Part of my time away from blogging was a real effort to mull over what I know and feel about Iraq, and to try and think though my own views – given the facts on the ground – about my own support for the war and my opinions on where it’s brought us. this isn’t meant as a tour d’horizon on what’s going on there today – it’s a reflection by someone who supported the war and is looking back and wondering about his own views.Before the war started, I said that
If we are going to invade Iraq, we need to make two public and firm commitments:
1) We aren’t in it for the oil. Not in the short run, anyway. A prosperous, stable Middle East would doubtless want to sell and exploit their natural resources. We’d want to buy them. Sounds like a deal could be made.
2)We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to “declare victory and go home” when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we’re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we’re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.
The fecklessness – that Hamlet-like internal debate which clearly signaled our lack of commitment and strengthened the commitment of those we opposed – was our biggest mistake (and knowing we’d be feckless, it’s a damn legitimate question to ask whether we should have gone). yeah, I know this is the Glenn Greenwald/Yglesias ‘Green Lantern’ theory, and when either of them rouses themselves from their Upper West Side torpor and does anything in the world, I’ll be happy to discuss the issue with them. People who – you know – do stuff know that commitment matters.
The right-side is happy to stamp their feet, whistle, and point at the left side of the aisle on this, but you know what? It’s Bush’s fault, pure and simple.
Here’s what I said in 2003:
Most wars have to be sold. Seldom is the perceived need for war strong enough overcome people’s reluctance to fight until the enemy is at the gates…at which point it is often too late. Much of Thucydides is about the efforts of various Greek leaders to rally the reluctant city-states to support the Persian war.
This is damn hard to do in the modern era, because the ways wars are seen…unfiltered, raw, live on television, tends to focus our attention intently on the costs of war. Blood, carnage, pain, suffering, grief. That’s good television. Good visual journalism shows the policeman executing the bound civilian-clad captive with a bullet to the head; it can’t give the backstory where the captive was a captured enemy assassin who was executed in the middle of a running battle. I’m far from sure that the backstory justifies the brutal act…but it frames it into an understandable human context, without which it is simple brutality.
And it is especially hard to do in the context of the modern philosophical crisis, in which we in the West seem to almost yearn for our own destruction.
But Bush has failed to sell this war in three arenas.
He has failed to sell it (as well as it should have been) to the U.S. people. The reality of 9/11 has sold this war, and our atavistic desire for revenge is the engine that drives the support that Bush actually has.
He has failed to sell it diplomatically. Not that he could have ever gotten the support of France or Germany; as noted above, even with an AmEx receipt for the 9/11 plane tickets signed by Saddam himself, France would find a reason to defer this war. But he should never have let them get the moral high ground, which they have somehow managed to claim.
He has failed to sell it to our enemies, who do not believe today that we are serious about achieving our stated goals. This is, to me the most serious one, because the perception that we are not deadly serious is a perception that we are weak; and we will have to fight harder, not because we are too strong, but because we will be perceived as too weak.
We needed Churchill or Roosevelt. We got Warren Harding. I believe that Bush is a far better President than he is ranked today. But he could be a far better President than he is given credit for and still be too mediocre for the challenge of the times. Peggy Noonan nails it, in her great book ‘Patriotic Grace’:
Three facts of this era seem now to be key to the fraying of our national unity.
2002: the Republicans had it all-
One: In 2002, the Republicans had it all – the presidency, both houses of Congress, high approval ratings, a triumphant midterm election, early victory in Afghanistan. The administration had been had been daring and gutsy, but I think the string of victories left them with illusions about their powers. <snip>
Two: It was during 2002, when the administration was on top, when it had proved itself to itself – and it should be noted here that these were people who had been forced to flee the White House by foot on 9/11, that they’d been handed by history a terrible challenge, that they could not know, as human beings, that they would be able to meet it, and then seemed to themselves to be proving they were meeting it every day – that they should have been swept by a feeling of gratitude, and ascribed their triumphs not only to their own gifts and guts but to … well, let’s leave it at a phrase like “higher forces;’ and the sacrifices of men and women in the field.
