Your weekend debate on Iraq

What do you do with a country like Iraq? Andrew Sullivan has plenty o’ posts and links with regard to the current stituation in Iraq — click here, here, here, and here. Over at the Council on Foreign Relations, Anthony Cordesmann has a frank conversation with Bernard Gwertzman that makes it clear he’s none too thrilled with his choice of major party candidates when it comes to Iraq. Here’s his response to the question: “Regarding the mistakes you describe in the post-war military planning, were they honest mistakes or should the United States have anticipated the insurgency’s resiliency?”:

I don’t think people could predict firmly what level of insurgency was going to be created. But some of this insurgency could have been avoided in the first place. People did not predict that when the United States went in, it wouldn’t secure the country, would leave large areas of the country open, wouldn’t secure the arms depots, would allow the government offices to be looted and the economy crippled during the early days after the liberation. Nobody predicted that we would not attempt to use the better elements of the Iraqi armed forces and police force and essentially try to recreate everything from scratch. But they could predict that the economic aid would be so ideological and so tailored to restructuring the entire Iraqi economy that most of the money would not flow to the Iraqis, and the services they got would be considerably worse today than they were under Saddam Hussein. So, in a way, this has been an interactive process. We’ve failed at many levels.

And here’s his response to the question, “The president is caught up in his own election campaign and he is under heavy attack from Senator Kerry for his handling of the war. What do you think of Kerry’s comments?”:

Well, I think the problem with Senator Kerry is that virtually everyone can see that we have very serious problems with the major insurgency, that we do not yet have an Iraqi government that Iraqis see as legitimate, and that our aid program, if it hasn’t exactly collapsed, is almost totally ineffective in meeting either its short-term or longer-term goals. These are very real problems. The difficulty is that Senator Kerry’s criticisms have not as yet been translated into one meaningful suggestion as to how to solve the problem. Instead, you have vague references to the international community, bringing people in from the outside, a whole host of measures which at best provide token or symbolic progress, but wouldn’t solve the problem. And I think there has been at least one mention of a “plan,” which is being kept secret if it exists. There is an old axiom in American politics: “You can’t beat something with nothing.”

Finally, here’s Cordesmann’s estimate of the chances of putting down the insurgency and establishing a democratic government in Iraq:

I think it is doable and not impossible. But I think we need to understand that the odds for success were 50-50 at best if we had adopted the right course of action after the fall of Saddam. Now the odds are probably one in four. We’ve wasted a year; we’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars. We’ve made serious military, political, and economic mistakes.

For more useful CFR information on Iraq, check out Sharon Otterman’s summary of the Sunni insurgency and U.S. plans to deal with it.