time, back in 2002, when this whole Iraq adventure could have been argued against or stopped, on the grounds of what it would cost the United States to accomplish this. Did we hear it? No. From the anti-war types, we heard the usual unbalanced America bad, so nothing we do is good neo-Vietnam blather.

From our public intellectuals of a conservative persuasion, we got -- Iraq must be stopped, War on Terror, Democracy Now even if morons are running the charge.
A question for our host-- if it was apparent they weren't putting enough troops in in the first place, why do you think they were EVER going to put enough troops in? When the will to properly implement a grand strategy is lacking, isn't even talking about the grand strategy somewhat absurd? Dan, what did you believe about troop strength in 2002? Did you think it would just appear when it became obvious there weren't enough in there?

When Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall dropped out of the pro-war coalition back in early 2003, I thought they were just expressing partisan resentments over a policy they would rather have had Bill Clinton implement. They were smarter than me. Guess that's why they have the big blogs, and I'm just a lowly commenter.

Feel free to casually dismiss this is a mere paleo-realist critique, but I find your article severely lacking in that it neglects the conflict of interests inherent with the idea of forcibly attempting to transform the Middle East to democracy. Democracy brings numerous benfits and it would be a good thing for the world if the Middle East were democratic. However, it's a lot to ask of the American people that they send their kids to invade a country and bring its people freedom and then have its people freely choose to kick us out and go on hating us just the same.

For the problem is not, as you forceful point out, that people in the Middle East hate freedom or are culturally incabable of democracy. The problem is that many Middle Eastern countries, if given free and fair elections, might elect rulers who are opposed to the United States and whose policies are harmful to our interests. They might elect Islamic militants, for instance. This is the inhernet flaw in the neo-conservative strategy, and we are witnessing it in action right now in the negotions over the limits of sovreignity that the new Iraqi government is to have: if we go to all the trouble of invading your country in order to let you hold free elections, it seems less than captious to demand that whomever you elect, y'know, doesn't hate us. If the true expression of the will of the people is likely to result in the election of such a government, you run into problems. The temptation to use the overwhelming force you already have present in the are to prevent such an election will be nearly overwhelming --- in fact, so much so that you may not even see it as temptation, nor need to exercise that force in explicit and visible fashion.

That was always the problem with Iraq. There may be a way to reconcile the Kurd's demands for autonomy, the Shi'ites demands for supremacy, the Sunni's demands for some smidgen of thier former autocracy --- perhaps some sort of loose federalism, Shi'ite led and with a much more Islamist flavor and pro-Iran stance. But there is no way to reconcile all those competing interests and the demands that Iraq be stable and friendly to the West, which are the only two things the United States requires of it. In order to create a success of Iraq, we would have to act against our own interests, risking that we would fail, and that the war would be futile. This is a very dangerous gambit, high risk, high reward. But it is not the neoconservative gambit; hell, they didn't even know they were tossing the dice. They thought they could have it all --- permanent miliary bases, a Haifa pipeline, peace with Isreal, an oil lever on the Saudis --- they weren't gambling, they were deciding how they'd spend the money when their lotto numbers came up. "450,000 troops" isn't merely "a number that was, and is, anathema to the Pentagon's civilian leadership;" it is a deployment literally impossible to maintain with the size of today's army. You would have to have a draft to muster that number. This wasn't a possibility that was rejected; 450,000 troops was an impossibility that would have prevented the launching of the war in the first place. No wonder, then, that the idea you would need 450,000 troops was never even considered.

Dan,

Didn't you get the memo that everything is great in Iraq?

Seriously, it is a good essay, but I think that it does not fully engage with just how difficult it is to bring democracy to a place with any version of hard power. There is just something distasteful to a population about being taken over and occupied, regardless of their former leadership. I think this is where the neo-Conservative vision is flawed.

You say yourself that there is an appealing aspect to the neo-Con vision of bringing democracy to the world. I think that is right. However there is also an appealing aspect to legislating that it only rain on days when I am stuck in the office and is sunny every long weekend. My point is that appealing visions have to be tempered with some degree of realism.

It is strange that after so many years of liberals being called hopeless idealists it is now the conservatives who are trying to implement a different version of that idealism.

We must do what we can to eliminate the causes of terrorism, and the democratic deficit is high on the list, but I think we are seeing that you can't bring democracy to a people in the form of an army. Sure more troops might bring more stability, but then the unrest would just be expressed differently. We just have to be patient and do the soft things very loudly to bring democracy to the Middle East. It is wrong to call a policy like that appeasement.