At that moment they should have reached out in an unprecedented way to the Democratic Party, included them in their counsels, created joint executive-congressional working groups that met often, shared the enjoyments of victory in Afghanistan, shared credit for it, thanked them for their support, been politically generous. This would have won for them – for the country – a world of good feeling, and helped the nation feel a greater peace with itself. Instead, in January 2002, barely four months after 9/11, Karl Rove went before an open meeting of the Republican National Committee, in Austin, Texas, and announced the GOP would use national security as a club against the Democrats. This marked the first deep tainting of the political atmosphere by a powerful figure, removing things from the patriotic level and putting them back down on the partisan.
Would the Democrats have been gracious in the same circumstance if they’d been in charge?
Oh my goodness, let’s just agree the answer is, “Not all of them!” But that is not the right question. The right questions are: “What did America need after 9/11? What did the country need, a sense of good faith and unity at the top, or a weary knowledge that the old political warfare would once again commence?” Which, of course, it did. And never stopped, not to this day.
Three: The Democrats in Congress were, in general, unserious in their approach to the Iraq war, and not up to the era’s demands. When the war was popular with the country they looked for ways to oppose it without political cost. But there’s always cost. Thoughtful, tough, historically grounded opposition – and along with that, the need to answer the question “What exactly should we do rather than move on Saddam, what path should we take in the Mideast, and against terrorism; what is best now?” – would have taken a political toll; there was no way around it. When the war was less popular, and then unpopular, Democrats acted as if it were now, finally, a partisan issue that worked to their advantage. But it wasn’t a partisan issue. America was on the line,
And then I step back and think; one book I reread over the holiday was McCullogh’s Truman; and as I read the section on the Korean War, I realized that incompetence, ignorance, self-interest – the litany of the Flashman model of history to which I really subscribe – really do describe the way the world works.
So I’m not as bothered about the cascades of error, bad faith, and stupidity that are woven integrally into our history in Iraq as some. I think everything we do is like that, and to demand that it will be different – than any human enterprise will rise above our real nature – is to make the demand Portia makes of Shylock – that he recover the pound of flesh he is owed while spilling
…no jot of blood;
The words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh:’
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.
Does that mean that I’m content with what has happened?
I’m torn.
As I’ve said before, in terms of the strategic justification that I bought into – of shocking the state sponsors of terrorism against the West into closing down their pay windows – I think it was a failure. The Saudis, Iranians, Syrians, and Pakistanis have taken superficial steps to sweep their own front porches – but from everything I’ve read it continues to be largely business as usual. We’ve badly weakened Al-Quieda itself, by financially constricting it, killing or imprisoning much of its senior leadership, and most of all, by letting the Arab world see what psychopathic thugs they really are.
But the overall violent Islamist movement was not truly broken in Iraq.
Let me talk for a second about ‘movements.’ Because the reality is that we are not fighting Osama Bin Laden; it’s not like a conflict with a nation-state where there is command-and-control downward. We are fighting a bazaar, as John Robb puts it – a marketplace in which people, ideology, training, cash and weapons are constantly being exchanged among a like-minded group of people. There is no “head” who can surrender, nor whose death will collapse the bazaar in one stroke.
The major thing we have to do to win is offer alternatives – ideological alternatives, lifestyle alternatives, a counter-ideology that diminishes the attractiveness of joining that marketplace. We’ve been a colossal failure at that for the last eight years, and that’s one of the things I hope will change in the next four.
The secondary thing we have to do is to raise the transaction costs within the marketplace; we’ve done a decent job of that and continue to do so, and Bush deserves credit for that.
So it’s time to step back and think about what Act Two will look like and what our plans, goals, and means will be.
But there’s another point to consider before we do, and that is the Iraqi one.
While Iraq may well have been a strategic failure, it may well be developing into a tactical success.
If you mapped the political stability of Iraq against any other Middle Eastern state – excluding Israel – it’s on a par, while having – for one of the first times since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire – a real national politics.
The Iraqi people and Coalition soldiers paid a price in blood for that, and the full bill is not yet in. But to have created the opportunity for politics – rather than coup and countercoup, or changes in government that take place by throwing opposition figures off of buildings – is itself a damn good thing, and something that has happened far faster than I believed it would. Talking about Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch (someone whose entire blogging career filled me with admiration), I commented:
I’ve been amused at his attacks on the ‘six monthers‘ – those who think the next six months will see all as well. But then again, I’ve always been more of a ‘six yearer‘ myself. I do think, with some confidence, that the next six years will determine the outcome of this conflict.
