Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy By Michael J. Mazarr.
Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy By Michael J. Mazarr.
Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy By Michael J. Mazarr.
Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy By Michael J. Mazarr.

Review: Michael Mazarr's careful, intelligent new book is the latest attempt to make sense out of the Iraq War


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Leap of Faith

Michael J Mazarr

Public Affairs

Dh67
 

The decision of US president George W Bush and his administration to invade Iraq on March 19, 2003 and conduct a "shock and awe" campaign of blitzkrieg and nation-building has been intensely debated ever since it was made. The motives and delusions of Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, and their neoconservative colleagues have been parsed and anatomised in more than a decade's worth of intensely concerned non-fiction works, including a trio of books by Bob Woodward, and 2006's Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

That "hubris" is echoed in the title of Michael J Mazarr's new book Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Foreign Policy Tragedy, the latest attempt to make some sense out of the Iraq War. Mazarr is a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, and he is ­therefore the latest think-tank expert to ask: How could this have happened? How could the smart, experienced men and women of the Bush administration have made so protracted a series of obvious blunders?

The deeper issues

Mazarr makes clear early in his book that "stubborn and erroneous mythologies" have clung to the subject right from the beginning; "that the war was produced by a conspiracy of neoconservatives", for instance, or "that it was waged for oil or Israel or Halliburton, [or] that George Bush was a puppet in the hands of Dick Cheney". Mazarr sees these as distractions from the deeper problems that prompted the whole fiasco (Fiasco being the title of yet another Iraq War book, by Thomas Ricks in 2006).

US intelligence officials, observing the secretary of state power through his assertions, were aghast that the speech included claims known to be false and references to human sources that had long been discredited.

Even after 16 years, the signal events of that fiasco still retain the power to outrage. Many of Mazarr's readers will remember with acidic clarity vice president Cheney's claim that American troops would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi civilians whose homes they were bulldozing. They'll likewise remember secretary of state Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, in which he laid out the administration's justifications for going to war.

“When the speech was delivered, chock-full of bad intelligence and hyperboles, many informed observers, watching in Washington and around the world, were horrified,” Mazarr writes. “US intelligence officials, observing the secretary of state power through his assertions, were aghast that the speech included claims known to be false and references to human sources that had long been discredited.”

Mazarr describes the US efforts to deprive Saddam Hussein of his alleged weapons of mass destruction as "rushed, confused and ad hoc"; he generally characterises the administration's entire approach to the war as "unaccountably ham-handed and shoddy." He points out that it should have come as no surprise to the Bush administration that "the initial welcome in Iraq was destined to congeal into something far more ferocious and grim". ("Do I welcome the Americans?" he quotes an Iraqi man as saying. "No. I am a soldier. If someone attacked America, what would you do?").

A leap of faith

What Mazarr refers to as a "fundamental dilemma" lurked in the very DNA of the whole enterprise: why was America leading a coalition to invade Iraq? To oust Saddam Hussein from power and install an Iraqi government in his place, or to commence an open-ended military occupation of the country? If you break the country, you produce chaos; if you rule it, you strengthen the very forces of resistance you meant to quash.

In other words, the perfect recipe for a protracted quagmire that was both unwinnable and immensely easy to predict. Indeed, many voices back in 2003 did predict it, and if Mazarr's careful, intelligent book has one besetting flaw, it's a tendency to downplay the obvious implications of that predictability.

As Mazarr points out, president Bush had some extremely able and experienced advisers. Mazarr knows he cannot call them stupid, but he'd clearly rather say they were blinded by a "messianic" impulsive sense of righteousness than that they were malevolent opportunists. The result may be a balanced account, but that very quality will infuriate many of the people who were infuriated back in 2003. Those readers will say Bush and company don't deserve balance.

It’s fairly organic for Mazarr to move from asking, “How could this have happened?” to asking, essentially, could this happen again? If the Bush administration could bungle its way into a disastrous decade-long war despite every possible indication against, couldn’t some new administration, fuelled by a comparable combination of zealotry and incompetence, do the same thing in, say, Venezuela or Cuba?

Mazarr says our safeguard will be a careful, prudent government administration and a thoughtful, informed populace. Leap of faith indeed.

Herc's Adventures

Developer: Big Ape Productions
Publisher: LucasArts
Console: PlayStation 1 & 5, Sega Saturn
Rating: 4/5

Your rights as an employee

The government has taken an increasingly tough line against companies that fail to pay employees on time. Three years ago, the Cabinet passed a decree allowing the government to halt the granting of work permits to companies with wage backlogs.

The new measures passed by the Cabinet in 2016 were an update to the Wage Protection System, which is in place to track whether a company pays its employees on time or not.

If wages are 10 days late, the new measures kick in and the company is alerted it is in breach of labour rules. If wages remain unpaid for a total of 16 days, the authorities can cancel work permits, effectively shutting off operations. Fines of up to Dh5,000 per unpaid employee follow after 60 days.

Despite those measures, late payments remain an issue, particularly in the construction sector. Smaller contractors, such as electrical, plumbing and fit-out businesses, often blame the bigger companies that hire them for wages being late.

The authorities have urged employees to report their companies at the labour ministry or Tawafuq service centres — there are 15 in Abu Dhabi.

Ms Yang's top tips for parents new to the UAE
  1. Join parent networks
  2. Look beyond school fees
  3. Keep an open mind
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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The Indoor Cricket World Cup

When: September 16-23

Where: Insportz, Dubai

Indoor cricket World Cup:
Insportz, Dubai, September 16-23

UAE fixtures:
Men

Saturday, September 16 – 1.45pm, v New Zealand
Sunday, September 17 – 10.30am, v Australia; 3.45pm, v South Africa
Monday, September 18 – 2pm, v England; 7.15pm, v India
Tuesday, September 19 – 12.15pm, v Singapore; 5.30pm, v Sri Lanka
Thursday, September 21 – 2pm v Malaysia
Friday, September 22 – 3.30pm, semi-final
Saturday, September 23 – 3pm, grand final

Women
Saturday, September 16 – 5.15pm, v Australia
Sunday, September 17 – 2pm, v South Africa; 7.15pm, v New Zealand
Monday, September 18 – 5.30pm, v England
Tuesday, September 19 – 10.30am, v New Zealand; 3.45pm, v South Africa
Thursday, September 21 – 12.15pm, v Australia
Friday, September 22 – 1.30pm, semi-final
Saturday, September 23 – 1pm, grand final

Leap of Faith

Michael J Mazarr

Public Affairs

Dh67