The expense of our illusions

By Dave Anderson:

We live in a world of illusions.  Those illusions are expensive.  For instance, the illusion that we could impose a Westernized, friendly to the US and Israel, OPEC busting government in Iraq was an illusion that was apparent to the dirty fucking hippies by the summer of 2002 and to most of the Serious People by 2006.  However to lose that illusion would require the United States' elites to admit that our will is insufficient to mold the world without constraints and that other actors have agency.  So instead, we got the Surge(tm) which was a strategic failure when it is evaluated on its stated objectives of using military force to create political reconciliation space.  

Stirling Newberry argues that Iraq is a failed state where the improvement of the past few years is merely the return to a decaying baseline of the pre-war era after the violent punctuation of the insurgencies, the Iraqi civil war, ethnic cleansing and the screw the Sunni's political coalition. 

Iraq is spiraling downwards, as wide spread power outages continue. It is not without a point that this is important. One of the key steps in stabilizing the former Yugoslavia, was providing power. Iraq has two large rivers, and oil, and large reserves of conventional natural gas, and cannot generate enough electricity. A few days ago, the energy minister was forced out over the continuing crisis.

Iraq's oil production, which supplies virtually all of its hard foreign currency, is between 1.7 million barrels per day, and 1.9 million barrels per day, which isroughly the amount allowed by the oil for food program in 1999. 

The Surge(tm) that was supposed to create space for political reconciliation failed by its own metrics.  The Sunnis are still the primary latrine of Iraqi politics, continually shitted upon.  The reduction in violence that has been attributed to the Surge(tm) that has allowed for a 'decent interval' for a 'controlled chaos' withdrawal has many confounding factors. 

The three biggest factors wer a shift in the opinion of the Sunni Arab elites from the desirability of fighting a three front war against the US, Shi'ite militias and AQI/foreign jihadi co-belligerents, the effective end of the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and other mixed-sect communities along the main lines of fighting, and thne ceasefire of the Mahdi Army.  The Sunni elite decided to allow their influence to be leased out by the US to beat up on the more relevant local threats poised by the AQI/foreign jihadi groups, and the ethnic cleansing removed the conflict zones between Shi'ites and Sunni groups.  None of these factors were caused by the Surge(tm) and they were the actions of local actors with their own agency, agendas and interests.  

On its own merits, the Surge(tm) failed.  However Matt Yglesias argues that the Surge(tm) was needed to change our illusions:

� No time ever came when Bush redefined the nation�s war aims. So if �success� is judged as meaning something so literal as �achieve one�s goals� then the surge, like the war, failed. Indeed, Petraeus failed. 

And for a long time, that�s how I saw it, sitting in Washington vaguely furious that the man was winning accolades for a �victory� that was largely a matter of resetting expectations. In retrospect, that was churlish.

Managing expectations is hugely important and Petraeus did the nation a great service by redefining a win in Iraq as something more like �improve the situation in some respects and recognize that the long-term course of things is out of our hands.�

So we need to delude ourselves at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, a thousand or more American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives in order to avoid reality.  We can not afford our illusions yet we embrace them and categorize their expense of needed and vital while it is truly discretionary and ineffective.  We are a nation which spends to avoid the monsters under our beds while the roof caves in due to a false rush for austerity.