This was in 2006; I still tend to think that we’ll really be able to judge the soup that we made in Iraq around 2012. But I think it had advanced enough that even today we can say that it’s pretty good soup, and that the lives of 28 million Iraqis are likely to be better for the war. Was it a good bet? Would I have supported it for that reason alone?
No, probably not. We can’t spend blood and treasure freely everywhere there is injustice.
Will there be an ‘ink spot’ effect from Iraq, as other Arab people see what political life is like? Can the changes in Iraq be a part of the process of creating an alternative to Islamist politics? That, to me, is what the balance of our effort in Iraq needs to be about.
Glorious things happened in Iraq; the bravery of the people of Iraq, of their own soldiers, the bravery and charity of our own soldiers.
Horrible things as well, some of them done by us.
I’ll wind up with two quotes; one from Weber – from the essay ‘Politics As A Vocation’ that Yglesias so badly misread:
Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation, has to realize these ethical paradoxes. He must know that he is responsible for what may become of himself under the impact of these paradoxes. I repeat, he lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence. The great virtuosi of acosmic love of humanity and goodness, whether stemming from Nazareth or Assisi or from Indian royal castles, have not operated with the political means of violence. Their kingdom was ‘not of this world’ and yet they worked and sill work in this world. The figures of Platon Karatajev and the saints of Dostoievski still remain their most adequate reconstructions. He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence. The genius or demon of politics lives in an inner tension with the god of love, as well as with the Christian God as expressed by the church. This tension can at any time lead to an irreconcilable conflict. Men knew this even in the times of church rule. Time and again the papal interdict was placed upon Florence and at the time it meant a far more robust power for men and their salvation of soul than (to speak with Fichte) the ‘cool approbation’ of the Kantian ethical judgment. The burghers, however, fought the church-state. And it is with reference to such situations that Machiavelli in a beautiful passage, if I am not mistaken, of the History of Florence, has one of his heroes praise those citizens who deemed the greatness of their native city higher than the salvation of their souls.
If one says ‘the future of socialism’ or ‘international peace,’ instead of native city or ‘fatherland’ (which at present may be a dubious value to some), then you face the problem as it stands now. Everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the ‘salvation of the soul.’ If, however, one chases after the ultimate good in a war of beliefs, following a pure ethic of absolute ends, then the goals may be damaged and discredited for generations, because responsibility for consequences is lacking, and two diabolic forces which enter the play remain unknown to the actor. These are inexorable and produce consequences for his action and even for his inner self, to which he must helplessly submit, unless he perceives them. The sentence: ‘The devil is old; grow old to understand him!’ does not refer to age in terms of chronological years. I have never permitted myself to lose out in a discussion through a reference to a date registered on a birth certificate; but the mere fact that someone is twenty years of age and that I am over fifty is no cause for me to think that this alone is an achievement before which I am overawed. Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.
And another great one from Atul Gawande’s great book, Complications:
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
What I am saying, I think, is that to judge the war in Iraq or the decisions to support or oppose it against an unrealistic standard is a serious error, because in reality no human enterprise can be judged against that kind of standard. And looking back or going forward – most important of all, going forward – it’s important that we acknowledge and embrace that uncertainty as a real part of what we have to deal with. It’s my hope that the left, having hammered Bush over this, will be kinder to Obama. And that the right – who ought to be more attached to the notion of national interest – will be as well.
For myself, I’ll leave off with an answer to a question John Quiggin posed in the comments to the post criticizing Yglesias:
Following up, would you like to specify an outcome in Iraq that you would regard as justifying the war. Taking what looks like a pretty optimistic scenario, suppose that the various Sunni, Shia and Kurd groups establish effective control over the areas that they occupy now, violence falls back to, say, 2005 levels, and US troops are mostly withdrawn by 2009. Would you regard such an outcome as proving Yglesias wrong?
I’ll interpret this question as asking whether in the end, the costs of the war were worthwhile given that kind of outcome. I think I’ve covered this above, but let me try again and close by saying that the only justification I imagined for the war was to change the Arab states willingness to support Islamist movements abroad as an outlet for their state interests and as a way of blowing off the pressure built by internal oppression and discontent. I’m far from believing that we’ve accomplished this goal, and believe that the root of that failure lies in the Bush White House and their flat inability to conduct a real war of ideas or information.
