perfidy

Matthew Yglesias has an insightful post up about that Iraq dealie we're in right now. In the interest of poking Buckethead with a sharp pointy stick, I'm just going to throw most of it up here verbatim.

". . .you can't just let a political process determine a military goal (remove Saddam Hussein from power) and then let the military pursue that goal by whatever means they deem appropriate and then declare victory when the war is over. Rather, you need to make sure that the way in which the war was conducted actually achieves your specific political goals rather than simply the broad task of defeating the other guy. 

One of the problematic elements of Operation Iraqi Freedom is that it was never really clear what these specific goals were. Instead you had lots of different people accepting different reasons for invading. On the assumption that the war would be a cakewalk, there was no problem with this, since folks could stay united around the military objective regime change and then continue the fight over political goals in the postwar period. Now that that scenario doesn't seem to be playing out, however, it seems to me that the administration is in danger of falling into the trap of redefining its political goals in purely military terms. Hence, our objectives now seem to be (a) capturing Baghdad, (b) destroying Republican Guard regiments, and (c) killing Saddam Hussein. Those are reasonable (and achievable) military objectives, but it's not clear to me that they're going to accomplish any important political goals at all."

While I think it's a little early to worry to seriously about the implementation of political goals (since we may be months from a military conclusion), it is a very real concern for this reason: nobody seems to know for sure what the political goals will even be. I've seen at least four different plans for post-war Iraq, all purportedly from gub'mint sources. Since I for one haven't seen a compelling, detailed, plan for reconstruction, my feeling is that that Matthew Y is right. Are we setting up a protectorate? A shadow government? A constitutional monarchy? An anarcho-syndiclast commune? Who gets the oil? Who develops Iraq's infrastructure? Who gets first crack at capital investment? What about trade arrangements for that same oil? What day is this? Is it dinnertime yet? Where are my pants? 

n.b. Historically, this war still definitely counts as a cakewalk. However, there are lesser and greater degrees of cakewalkitude, and my sense is that the needle is rolling over to the lesser side of the dial now. Just saying.

also n.b. Unlike my compatriots, I am not much of a political scientist. So, in choosing to separate military and political ends in my argument, I may have made a big mistake from a poli-sci standpoint. I realize that if we are at war to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, then that matters now. But, we are also at war to create a new government in Iraq, and that doesn't so much matter until the shooting dies down. That seems to me to be the true political goal, hence my disconnecting the two. If I have in fact made a big mistake, well... nyah.