On the heels of this thoughtful commentary about the Iraq war, I'd like to say that I agree, from what I know at the moment, that the effort has been badly mismanaged.

I'm not into armchair quarterbacking. I've never run a war, and don't know if I'd do any better. And I'm not a person who makes snap judgements on these things: It took me nearly a decade to come to the conclusion that Johnson and McNamara were grossly negligent in Vietnam.

But if so, where does the blame lie?

Well, there's General Paul Bremer, who, credible sources tell me, mismanaged the occuption in the crucial first months, and gave away millions of dollars with no accountability whatsoever. But I'm sure he gave some very plausible justifications until they could no longer withstand close scrutiny, and was sacked.

Looking a bit higher up the chain, Rumsfeld -- though I loved the way he handled the media and tried to reform the Pentagon -- was also wrong. We needed more troops. He was, in fact, dead right in his contentions we could topple Saddam with a lighter, more efficient force. (And his many critics were, in fact, quite wrong there.) But it was the aftermath itself which turned out to be the bigger problem. We didn't switch gears fast enough.

And of course, the buck stops with President Bush, their boss.

Unconstructive Critics

Yet I'm not at all inclined to agree that Bush had his head utterly in the sand, as so many insist. This is a classic case of replacing a legitimate criticism, which could have led to a helpful correction (we didn't correctly anticipate foreign terrorists and the resulting sectarian strife) with an absurd one:

Some in the administration, alleged we'd be greeted as liberators. The media initially dismissed the idea, then grudgingly ran video of Saddam's statue and shoes being thrown at his picture (grudgingly, because Fox was showing it -- I expect we wouldn't have seen it otherwise) and then went back to sneering that the idea was utterly false.

As the linked article notes:

I know that these anecdotes will sound as if Karen Hughes or somebody paid me to cook them up, but they all really happened: The day I met Riyadh, he told me what he had been doing before the war. He and his family would sit around and listen to underground BBC radio. And if the French or somebody else in the U.N. seemed to come up with something that would offer the world a glimmer of hope that war could be avoided, their reaction was not, "thank God." It was: "Oh s**t." ...

In the late spring of 2003, like hundreds of reporters, I joined the multitudes flocking to Karbala for ashura, the Shi'ite pilgrimage which had been forbidden under Saddam. Concerns about violence were high, but unfounded: As it turned out, in every possible sense, it was the brightest possible day. Flags were flying... Throughout the day, I could feel myself being sized up by people, and this, I'll admit, made me a little nervous. No need: when they were sure of the foreignness of my face, people did not insult or attack me. They smiled and said: "Thank you Bush, thank you Blair."

Yet, after the regime fell, we stopped hearing about this goodwill -- as though it had disappeared instantly -- and what was happening to dissipate it. Instead, the media told us, in a dozen different ways, that most Iraqis viewed us as unwelcomed "occupiers" (often by quoting hostile Baathist sources) -- and used that very term to drive the point home.

So one day we're told: "The Bush administration has lied to us by telling us we'd be greeted as liberators!" followed, later, by: "We had a chance at first, but Bush's incompetance completely screwed that up!" If we were never told we had a chance, how could we have pressured our politicians to make sure they seized it at the moments when it was actually slipping away?

Sadly, this pattern was repeated on subject after subject: Initially the drumbeat was that Bush was going into Iraq for oil. And that France (!!) and Russia (!!!) opposed the war out of conscience. And that Bush had single-handedly created the impression that Saddam appeared to be hiding WMD. After seemingly endless investigations into these lurid possibilities, none of these turned out to be true. In fact, none of these ideas were even sensible at the time, despite the fact that supposedly-responsible media outlets repeated them incessantly.

And though the media liked to paint Bush as a man who could not admit error, there were even fewer mea culpas on these points. (None, actually.)

But the bigger issue was this: When you criticize your opponents for manifestly fictional problems -- the kind of irresponsible criticisms we've seen and still see from the left and the press -- you aren't helping to correct or solve real problems. When the media relentlessly pursues fantasies born of blind hatred -- which seem to be it's stock in trade these days (Plame, flushing Korans down toilets, the assertion Rumsfeld caused Abu Ghraib, screaming for Karl Rove's head, etc.) -- we all lose.