I think we’ll easily meet Quiggin’s standards, and that the lives of Iraqis themselves will be far improved by the removal of Saddam – which may itself be worth the cost. And that it’s important to remember that we were faced with a series of bad choices in 2000 and 2001 regarding Iraq as the sanctions regime collapsed under corruption.
The impact of what our war has created – a real political space within the Iraqi nation – remains to be seen. We have the option of making it a good, even great thing if we can sustain it and help it tip the other Middle Eastern states away from a one-dimensional choice between oppressive secular dictatorships and oppressive Islamist ones.
That’s what I believe about Iraq today, and that’s what I hope to discuss in the next year.
Wow. That’s really a lot to take in. I’d like to just add this- in some small way I understand the Lost Generation (and their writings) of post-WWI far better than i ever did before.
Maybe we’ve come to believe so many of our own legends that we needed a jading. By that I mean, most of us were taught as children that the US gained independence because the colonists were oppressed, they rose up, fought and won, fait accompli or providence (take your pick). Isn’t that the story that defines America more than anything else?
Now look at France, who’s people were oppressed, rose up, created a Terror, embraced a tyrant, tore Europe apart for a decade, and ended up back under a Bourbon for a while more. Different experience, different story. Is it any wonder they look at our worldview with a jaundiced eye?
I’m not saying they are right and we are wrong. I’m saying the law of unintended consequences is vastly underestimated, and maybe it is paramount. It was superior American munitions and skilled warriors that toppled Hussein, not the momentum of history (or winds of change) that overtook him.
In other words, I think there is a dangerous undercurrent in Americans of all stripes to believe that just because something is Right or Just, it should be Easy. The world just doesn’t work that way. And the fact that something is hard, or bloody, or painful doesn’t prove that it was the wrong thing to do. Not many mention Karma when it comes to foreign affairs, but that’s ultimately the card each side plays, right?
And that doesn’t just apply to military issues. Diplomacy has killed an awful lot of people on its own terms (or let them die). Appealing to invest powers in the UN is simply making a different choice of how or where to apply (or not apply) power.
Noble intentions don’t ensure results, and sometimes good deeds get punished. Sometimes they produce great evil.
Perhaps that’s meant to teach us wisdom, somehow. Surely it should teach us caution.
I’m more hopeful for Iraq than I have been in the past, but I still have some basic fears. Yes, I’m a glass half-full kinda guy, but I’d rather see the problems (and the margin for improvement) than celebrate my successes.
Iraq is still littered with systematic corruption. Corruption that does not stray far from the president, or from the Iraqi congress. Considering the last 30 years, it’s to be expected. There’s no way a clean non-corrupt government could have formed.
Now that the government is largely operating on it’s own feet (w/out an insurgency) we reach the next pivotal moment in the Iraqi transition to democracy. Will Iraq take this moment to become a truly functioning goverment, or will it be satisfied with a faux-democracy that’s common in 3rd world (and Russian) countries?
And while the worst-case scenario is certainly appears better than “Fundamentalist State”, I would argue that it’s not that much better… for Iraqis, for Americans or for the GWOT.
I think you have a lot correct. Your first point—that we didn’t get the terror masters to close the pay windows—is correct, although I think it misses the point. If there is something, anything, that we could do which would have produced that outcome no one has yet identified it. We’re not dealing with the Soviet Union here. The terror masters aren’t funding distractions to make their system look better than ours.
We have the same problem trying to offer alternatives. I agree that we haven’t been having much success. I submit that the failure is not exclusively ours; leading a horse to water comes to mind. I also submit that the refusal to recognize that alternatives, from whatever source, are not acceptable to the people we’re trying to change is a significant failing. Very few veterinarians will waste resources trying to treat a rabid dog, and no court would accept a class action suit against a veterinarian for failing to do so. It seems to me that this is asking for an unreasonable standard of performance.
I also think you punted your attempt to answer the final question. If the only justification you can envision for a war action is to change Arab state willingness to support Islamist movements, there is no possibility of justification. This leads to the question of what justification could you provide for doing nothing; how many in the West would you allow to die undefended because you could not justify the only actions which might prevent their deaths? I beg forgiveness if that sounds a bit harsh, as I have no desire to offend.
You are welcome to your belief that the Bush White House is unable to conduct a real war of ideas or information. The point is not whether you’re correct; the point is that the war is not only in the realm of ideas and information. It is no secret that the West is materially rich. It doesn’t shock anyone that non-Middle Eastern cultures have options that don’t exist in the Middle East. The ideas and information that might bring about the change you desire have been violently resisted for the last 1400 years, in all their forms. The West does not offend by being successful; the West offends by being. There’s not a lot of room for the success of ideas or information in that context.
