A Response to Niall Ferguson’s “Muddled” L.A. Times Op-Ed
In an op-ed in today’s LA Times, Harvard Professor of History and Senior Fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution Niall Ferguson criticizes Sen. Obama’s plan for gradual troop redeployment in the Iraqi War. But in order to make his argument, Ferguson misrepresents a report on the escalating Iraqi civil war and dramatically oversimplifies both that and other international conflicts.
Ferguson opens by claiming, in the classic counterintuitive fashion of columnists trying to be provocative, that “Obama’s stance on Iraq may yet prove to be his biggest vulnerability.” He concludes that Sen. Obama’s plan for de-escalation in Iraq is “a fraud” — an attack he supports with two assertions:
- That a Brookings study suggests that America’s withdrawal would precipitate the country’s descent into civil war, and
- That Sen. Obama’s position on Iraq is inconsistent with his stance on American intervention in international conflicts.
Both of these explanations are faulty.
To buttress his first explanation, Ferguson relies almost entirely on “a devastating 2006 paper for the Brookings Institution” by scholars Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack. This paper, Ferguson claims, states that “If the U.S. pulls out, as Obama recommends,” there would be “‘a humanitarian nightmare’ in which we should expect ‘hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die.’”
Except, the paper says no such thing. Titled “Things Fall Apart: What do we do if Iraq implodes?,” the paper actually argues that Iraq is probably already headed toward long-term civil strife regardless of America’s actions, and that the best we can do is prepare to manage the inevitable hostilities to come. Nowhere do the authors claim that keeping American forces in Iraq would prevent a “humanitarian nightmare,” nor even that withdrawing them gradually would precipitate such an awful consequence, as Ferguson suggests they do.
Instead, the authors note that “it would likely require 450,000 troops to quash an all-out civil war there,” a prospect they (and undoubtedly Ferguson) recognize to be a political impossibility. All that’s left, they explain, is to prepare for what’s next, working with Iraq’s neighbors to contain the violence and prevent an influx of foreign fighters and an exodus of refugees, which could further destabilize the region — ideas Sen. Obama’s plan embraces, calling as it does for “a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative…[to] prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and regional conflict.”
Byman and Pollack explain:
[W]e are heartened by signs that some American and Iraqi officials, particularly in the U.S. military, recognize the grave problems we face in Iraq and are exploring options to change course. However, given how many mistakes the United States has already made, how much time we have already squandered, how difficult the task is, and how bad things have already gotten, we cannot be confident that even a major course correction from Washington and Baghdad will avert a full-blown civil war in Iraq at this point.
With this in mind, the next question that the United States may have to face is what to do if in spite of (or because of) all our efforts, Iraq explodes into all-out civil war. … [I]f worse comes to worst, and the United States is confronted with an all-out civil war in Iraq, its principal challenge will be to contain any spillover so that it does not destabilize the other states of the region.
Second, Ferguson claims that Sen. Obama’s de-escalation plan for Iraq stands in contrast to previous positions he has taken on international conflicts, asserting that his “call for rapid withdrawal from Iraq would make some sense if he were an isolationist. But he’s not.” Ferguson cites Sen. Obama’s advocacy for U.S. and U.N. involvement in Rwanda and the Sudan as examples of his instinctive interventionism, suggesting Sen. Obama is hypocritical for not applying the same rationale to Iraq.
The comparison is absurd. Certainly Ferguson, a respected scholar, professor and political commentator, understands the difference between intervening in a genocide, as occurred in Rwanda and continues in Darfur, and refereeing a civil war, as we did in Vietnam and, as Byman and Pollack indicate, we are doing in Iraq. If Ferguson does understand this distinction, then his willingness to conflate the two in order to score cheap political points in a column is as reckless as it is disingenuous.
Ferguson uses his misrepresentations of the situation in Iraq and international conflicts generally to rail against what he calls Sen. Obama’s “muddled stance on foreign intervention.” But Sen. Obama’s stance on the Iraqi War is clearly defined — moreso than most other presidential contenders — and completely in keeping with his overarching global vision. The only thing that’s muddled here is Ferguson’s presentation of the facts.
February 19th, 2007 at 4:46 pm EST
Thank you posting this. I noticed it as well. You guys rock.
February 19th, 2007 at 4:47 pm EST
Ooops, I meant
Thank you (FOR) posting this.
