Rumsfeld’s Position on Democracy in Iraq was an Unknown Known.

Hat tip Daily Kos for this:

Rumsfeld Now Says George W. Bush was Wrong About Iraq

Oh, is that what Rumsfeld is saying? Going to their MSNBC source:

President George W. Bush was wrong to try to build democracy in Iraq, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a recent interview, marking a striking admission from a key player behind the 2003 U.S. invasion.

In an interview with British newspaper The Times, Rumsfeld said that efforts to oust Saddam Hussein and replace his tyrannical regime with democracy were unworkable, and that he had concerns about the plan from the beginning.

“I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories,” Rumsfeld told The Times. “The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words.”

The KosKiddies are in an angry giddy frenzy over this, thinking Rumsfeld has changed his tune and mad that it’s too little too late and not a full-blown apology/admittance of being a war criminal.

A writer on the Maddow Blog:

He’s only now getting around to saying – out loud – that he’s always been “concerned” by Bush’s stated rationale for the catastrophic conflict?

Ok, from what I seem to remember through reading Douglas Feith’s book and Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, he was always a skeptic on the democracy issue. That doesn’t mean he’s changed his tune regarding the original decision to invade. What he didn’t believe in was becoming occupiers (not the original plan).

This headline blurb- “Rumsfeld admits Bush was wrong on Iraq”- is another case of media malfeasance, hearing what Bush war critics wish to hear and distorting what is actually being said. It’s similar to how media headlines proclaimed “Bush says Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11”, as if he had a change of tune- which wasn’t the case at all. What it was a case of is the media blowing down its own strawman creation.

Today, the media once again goes to press with the story it wishes to have, not the story it actually has.

A brief search through Rumsfeld’s 2011 Known and Unknown reveals this on page 498-500, commenting on the “Mission Accomplished” speech:

I had another issue with the President’s remarks. “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort,” Bush had said. “Our coalition will stay until our work is done.” That was not the way I understood our plan. A nation that had suffered under decades of dictatorial rule was unlikely to quickly reorganize itself into a stable, modern, democratic state. Deep sectarian and ethnic divisions, concealed by a culture of repression and forced submission to Saddam, lurked just below the surface of Iraqi society.

I hoped Iraq would turn toward some form of representative government, but I thought we needed to be clear-eyed about democracy’s prospects in the country.

~~~I was concerned that the President’s remarks suggested that the United States might remain until Iraq had achieved democratic self-sufficiency which might take decades. I doubted whether the American people would have the patience for a protracted, multiyear occupation as Iraqis fumbled their way along the road toward something approximating a free, nondictatorial government. And I assumed the Iraqi people would be even less willing to put up with a long American occupation, which could become a rallying point for rebellion.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “[T]he central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” A millennia-old culture dating to the very beginnings of civilization would have to work its way toward adopting practices we considered democratic gradually. The art of compromise, which is central to a successful democracy, is not something that people learn overnight. If we hurried to create Iraqi democracy through quick elections, before key institutions- a free press, private property rights, political parties, an independent judiciary- began to develop organically, we “could end up with a permanent mistake- one vote, one time- and another Iran-like theocracy,” as I wrote in a May 2003 memo.

I conveyed these thoughts to the President and to Rice, suggesting the administration soften the democracy rhetoric. I proposed we talk more about freedom and less about democracy, lest the Iraqis and other countries in the region think we intended to impose our own political system on them, rather than their developing one better suited to their history and culture.

~~~

Bringing democracy to Iraq had not been among the primary rationales.

It was hard to know exactly where the President’s far-reaching language about democracy originated. It was not a large part of his original calculus in toppling Saddam’s regime, at least from what I gleaned in private conversations and NSC meetings. I didn’t hear rhetoric about democracy from Colin Powell or State Department officials. I know it did not come from those of us in the Department of Defense. Condoleezza Rice seemed to be the one top adviser who spoke that way, but it was not clear to me whether she was encouraging the President to use rhetoric about democracy or whether it was originating with the President.

Bush often expressed his belief that freedom was the gift of the Almighty. He seemed to feel almost duty-bound to help expand the frontiers of freedom in the Middle East. I certainly sympathized with his desire to see free systems of government spread around the globe. I had met and greatly admired Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, whose ideas on democracy had deeply influenced Bush. As much as I agreed with both Sharansky and Bush that we would all be better off if the world had more democracies, I thought we needed to be careful about how we pursued it. I believed in expanding the frontiers of freedom where possible, but that goal had to be tempered by our limited ability to achieve it.

Pg 368 in Douglas Feith’s War and Decision:

There was no controversy among the Deputies and Principals that the U.S. aim was to liberate, not occupy, Iraq. Papers from all the agencies- State, Defense, CIA, and NSC staff- endorsed the principle of liberation, warning that, if Americans were seen as occupiers, we would be inviting guerilla warfare, terrorism, and political instability. “Liberation, not occupation” was the President’s own guiding principle, and Rice referred to the concept in all her Iraq policy papers for the top-level interagency meetings.

My Pentagon colleagues and I made the liberation concept central to our Iraq efforts. We judged policy proposals according to whether they would help the United States communicate that it had no intentions to dominate Iraq, much less steal its oil. We never tired of remarking that Iraq belonged to the Iraqis and not to us. As much as possible, we wanted to be seen as helping Iraqis rid themselves of the Saddam Hussein regime.

On War and Decision’s old website:

Misconception 3

Was the goal of regime change in Iraq simply a cover for pursuing political reform in the Middle East?

• IN FACT: The Pentagon “neocons” continually urged the President to tone down his democracy rhetoric.

