Iraq will fall apart. NeoCons knew, didn't care

Although Bush stated when he ran for President in 2000 that he would not get involved in "Nation Building", when 9/11 happened and exposed his total failure to understand foreign policy and terrorism he listened to Cheney and turned to the NeoCons for an idea how to respond. The NeoCon preplanned response was to assume that any nation in which the population was freed from the control of government would automatically and immediately become a free enterprise democracy on its own. All that was required was to remove the oppresive government.

The complete falsity of this assumption has been (again) proven. A democracy based on a free-enterprise economy society may start from releasing some of the economic control of government, but it requires massive amounts of nation building over extended periods of time to bring the democracy part into being. Even then, the democracy is uncertain.

It doesn't help if the society to which such changes are being applied is not yet a true and unified nation.

The result of these miscalculations was to require massive efforts of nation-building in Iraq following American military operations to disrupt the existing but fragile "nation" that was there under the oppressive tyranny of Saddam. As nasty as the dictatorship of Saddam was, such governmental oppression was required to hold the disparate tribes, religions, cultures and groups together in a single state. Iraq was not and is not a natural nation.

In his ignorance Bush and his trusted advisors saw the use of the American military as being the end-state in creation of a democratic free-enterprise based nation, much as appeared to have been the case in Germany and Japan after WW II. The difference is that both Japan and Germany were nations before WW II.

As a result of their failure to perceive this, Bush and his supporters had no clue how expensive and time-consuming the necessary nation-building was that would automatically result from the preemptive invasion of Iraq. Even to suggest to them such likely problems before the invasion of Iraq was, in their minds, nothing more than political obstruction from the uninformed non-conservative non-believers, something they expected from any non-conservative to their proposals. The conservatives were right and they knew it. Why listen to obstructionists?

Well, maybe because they had an element of understanding of what was happening? But the obstructionists were the enemy. You don't learn from your enemies. You crush them politically.

Such self-certainty is almost invariably wrong. It clearly was in this case.

The real question is whether the Bush administration knows now that those objections were based on good understanding of what would be involved in the invasion of Iraq. It is clear that the conservatives of the Bush administration would not in the past accept advice from those who have a different idea of what was required to change the Middle East.

That is easily understood if you know the history. For the most part the conservatives who currently run the American government have spent their political careers fighting against those very experts and downrating their knowledge and experience. Why should they change that now, even when the results of their invasion of Iraq isn't progressing as expected.

The NeoCon theoreticians had a somewhat better understanding than Bush and his advisors of what they were getting into, but not enough. They simply assumed that America, as the sole remaining "SuperPower," would be able to easily deal with the nation-building if they could get over the "Viet Nam Syndrome" that they thought was the only thing that inhibited the use of military power. They thought that all that was needed was to convince America to actually use the massive and overwhelming military power we then had.

From Robert Drefus in Tom Paine:

For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn’t even alarming: they just didn’t care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.

In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous “Clean Break” paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq would “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.”

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance author who wrote the book "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005).

Bush did not understand or like nation-building when he first ran for President. It should be no surprise that he did not understand that his use of the military would require him to do nation-building to do what he wanted done, or that he has failed miserably in his attempt to do it.

Sadly, even his five years of failures have not taught him enough to do the job. It doesn't look like he can learn.