Thank you for your willingness to ask the questions and for supporting the forum.
I saw:
bq. It’s Bush’s fault, pure and simple.
and quit reading.
robo, you’ve gotta look at what was Bush’s fault before you take that stance…
Marc
That’s a shame, Hobo, because the quoted material directly after is prescient.
Bush absolutely failed to sell this war to the most important market– the citizens of the United States. I remember, I was there. I study international relations and power politics as a hobby. I understood (I believe I did then; I remain convinced to this day) that the point was to wage a strategic fight against terrorism in the only way it could be done– with boots on the ground in the most central and valuable real estate in the area, with the aim of influencing all the other state actors in the region. This explanation has the virtue of making sense, even if one doubts that it will, or could, work.
But this was never part of the public debate. Questions about the purpose of the war were met with the justifications that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was arming terrorists against us. Now, I don’t doubt that the intel community believed with all their collective hearts that he did have such weapons. But the notion that they were to be used against us was, well, ludicrous on the face of it. If Hussein actually had those weapons, history might have played out a little differently, but probably not all by that much– were that the only change, the ocupation would still have been a muddled travesty, and the good will from the idscovery of weapons would only have lasted a little while longer. Months, at best. Perhaps six. Why? Because it wouldn’t take that long for the public to realize that chemical weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein are simply not an existential risk to the United States.
It would have been far better to be up front and honest about the process– that we were using the WMD issue as a formal cause of war in order to do something else that needed to be done in the larger scheme of things. I have sufficient faith in the American public to believe that enough of us would have signed on, with more durable goodwill, to get the job done.
That would have been selling the war to the American public. That done, it would automatically have been sold to the enemy, because historically our biggest constraint has always been our willingness to engage. With that, selling to the Europeans would have been far less important– it would have been reduced to a decision to fight a war on the Democrat model (with as many allies as possible) or on the Republican model (with as few constraints as possible.)
Just to restate the last half of my comment, linked in the post:
bq. Nothing that can happen in the future will change the fact that that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands of American and allied troops have been killed or wounded, millions of people have become internal and external refugees, and half a trillion dollars that could have been used to do good has been spent on war.
I don’t believe the outcome justifies this cost, and I think it’s clear that, if the likely costs, and benefits, had been known when the case for war was drummed up, very few Americans would have supported it.
[NM: Mr Quiggen, thanks for participating, but be mindful that this post skirts the zone of redundancy. I think it is (and has been made) clear what your restated stand is; additional correspondence on that topic is best done elsewhere. In case you missed it, we’re trying to steer a path less traveled for Winds. See the sixth and following paragraphs of “this recent post by AL.”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/back_from_vacation_blog_stuff.php
Other participants: to the extent that your response to Mr Quiggen would lead this thread into yet another impassioned, predictable rehash, I plead that you not go there. Check the linked article and reflect, please: What do we do now?]
Though I’ve been a steady supporter of the Iraq campaign and Bush (well, at least in that regard), I agree with pretty much everything Marcus says above. The administration failed to treat the American public as adults and lay out the full case for war, including the strategic rationale. WHY this happened is likely a matter for the historians somewhere down the line; I’ve seen plausible explanations ranging from wanting to get the UN and France on board, to treading too lightly on Saudi and other Muslim sensibilities. A whole host of ills flowed from that failure. While the WMD issue was never presented as the sole reason, or as an immediate threat, it was certainly highlighted, particularly in the presentation at the UN which may have been many Americans’ largest or sole impression of the run-up to combat. That made the issue a ‘single point of failure’ in the political strategy, which promptly obeyed Murphy’s Law as applied to intelligence, and failed.
The outcome has been to turn Iraq into a political football, and weakened commitment to seeing it through. Bush’s stubbornness and willingness to spend his entire political capital in the cause has mean we have seen it through, perhaps just long enough. This outcome has to give any GWOT strategist pause, however. If we can barely summon the fortitude to conclude Iraq successfully, what does that say about strategic visions such as Tom Barnett’s that include multiple, long-term commitments to nation building in often hostile circumstances, as well as raising a force dedicated to this activity.
