No, It's Worse Than That
Yglesias points to this Daniel Byman/Kenneth Pollack idea as evidence that the DC Foreign Policy Community hadn't done much thinking about postwar Iraq. Byman and Pollack
envisioned "as many as 200,000 troops" that "should be replaced by a multinational force of 50,000 to 100,000 troops, including American and foreign forces" within one or two years.
However, if you look to the longer Washington Quarterly article (.pdf) from which the DLC piece was extracted, it gets worse. A lot worse:
By leading a multinational force of initially at least 100,000 troops with a strong mandate to act throughout Iraq, the United States and its coalition partners will have an excellent prospect of ensuring the degree of security necessary for a successful transition to democracy. In essence, the goal for the U.S.-led peacekeeping force would be to ensure that no group or individual uses violence for political advantage. International security forces will reassure Iraq’s Shi‘a and Kurdish communities that repression at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis is at an end. Equally important, the presence of these foreign troops would reassure Iraqi Sunnis that the end of their monopoly on power does not mean their persecution and repression, minimizing their incentives to oppose the process. The presence of multinational troops could prevent small incidents from snowballing and thus could help create the expectation of peace within Iraq—an instrumental factor in making peace a reality.
Such a U.S.-led security force would likely affect all aspects of political transition profoundly and discourage, if not eliminate, most efforts to subvert the process by, most obviously, preventing the cancellation or disruption of elections and other elements of democratic institution-building. Preventing hate speech, warmongering, and chauvinism will be more challenging, but tremendous room for influence still exists. By ensuring domestic security and deterring foreign aggression, leaders will find playing on people’s fears to gain power far more difficult.
Still, try challenging this sort of thinking and getting an op-ed placed in the New York Times or Washington Post. I say my predictions database idea looks better and better all the time. And not as a "gotcha" vehicle, but rather to seriously put our reputations on the line, which hopefully could get us to more actually serious thinking about the implications of our policy choices.
Interestingly, Michael O'Hanlon, in his interview with Glenn Greenwald, appears to agree:
what I would say is over a several year time horizon is that I think I've had a good track record, but certainly not a perfect one, and I think that to the extent that people would be asked to believe me just based on my own credibility, I don't think I've been so infallible that that should be expected of people. In fact, as an academic who always likes to go back to the evidence myself, I don't tend to think that anybody in any walk of life should get a free pass just based on their personal reputation. So, that's one more way of saying that I think it's only fair that there be scrutiny of people's record.
As I wrote in TNI:
Predicting the future is hard, and if nothing else, pundits are experts at explaining why their failed predictions are somebody else’s fault. It may be the case that even the best experts rarely make accurate predictions of important events. But the only way to better our predictions in the future is to learn not just who gets things right, but why. Putting our reputations where our mouths are would teach us a great deal.
So: How can we operationalize this?
