In Defense of America (13 page)

“Big Mistakes”

I am not going to attempt to defend America on its handling of the aftermath of the invasion, other than to say that there may have been almost no “right” way to do it, given the deep political obstacles to democracy I have just described. Every time a problem has been solved, by military commanders or by administrators, it has run back into that same lethal unwillingness of a Shia-led government to share power. Given that, it becomes secondary to ask what might have been done differently.

The flippant answer is “everything,” and America has no defense against the charge of astounding incompetence. In Iraq, America fought the war it wanted to fight, not the one that was there, determined that it should be like the liberation of Germany and France after the Second World War, its greatest triumph, and not like the counterinsurgency of Vietnam, its worst defeat.

The years since the invasion have seen a bitterly comical blame game as the protagonists write books to defend their own actions and fault others. It is now commonplace to say that three mistakes taken as fundamental caused Iraq to deteriorate so fast after the invasion. The first was the failure to stop the looting of Baghdad, and then, two decisions for which Paul Bremer, the American administrator, has been pilloried: the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the concurrent program of “de-Baathification” —stripping everyone senior in Saddam Hussein’s party from a position of authority. Some critics would add to this list the failure to hand over sovereignty early to Iraqis; that is certainly what many Iraqis themselves say.
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The charge is fair.
Fiasco,
published in 2006 by Thomas Ricks, the
Washington Post
’s Pentagon reporter, is the best account of who said what in 2003 and 2004. The book is a brilliant portrait of denial of the burgeoning trouble on the ground. Ricks is particularly astute on the clashes, not just the now-notorious one between the Pentagon and the State Department, but between the civilian and military sides of the Pentagon as well.

Nevertheless, decisions were never as simple as the retrospective accounts of “big mistakes” now portray. For example, the decision to disband the Iraqi army was premature and extraordinarily damaging, yet there is a case that, as it was, dominated by Sunnis, the army would not have held together under the ethnic strains that emerged. Senior officers in the coalition have made that point to me with some force. Much the same could be said of the de-Baathification —something had to be done to remove the Saddam supporters, although the policy went too far (as the attempts to reverse it in 2007 have acknowledged).

As Sir Hilary Synnott, Britain’s first ambassador in Iraq, has argued, it is too easy to say that the mission was doomed.
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But the scale, complexity, and speed of the problems which faced America once it toppled Saddam meant that it was almost impossible to pick the “right” path through them quickly enough to forestall the rise of ethnic violence. Barbara Bodine, a career Foreign Service officer and former ambassador to Yemen charged with overseeing the administration of Baghdad during the first few months of the occupation, has said that she believes that with the right planning, the occupation could have succeeded. But she viewed the obstacles this way: “There were 500 ways to do it wrong, and two or three ways to do it right. What we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”
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Never Again?

Part of America’s defense must be that it has quickly learned some of the lessons from Iraq, and that its own institutions have changed to make any repetition less likely. Its allies might forgive it for the mistakes of Iraq (although many Iraqis will not) if it can make that case. Congress has little power to determine the president’s foreign policy, but all the same, its supine stance in the months before the Iraq invasion represents a failure of the system’s checks and balances, which it now has every incentive to correct.

Congress’s passivity was partly a reflection of the Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, and the consequent inclination to support a Republican president. In 2002 and 2003, Congress failed to challenge either the intelligence about Saddam’s weapons or the postwar planning. Criticisms did bubble up, mainly from Democrats, but won no purchase on the parade of administration officials before congressional committees. In the main hearing into the looming invasion held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Russell Feingold asked, “Why do we give the president a blank check to go ahead with this before we had the answers to these questions?” Few of his colleagues listened. Indeed, when push came to shove, many Democrats (including, notably, Hillary Clinton), fearful of looking soft or unpatriotic, voted to authorize the invasion.

The much more aggressive, questioning stance of the Senate Armed Services Committee since President Bush’s 2004 reelection, as the American military toll in Iraq has been rising, suggests that it has learned a lesson, although that can be tested properly only by the passage of time. Some of that change came when the Democrats, who had no inclination to accommodate Bush, took control of the committee. But a good number of Republicans grew nervous about the war’s impact on their own reelection prospects and also felt they had been misled by the Bush administration. That makes it likely that members of both parties will challenge the president more on future decisions to take military action.

One of the most striking signs that America is determined to learn the lessons of Iraq is in the U.S. Army’s new operations manual, the first since 2001, which officials began briefing to members of Congress early in 2008. This comprehensive doctrine of how the army thinks it should fight a war now elevates the goal of stabilizing nations after conflict to exactly the same level as winning in battle.

It is hard to overstate the change in attitude this represents. It has come after searing self-criticism by the army, which tries to draw lessons from failure perhaps more systematically than any other branch of American public life. (Among others, Colonel H. R. McMaster, the commander during a successful 2005 battle in northern Iraq, accused the army of “self-delusion” about the character of the conflict. In a paper for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London- and Washington-based think tank, he said that the army had placed an exaggerated faith in military technology and had neglected the skills of building the peace.) The army’s new manual reflects the warning by Robert Gates, defense secretary, that counterinsurgency, Iraq-style, may be the future norm. If that is right, then the changes mean that America will not be as colossally unprepared as it was in Iraq, and much more able to tackle those new threats.

America will be judged not only by what has happened in Iraq, but by what is yet to happen, and by its willingness to try to repair the problems in Iraq and in the region. The military “surge” of 2007 was followed by a sharp drop in violence, down from hundreds of Iraqi deaths a day to dozens, but though a relief, the comparative calm is fragile in the absence of a political deal between Shias and other groups. Deciding whether America can still push them toward that deal through its presence in Iraq is one of the most difficult decisions Bush has left behind.