I agree with Marc that we’re likely now looking at a tactical success in Iraq, from the point of view of reduced violence levels, the effective extinction of AQI, and a government that looks stable at least for the nonce. The strategic meaning is still unclear, and to a large extent outside our control. Now it matters what the Iraqis and other Arabs and Muslims do in response to the tactical outcome. Can Iraq overcome its history of corruption, tribalism and autocracy and become a reasonably cohesive, pluralistic and free society that others in the area will want to emulate? The precedents aren’t all that encouraging. On the other hand the standard of comparison with the mullahcracies and strong men of the area is pretty low. Now that security is receding as the leading issue in Iraq, soon we’ll be on to the economy as the top of the list.
So what can we do to encourage a successful outcome at the strategic level? One is to simply stay engaged as a guarantor of the victory. Part of the reason that Iraq ended up saddled with Saddam was the successive implosions and power vacuum left by the Turkish and British empires, a vacuum that was ultimately filled by the worst of society. Even if we have no aspiration to empire, that means several brigades of our finest sitting somewhere in the desert for more years, hopefully bored, to make sure things stick to the wall. I also suspect that a key part of a success will be a secularized, national Iraqi army built on the American model. Let’s hope they can build an NCO cadre as professional as ours.
Then there’s that economy thing. Without knowing many details, I get the impression from everything from bloggers to State Dept. job postings that a large amount of the Iraqi economy remains in the hands of the state, a form of socialism that’s a magnet for corruption. Getting more of the economy, including the oil revenues, out of the hands of the national government seems like a good way to work against Iraq relapsing into yet another strong-man rentier state. Dealing with Iraqis in a non-coercive fashion to cause this to happen will be one hell of a challenge.
John, as ought to be clear from what I wrote, I might not have supported the war given the strategic outcome, and the failure on the “war of ideas” front by the Bush Administration and the US foreign policy apparatus (which exists somewhat independently from any Administration).
But that begs two questions, both of which need to be answered by antiwar folks such as yourself (and one of which needs to be answered by everyone…)
1) what else could we have done in the face of collapsing sanctions (and I’ll be presumptuous enough to ask your contemporaneous view on the sanctions regime)??
2) As NM puts it so well …what do we do now?
Marc
AL – That there were mistakes made is okay to say, it is the constant drumming of “it’s _ALL_ Bush’s fault…” incessantly drummed into the discourse for *YEARS* now that grates to the point I just stop listening.
The case was never made, as you say, of
bq. …of shocking the state sponsors of terrorism against the West into closing down their pay windows…
The currency to pay that bill I do not believe the West still has. But we better find a way because the enemy is not just a threat to our systems but to the very lives we have. If we do not recognize that in time then we go on the ash heap.
The constant drumming of derision for other ideas other than those approved from the Left has made me stop caring about whether the soft metrosexual man-things survive in the future. I really don’t.
More later.
What else could have been done?
Resolution 1441 could have been followed and the inspections carried through to the point where it could be demonstrated that Saddam in fact had no weapons, and no active program to produce them. At that point, the major objective of the sanctions under UNSC Resolution 687 would have been fulfilled, and sanctions should have been lifted, subject to an agreement on the other issues covered in 687 (mainly reparations to Kuwait).
What should be done now?
Withdraw in as orderly a fashion as possible and hope for the best in Iraq as in many other countries where there are serious problems but where the US does not assume the right and obligation to determine political outcomes. Promise continued large-scale financial aid and deliver it as long as there is a coherent government to receive it.
Mr Quiggen: Taking your first paragraph and reading it skeptically, I interpret it approximately as follows:
An eternity (or at least decades) could have been spent, dealing with an infinite number of bad-faith “gamesmanship” and shell-game tactics (including repeated expulsions of inspectors by Saddam–it worked once, why not more?), which all could have been put up with, while oil-for-food and other corrupt processes worked to keep Saddam and his cronies fat, until all inspectors were tired and wanted more than anything else to go home, at which point they’d report whatever would get them out of there.
Does that sound like a viable strategy to you?
Or are you claiming that you are confident that wouldn’t have been how it played out?
If the latter, what actual evidence, rather than wishful thinking, warrants that claim?
John, seriously? First I’m kind of shocked that what Saddam put the Iraqi people through means so little to you.