Beyond the Pale

But perhaps there was another reason a number of critics were loathe to offer constructive criticism.

I hate to be cynical, but too many anecdotes from reporters -- shocked at their peers' apparent glee at death -- have led me to think the situation is utterly the opposite of what some portray: that some (certainly not all, but still too many) who claim to be in favor of peace and the good of Iraq actually want Iraqis to die by the score, while many on the "warlike" right actually prayed each night for few civilian and US causalties, and a peaceful Iraq.

It seems our author, Tish Durkin, though she is my political opposite, has come to the same sad conclusion:

... what depresses me, and makes me despise so much war criticism even when I agree with it, is that so many of those positing it seem so happy about what's gone wrong. They seem to relish the probability that Iraq will get worse and worse so that they can be righter and righter.

This isn't new.

I remember an anti-war activist who was staying in our hotel in Baghdad, who had not come to Karbala for that first ashura. A good person trying to do good things, she had stayed behind to prepare a media alert on the horrors of the occupation -- which, especially at a time when the coverage out of Iraq was largely very upbeat, was a very worthy thing to be doing. Still, one thing really bothered me about her. When, upon everyone's return from Karbala, the activist heard that the day had actually been free of violence, and full of jubilation, she looked as if she had tasted a bad olive, and spit out her response: "Oh, f**k."

How she must be gloating now.

In an environment like this, with many would-be critics praying for failure (and war supporters defending mostly false charges) the dearth of constructive criticism isn't surprising. Constructive criticism can function as a corrective, and correction is not what is desired -- since it might lead to success.

Responding to Feedback

Thus, I'm sure a large part of the reason President Bush didn't risk more troops was this relentless focus on the negative. This isn't to excuse his mistake, but rather to ask what impact the vaunted "fourth estate" has on a democracy.

While Iraqi 'insurgents' might physically evicerate and burn a dead American soldier, dragging his body through the street, or hanging his corpse on a bridge for all to see -- the US press did approximately the same thing day after day in ink. They paid keen attention to every death in Iraq (even fictional ones created by our opponents) and very little to those in Afghanistan. They gave endless time to a few shrill relatives who criticized the war, and almost none at all to more moderate ambivalent or supportive voices.

And they utterly failed to put our casualty rate into any kind of historical perspective.

People say Bush always believes he's right, and never listens to his critics, but I believe that's untrue. I expect part of his failure to do the right thing came from the endless calls in the media to minimize the bloodshed or harm to our troops. (We say such things, and then forget, in just a moment, what we said before, and then blame a politician for responding to our concerns.) The papers want to depict him as unconcerned about American blood spilled, but I think it's quite the opposite: he seems to have been too concerned, ironicly.

Eventually, after the 9/11 and "WMD cherry picking" investigations came up empty-handed, it finally became fashionable to criticize Bush for low troop levels. Generals have always been split on these topics, and, whichever approach is followed, there are a dozen more in the Pentagon who would have done the opposite. But the political use of this criticism was, as usual, revealed to be utterly unprincipled: the moment Bush listened to his opponents and changed the strategy, his opponents also reversed themselves.

An aside to critics

At this late date, it's now easy to identify Bush's main failure -- that is, not putting enough US troops in harm's way. We've got a lot of hindsight now.

Yet I wonder: if you or I found ourselves managing the war in the first years, could we have done better? Could you have faced that media pressure to minimize harm, and announced you were going to put even more people in? I'm not sure I could have. It would be very hard for me to escalate a war in an environment where every press conference accused me of not caring about death, or of sacrificing my fellow citizen's children for my personal profits.

Undoubtedly there are those of you who would answer my challenge with: "Well, I wouldn't have gone to war in the first place!"