Appeasement is about aggressive foes. And if we were dealing with a nation that was being aggressive towards the US then Iraq would be rightly deemed a success at this point. However, there is ample evidence that Sadaam was sufficiently detered by 2000 that we did not need to be be pro-actively eliminating him as a threat. That is all a different story though to the goal of bringing Democracy to the Middle East.

3 options: democracy promotion, appeasement, or "muddling through".

It is my understanding that the "containment" effort of sanctions, forced UN inspections, no-fly zones and freezing assets would define this "muddling through" option. And it is my understanding that this was considered an undesireable option because through all this, we apparently still believed Saddam managed to be a threat to the U.S.

As to democracy promotion, I liked B. Kristol's take that we already had justification to invade due to Saddam's non-compliance with U.N. resolutions (which strikes me as quite a change from a younger B. Kristol), and could have leveraged world-wide 9/11 sympathy to build a multinational invasion force.

(I know - "Get over it". I will)

Justification to invade and the wisdom of acting on it are two different things. I agree with Kristol on whether we were justified in overthrowing Saddam, but inasmuch as it now appears the largest part of the short-term threat Saddam's Iraq represented -- the Iraqi WMD arsenal and production capacity -- was at a minimum badly overestimated it may fairly be questioned whether the matter needed to be attended to as quickly and directly as the Bush administration did. In fairness, this represents hindsight on my part and was not my view a year ago.

A comment on the "boots on the ground" question: we need to be clear about what we are asking the men in those boots to do. In this connection timing is a very important consideration. For example, had the 4th Infantry Division been deployed in Kuwait when the war started instead of floating in the Mediterranean waiting for Turkey's approval of a northern front it could have played a vital role securing arms dumps, of which Iraq had a really amazing number. This would have changed the security situation immediately, permanently and in a dramatic way. Adding the equivalent of an extra division to do police work now would not have anything like the same chances to make a decisive difference -- which is not to say it wouldn't do any good, only that more "boots on the ground" now is at most a step toward incremental improvement, not the difference between success and failure.

Devin,

The purpose of more boots on the ground over the last year would presumably be so US troops could police the cities, thereby improving security. They would also presumably be deployed in small groups (2-3 GIs) in order to get coverage, much like cops in our own cities deploy. While security for the non AK-47 wielding Iraqi would be much improved, the individual troops would be much more vulnerable than they are currently in their compounds. I suspect this policing tactic would have failed (a) because of unacceptably high US casualties in the eyes of the US public and (b) because the increased visibilty of Americans may have stirred greater popular resentment than we have seen to date.

Isn't it possible that the neocon (plus Thomas Friedman) view of a more democratic Middle East was a good one, but that the decision to begin implementation with a war on Iraq was irremediably bogus from the get-go?

Obliw is correct, but I would go further. Chalabi sold the war, initially to the neocons, and thru them to the entire country, precisely because he offered himself as leader of an Iraq that would be democratic (remember, he claimed to lead an internal resistance movement, that existed only in his head), and pro-American, and even pro-Israeli! He was the one-man resolution of the terrible problems that (1) how do you impose democracy at gunpoint, (2) how do you compensate for an armed force every expert pegged as much too small to occupy Iraq, and (3) how do you assure Iraq is not pretty-much democratic yet still anti-American and anti-Israel.

We could have started with pouring the same $100Bn into Jordan, whose king seems up for transition ot a parliamentary monarchy and would probably welcome it. We could still condition the dough on Halliburton contracts. Or we could have put much more effort into the Israel/Palestine issue, perhaps starting with a firm demand that settlement expansion for all excuses end immediately. These ideas, however, didn't have nearly the potential to cleave the Democrats in two for the midterm election, not to mention give President Flightsuit his chance to prance around the flight deck.

“Or we could have put much more effort into the Israel/Palestine issue, perhaps starting with a firm demand that settlement expansion for all excuses end immediately.”

Are you some sort of self hating Jew? Your commitment to the liberal social milieu is blinding you to reality. Do I sound rude and obnoxious? Should a non-Jew like myself accuse you of such a thing? Oh well, I am doing so and you can respond any way you so desire. You are disgracing yourself and need to be taken to task. The Palestinian radicals will settle for nothing less than the total elimination of Jews in that part of the world. They have control of the Palestinian territories. The territories is a phony issue. Do you desire to improve the situation? If so, the only way to resolve these problems is to either kill or jail them. Stop blaming the Israeli Jews. Even the most conservative of them are not into nihilistic violence.

One reason that Israel/Palestine is such a mess is that the Kindergarten concept of not taking other people's land and building settlements is seen as some sort of reward for terrorists.

Stopping the settlement movement is not a question of caving to Palestinian terror, any more than stopping gang rape at Abu Ghraib is caving to al Sadr or al Zarqawi. It's a question of refusing to use the nature of one's enemy as a "not-as-bad" excuse.

As far as nihilistic violence and Jews, who the hell assassinated Yitzhak Rabin because he wanted to make peace? Oh, yeah. Forgot that one.

“As far as nihilistic violence and Jews, who the hell assassinated Yitzhak Rabin because he wanted to make peace?”

Are you serious? You are pointing to one incident, a gross exception to the general rule. Yitzhak Rabin did indeed desire peace---but he unwittingly did much to damage Israel. That is why he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The radical liberals rewarding him for endangering Israel. Even if one accepts the arguments of Benny Morris, the Jews are still only responsible for 20% of the problem. The rest of the blame solely rests on the shoulders of the Palestinian radicals. The vast majority of Jews want to work things out with their Palestinian neighbors. However, the radicals who truly speak for the Palestinian people only want the annihilation of the Jews. Compromise is not part of their agenda. The Palestinian moderates have no voice. They are intimidated into silence.

I consider the settlement issue as somewhat bogus. A large number of Arabs are Israeli citizens and live within its borders. Why should the Palestinian areas be so Judenfrei? Do the Jews smell bad? Why are the Arabs so upset? Do they prefer a segregated society?

There is one more question I would like answered? Why are you so focussed on the settlements? Are they truly that important? Do you truly believe that the radical Palestinians would become warm and fuzzy if this issue was off the plate? What justifies this near obsession?

"This country, and the world, was not sufficiently motivated in 2002 to provide that kind of troop support. If Bush had not convinced himself that 115,000 troops would do the job, we would not have gone in. Because to do so would have meant the draft, lots of military spending, and a few less of those oh so important tax cuts."

Why, oh why, does everyone who thinks more troops are needed blithely assume that the option to recruit more troops simply doesn't exist? We could expand our troop levels by a third, and thereby return our military to the size of the all-volunteer military that existed during the first Gulf War. We would not need a draft to get as many more troops as we needed.

Of course, if we wanted to minimize our chances of success, destroy morale inside and outside of the military, and bring about a real replay of Vietnam, then of course a draft would be our best bet.

"For the problem is not, as you forceful point out, that people in the Middle East hate freedom or are culturally incabable of democracy. The problem is that many Middle Eastern countries, if given free and fair elections, might elect rulers who are opposed to the United States and whose policies are harmful to our interests. They might elect Islamic militants, for instance."

Well, yes, democracies have been known to produce results that were exceedingly harmful to the people thereof. Limits to the things that democratic majorities may do are perfectly reasonable; we have (or rather, had) them in this country, and it certainly would be appropriate for the Iraqis as well (plenty of Iraqis would be rather upset if a majority of their countrymen voted in a theocracy). The real goal is liberty; democracy is simply a sometimes-useful tool for producing liberty.

"This is the inhernet flaw in the neo-conservative strategy, and we are witnessing it in action right now in the negotions over the limits of sovreignity that the new Iraqi government is to have: if we go to all the trouble of invading your country in order to let you hold free elections, it seems less than captious to demand that whomever you elect, y'know, doesn't hate us."

Why? We live under a consititution that demands that the people we elect refrain from doing all sorts of things. And before you object that "we" wrote the thing ourselves and voted on it, note that the Japanese still live under a constitution written and enacted by occupiers.

David, if Israel wants to give the Palestinians citizenship rights like the Israeli Arabs have, that's an OK solution by me. You knew perfectly well when you posted that their legal situations are not remotely similar, and also that for demographic reasons this solution commands very little support within Israel. As of now, Palestinians have no say in the development of the settlements, which are run on an apartheid system. Do you think Arabs can buy any house wherever they want like in the USA? No, you know better. So why are you wasting my time; you think I don't know this, too?

As far as the assassination of Rabin—given how you think he endangered Israel, imagine how the settlers felt. You know, of course, that the extremist settler rabbis had placed him under a fatwa, nu? (The Hebrew term is din rodef if you want to Google it.)

