Quote of the day: Even if Chimpy the Prez can really be persuaded that we have to get out of Iraq, it's a long way out of the hole we've dug

"Anyone wanting to answer the question of 'how we began' in Iraq has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened. . . .

"Irresistible as Rumsfeld is [as the villain], however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing."

--Mark Danner (pictured above), in "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," in the new (Dec. 21) New York Review of Books

In this indispensable piece, taking off from the chasm between the reality of our invasion of Iraq and the story imagined by American leaders (and many of their followers), Danner draws in part on Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11, and James Risen's State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

It's Bob Woodward who has chosen, "with impeccable timing," Danner writes, "to place Donald Rumsfeld in the role of mustache-twirling villain, a choice that most of the country, in the wake of the elections and the secretary's instant fall from power, seems happy to embrace."

Ron Suskind, however,

more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason."

Suskind suggests that--

the most telling [reason] may stem from George Bush's belief in his own certainty and, especially after 9/11, his need to protect the capacity to will such certainty in the face of daunting complexity. His view of right and wrong, and of righteous actions--such as attacking evil or spreading "God's gift" of democracy--were undercut by the kind of traditional, shades-of-gray analysis that has been a staple of most presidents' diets.

And out of this, Suskind and Danner argue, was born the bizarre, secretive policy-making system of the Bush administration, where decisions were made on the basis of little or no information with little or no input from outside the tightly secretive circle of secret-holders.

Suskind describes how many of those in the [U.S. government's] "foreign policy establishment" found themselves "befuddled" by the way the traditional policy process was viewed not only as unproductive but "perilous." Information, that is, could slow decision-making; indeed, when it had to do with a bold and risky venture like the Iraq war, information and discussion--an airing, say, of the precise obstacles facing a "democratic transition" conducted with a handful of troops—could paralyze it. If the sober consideration of history and facts stood in the way of bold action then it would be the history and the facts that would be discarded. The risk of doing nothing, the risk, that is, of the status quo, justified acting.

As an example of the grotesqueness of this policy-making procedure, Danner cites the strange experience of Gen. Jay Garner (right) as the first overseer of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Consider, for example, this striking but typical discussion in the White House in April 2003 just as the Iraq occupation, the vital first step in President Bush's plan "to transform the Middle East," was getting underway. American forces are in Baghdad but the capital is engulfed by a wave of looting and disorder, with General Tommy Franks's troops standing by. The man in charge of the occupation, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner, has just arrived "in-country." Secretary of State Colin Powell has come to the Oval Office to discuss the occupation with the President, who is joined by Condoleezza Rice, then his national security adviser. Powell began, writes Woodward, by raising "the question of unity of command" in Iraq:

There are two chains of command, Powell told the president. Garner reports to Rumsfeld and Franks reports to Rumsfeld.

The president looked surprised.

"That's not right," Rice said. "That's not right."

Powell thought Rice could at times be pretty sure of herself, but he was pretty sure he was right.

"Yes, it is," Powell insisted.

"Wait a minute," Bush interrupted, taking Rice's side. "That doesn't sound right."

Rice got up and went to her office to check. When she came back, Powell thought she looked a little sheepish. "That's right," she said.

Danner has a good deal to say about the implications and consequences of this fact--apparently unknown either to the president or to his national security adviser--that there were two chains of command in Iraq, which both ended in the Pentagon, but let's just skip to some immediate consequences of this whole policy-making nightmare.

General Garner, you'll recall, was dismissed almost before he began work. Danner notes that he "had briefed the President and his advisers before leaving Washington, emphasizing his plan to dismiss only the most senior and personally culpable Baathists from the government and also to make use of the Iraqi army to rebuild and, eventually, keep order." But before Garner left Baghdad, he became aware--on the first and second days of his successor, L. Paul Bremer, in Iraq--of Bremer's first two Coalitional Provisional Authority orders.

The first ordered the total "De-Baathification of Iraqi Society."

When an appalled aide showed a draft of the order to Garner, he raced to Bremer (right) and tried to explain that "before nightfall . . . you will put 50,000 people on the street, underground and mad at Americans."

"I have my instructions," Bremer replied, "and I have to implement them."

Garner actually got Secretary Rumsfeld, the highest person in his chain of command, on the phone. Rumsfeld claimed, "This is not coming from this building."

Woodward stops short of using the word "lie," but makes it clear that he believes the "other participants" who told him that "the de-Baathification order was purely a Pentagon creation. Telling Garner it came from somewhere else, though, had the advantage for Rumsfeld of ending the argument." And also preserving a measure of deniability for the wily Rumsfeld. (Bremer would write in his book that the order came from Rumsfeld undersecretary Douglas Feith, who may have been one of the arch neocons promoting the war but was hardly likely to have give such an order on his own.)

Garner had more luck on Bremer's second day, when he learned that Order Number 2 was about to disband the Iraqi ministries of Defense (including the army) and Interior. No no, he couldn't make Bremer understand the disastrousness of peremptorily disbanding the army, amid pipedreams of somehow concocting a new army out of thin air. ("Jerry," General Garner argued, "you can get rid of an army in a day, but it takes years to build one.") But Garner pointed out to Bremer that he himself had just made a speech saying how important the Iraqi police force was to his rebuilding plans. Garner pointed out that the police were part of the Ministry of the Interior.

Bremer looked "surprised" by this--"an expression similar, no doubt," Danner ventures, "to Rice's when she and the President learned from the secretary of state that the civilian occupation authority would not be reporting to the White House but to the Pentagon." (Postscript: The axing of the Interior Ministry was removed from Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2.)

Danner begins his concluding section:

Nearly four years into the Iraq war, as we enter the Time of Proposed Solutions, the consequences of those early decisions define the bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to secure Saddam's enormous arms depots they armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration that provided the insurgency such fertile soil. By blithely purging tens of thousands of the country's Baathist elite, whatever their deeds, and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept American occupation without an "Iraqi face," they created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to shelter it. And by providing too few troops to secure Iraq's borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states. It was the foreign Islamists' strategy above all to promote their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their attacks and to protect the Shia who became their targets, the US leaders have allowed them to succeed.

To Americans now, the hour appears very late in Iraq. Deeply weary of a war that early on lost its reason for being, most Americans want nothing more than to be shown a way out. . . .

But what kind of way out is there?

Danner has more to say in this piece, and promises a future piece on this subject, but it's hard to be optimistic. In fact, I was already punchy from reading a "Comment" piece by George Packer (right) in this week's (Nov. 27) New Yorker. Packer has been writing sensibly about our adventure in Iraq (though it's wise to remember that he originally favored military intervention). In this piece, called "Unrealistic," he goes off on what he perceives as widespread misunderstanding of how difficult it is going to be for us to extract ourselves:

Since winning the midterms, [the Democrats] have been talking about the endgame in Iraq with a strangely serene sang-froid. Last week in the Times, John M. Deutch, who was the director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton, praised the nomination of [Robert] Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld, and added, "The consequences of withdrawal need not be catastrophic to American interests in the region." Also last week, on National Public Radio, Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was an early supporter of withdrawal, casually offered that, if Iraq were to fall apart in the wake of an American departure, "I don't think it'll be any worse" than the partition of the Indian subcontinent. A million people are estimated to have died in 1947 during the movement of Muslims and Hindus across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border. Sixty years and several wars later, the two countries confront each other in a nuclear standoff, trade charges of subversion, and periodically exchange fire in the Kashmiri Himalayas.

Packer goes on to name some more names--of people who he says have been misleading the public into thinking that our extraction from Iraq can be accomplished anytime soon or without near-catastrophic pain. Well, I hadn't noticed those expectations, and if Packer is right, then he has perhaps performed a useful service in dashing them. Meanwhile, Here is the best hope he can offer:

Though it may well be too late, politically a new Iraq policy is finally possible. It should use every ounce of America's vanishing leverage to get the Iraqi factions, including insurgent and militia leaders and their foreign backers, to sit together in a room, with all the vexing issues of political power and economic resources before them. The U.S. government should announce that decisions about troop levels, including withdrawal, would depend on, not precede, the success or failure of the effort. An official involved with the Democratic congressional leadership said last week that political compromise and a gradual lessening of violence could allow the U.S. to reduce its numbers over the next eighteen months to thirty thousand troops, with other countries, including Muslim ones, convinced that it's in their interest to fill the gap with peacekeepers. If America is already heading for the exit, no one will want to have anything to do with Iraq except to pick at its carcass.

Ultimately, it's up to the President. The man who still holds that office may not want a new policy. And even if he does, it may not work. We may have to accept that the disintegration of Iraq is irreversible and America's last remaining interest will be to leave. If so, we shouldn't deepen the insult by pretending that we're doing the Iraqis a favor. Even realism has an obligation to be realistic.

I don't want to backpedal on the need for us to extricate outselves from this horrendous mess. I just want everyone to keep in mind the nightmarish clutch of realities that have to be included if we're to find a, well, realistic way out.