Chapter 8

THE INDEFENSIBLE: GUANTÁNAMO AND TORTURE

Any defense of America stops short of Guantánamo. The prison camp America set up at its naval base on the southeastern flank of Cuba is an offense to the values it says it is upholding in its “War on Terror.” So are the practices, amounting to torture, that the Bush administration has deployed and which it continues to try to defend. The pity of it is that the United States should have found it easy to avoid the Guantánamo predicament.

Every time I write about Guantánamo in
The Times
I get a torrent of online comments from Americans saying that no one else has a right to comment. “You mind your business, we’ll mind ours,” was one of the more polite.
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Expressed more subtly, that is the attitude of American diplomats abroad: irritation and bafflement that any other country should think it of concern what happens to no more than several hundred suspected terrorists collected from some of the world’s least pleasant neighborhoods. They dispute that this one action of setting up the base, carried out in pursuit of the terrorists who planned the September 11 attacks, should lead to the forfeiting of international support, and they move quickly on to saying that they don’t care if it does.

The Problem with Guantánamo

I was sitting at Guantánamo Bay one night in April 2006, after a week watching pretrial hearings, looking out at the Caribbean in the dark and thinking, “This is such a stupid mess for America to get itself into.” In the heat of its response to September 11, the United States decided that it was justified in suspending its own principles of presuming someone innocent until proven guilty, of not holding someone without charge, of the right to a fair trial, of not using torture.

It’s worthwhile to spell out what is wrong with Guantánamo because three-quarters of the e-mail I get on the subject from the United States professes absolutely no recognition that there is anything wrong with it. (“Thanks for treating our lives so lightly,” said one typical comment in February 2008, the writer wrongly believing that I was arguing for the release of all those at Guantánamo.)

In the early days, when the world was transfixed by images of orange jumpsuits and goggles, and prisoners shackled to gurneys being moved between wire cages, the furor was about the harsh treatment of the captives. Although there are still serious legal challenges about maltreatment or torture, “Camp X-Ray,” the site of those wire cages, is now abandoned; hummingbirds hover over the yellow flowering vines that have smothered the cells, and the interrogation room is a bare, sunny hut smelling of timber in the heat. The captives are now kept in purpose-built cells in “Camp Delta,” two hundred feet from the edge of a cliff, although a double ring of green mesh blocks the sea view. Many are in solitary confinement, although the “most compliant” are free to congregate (“This block is a free-range camp,” said the deadpan army captain showing me around).

The offense of Guantánamo boils down to two issues: the principle of holding people indefinitely without charge, and the new procedures of the military trials or “commissions” the United States has devised to try the very few captives whom it has charged, which do not give the accused the usual rights of conventional military or criminal courts. In spring 2008, there were 275 captives left in Guantánamo —less than half of the number that have passed through the camp. But the controversies do not dwindle as the numbers shrink, as they apply equally to other bases, such as the detention center at Bagram in Afghanistan, where in early 2008, the United States held 630 captives. At least Guantánamo has had a spotlight of international attention directed on it; the others have not.

Clinging to the Edge of Cuba

The United States claims the right to use the deep Cuban bay under a lease dating from 1903, which it held on to through the 1959 coup by Fidel Castro, although the former Cuban leader refuses to cash the annual $4,000 rent check. The struggles of an unbending military culture to resist the charm and untidiness of the Caribbean would be comical were it not for the grimness of the detention camp. For the eight thousand–odd military personnel crammed into what was, before 9/11, a sleepy naval base, there are sunset cruises, with guests segregated by rank of spouse, playgrounds with nothing to shield the metal climbing bars from scorching sun, and a lone McDonald’s urging customers to “celebrate the month of the military child.”

The sole purpose of putting a camp here —on the edge of an island with whose president America was not on speaking terms —was to claim that because the prison was not located in America, the United States did not have to apply American laws there. But the sight of the world’s most powerful country in flight from its own jurisdiction has understandably provoked scorn, and legal challenge.

Holding People Without Charge

More than six years after Guantánamo received the first captives in January 2002, it is clear that the United States is in a position to bring cases against only a tiny minority of those it has detained. Indeed, by early 2008, the United States had charged only eighteen people at Guantánamo with offenses.
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Pentagon officials venture that they hope eventually to charge about seventy of the total of more than six hundred who have passed through the prison.

Nevertheless, the United States still claims the right to hold the rest without charge. Its tortuous arguments for doing so have provoked sustained legal challenges. The American government argues that its captives are not traditional prisoners of war entitled to the protections of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, on the grounds that they are not soldiers of a recognized force, with identifiable uniforms. This makes them, the argument goes, “enemy combatants,” and, when at Guantánamo, “detainees,” a ludicrous verbal evasion of the straightforward label “prisoners.”

One consequence of that evasion is that the Pentagon refused at first to confirm the names of those at the detention camp. Only on May 15, 2006, in response to an Associated Press Freedom of Information request and lawsuit, did it finally release a comprehensive list of all those who had been detained. Until then, lawyers and rights groups had tried to piece together a list from reports of those released, and by searching countries where the United States had collected captives, asking families if they thought that they might have a relative held in Cuba.

The first objection to the Guantánamo detentions is that the United States has not complied with the requirement of the Geneva Conventions to establish that the captives are indeed fighters and not unconnected bystanders, easily mistaken in the heat of conflict. The United States says that it has done so, through the “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” interview panels carried out in 2004 and 2005. But defense lawyers, including those appointed by the Pentagon who are military officers in uniform themselves, have argued that these tribunals are entirely inadequate. Many of the captives from Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to their lawyers, were handed over to American forces by bounty hunters in return for about five thousand dollars. In the tribunals, they did not have access to a lawyer and were not able properly to contest the evidence against them.