The Root of Our Failures in Iraq - Conservatism

Or to put a finer point on it, Neo-Conservatism. There have been many books written on what went wrong in Iraq, never mind whether we should have even invaded in the first place. But this article I found on yahoo made me rethink what happened in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Yes there was incompetence and ignorance and cronyism and many bad decisions made that we can now secondguess, but I think there may have been a fundamental flaw that doomed the invasion and reconstruction before we dropped bomb #1 -- Conservatism.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070409/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_insider_s_account

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation's "shocking" mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had "turned their backs on their would-be liberators."

....

• The Americans disbanded Iraq's army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.
The Bush admin's moral absolutists chose idealism over pragmatism. In the Middle East, idealism gets people killed and pragmatism saves lives.

• Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party — from government, school faculties and elsewhere — left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.
Here Bremer acted unilaterally and in ignorance of the reality "on the ground". Many Iraqis were Baathists, but that did not mean they were necessarily Saddam-loyalists or Al Qaeda sympathizers. We completely threw the baby out with the bathwater.

• The CPA's focus on private enterprise allowed the "commercial gangs" of Saddam's day to monopolize business.
The de-regulators strike again

• Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.
Would you rather run a business in Iraq or any country other than Iraq? Exactly. People who had the means bought up capital equipment (and I'm sure hired members of Iraq's educated labor force) on the cheap and bolted. Thanks free-traders!

• The CPA perpetuated Saddam's fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.
Typical conservative move. Subsidize the oil industry...


--These are just examples from the article. This doesn't even get into some of the CPA's questionable ideas regarding the institution of an Iraqi flat tax, the intimidation of Iraq's neighboring countries, the religious/ideological conflict of American Fundamentalist Christians vs Arab/non-Arab Muslims, the unflinching support of Israeli policies and many other terrible ideas that Conservatives fantasized about "trying out" in Iraq that ended tragically. All of this leads me to question the popular narrative for why the war failed (the Bushies incompetence, ignorance). Perhaps the root of the failure is not just in the individual Conservatives who iniatiated and ran this war, but rather in Conservatism itself.

They didn't see Iraq as a nation of people, but as an abstract social experiment where they could try out all their pet theories - and as with any pet theory, if the theory is proved wrong it, well, it CANNOT be proved wrong so it must be someone else's fault.

Talk about ivory tower elitists.

because the neo-cons are so ideologically invested in this, they cannot admit defeat or that they were wrong. A few have come around, but not the ring-leaders. Hence the rosy pictures painted that do not reflect reality.

IMHO, one can track back through American hitory, looking, but not finding, a single instance where adherants to conservative 'thinking' brought about anything good.

In fact, McCarthyism is about as successful an effort as conservatives have ever made. And it is typical of the kind of contribution conservatives have made to holding America back.