The Myths of Iraq

Peter W. Galbraith served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia and with the United Nations in East Timor. As a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1980s, he uncovered and documented Iraq's "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds. Currently, he is the senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a partner in a firm specializing in international law and negotiation.

How to Get Out of Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith

1.
In the year since the United States Marines pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, things have gone very badly for the United States in Iraq and for its ambition of creating a model democracy that might transform the Middle East. As of today the United States military appears committed to an open-ended stay in a country where, with the exception of the Kurdish north, patience with the foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy.

Much of what went wrong was avoidable. Focused on winning the political battle to start a war, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the postwar chaos in Iraq. Administration strategy seems to have been based on a hope that Iraq's bureaucrats and police would simply transfer their loyalty to the new authorities, and the country's administration would continue to function. All experience in Iraq suggested that the collapse of civil authority was the most likely outcome, but there was no credible planning for this contingency. In fact, the US effort to remake Iraq never recovered from its confused start when it failed to prevent the looting of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation.