[Mb-civic] Condi and Rummy By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Condi and Rummy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry when you read about the spat
between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld over whether the U.S. committed any "tactical" errors in the Iraq
war.

In case you missed it, Secretary Rice told reporters in Britain last Friday
that "I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," but
that the big strategic decision to take down Saddam Hussein will be seen by
future historians as correct.

During a radio interview on WDAY in Fargo, N.D., on Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld
responded: "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly
honest." Then Mr. Rumsfeld elaborated with a blast of incoherent nonsense
about how you always need to change tactics in war: "If you had a static
situation and you made a mistake in how you addressed the static situation,
that would be one thing. What you have here is not a static situation, you
have a dynamic situation with an enemy that thinks, uses their brain,
constantly adjusts, and therefore our commanders have to constantly make
tactical adjustments."

Where does one even begin? First of all, Secretary Rice is wrong that the
Bush team's mistakes in Iraq were purely tactical. Under Mr. Rumsfeld's
direction, it made a monumental strategic error in not deploying enough
troops to control Iraq's borders and fill the security vacuum we created by
bringing down Saddam ‹ a vacuum that has since been filled by looters and
scores of head-chopping sectarian militias and gangs.

Here is the brutal truth of where we are in Iraq today: After three years,
more than $300 billion and thousands of U.S. and Iraqi casualties, we still
do not have an Iraqi government or army that could hold together, without
U.S. help. There is still no self-sustaining, democratizing Iraq. And even
if we eventually get a national unity government there, it is not clear it
will be able to reverse Iraq's slide into sectarianism and militias. No one
even knows anymore whether Iraqis in uniform work for the state or a
militia.

The other day, the Iraqi blogger Riverbend, who writes for Salon.com, told
of watching Iraqi TV when an Arabic message scrolled across the screen: "The
Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of
the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by [U.S.]
coalition forces working in that area." Riverbend's translation: Many Iraqi
security forces "are actually militias allied to religious and political
parties."

As someone who believes in the importance of building a progressive politics
in Iraq, in the heart of the Arab world, it pains me to say this, but we are
in real trouble there.

Some critics dismiss the Iraq invasion as being all about oil. They are so
wrong. It is so much crazier ‹ and nobler ‹ than that. This region has known
only top-down monologues: colonial powers, then kings and dictators, always
talking down to their people, backed by iron fists.

What we have been trying to bring about in Iraq is something unprecedented ‹
the first ever bottom-up, horizontal dialogue between the constituent
communities of an Arab state. What you are seeing in Iraq today is that
horizontal dialogue, between Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis ‹ communities who
have never been allowed to forge their own social contract ‹ so they
wouldn't have to be ruled from the top down, with an iron fist.

If the Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds can forge their own social contract,
democracy is possible in this part of the world. If they can't, then it's
kings and dictators as far as the eye can see. And since it was decades of
that sort of politics that produced the pathologies that produced 9/11, that
would be very unfortunate.

Our job was to do one thing right: provide a secure environment so that
Iraqis could have a reasonably rational, peaceful horizontal dialogue, which
is difficult enough given their legacy of fear from the Saddam years. We
failed to do that, largely because Mr. Rumsfeld, who was warned otherwise,
refused to deploy sufficient forces. Mr. Rumsfeld made that decision because
‹ if you read "Cobra II," the Michael Gordon-Bernard Trainor history of the
Iraq war ‹ he was more interested in transforming the Pentagon than in
transforming Iraq. He was never ready to devote the unprecedented military
resources to match the unprecedented Iraq mission. President Bush, Condi
Rice, Dick Cheney all went along with him for the ride.

They tried to make history on the cheap. But you can't will the ends without
willing the means. That is Strategic Theory 101, and ignoring it is not just
some "tactical error."

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

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