According to Crocker, “We’re a superpower, we don’t fight on our territory, but that means you are in somebody else’s stadium, playing by somebody else’s ground rules, and you have to understand the environment, the history, the politics of the country you wish to intervene in.”
So does that mean that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the attempt in Afghanistan not only to punish the Taliban government for sheltering Al-Qaeda but to convert that country into a secular, bourgeois parliamentary democracy were disastrously wrong ideas that wasted thousands and thousands of lives and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars?
Well, Crocker isn’t going to say that. He sounds weary, and skeptical, but he’s a man who implements policy rather than making it. Laboring manfully with Gen. Petraeus, he turned the Bush Administration’s spectacularly ill-advised and ill-executed invasion of Iraq from an unmanageable disaster to a manageable one. In Afghanistan, he’s served a similar function for the Obama Administration, though in this case he protected his political masters not from the wrath of the people but rather the Pentagon and the CIA, who must always have something to do.*
I don’t mean to make fun of Crocker, He’s served his country well, far more than most of us have. I’m sure he has many protégés in the State Department, who worked incredible hours under appalling conditions, in the constant presence of very real physical danger. For him to “go rogue”—to tell the truth about how useless and counterproductive these wars have been—would be the ultimate in unprofessionalism, a selfish betrayal of those who served him selflessly. And would America listen? A speech, an article, a book, however wise, would surely be trampled in a second by the masters of the sound-bite.
And so Crocker counsels caution. The Times tells us of a paper he co-authored prior to the invasion of Iraq, “The Perfect Storm,” predicting the sectarian civil war that in fact emerged after our invasion. But are we, or even the Times, allowed to read that? Apparently not.
Afterwords
In addition to the article about Crocker, by Alissa J. Rubin, the Times includes an actual Q&A with Crocker, but every question is about Afghan “minutiae”—the value of particular policies, etc., to which Crocker replies intelligently, though his answers, unsurprisingly, tend to fade off into the “it’s very complex” thicket, which it surely is. But the Times certainly could have asked better questions, and Crocker could have taken the opportunity, if he wished, to provide better answers—“the real problem is, we simply bit off more than we could chew. We should have gotten out of there back on ’03.” Sadly, that’s not the kind of answer Crocker’s willing to give.