An Eyewitness to the Iraq Botch

When I went to Baghdad in early January as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, I believed that a democracy of sorts could gradually be constructed in Iraq, despite the formidable obstacles. Although I had opposed the war, I accepted the invitation because I believed that the United States could not allow postwar Iraq to sink into chaos and that the Iraqi people deserved an opportunity to live in freedom. This did not seem to me to be an unrealistic goal.

But I returned three months later sorely disappointed. Because of a long catalog of strategic and tactical blunders, the United States has failed to come anywhere near meeting the postwar expectations of Iraqis. It now seems clear that the occupation will leave a mixed, and on balance negative, record when the Americans hand over power June 30. Though we leave behind a framework for political transition, it is hobbled by two huge deficits: security and legitimacy.

Previous international efforts to build democracy after violent conflict counsel one clear, overriding lesson: "It's security, stupid." If a decimated country doesn't restore enough security to rebuild its infrastructure, revive commercial life, employ workers and enable civic organizations to mobilize, political parties to campaign and voters to register and vote, it can't craft a decent political order -- certainly not a democratic one.

The aftermath of tyranny and war is never going to be perfectly tranquil. But to build a democratic state, a country must first build a state, and the transcendent imperative for that is to establish a monopoly over the means of violence. In Iraq, this meant moving quickly to prevent a resurgence of violence on the part of the defeated Baathists, radical Islamists, external jihadists and others threatened by the new political order. But despite warnings from the Rand Corp. and others, the Pentagon plunged blithely ahead with only half the necessary force (less than 150,000 troops). Our inability to control the savage looting that swept Baghdad in April 2003 signaled the hollowness of the U.S. posture and emboldened the die-hard Baathists to regroup for the insurgency that has devastated postwar reconstruction.