;p
February 20th, 2007 at 12:02 pm EST
Great critique, JHCDawg. That Ferguson article was a real disappointment to read. Having looked at some of his scholarly (peer-reviewed) stuff, I have to assume the op-ed was purposefully misleading. If it wasn’t a conscious decision to score points with a confused audience at the expense of good conflict/policy analysis, then Niall’s recently suffered a head injury. It’s sad, because the discussion about Iraq hasn’t evolved in terms of complexity or honesty, the way it should. One of the reasons for this might be that part of the emerging academic consensus (scan CFR publications for current thinking on policy from within the US political establishment, or jump to the International Crisis Group for the real deal) is that fact that, regardless of whether or not US troops should be engaged in the Iraq conflict, as an invading force and thus party to the political debate we are unable to affect long-term positive change there. Telling America our troops are impotent, under any circumstances, is politically untenable, I would think. Anyway, the point I want to make is that Ferguson’s attempt to contrast Obama’s stance on some African conflicts with his Iraq position is pretty dumb, but the dichotomy is not between civil war and genocide. As the NIE implied, “civil war” doesn’t cover the hellacious, multifaceted failure of humanity that is Iraq. And looking at the number of internally displaced people and the increasing access to conflict resources in Iraq, I don’t know if we can really claim that this “war” will end up being any more horrible than those “genocides”. Besides, Obama is an interventionist. Look at his stance on the DRC. His beautiful, moral, proactive, appropriate stance on the DRC. A country slides up on the democracy and human security scales and we help to keep them from sliding back through valid intergovernmental organizations. The difference between the African situations Obama wants to engage in and Iraq is the potential to do good. We are not a party to the deteriorating security situation in northern DRC and so we can be an effective component of a NATO or UN mission there. In Africa our motives can be trusted (is that changing?). Contrast this with Iraq, where we are seen by governments and individuals as imperialist, self-interested and extremely dangerous. Once the conflict cycle gets spinning it is, at least in part, fuelled by fear. We’re the scariest thing in the Middle East. Now, contrast the conflicts themselves. It’s easy to see how much more costly in terms of human life and international instability it would be to capture each unit of peace in Iraq than in Darfur, Guinea, DRC…AFGHANISTAN!! There are so many aspects of our foreign policy that need to be elucidated. If I were a talented blogger like JHC I’d start by opening up a discussion on Islam and Western foreign policy. But I’m not, so I’ll leave off. After I say that I’m not sure if I’m going to vote for Obama because his intense sexuality is intimidating to me, but his foreign policy is unimpeachable.
February 20th, 2007 at 4:34 pm EST
What does an intense sexuality have to do with anything? Is it a cultural thing or something? All your comments were very intellectual and well thought out, then I read the sexual one. ??????????????????
Speaking towards charisma (and yes, Obama possesses it), a good leader needs charisma. People will follow someone who has it. If you combine charisma with intelligence and good policies, you have a good chance of success. I don’t see Obama’s charisma or sexual attractiveness as anything more than a positive thing, because his message is positive.
February 21st, 2007 at 10:14 am EST
This is a thought-provoking response to Ferguson’s column, which I agree is somewhat misleading. Simply put, I agree that Ferguson is misrepresenting Byman and Pollack’s report by falsely suggesting they believe a “humanitarian nightmare” will be averted if we keep the current number of troops in Iraq. They believe the current number of troops are likely not enough from preventing Iraq from falling into a full-blown civil war with terrible consequences.
But I also have a couple concerns that get at just how complicated the way forward in Iraq is for the U.S. First, I don’t think Ferguson is wrong to suggest Byman and Pollack believe withdrawing troops would precipitate this descent into chaos. This is the full quote from Byman and Pollack:
“The only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like maelstrom is 135,000 American troops, and even they are merely slowing the fall at this point. Unless the United States and the new government of Iraq take dramatic action to reverse the current trends, the internecine conflict there could easily worsen to the point where it spirals into a full-scale civil war that threatens not only Iraq, but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf, with instability, turmoil and war.”
The “dramatic action” Byman and Pollack favor involves a major increase in troops that is almost assuredly unfeasable, as Obamarama notes. But Byman and Pollack clearly believe that a full-blown civil war will occur more rapidly in Iraq if we pull out the troops we have there now; hence their claim that U.S. troops are “slowing the fall.” And the tactics Byman and Pollack argue will be necessary for dealing with a full-blown civil war — both in this report and a March 2006 article by Pollack titled “The Right Way: Seven Steps Toward a Last Chance in Iraq” — also involve the U.S. maintaining a significant military presence in Iraq, not pulling all our troops out by 2008, as Obama has advocated. They believe we should use the current troops levels to stablize the parts of Iraq that are deemed “areas of high importance and high support for reconstruction,” as Pollack explained in “The Right Way”:
“To secure the remaining 22 million people, then, would require about 440,000 security personnel. This number is the baseline figure for what will be required ultimately to stabilize Iraq. Unfortunately, we are far from that number. At present, the United States has 135,000 to 160,000 troops in Iraq at any given time. They are joined by roughly 10,000 British and Australian troops, along with a grab bag of other detachments that may withdraw in 2006 and so should not be considered for planning purposes. There are probably some 40,000 to 60,000 Iraqi security personnel in the army, national guard, police force, and other units that are capable of participating in security operations in a meaningful way. This yields a total of 185,000 to 230,000 Coalition security personnel, a force that should be capable of securing a population of 9 million to 11.5 million, or about half of Iraq’s population outside Kurdistan.
If the United States and the Iraqi government were to begin with only this baseline of troops and were to employ a traditional counterinsurgency strategy, withdrawing most of their forces from those areas of Iraq most opposed to reconstruction and instead concentrating the troops and resources on areas of high importance and high support for reconstruction, its starting oil stain could encompass Baghdad, all of central Iraq, and a significant portion of southern Iraq, with a smaller “economy of force” presence in northwest Iraq to prevent the situation there from deteriorating. Different strategists might draw the oil stain differently, but that is a very big area to start with and would allow the further pacification of the rest of Iraq within a number of years. ”
I am not saying that Byman and Pollack are right. But I am saying Ferguson is not totally off base in citing them to challenge Obama’s withdrawal policy.
Also, on the difference between civil war and genocide: It is true that there is not a genocide occuring in Iraq at present, but there is certainly a possibility one could occur if we remove all U.S. troops, who are handling most of the security situation over there. The fact is that 60 percent of the population are Shiites, and only 20 percent are Sunni. The Shiites rightfully feel they were horribly oppressed under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime, and if a situation develops where the Shiites have free reign to enact revenge, it is reasonable to suggest that it could devolve into a genocide against the Sunnis.