unintended-consequences-peter-w-galbraith1.thumbnail.jpgIn his 2006 book, The End of Iraq, Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith drew upon his years of experience in the Middle East to analyze the multiple failures in judgment and decision-making that resulted in the fracturing of Iraq between Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites. Galbraith has now written another important and timely book about Iraq, entitled Unintended Consequences: How the War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies.

In the book's introduction, Galbraith lists some of those consequences:

- A war intended to fight terror has helped the terrorists.
- A war intended to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq now has U.S. troops fighting for pro-Iranian Shiite theocrats alongside unreformed Baathists.
- A war intended to undermine Iran's ayatollahs has resulted in a historic victory for Iran. Iranian-backed political parties control Iraq's government and armed forces, giving Iran a role in Iraq that it has not had in four centuries.
- A war intended to promote democracy in the Middle East has set it back.
- A war intended to showcase American power has highlighted the deficiencies of U.S. intelligence, the incompetence of American administration, and the limitations on the American military.
- A war intended to boost American global leadership has driven U.S. prestige to an all-time low.
- A war intended to make America more secure has left the country weaker.

Galbraith's argument is simple and devastating: The Iraq war is lost, and George W. Bush lost it. Certainly, Bush had help — the inexperienced and incurious President was surrounded by a gallery of ideologues and ultra-nationalists whose only successes have been the discrediting of their ideology and the weakening of their nation — but history will record the Iraq war as President Bush's failure. At times, this failure was the result of bad decisions, such as the decision — made mere months after the September 11 attacks — to invade Iraq.

Just as often, however, it was the result of neglecting to make decisions at all, delegating the task to underlings who were often in battle with each other. This was the case with the moves to dissolve the Iraqi Army, to fire Baathist bureaucrats, and to have a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq. "These three decisions" Galbraith writes, "were the most momentous of Bush's presidency, and the President never made them." Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, and L. Paul Bremer have all pointed fingers at each other for these decisions, a fact which itself speaks volumes about the administration's incompetent management.

One of the most important interventions that Galbraith makes into the Iraq debate is his thorough dismantling of the argument that "the surge has worked." Though violence in Iraq has dropped in the last year, the reasons for this are complex, and not easily attributable to the influx of 30,000 American troops. The result, in any case, is that the United States has empowered Sunni militias made up of ex-Baathist and former insurgents hostile to the central government, while helping to consolidate control of Baghdad and southern Iraq in the hands of Shiite parties closely tied to Iran, who Galbraith maintains has been the ultimate victor of the Iraq war. The surge has frozen in place a situation in which Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds each believe themselves entitled to concessions and compromises that will likely not be forthcoming. As indicated by the continuing tension between the Kurds and the central Iraqi government in Kirkuk and Mosul, Iraq's political factions could very soon begin again to practice politics by other means.

A particularly good chapter deals with the effects of the Iraq war on the U.S. relationship with Turkey. Galbraith offers an informative survey of the current Turkish political environment, where the ruling moderate Islamist AK Party wants to move the country toward full-fledged democracy. But, Galbraith writes, "the Bush administration's careless handling of relations with Turkey has turned an ally into a country whose people are among the most anti-American in the world." Galbraith suggests that the AK's political rivals might take advantage of that anti-Americanism, and warns that "Turkey's internal power struggle could play out in an unwelcome way in Iraq and the Middle East while undermining the Islamic Middle East's one stable democracy."

The book closes with a simple dictum: "U.S. national security policy should be effective," and George W. Bush's policies have been ineffective because "he has substituted rhetoric and wishful thinking for strategy." Galbraith calls for a reevaluation of U.S. national security policy, recognizing that idealism and pragmatism need not be treated as incompatible. Galbraith also advises against the United States abdicating its global leadership role. While the damage to America's reputation from the Iraq war "will not easily be repaired" Galbraith writes, "the greater damage will be if Bush's presidency is followed by a period of introspection and retrenchment in which manageable challenges go unaddressed." George W. Bush "has given idealism a bad name," Galbraith recognizes, "and this may be the greatest unintended consequence of all."

Ambassador Galbraith will be with us this evening to discuss this important book on America's war in Iraq.