I did not think that a U.S. president could properly decide to go to war just to spread democracy, in the absence of a threat requiring self-defense. . . . I had the opportunity to clarify [publicly] this democracy point . . . in an interview I gave to Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker. . . . “Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region? The answer is no.” (pp. 235, 304)

In my view, the reason to go to war with Iraq was self-defense. If that necessity drove us to war, the fighting might open the way for a new democracy to arise (as it did with Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II). . . . But it’s one thing to try to ensure that your defeated enemy becomes a democracy after the war comes to an end, and quite another to initiate a war for that purpose. (p. 234)

Discussing a draft of a Presidential speech in May 2004:
[Material in quotation marks comes from the memo cited below.]

Some of the speech’s rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: “The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there,” I noted. But that implication “is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve ‘democracy,’ an undefined but high standard. . . . [I]t would be better to talk of ‘building democratic institutions,’ or ‘putting the Iraqis on the path to democracy,’ rather than ‘constructing a stable democracy,’ a goal that will not be achievable for many years.” (p. 492)

Citation: Douglas J. Feith, Memo to Rumsfeld, “Comments on Draft #8 of President’s Speech on Iraq,” May 23, 2004. [Not available for publication]

As a side note, here’s Rumsfeld’s snowflake on the many things that could go wrong in Iraq:

The “Parade of Horribles” memo:

* The United States might fail to win support from the United Nations and from important other countries, which could make it harder to get international cooperation on Iraq and other issues in the future. We might fail here by not properly answering the question: If the United States preempts in one country, will it do so in other countries, too?

* The war could trigger problems throughout the region: It could widen into an Arab-Israeli war; Syria and Iran could help our enemies in Iraq; Turkey could intervene on its own; friendly governments in the region could become destabilized.

* The United States could become so absorbed in its Iraq effort that we pay inadequate attention to other serious problems—including other proliferation and terrorism problems. Other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere might try to exploit our preoccupation to do things harmful to us and our friends.

* The war could cause more harm and entail greater costs than expected, including possibly a disruption in oil supplies to world markets.

* Post-Saddam stabilization and reconstruction efforts by the United States could take not two to four years, but eight to ten years, absorbing U.S. leadership, military, and financial resources.

* Terrorist networks could improve their recruiting and fund-raising as a result of our being depicted as anti-Muslim.

* Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia. . . .

In addition, the memo included these three notable items:

* “US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.”

* “World reaction against preemption or ‘anticipatory self-defense’ could inhibit US ability to engage [in cooperation with other countries] in the future.”

* “US could fail to manage post-Saddam Hussein Iraq successfully, with the result that it could fracture into two or three pieces, to the detriment of the Middle East . . . .”

This was a serious and disturbing memo. The concerns it listed included military, diplomatic, and economic matters. The list was more wide-ranging and hard-hitting than any warning I saw from State or the CIA—even though their leaders are widely viewed as the Administration’s voices of caution on the war. (pp. 332-3)

And on another side note, here is a very interesting interview with Emma Sky on Iraq after the Surge:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM-L5loEpQ[/youtube]

In my mind, the biggest mistake made by the Obama administration was actually in 2010, not upholding the election results. It’s a very, very close election. Very close election. To everybody’s surprise, it was actually won by the party called Iraqia [ph] headed by Ayad Allawi, and this party was campaigning on a nonsectarian — no to sectarian platform. People want to get rid of religious parties, people want to put sectarians behind to build an Iraq for all Iraqis. This party won two more votes than Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki couldn’t believe the results. All his advisors have told him that, “You’re going to win. You’re going to win big.” When the results came in, he was just in shock. He blamed the international community for tampering with the results, he demanded a recount, he started to use debuffication to try and disqualify the Iraqian [ph] leaders, and this went on and on and on for months, and there was a big dispute within the US system which I described in the book, between those who wanted to uphold the election results and give the winning block, Iraqia, the right to have first go at trying to form the government, and those who said look, “Maliki, he’s our guy. I belong to that former group that thought give the winning block the right to have first go in trying to form the government. I didn’t think Ayad Allawi was going to be able to do it himself as Prime Minister, but I thought that negotiation was really important.

Gideon Rose: We give it to Maliki, walked away, and he then destroyed Iraq?

Emma Sky: Well, this is kind of what happens. This is when the Iranian steps in. The Iranians — they’re influence had really gone down during the surge. America was seen as the big player. The Iranians saw this opportunity and they tried to get all the Shia together to support Maliki, but the Shia were coming together, but they would not going to have Maliki as prime minister. In the end, the Iranians went to Lebanese Hezbollah and got Lebanese Hezbollah to pressure the Sadrist to support Maliki. Maliki had really gone off to the Sadrists during the surge, and the Sadrists were like, “Over our dead body,” but with Iranian pressure …

Gideon Rose: Quite literally often.

Emma Sky: Quite literally — with Iranian pressure, with Lebanese Hezbollah helping out, they pressure the Sadrists and they said, “Look, support Maliki as prime minister, we will ensure no US troops will remain in Iraq after 2011.” That is what happened. The Iranians brokered the deal, and the price was always going to be no US troops. Maliki, second term, determined to go after all his rivals. First of all, he goes off to the Iraqia leaders, accuses them of terrorism. Then he started to round up masses of Sunni’s, put them in jail. All of these people being held not knowing why they were being held. Sunni starts to feel more alienated, more grievances, which ends up in this mass protests across Iraq, demanding an end to this discrimination. Unfortunately again, Maliki doesn’t respond to those through negotiations. He sends in the security forces and a few of the demonstrators are killed. 50 killed in Hawijah, and it just boils and boils and boils.

Gideon Rose: We’re not there to keep things in order, we’re not pushing Maliki to be nicer, and at that point, then ISIS emerges and takes over the — eventually, the Sunni areas who go with them because they’re disgusted with the Maliki government.

Emma Sky: Exactly.