The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

Writing in The Atlantic Online Jack Beatty expresses, hopefully, the view that the misadventure in Iraq will explode once and for all the pipe dreams that passed for strategy in the neo-con world view.

Paradoxically, the very scale of the debacle in Iraq may yield one long-term good: the repudiation of neo-conservative "democratic imperialism." The Americans killed in Iraq will not have died in vain if their sacrifice keeps other Americans from dying in neo-con wars to "remediate" Syria, Iran, or North Korea. After Iraq, "neo-conservative" may achieve the resonance of "isolationist" after World War II-a term of opprobrium for a discredited approach to foreign policy, shorthand for dangerous innocence about world realities. Like the isolationists, the neo-cons are history's fools. The strategy they championed was the wrongest possible strategy for the wrongest possible moment in the wrongest possible region of the world.

Beatty's article makes a nice companion piece to Dan Drezner's latest TNR essay (with footnotes here). Drezner faults not the neo-con strategy but the faulty implementation of that strategy. Drezner's worry is precisely Beatty's hope.

The political problem for those sympathetic to democratization is that even if fault does lie with the implementation--which may well be the case--Americans are likely to blame the strategy that got us involved in Iraq rather than the nuances of how we carried it out...[voters] will therefore respond to our setbacks in Iraq by writing off the neocons' big idea altogether, concluding that democracy promotion in the Middle East was a pipe dream. Without public support, the grand strategy of reforming the Middle East will inevitably fall by the wayside...

A lot of the debate about whether the Iraq debacle results from flawed strategy or bad implementation of a sound strategy is one of semantics. How can one effectively distinguish between those elements of the neo-con strategy that masquerade as implementation (and vice versa)? The neo-con "strategy" calls for transformation of the Middle East via the (forceful) promotion of Western style democracy. The promotion of democracy part is a laudable goal and one that I'm not sure is opposed by non-neo-cons. (Yes, even those nasty, radical elements of the America-hating Left are in favor of democracy.) The question, really, is how "forceful" America must be in promoting democracy? And at what point does the forceful "implementation" become the strategy itself?

The traditional tools for promoting democracy -- diplomacy, deterrence, containment, coalition building -- take time to have their intended effect. The neo-cons decided that these tools were ineffective. The need for action, they argued, was immediate and acute. Was that a strategic or a tactical (i.e. implementation) decision?

I myself am a little dubious of the notion that we can impose democracy with shock and awe. I'm even more dubious when it is we -- not our adversaries -- who are shocked and awed. The shock of beheadings and torture coupled with the awe at a mighty super-power's ineffectiveness against the Mehdi "Army" can't fail to cause one to question the implementation if not the strategy.

Kevin Drum points out additional problems that contribute to the notion that the implementation was and is flawed.

Finally, there's one very interesting side-note to the larger debate on this topic (of which Drezner and Beatty form but one small skirmish). Over the last 18 months the discussion has evolved completely into the merits of democratization of Iraq and the methods by which democracy can be promoted. We have seemingly moved entirely beyond the ostensible rationale for the war: WMD and the immediate threat to American security. In this regard it can be said that the GOP has decisively won the rhetorical battle of why we're in Iraq.