And eighteen months after the sanctions were lifted – what then? When Saddam starts up his first flight of centrifuges, and starts dealing with the Kurds by Hama rules? Seriously – finish the inspections, lift the sanctions, and forget it – that’s your alternative?
Marc
I’m demoralized. I’m not exactly sure why, but perhaps I do think that a morally superior position ought to be somewhat less demanding than it is. I also felt sort of abandoned by the Bush administration, and their unwillingness to mount a coherent defense of a morally superior position. It’s possible that this was because their moral compass was compromised from the start.
I don’t find much enthusiasm for current events, which is why I’m looking to the past for inspiration. I figured, for what it’s worth, that when Paul Berman published his book on Terror and Liberalism we would be in for a multi-generational war. But that doesn’t mean I tolerate the stretch very well.
At this point I’d sure like to see the capture of Zawahiri or Bin Laden. We’re now eight years on from the event. Why aren’t they in our grasp? I’m not sure I see why they should have lasted until 9/12/2001. They sure had the foresight to take out Massoud. Why are they still stealing our oxygen?
robo, I just finished reading Truman. Where does the buck stop?
Yes it’s hard, but somehow your complaint feels like a boxer’s being offended because his opponent hit back. Go back and think about what domestic politics Truman or Roosevelt went through during wartime.
Part of the President’s job is to cope with and overcome that, and Bush did not – when he easily, right after 9/11, could have (see Noonan). Sorry, but as much as I respect Bush and Rove (and I really do) they don;t get anything like a pass on this one.
They chose partisan advantage over national interest, and we’re all suffering for it today.
Marc
Well, Marc, it’s certainly true that Bush did a terrible job selling the war, which was one of his chief duties. Moreover, he did this, so far as I can tell, because when he had everyone yelling “what do we do to help,” his answer was “nothing.” Everything else on the communications front flowed from that decision to act like the military and the administration, rather than the United States, was as war. Had Bush asked for a declaration of war and an expansion of the military to fight it, he’d almost certainly have gotten it. Had the declaration been properly tailored, it would have eliminated a lot of the politicking. His poor decision, and his refusal to ever to this day explain his grand strategy, has certainly led to more division than would otherwise have existed on the war.
All that said, the charge that Bush/Rove used 9/11 for partisan advantage is a yawner. Have the Democrats used the economic trouble to bring us all together to face the crisis, or for partisan advantage? Did FDR, for that matter, use the Depression to bring us all together or for partisan advantage? (Even during the war, a lot of Roosevelt’s speeches were about how we were all pulling together and that’s why the Republicans needed to let him do whatever he wanted without any oversight. See the Pearl Harbor investigations and the railroading of Admiral Kimmel, for a good example.)
For that matter, the Democrats are hardly blameless in using this war as political fodder. Quite soon after 9/11, the Democrats were already making noises about how 9/11 was Bush’s fault. Their behavior during 2002 was barely reasonable, while their behavior from 2003 onwards was simply execrable.
Politics is what politicians do, regardless of their party, and if we want the President not to be a politician, we need to change the job duties and method of selection.
Jeff: Everybody was blaming everybody else for 9/11. They were all culpable, and hopefully, someday, they will all admit it. However, when history is written, it will show that Bush held power in this country, and on this decision he did no better or no worse than other politicians. That’s not exactly glowing praise.
When did this meme that Bush didnt sell the war to the American public become accepted? As i recall the war was solidly popular in polling and in Congress, certainly moreso than the first Gulf War.
Bush sold the war just fine. He didn’t sell the aftermath at all, mainly because he really had no clue what to do about it until about 2 years ago.
Realistically, nothing Bush could have said or done would have garnered him the support of the people opposed to the war at the time. How exactly do you get Dennis Kucinich on board, and would that ultimately have mattered?
The truth is, we had a long hard occupation, and that is ALWAYS unpopular. It could have been _executed_ much more skillfully early on (militarily and politically), but the cost was really a matter of degree, not of kind. We could have lost half the troops we have so far and i think the country would be about equally as unhappy.
I agree with Mark B and I would add that a student from the University of Illinois received honors for summarizing the numerous (30 or so) war justifications given before the war. They were all there; some felt some were more persuasive than others.
The President didn’t sell his strategic vision to his own cabinet, Powell and Rumsfeld in particular, neither of whom appeared to be implementing the President’s strategy. Failure to lead.
