A Theme to Follow

In a piece written for London's Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan reviews the post-war strategy in Iraq by synthesizing information from new books by L. Paul Bremer and Fred Barnes. The implications are staggering. But in particular, I was struck by two easy to gloss-over but entirely true paragraphs.

What deeper conclusions can we draw? The post-invasion plan was all but non-existent, an act of recklessness. The reason, however, was not just incompetence; it was a deliberate decision by Rumsfeld and Bush not to commit sufficient resources for nation-building.

Rumsfeld, after all, had never been a neocon. He loathed the idea of using large numbers of American forces to reconstruct a broken society.

And there, in my opinion, you have it. The underlying theme of our very conflicted and troubled engagement in Iraq is that an invasion undertaken on behalf of neoconservative ideals has been left to be implemented by those who are almost completely disinterested in those ideals. The critics who have droned on and on about a "neocon cabal" which has co-opted the White House and run the war repeatedly miss the point that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (among other key policymakers) are not neoconservatives. Thus, when it came time to implement the war and post-war occupation strategies, these folks simply weren't interested in the nation-building agenda. Rumsfeld's mantra has always been about military transformation, not about turning Iraq into a democracy. So naturally, he has recommended; and we have done, more with less. Even though that is at odds with what probably needs to be done in order to make Iraq a success story. In my opinion, Iraq should already be a success story. In some respects it is. But it has been at an unnecessarily high cost and has been so messy as to literally call into question the wisdom of the invasion in the first place.

And again, what this illustrates is a failure of leadership on the part of the president. Bremer and Barnes portray a master delegator, but a disinterested leader. In the case of objective / implementation disconnect, it should have been /should be, George W. stepping into the breach. But he's not interested in the details, and so this enterprise lurches on...