Bobo's World

David Brooks proves how very difficult it is to write about a subject, week after week, about which you really know nothing.

May 18, 2004

There's something about our venture into Iraq that is inspiringly, painfully, embarrassingly and quintessentially American.

No other nation would have been hopeful enough to try to evangelize for democracy across the Middle East. No other nation would have been naïve enough to do it this badly. No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success, as I suspect we are about to do.

American history sometimes seems to be the same story repeated over and over again. Some group of big-dreaming but foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face. It's too late to turn back, so they reinvent their mission. They toss out illusions and adopt an almost desperate pragmatism. They never do realize the utopia they initially dreamed about, but they do build something better than what came before.

January 28, 2005

Let's look at the effect of the campaign on world opinion. What we've seen in the past week is a polarization of the two sides or a clarification of the two sides. On the one hand you have the insurgents who are threatening to cut off the heads of the children of anybody who votes. You have Zarqawi saying the enemy here is democracy. That makes the case very strongly.

On the other hand you have got tens of thousands of candidates and hundreds of thousands of millions of voters who are braving all to actually go vote. This is as clear a contrast between good and evil as one sees in human nature.

The insurgents are truly evil. And the people are trying to vote, it might not be what we like, but it is such a virtuous - it's like the civil rights movement and fighting the Nazis all wrapped up into one.

December 2005

MR. RUSSERT: David Brooks, the president and, as he attempts to recoup his popularity and deal with Iraq, what do you see?

MR. DAVID BROOKS: Well, he's surging. He's gone from 35 to 40, almost in landslide defeat territory. No, I think he actually is picking up, first on the communication level. The first two speeches in this recent offensive have been successful. You know, I used to go to the White House for White House briefings, and they talk intelligently about what was going on in Iraq. The Interior Ministry is a mess but the Foreign Ministry's pretty good. The training of troops is going good; the police force is not going good. You get these intelligent discussions. Then they'd go out and it was like, the five-year plan is on course. And they were just not being fair to the American people. They were insulting the intelligence of the American people.

These last two speeches, they've stopped insulting the intelligence of the people, and I think they've begun to see little pick-up. And then in Iraq we actually have begun to see progress. Madeleine Albright said the military situation is going terribly. I don't know anybody who think that's true. Anthony Cordesman, no friend of the administration, said the training of the troops is going better. So we're beginning to see some progress. Whether the bad guys are improving, we don't know. But I think, you know, there's some signs for optimism and they've finally begun to communicate a little better.

Just two weeks ago, Brooks (like Conrad Burns) thinks Bush has "a secret plan."

Matthews: David, do you believe the President is looking for an out from his doctrinaire policy of staying the course?

Brooks: Not really, no I don't. I think they're looking at policy options. One of those options is trying to replace the current government which seems to be doing nothing. The second option is some sort of federation which–Joe Biden has suggested as separating Iraq. A third option and by far the least likely is going in with more troops, So there's all different three options…We have much less control over Iraq than we did two or three years ago…

Well, if you call this a plan.

Policy makers are again considering fundamental changes in our Iraq policy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Kedourie’s essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.”

Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.

“Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine,” Kedourie wrote.

And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution.

Kedourie described “a country riven by obscure and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath.” He observed, “The collapse of the old order had awakened vast cupidities and revived venomous hatreds.”

In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”

The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”

At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.

The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option.

Today Iraq is in much worse shape. The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration. This latest descent was initiated by American blunders, but is exacerbated by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise for the common good, even in the face of self-immolation.

The core problem is the same one Kedourie identified decades ago. Iraq is teetering on the edge of futility. Perhaps a competent occupation could have preserved it as a coherent entity, but now the Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion.

Partitioning the country would be traumatic, so after the election it probably makes sense to make one last effort to hold the place together. Fire Donald Rumsfeld to signal a break with the past. Alter troop rotations so that 30,000 more troops are policing Baghdad.

But if that does not restore order, if Iraqi ministries remain dysfunctional and the national institutions remain sectarian institutions in disguise, then surely it will be time to accede to reality. It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable — the clan, tribe or sect.

A muscular U.S. military presence will be more necessary than ever, to deter neighboring powers and contain bloodshed. And the goals will remain the same: to nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.

But the boundaries may have to change. The war was an attempt to lift a unified Iraq out of its awful history, but history has proved stubborn. It’s time to adjust the plans to reality.

So, history proves Iraq cannot be a state. The British tried to "civilize" them, but failed. The British threatened to pull out if they proved unable to govern themselves, which only made things worse. We should raise troop levels to bring to heel the insurgency in Baghdad (never mind the rest of the "country." If that doesn't work (and Brooksie don't sound too confidant...anymore), we should let the place devolve to "the clan, tribe or sect." But still keep lots of troops on hand to "contain bloodshed." But our goal remains the same.

Yes, in our naive, quintessentially American way, we're building something better than before.

Bobo's world: Short, brutish and hopeful.