Unanswered Questions in Iraq

March 13, 2008

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It’s the $3 trillion question. Five years after the United States started the war in Iraq, after pivotal early decisions by the Bush administration caused the descent into chaos and violence, what can be made of current efforts to make up for our past mistakes in Iraq, to bring lasting change to the country?

“There’s a wide spectrum of opinion” on the issue, said Charles Ferguson, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "No End in Sight" and author of a new book by the same name. He’s conducted thousands of hours of interviews with administration officials, policy analysts, American soldiers, and Iraqi civilians in the course of the last several years. Thursday at a Center for American Progress event, Ferguson said that he’s heard the gamut of responses on the current state of Iraq: everything from it’s very good to the current arrangement needs time to stabilize, to the current alliances with factions are risky.

The conversation about Iraq and "No End in Sight" with Ferguson and CAP Senior Fellow Brian Katulis kicked off a series of events and reports from the Center to mark the fifth anniversary of the War in Iraq.

Iraqis, said Ferguson, have “gradually, painfully come to realize that we just f***ed up. Now, they won’t trust the U.S. because they think we’re incompetent. They’re sad and hopeless about the future with us there. There is still a widespread view in Iraq…that much of what America does it does deliberately.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact there wasn’t much of a plan from Washington.

Ferguson’s book supplements his film’s chronicle of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Both document a litany of policy errors the United States committed early in the war that led to insurgency and chaos—the Bush administration’s gross underestimate of the number of troops needed to secure the country, the military’s failure to stop the looting after the fall of Baghdad, and L. Paul Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi military.

In the film, audiences saw only 1 percent of all footage Ferguson collected in his research and interviews both in Iraq and in the United States. The book expands the film’s voices, putting the material in the public sphere in a way that, he says, “makes [the information] irrefutable and thorough.”

Fast-forward from the fatal errors of 2003 to 2008. Five years later, despite the best efforts of our men and women in uniform, Iraq remains awash in sectarian violence. Insurgency and militias continue to be part of the landscape. Two million Iraqis are now refugees and another 2 million are displaced internally, perhaps the “greatest scandal yet to come,” said Ferguson.

Yet Ferguson has heard, in his interviews with those involved, signs of a “cautious, halting optimism that maybe violence is sustainably reduced.”

No one knows what would happen if the United States were to leave Iraq. Some say we could see a “bloodbath on the scale of Rwanda, while others think it will be ok,” Ferguson recounted from his interviews. The worst violence could be Shiite militias fighting each other for control of the South, and it’s also possible that so much ethnic violence has occurred already that levels would decrease when U.S. troops leave.

Realistically withdrawal is a long way off. The next president, said Ferguson, would be “sobered, scared, and tentative about doing anything” to that effect, and even if they stepped into office willing to withdraw, it would still take 18 months to two years to fully remove the American military from the country.

Regardless, there must be room in the middle of the polarized political debate for a complex, in-depth discussion about how to manage Iraq policy going forward, said Katulis. “The American public is still deeply conflicted,” he added. “There is a growing consensus for change” that the next administration will have to address.

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