Dan writes approvingly of Bush's "grand strategy" to build democracy in the Middle East starting with Iraq, and he says that "decades of alternately coddling, cajoling, and ostracizing Arab despots has not led to liberalization or democratization."

So I guess Dan's position is: Thank God for Saddam Hussein, since without the impetus he provided for the invasion of Iraq, there would have been no way to start building democracy in the Arab world.

Dan worries that "the neoconservative vision of exporting liberal values" may now be rejected because of our government's failure to execute it well. I, on the other hand, am not convinced that our government is serious about this vision.

If it was serious, and willing to spend enormous sums and many lives to achieve this vision in Iraq, then one would certainly expect a big effort in other Arab countries at the same time, as some people in this forum have suggested. I've never heard of such an effort. I tried a Google search on "United States Arab democracy" and turned up essentially nothing. Perhaps others will have better luck.

If the administration was serious about building democracy in Arab countries, wouldn't they have consulted George Soros to get the benefit of his experience in Eastern Europe?

I would not count military aid to Egypt or threats against Syria as attempts to build democracy. Nor do I think that the decades of coddling, etc., were an attempt to build democracy. Isn't it precisely the position of the Bush administration that previous administrations did not attempt democracy-building in Arab countries?

I'm afraid the evidence indicates that when the administration talks about exporting democracy to the Arab world, it is just propaganda. Whatever the intrinsic merits of the idea, any discussion of it should recognize this.

Well, yes, democracies have been known to produce results that were exceedingly harmful to the people thereof. Limits to the things that democratic majorities may do are perfectly reasonable; we have (or rather, had) them in this country, and it certainly would be appropriate for the Iraqis as well (plenty of Iraqis would be rather upset if a majority of their countrymen voted in a theocracy). The real goal is liberty; democracy is simply a sometimes-useful tool for producing liberty.

I used electing militant Islamist government as an example; I don't think it at all likely that you could get a majority of Iraqis to vote a straight Sadrist ticket, and as you concede, neither do you. So I beg of you, please let us turn from debating the specific example of creating a theocratic government to the general principle of creating a government which opposes U.S. interests. Are you suggesting that electing a government which opposes U.S. interests, in any fashion, is inherently harmful to the people of Iraq? What about the people of France? 'Cause they have a real nasty habit of doing that, the Gallic cocks. Do we get to invade them, too? Sorry, I'm being snarky, but I think you see what mean. Perhaps there are certain extreme circumstances in which democracies must be saved from themselves, but I don't think the multiplicity of possibilities encompassed under the rubric "Things We Don't Like" is always one of them.

Why? We live under a consititution that demands that the people we elect refrain from doing all sorts of things. And before you object that 'we' wrote the thing ourselves and voted on it, note that the Japanese still live under a constitution written and enacted by occupiers."

Well, I should note, as you seem to have misunderstood me, that I said "less than captious." I was being all ironical; terrible habit, but I'm given to it. Moving on.

I was not referring to the balance of powers among the branches of the new Iraqi government to be established by the new Iraqi constitution, nor the various checks imposed upon the executive and legislative branches of our own. I was referring to the efforts of a foreign power to ensure by force or the threat of force that the government of a sovereign nation adopts policies friendly to it. The mere idea that foreign leaders might openly, verbally, favor one candidate over another in our own forthcoming elections was enough to cause a minor kerfluffle because it suggested undue influence upon the conscience of the American voter. Surely you can concede that the veto power inherent in an occupying army is a considerably greater constraint upon the electorate's freedom of choice.

Now, did we, by threat of force, attempt to influence the makeup of the governments of Germany and Japan? Yes, we sure the heck did. However, I feel there are a couple important differences between post-war Germany and Japan and post-war Iraq, for instance, Germany and Japan had launched a worldwide war of conquest, which they lost. Iraq has not. The Iraq war was a pre-emptive war, against a future threat, posed by one man and his regime, not a war against the Iraqi people; those folks we came to liberate. If the Iraqi people do not bear collective responsibility for Saddam's sins, then they ought not to be collectively punished and reformed according to our will. Second, both Germany and Japan were not forced to ally with us rather than follow their own path; they were forced either to ally with us or with the Soviet Union, and we were the lesser of two evils. Invading and conquering a country not at war with you, sitting on it with your army and attempting to permanently change its political and cultural makeup against the will of its people isn't bringing liberty or democracy, it's imperialism. And Niall Ferguson can talk all the smack he wants to, but I happen to feel that didn't go all that well the first time around. Because the colonized don't like it much and tend to resist.

