By Noah Rothman
Monday, April 04, 2022
As Russian forces retreat from their failed drive to
capture Kyiv, Ukrainian officials and Western reporters are witnesses to horror
after horror.
Journalists are confronted with mass graves, the execution-style murder of civilians, and the booby-trapping of bodies left to rot in the streets.
Little is known about what’s happening behind Russian lines, but accounts of
the mass “evacuation” of Ukrainians to Russia is lent credibility by
videos featuring the “evacuees” heaping praise on Moscow and
insinuating that Ukraine is responsible for the bombing of its own hospitals
and civilian shelters. Combined with evidence that the Russian campaign has
taken to using banned
munitions and unguided ordnance to bomb, starve, and freeze whole
cities into submission, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Russia is
executing crimes against humanity.
Moscow’s strategic ineptitude along with mounting proof
that Russia is committing systematic atrocities inside Ukraine should by now
have led any self-respecting Western analyst to abandon the temptation to
compare this barbarity to their favorite frame of reference: the Iraq War. It
seems, however, that they just can’t help themselves.
As recently as March 29, former Foreign
Affairs editor Gideon Rose likened the strategic debacle Russia
engineered for itself to the campaign mounted by coalition forces in 2003.
“Defeat or stalemate on the battlefield is a necessary condition for Russian
withdrawal,” he wrote, “but as Americans have learned, it can take a
long time for a great power to go through the stages of grief and accept such
an outcome.”
Even today, the story goes, American elites still
stubbornly refuse to accept that they’ve been thoroughly beaten in Iraq. But
who could blame them? After all, U.S. forces remain on the ground in Iraq at
the invitation of a friendly government in control of the whole of its
sovereign territory. Vladimir Putin could only hope to fail in Ukraine with
such aplomb.
This exercise in throat clearing can only be understood
as a gesture of deference to the quasi-religious conviction that the Iraq War
was a strategic blunder for the West. That conviction is being shaken by events
in Ukraine, or we wouldn’t be forced to endure so many tortured efforts to
liken that campaign with Russia’s spectacular blunder.
Writing in the New York Times, the essayist Tanner Greer denounces the
Iraq War as a perfunctory aside in an otherwise rational analysis of Putin’s
miscalculations. The Bush administration alone “blundered its way into
catastrophe two decades ago” when it succumbed to emotion and motivated
reasoning in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Greer is right to warn against
allowing moral outrage to motivate policymakers. But today, the West’s
“catastrophe” in Iraq has produced a stable, nascent democracy in the heart of the Middle East
that no longer threatens Western security. That’s more than you could say for
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and a lasting victory in Ukraine is now wholly out of
Putin’s reach.
More than most, Oxford University professor Andrew Hammond exposed the blindness of devotees to
the Iraq War-as-disaster narrative. He says that from the sanctions imposed on
Hussein’s regime to the West’s occupation, the U.S. is particularly guilty of
“torture on a widespread scale.” He contends that the West’s abundant
commitment to Ukraine’s independence has been accompanied by an “equally
voluminous outpouring of supremacist talk that only reminds the rest of the
world of western hypocrisy.” By trying to contrast itself with Russia’s
conduct, “the West convinces itself that it’s good once more.”
To the extent that crimes were committed by American service personnel or
contractors in Iraq, we know about them because they were investigated by
independent media outlets and confirmed by prosecutors, and their perpetrators
were punished in accordance with the law. That’s more than can or will be said
of Russia’s conduct in Ukraine, but that worldview-shattering caveat is left to
be articulated only by those capable of holding two competing thoughts in their
heads simultaneously.
As the Spectator’s Andrew Bacevich demonstrated in a March 2 article, the
Iraq War analogy was deployed well before anyone could have rightly known the
salience of such comparisons. The columnist rightly notes that Russia’s actions
in Ukraine have exposed the falsity of the idea that the world is governed by
liberal “norms.” Those “norms” were a byproduct of America’s preponderant military
power alone. And yet, “the United States…has routinely demonstrated a
willingness to write its own norms while employing violence on a scale far
exceeding anything that Russia has done or is likely to do,” Bacevich
continued. “As for the calamitous results of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, the impact of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine rates as trivial by
comparison.”
Okay, but how could he have known so early in the war how
bad it would go for Russia? Perhaps by engaging
with Ukrainians, for one. Or maybe by consuming any of the declassified
pre-war intelligence forecasting planned war crimes and the mass mobilization of the Ukrainian people to resist Moscow’s designs. If your only living memory of a
popular insurgency is the one that materialized in Anbar Province, you could be
forgiven for dismissing as inconceivable the scale of the resistance Russia is
encountering from Ukrainian regular forces and citizens alike. It must be
satisfying to project that failure of imagination onto everyone else.
If Vladimir Putin was presiding over a debacle akin to
the West’s alleged misadventure in Iraq, his troops would today be entering
their second week in total control of Ukraine’s capital city. Three weeks from
now, he’d be declaring the end of combat operations in Ukraine. The occupation
would face a restive populace, particularly in areas populated by ethnic groups
that benefited most under the old regime, but the insurgents would be
outnumbered by a population that was either ambivalent toward or outright
supportive of the new status quo. And in 20 years’ time, despite many growing
pains and external attempts to destabilize the country, Putin could count on a
stable and secure government in Kyiv that no longer opposed Moscow’s interests.
If Putin is still betting on that outcome, the Russian autocrat
is as deluded about the Iraq War as so many of its detractors seem to be.
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