The Importance of Losing
by Jonathan Schell

The basic mistake of American policy in Iraq is not that the Pentagon-believing the fairy tales told it by Iraqi exile groups and overriding State Department advice-forgot, when planning "regime change," to bring along a spare government to replace the one it was smashing; not that, once embarked on running the place, the Administration did not send enough troops to do the job; not that a civilian contingent to aid the soldiers was lacking; not that the Baghdad museum, the Jordanian Embassy, the United Nations and Imam Ali mosque, among other places, were left unguarded; not that no adequate police force, whether American or Iraqi, was provided to keep order generally; not that the United States, seeking to make good that lack, then began to recruit men from the most hated and brutal of Saddam's agencies, the Mukhabarat; not that, in an unaccountable and unparalleled lapse in America's once sure-fire technical know-how, Iraq's electrical, water and fuel systems remain dysfunctional; not that the Administration has erected a powerless shadow government composed in large measure of the same clueless exiles that misled the Administration in the first place; not that the Administration has decided to privatize substantial portions of the Iraqi economy before the will of the Iraqi people in this matter is known; not that the occupation forces have launched search-and-destroy operations that estrange and embitter a population that increasingly despises the United States; not that, throughout, a bullying diplomacy has driven away America's traditional allies. All these blunders and omissions are indeed mistakes of American policy, and grievous ones, but they are secondary mistakes. The main mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging the war at all.
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