"David, if Israel wants to give the Palestinians citizenship rights like the Israeli Arabs have, that's an OK solution by me. You knew perfectly well when you posted that their legal situations are not remotely similar, and also that for demographic reasons this solution commands very little support within Israel. As of now, Palestinians have no say in the development of the settlements, which are run on an apartheid system. Do you think Arabs can buy any house wherever they want like in the USA? No, you know better. So why are you wasting my time; you think I don't know this, too?

As far as the assassination of Rabin—given how you think he endangered Israel, imagine how the settlers felt. You know, of course, that the extremist settler rabbis had placed him under a fatwa, nu? (The Hebrew term is din rodef if you want to Google it.)"

Apartheid system? Are you serious? These are truly the words of a despicable self hating Jew. You definitely want to be able to attend the white wine and brie cheese parties held by the far left. Adolph Hitler would have made full use of you. I’m sure you would have offered your full cooperation. You are conveniently ignoring some pertinent facts. So much so, that I’m tempted to charge you with blatant dishonesty. The extremist Jewish rabbis still remain a very small minority. This is not the case regarding the Palestinian militants. The polls prove conclusively that the vast majority of Jews are willing to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. Far too many of the latter, regrettably, only wish to rid the region of all Jews. As Golda Meir said, there will be no peace until the Palestinians love their children more than they hate the Jews. This is the number one reason for the conflict. Jews do not participate in suicide bombings and celebrate the murder of innocent women and children.

David, either you simply haven't a clue about life in the Palestinian territories, or I don't know what. Pretty much everything you say about Palestinian militants is true but none of it refutes anything I've said.

An excellent argument.
What the article misses is the larger point that the threat of intervention must not be lost as an American policy option. Exactly what would be a premature withdrawal, and thereby destructive to America’s need to preserve the intervention threat, is not yet clear, and indeed, may not be clear for some months and many more billions of dollars and lost lives.
Staying the course in the Iraq case may not even make the next case markedly easier. But whatever conditions exist after the case is resolved cannot be widely understood as setting a precedent for a future in which limitless tolerance of dangerous enemies to global stability, like Saddam, can be assumed.
All the problems of the occupation need be remembered as just so many good and bad experiences of learning the details of a credible policy of intervention when conditions warrant a military response. And on exactly that point is where U.N. security policy is inextricably linked, both for the shorter and the longer terms.

I would like to thank the commenters here (with one predictable exception) for one of the most thoughtful threads i have seen on this issue.

Here's my two bits:

the draft is never going to happen. The day after Bush states that he is sending legislation to that effect to Congress is the day the republican party dissolves. American isolationism would return so face that sonic booms would be heard all over the country.

Force levels (according to Intel Dump -- i have no personal knowledge) are set by federal law. Both parties agreed, during Bush I and Clinton, to ramp down the size of the Army. That being said, if there is the congressional will to pay for a 14 division army, it's really just a matter of money and time. I think that the Army could pay enough to obtain the bodies for 14 divisions, and then it's just a matter of training. Like, say, three or four years (once again, according to Intel Dump.)

But this is fundamentally a matter of political will, and tax policy. Previous administrations, with bi-partisan support, made a conscious decision to spend money on the technology to make our Armed Forces the hardest-hitting ever. So, fewer people can destroy more enemy armies faster than ever. But the repercussion of spending money on tech meant that fewer bodies were needed, or even affordable. We designed our military to destroy armies, NOT OCCUPY COUNTRIES.

So, we now as a country need to decide what kind of military we want. How many readers are willing to face SIGNIFICANT tax increases to pay for Armed Forces that have the tech advantage to smash all enemy armies with very low casualties, and the size necessary to place MILLIONS of military police across Iraq? Our federal budget is already a disaster. Who wants to pay for an army of occupation?

I don't. Occupation rarely works. Yes, there are the examples of Japan, Germany and the American South. [this really should be abbreviated "JGS" it's used so much]. but there is also Algeria, Lebanon, Afghanistan [by the Russians] etc. JGS worked, as best I can tell, because there was tremendous political will to make it work. Given the level of disagreement on this comment thread alone, I'm pretty comfortable in stating that there is not the strong bi-partisan political will to make the occupation/liberation of iraq "work" in our favor.

cheers