On May 1st, 2003 when then President George W. Bush, declared the end of major combat operations and the mission Iraqi Freedom to be "accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, much of the failure and dying in Iraq still lay ahead.

The invasion, starting on March 19, 2003, had been a remarkable military success, on schedule and with comparatively few casualties (139 US troops and approximately 7,500 civilians before May 1, 2003 according to CNN and Iraq Body Countestimates, respectively).

In the insurgency that followed (and has recently slightly abated), more than 4,000 US troops and 60,000 Iraqi civilians were killed (ibid.). To this date, seven years after "major hostilities" ended, the country is still plagued by sectarian violence and crime, marred by economic hardship and destruction and paralyzed by deeply divided politics and dysfunctional government. The vision and partial casus belli of the "Coalition of the Willing", to turn Iraq into a role model liberal democracy for the Middle East, has not materialized. Instead, the suffering and dying continues.

What happened?

I recently wrote about the failure in reconstruction and state-building in Iraq for our seminar in "Organizational Failure and Public Policy Disasters" with Professor Wolfgang Seibel at Hertie.

Some of the lessons, I think, apply also in Afghanistan and elsewhere, where the West finds itself in or stirs up civil wars.

It's Hobbes first, then Jefferson/Madison.

It is hard to grasp just how horrifyingly anarchic post-invasion Iraq was. Aggressive De-Ba'athification dismantled the remains of an already weak (if despotic) state, Army and police were sent home, and a badly mismanaged and grossly understaffed post-invasion effort failed to provide security or even the most basic of administrative services. To cite just one mind-boggling statistic: in the weeks following major combat operations, an estimated 250,000 tons (!) of weapons and ammunition were looted from abandoned Republican Guard depots (Brookings Institution's Daniel Byman).

Reconstruction and state-building, some analysts suggest, crucially failed as Coalition forces allowed and promoted a fundamental security vacuum.

You can't get to Jefferson and Madison without going through Thomas Hobbes first.
Larry J. Diamond

Rewind to Pre-Westphalia

Charles Tilly's history of government, insightfully titled "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" provides the theory for this calamity. He argues that modern states emerge as successful racketeers, who, in exchange for a tribute, protect against external as well as racketeer violence. When equipped with  new, powerful weaponry and exploiting increased economies of scale in their production of violence, these racketeers expand and compete, until, finally, they morph into that monopolist of legitimate use of force that we call a state.

This narrative may strike one as repellent, but it enables us to understand what happens, when the modern state, this father of all racketeers, breaks down: smaller, less sophisticated racketeers (a.k.a. insurgent groups) take over and struggle for dominance and growth.

This, analysts like the Brookings Institution's Kenneth M. Pollack show, is exactly what happened: the security vacuum attracts and creates new holders of power: first, local "security" entrepreneurs monopolize security, later moving on to providing basic welfare services, following the insurgent model successfully pioneered by Lebanon-based Hezbollah and the Gaza strip Hamas.

Shi'a cleric's Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army, for instance, started providing policing and later food, fuel, welfare relief and healthcare in Bagdad's "Sadr City" district already in April 2003, rapidly gaining power and support.

Rogers Brubaker's constructivist insight, that group identity is a project, also applies here: the Iraq Study Group report suggests that much of the ideological and organizational consolidation into insurgent factions occurred only relatively late in 2005.

If you're someone from one of the think tanks that dreamed up the Iraq war and predicted (...) that the whole bloody mess wouldn't turn into a civil war: you have to stop making predictions.
Late-night comedian Bill Maher on his show Real Time.

A squandered opportunity: maybe. But no more neocon optimism.

The "War on Terror" rhetoric, is then, to put it clearly, very misleading: this war created terror in an insurgency-gripped Iraq. The causality in fact, runs the other way: first, there is a collapse of the state, then a security vacuum and authority drains both to what is left of society (criminals or sectarian activists, a matter of degrees) or to other "master racketeers" across the border, in this case, Iran, which with its Iraqi Special Groups attempts to emulate Hezbollah's successful infiltration of Lebanon (House of Commons 2007).

I agree with the notion, that war in Iraq may have been a (squandered) opportunity, but one that should never have been sought, both for moral reasons, and based on a more instrumental weighting of the expected costs and benets.

In the future, we must prevent that this sort of "second-guessing" with the privilege of hindsight leads us to again overestimate our capability to violently force change and to seek a new, putatively inevitable war, where the better angels of our nature should prevail.

Even under cold-hearted, but thorough weighing of costs and benefits, future regime-change interventions should be considered more carefully. If the lessons of the fiasco in Iraq are borne in mind and applied in the future, chances are that distorted political persuasion (vulgo: lies) as that employed by the Bush Administration may no longer succeed.

(Download the entire essay here, including references.)