April 21, 2004

Looking back
Posted by Jon Henke

Tyler Cowen has an interesting mental excercise - a "before and after" of his Iraq war expectations.

Here is what I expected before the war started:

1. WMD would be found, and probably used by Iraq during fighting.
2. The whole world would come to America's side.
3. Iraqi reconstruction would be a huge mess.
4. Our administration (indeed any administration) would handle it badly.
5. In Iraq civil war would ensue. Ten to fifteen years later Iraq would end up with a (relatively) stable oligarchy, better than Saddam but hardly ideal.
6. A kind of de facto partition might arise/continue, under the U.S. guise of protecting the Kurds.
7. If we didn't fight the war something worse would happen. I never thought Iraq was a threat to the U.S., but I envisioned a wider Middle Eastern war breaking out, sooner or later. We would intervene later, but on worse terms.
8. The strike would cause some countries to accelerate their nuclear programs, but this would happen anyway. The pace would not so much matter.

Let's do a simple stocktaking. Clearly I was wrong about #1 and #2. So far I am right about #3 and #4. #5 and #6 remain to be seen. In that department things have gone as I had expected. We'll never know that much more about #7, since it is a counterfactual. I will stick with #8 as written.

It's something I think each of us should probably do more often. So, here is my approximation of his list:

1: WMDs: would either be found, but largely unused/unusable...or, more likely, WMD programs would be found, though actual WMDs would not.
- I'd say I was correct about that, though I may have been a bit optimistic about the state of the programs.

2: The world (read: UN) would remain deeply polarized - especially the Middle East - but would pitch in to help secure and rebuild Iraq.
- Right about the first, wrong about the second.

3: Iraqi (infrastructure) reconstruction would be halting, slow and messy....but progressing.
- Correct.

4: The Bush administration would neither "get it right" nor "screw it up"...but would do enough of both to give ammunition to critics and supporters.- Well, when isn't that right?

5: The Iraqi push towards democracy would be marked by friction and rivalry, but would settle down as they got closer to the handover. Once they assumed power, the "democracy" we intended would eventually morph into a somewhat theocratic "democracy" - i.e., moderate Islamism. It wouldn't be ideal, but it would be far better than the previous regime.
- I still think the end result is probable, but I was wrong about the degree to which the Iraqi's would step up and take responsibility for their own governance and security.

6: Iraq would remain whole.
- It may be decades before we know if the current boundaries remain in place.

7: The "democratization of Iraq" would set off a push towards more liberalization and democratization in neighboring nations.
- Mixed results. The Iranian uprising has not manifested itself, though the reformists are agitating more and more. Saudi Arabia is instituting some democratic and liberal reforms. Syria is Syria. Some smaller neighbors are allowing a bit more freedom of information and media.

8: Military action in Iraq would spur the Palestinians to come to the table and take negotiations more seriously.
- Wrong.

9: Military action in Iraq would pressure other rogue nations to fall into line to some degree.
- Mixed results.

10: After one year, we'd have accomplished enough to call the Iraq war a success.
- Wrong. We haven't settled enough problems to call the game, yet.

An interesting excercise. If you have a blog, try it. Contrast your own expectations with reality.

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Comments

One thing I've learned is that betting against administration propaganda is a good bet.

What I expected is that Iraq would eventually take to some sort of unified, democratic society. With Iran and Turkey in the picture, the unified part seems to be a short-term constraint. Which leads me to question your point #5.

I'm not sure that Iraqis have been given the chance to take responsibility for their own governance and security. We've heard the complaint that security is the bottleneck. The way I see it, the problem is the top-down approach to this. The bottom-up approach would be to turn over governance and security to Iraqis piecemeal.

That's means withdrawing from some areas. Once the US military was out of the way, local Iraqis could, for example, find those weapons caches to add to their own armories and would be better motivated to flush out foreign agitators. This could lead to warlords and militias, but I think that could be tolerated so long as the top-down architecture progressed in tandem and Iraqis agreed that changes at the local level would be required over time to conform.

So the plan would be to turn over control at the municipal and provincial level and let each area proceed at its own pace, setting an example for others areas. These localities could negotiate contracts for economic development and any terrorist activity in their areas would be their problem. But the first thing that has to happen is to yield complete control to those areas that are ready so that there is no taint of occupation or collaboration, and allow Iraq to evolve one province at a time.

This article makes a similar case:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/042004A.html

It differs in that it is much more open to a non-unified solution. The unifying top-down aspects I'm thinking of include such things as a common currency/banking system, oil industry management and foreign relations. Citing Rwanda, for example, it points to the larger issue of colonial map-making. A partitioned Iraq might address that in microcosm, but it would still be within the confines of the larger, phoney boundaries. Any intra-boundary tensions that might be avoided by a partitioned state might only lead to cross-boundary tensions with neighboring states. It's a tough nut to crack.

There might be some usefulness for a reformed United Nations longer term here by making membership conditional on conforming to a set of evolving standards. It could start out by addressing sovereignty issues of these post-colonial nations and addressing poverty by making property rights one of the first standards. Much of the third-world poor are held back by retarded bureaucracies and the inability to leverage property.

Let's change the world.

Posted by: William at April 22, 2004 02:56 AM