From those who say that, I'd like to know: How could you justify continuing sanctions which, you were told, were killing tens of thousands of children each month? And yet how could you lift them, knowing that Saddam had every intent of re-arming? And how could you leave a man like that -- who had already attempted to assassinate a US president, who openly supported terrorists, who had already used WMD, and who (according to the near-universal opinion of intelligence agencies around the world) was probably hiding some now -- in power?

Never mind the torture chambers and massive body count.

I've waited years to hear that question answered, and not one war critic has given me a reasonable response. Even though it appears to be the most obvious set of questions one should consider.

But regardless, if the criticism is "Bush did X badly", the response: "Well, in his shoes, I wouldn't have faced problem X" is simply a cowardly evasion. If we shouldn't have been there in the first place, and it's a no-win situation no matter what would be tried after starting the war (which seems to be the unspoken admission behind that particular evasion), then at least have the courage to say so. Don't pretend to offer a criticism you don't really believe.

Today

Although I hate death (and precisely for that reason) I don't regret the decision to go to war and depose Saddam. I don't think it was a mistake. My body count before-and-after analysis still indicates there are tens of thousands of people alive today, and each coming year, who wouldn't have been alive in the alternate reality where Saddam still rules.

I wasn't fundamentally wrong about my pre-war guesses, but there are several small differences. For one, I had expected that another corrupt strongman would step into Saddam's shoes. I expected that he would be kiling opponents of his regime (in smaller numbers than Saddam, though), and that we would eventually be blamed and hated by the Iraqis, as we have been by the Germans and French and South Koreans. And this may well happen still.

Instead, we have ethnic strife which was touched off by terrorists from abroad. I missed that exact angle (I considered civil war, but not the shaheeds), but I also didn't see the media predicting that either.

Also, I didn't think we'd be so stupid as to delibrerately let Muqtada al-Sadr and his minions escape alive when we had them backed into a corner. That was a stunningly bad decision: now they foment sectarian violence. Thus the old saying is true: those who are kind to the cruel are cruel to the kind. When you let bad men live, you let good men die -- you kill them yourself. But we're so busy trying to disprove our image as cruel killers that we appear to have gone too far to the other extreme.

I don't think the situation is irretrievable, but I also think anyone who expects a peaceful Iraq, now or in the future, will be disappointed. I hope we stay there until the Iraqis themselves, by a majority, want us to leave -- and not a moment longer. I hope we keep killing the people (Iraqi or otherwise) who kill Iraqis, and still keep taking the extreme measures our troops take (but which are never reported) to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties.

In the end, the Iraqis will hate us -- that was inevitable before we started, and I knew it full well from the European example. But no matter: we are judged by conscience and God, not international opinion.

Lastly, I think we've now answered a question. Can an Islamic nation recover from totalitarianism and be led into democracy? Germany was deeply fascist, and became a vibrant democracy. Japan changed from a feudal dictatorship to a industrious partner for peace. In each case, this transition took over a decade.

Yet at this point, five years in, the going is harder than it was then. Partially, this may be to the smaller influence we're exerting. But I fear the worse: it may also be that unless we can continually use the measures Attaturk did, modern Islamic nations cannot long sustain pluralism and democracy.

There are many critics of the administration who say: "We're wasting our time there! It's not worth it!" They may ultimately be proved right. But they never openly stated their real meaning: they don't believe Iraq can be improved.

I hoped they were wrong, but perhaps they're not. But, nontheless, the irony remains: it is the allegedly "racist" conservatives who hoped the longest and hardest that Iraqis could be free, and the "multicultural" left who had the dimmest view of their ability to become a first world nation.

But now it's up to the Iraqis, the Democrats, and us. Bush finally fixed the problem -- and from all reports, the surge is indeed working -- but just as the we were finally winning Vietnam there, and lost it at home, so we could see the same thing happen with Iraq.

I'm ending here, but I want you -- particularly if you disagree with me -- to think about what an Iraq with no American presence will look like, who will dominate it, what will happen domestically, whether more or less people will die than in the current situation -- and who it will ally with on the world stage.

If you find that better than the current situation, then, by all means, support ending the war.

Me: I do think it's fairly bad now. But all the alternatives look worse.

Bless you.