What Went Wrong: A Top-Ten Review

What went wrong in Iraq? It seems as though it might make more sense to ask why didn’t anything go right. When Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the good news was that a brutal tyrant named Saddam Hussein had been ousted from power. For the billions of dollars thrown at modern Mesopotamia, the result is now in painful hindsight a bloody (and I do not simply mean the British expletive) mess with no good in realistic sight. The litany of bad news has morphed into a politically untenable tsunami, destroying all good intentions in its wake. One of the top stories in today’s news is the alarming rate of deaths among contractors working alongside the American military in Iraq. In the first three months of 2007 almost 150 were killed, often because they tend to be “soft targets,” but increasingly because U.S. troops are stretched thin outside the surge-happy capital. Even Chatham House, hardly a left-leaning lean-to in British politics, has neon-lighted the handwriting on the Babylonian wall with a recent report by Gareth Stansfield, who argues in a paper released Thursday that “Iraq is on the verge of being a failed state which faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation.” You know things are really bad when the U.S. military creates its own shared channel on You-Tube.

The reasons are so obvious four years after the patriotic fever orchestrated by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gang of neocons that it almost seems trivial to keep repeating them, so perhaps the best thing is a Letterman-like line-up of the top ten real stupid mistakes made so far (it ain’t over until the fatuous voter sings) by recent U.S. foreign policy in Iraq:

10. Needling the CIA to confirm Weapons of Mass Destruction in a haystack outside one of Saddam’s palaces. Moral: You can’t make up your yellow cake without having to eat it too.

9. Thinking that “shock and awe” is a winning strategy because it works in the video games. Moral: It takes more than pushing a button in a Pentagon war room to win a war.

8. Not reading the history books about what happened when Britain tried to engineer Modern Iraq version 1.1. Moral: The Iraqis did not want a puppet king and eventually toppled the dynasty on their own.

7. Listening to Iraqis in exile and turning a deaf ear to the differing aspirations of Iraqis who had suffered through Saddam’s reign of terror. Moral: Treat war the old-fashioned railroad way: stop, look and listen before crossing the tracks.

6. Racing to the goal, as though it was an end in itself. Saddam did not have WMDs, but he had tons of weapons and ordinance that has been recycled by insurgents on all sides. Moral: Stop thinking like a “hare” when you are racing a geopolitical “tortoise.”

5. Equating purple fingers with democracy in action. Moral: Don’t praise the Shiite chits in their ballot box before you remove the missing Supreme-Court-deleted chads from your own.

4. Rewarding individuals who really got it wrong with an opportunity to do even more damage. Moral: Try finding a moral if I mention just these two names: Wolfowitz and Gonzales.

3. Always tell the public that nothing bad ever happens. Moral: Don’t duck questions if you can’t shoot straight at low-flying ducks close at range.

2. Believe your own hype that good guys never lose, no matter how stupid they are. Moral: Don’t unfurl your “Mission Accomplished” banner until you see the whites of their surrender flags and put down the plastic bird before the photo-op.

1. When you know a decision will be unpopular, bring in religion and bring it on hard. Moral: The next time God tells you its okay to go to war, get it in writing and read the fine print.

Luke R. E. Publican