Can't Tell Friend from Foe?
Another point from the new Hitchens piece in Slate:
"Now we hear on all sides, including Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, that de-Baathification was also a mistake. Can you imagine what the antiwar critics, and many Iraqis, would now be saying if the Baathists had been kept on? This point extends to Paul Bremer's decision to dissolve the Baathist armed forces. That could perhaps have been carried out with more tact, and in easier stages. But it was surely right to say that a) Iraq was the victim of a huge and parasitic military, which invaded externally and repressed internally; and b) that young Iraqi men need no longer waste years of their lives on nasty and stultifying conscription. Moreover, by making it impossible for any big-mouth brigadier or general to declare himself the savior of Iraq in a military coup, the United States also signaled that it would not wish to rule through military proxies (incidentally, this is yet another gross failure of any analogy to Vietnam, El Salvador, Chile, and all the rest of it)."
So: anyone at all who served Saddam's regime, even in the lowest position in the armed forces, couldn't be trusted? Could any Iraqis be trusted other than the hand-picked members of the IGC, who would meet inside the Green Zone or whatever the former palace is called?
So you're liberating people you don't trust? From the beginning you're operating from within an armed camp, sending out orders to construction teams, paid security forces, and pitifully few regular troops, and hoping for the best?
Kevin Drum among others has suggested that disbanding the armed forces--opposed by Jay Garner, carried out by Paul Bremer (at the behest of Bush personally?)--may have been the single worst mistake of the U.S. occupation.
Douglas Saunders in the Globe and Mail adds another dimension: young Iraqi males in general were not trusted in the early days of the occupation. Paid employment was given to almost anyone, from almost any country, in preference to young Iraqi males.
From Saunders: "We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to protect ourselves," explained Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority's procurement office. "From a force-protection standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad-guy influence."
Hitchens seems to be babbling at this point, but he might actually have captured Bremer's thinking a year ago--best and safest to send them all home, with nothing to do but fume.
The problem seems pretty obvious. If there are many Iraqis who have, so to speak, ordinary ambitions--not just for the return of a black market, but for honour, and positions of responsibility, among their fellow-citizens--then one either trusts a great many of them, willy-nilly, or not. If, on the other hand, you are convinced that mullocracy, combined with lingering loyalty to Saddam, and who knows what crazy resentments, are all bursting out all over, then you can't tell friend from foe, you can't really trust anyone, and military occupation is ... not a good idea.
An unfair but hard-to-resist analogy: when the French helped the American revolutionaries in the 1770s, they didn't say: we can't trust you guys to fight; there might be a Benedict Arnold among you.
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