If the knives aren't out quite yet, they certainly seem to be being sharpened in anticipation of some sort of bloodletting (you can hear the skritch-skritch-skritch quite clearly at Talking Points Memo).
With every last, little detail (except for any sort of context or explanation of grand strategy) scrolling up one screen and splashing 24/7 on the other, we have entered all crisis all the time. As a result, every caveat and option, every alternative analysis and discarded plan is being leaked, tweaked, caught up and written up, and blasted through our screens, onto our eyeballs, and into us. It seems that everyone had reservations - though one week ago, confidence was the rage.
And all this because the Iraqis in the South did not make life perfectly easy for the invading forces. Either the military units could have surrendered or the populace could have risen up in insurrection, and all our glorious plans would have come to immediate fruition. Now we hear that such an expectation was always folly, that of course the Iraqis - even the brutally oppressed Southern Shi'a - would consider an invasion, any invasion, an assault on them and their homes and their country.
All of this sound and fury, the dashed delirious hopes on the one hand and the stubborn worst-case realism on the other, still fails to grapple with the complicated reality, still tries to reduce the Iraqi people to an either/or. The two assumptions - first, that, given the chance, Iraqis would pick up their guns and shoot at their oppressors; and, second, when that did not happen, given an invasion, Iraqis will shoot at invaders - both create an imaginary, wholly reactive Iraqi.
I wonder if anyone has stopped to think that both could be true? The rosy intelligence reports on which the initial invasion plan was based did not come out of nowhere. There are, no doubt, Iraqis who would be delighted to surrender or to take up arms against Saddam and his minions - if circumstances encouraged that behavior. And, of course, peoples do tend to resist invasion - if the circumstances encourage them to do so. And still others will try to avoid the conflict; or try to make a profit; or sink into black depression; or, even, just go on trying to live their lives in as ordinary a fashion as they can. There isn't just one type of Iraqi: gun-toting and predisposed to violence, who is just going to start shooting at something once the war starts (though the gun-toting ones do seem to carry a lot of authority when there is shooting going on...).
Every one of those options resides in the breast of every Iraqi. Their responses were not pre-ordained. Nothing is inevitable.
The question that needs to be asked is not, "how could we have gotten our information wrong?", or even, "how could we have gotten the President to listen to other voices?" Those are questions you can ask in Washington. Those are questions which cover asses here and now and don't save American lives in the future.
The question, the important strategic question that changes things on the killing ground, is: "How could we have done things differently to increase the chances of a favorable reaction by the Iraqi people?"
I'll tell you one thing you don't do if you want people to welcome you to their proud and ancient land: You don't announce that the country will be ruled by an American proconsul - who will operate without a concrete plan or a timeline for either physical or political reconstruction.
Posted by Martial