Michikio Kakutani has a review in todays NYT of a new book about the Iraq war entitled Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. The author is Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. He suggests that George Bushs decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.
Its hard to argue with that assessment. One might go even further and say that Iraq is on its way to being the most catastrophic failure of American foreign policy since the founding of the country. But that still raises the question of what is to be done now. In that regard, I wanted to draw your attention to a recent hearing held by the House Committee on Government Reform entitled The Evolving National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.
One of the witnesses at the hearing was Kenneth Pollack, Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution (click here for his testimony). Some of you may remember that Pollack was the author of a very important book published during the run-up to the invasion entitled The Threatening Storm, in which he argued that the United States should consider invading Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons and possibly initiating another regional war on the scale of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
There is something almost tragic about Pollack. He was the quintessential liberal hawk. He clearly had little sympathy with the worldview of the neoconservative intellectuals in the Bush administration. But his reading of the evidenceas he understood it at the timeled him to the conclusion that the choice was between fighting a war now and fighting one later. The tragic part is that despite his intellectual honesty, Pollack turned out to be simply wrong about a great number of things, including the extent of Iraqs WMD capacity and the probable costs of reconstructing the country after the war.
To be fair to Pollack, the war that Bush fought was not the one Pollack envisioned. Pollack believed that the U.S. would have to secure the support of our allies and make real progress on the Israel-Palestinian dispute before contemplating invasion. He strongly advised that the Administration not try to go it alone or do this on the cheap, and clearly both types of counsel fell on deaf ears.
Pollack is still deeply committed to making the reconstruction of Iraq work and his testimony provides some clear ideas that, if followed, might allow for a chance at success. But reading the volume of recommendations makes clear just how daunting this task will be, something on the scale of drawing to an inside straight flush. Pollack suggests that after a successive series of serious policy failures, this is the United States last chance to get it right.