No American war, except perhaps WWII, retained popular support over time. The strategic considerations have to be towards major use of military force early; crushing insurgencies early.
Support for the Iraq War went up this year. “Example”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/13/politics/politico/main3933699.shtml Was it better salesmanship or are we doing a better job?
Mark, #18,
When did this meme that Bush didnt sell the war to the American public become accepted? As i recall the war was solidly popular in polling and in Congress, certainly moreso than the first Gulf War.
He sold it just fine to a population still pised off from 9/11 and riding high on Afghani adrenaline. He sold it in terms of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and foolish claims that those were a threat to us. (Seriously, nerve gas? 7,000 miles away? Is not a threat to us.)
As soon as the WMDs were shown not to exist, support deflated a great deal. When Bush’s popularity dropped further in the aftermath of Katrina, support deflated even further because it was only Republican loyalty to one of their own in the Oval Office that drove it.
If this had been done right, support would have been immune to the lack of WMDs and immune to the drop in Bush’s personal popularity.
He did a terrible job at this.
I’m going to reiterate this for all participants, though I thank them for the relative comity thus far exhibited:
[T]o the extent that [you] would lead this thread into yet another impassioned, predictable rehash, I plead that you not go there…. What do we do now?
I swear that if this thread degenerates into another “Bush pushed the WMDmeme” morass, I will pull the plug on it *and* delete posts at will.
–Marshal Nortius “Big Tuna” Maximus, acting in that capacity.
A.L. says _John, seriously? First I’m kind of shocked that what Saddam put the Iraqi people through means so little to you._
As opposed to what the U.S. invasion put the Iraqi people through?
Hypoc:
Yes, as opposed to that. Seriously, any more drive-bys and I’m going to start culling.
I regret the evident necessity,
Sorry, NM,
I read your previous enjoinder, nodded to myself in agreement, then unthinkingly went ahead and posted again along the same lines.
It’s… insidious.
Will not happen again in this thread.
[NM: Thanks! I agree that it is a seductive thing.]
Let’s look at the situation from the standpoint of September 2001, before even the invasion of Afghanistan. Let’s be generous and grant ourselves all our current knowledge, and none of our then-current worst fears. Now, let’s look at what the imperative was, and the options to attain it.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the unsolved anthrax attacks and (not long after) the DC sniper attacks, the world stood thus:
Against this background, what was the US imperative? Clearly, it was to end attacks on the United States, and the threat of future attacks, as expeditiously as possible. This was, I think, fairly universally agreed to. But how were we to do this? What would our grand strategy be to end the threat of future attacks by the jihadis?
One school of thought was that our best course of action was in effect to surrender, to give the jihadis what they wanted by abandoning the Muslim governments in the Middle East who were at least not actively hostile to us, and eventually by abandoning Israel. This was generally mooted under the banner of “root causes.” The intent was to induce the jihadis to cease attacking us by getting out of their way.
Another school of thought, at the other extreme, was to “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” This school of thought held that all Muslims were at least suspect, most were complicit, and enough were threats to the United States that, given the lack of any redeeming value in Arab or Muslim culture or society, we should start killing jihadis, then work our way up through the Islamists to the general population if necessary, not being too careful about the boundaries between those groups, and to stop when all Muslim thoughts and deeds towards attacks on the rest of the world were eliminated (if necessary, with the elimination of all Muslims). To be fair, I don’t think that most adherents of this view would have thought it necessary to kill more than a small fraction of the Muslim population; it’s just that they were not bothered by whether or not that was the case.
I will pull no punches and simply state that both of these were stupid and counterproductive at best. The former was stupid and counterproductive because it would have done nothing but strengthen our enemies for their coming fight against us, which would have achieved their final goal of the imposition of Islam and Shari’a law globally. In other words, it was the old and often-failed strategy of appeasement. The latter was counterproductive and stupid because it required us to be genocidal monsters, which is hardly the case.
But in the middle were a number of reasonable options, and I’d like to go through them in increasing order of force (from us).
The least amount of force would have been to continue to treat terrorism as a criminal problem, using law enforcement methods and, very occasionally, very limited military force against terrorist training camps. That is, to continue to treat terrorism exactly as we had done prior to the 9/11 raids. The obvious problems with this approach were that it had already been proven not to work, and that the American people (yes, including Obama and Matt Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald and John Cole and Andrew Sullivan) would have been out for President Bush’s head, and the heads of anyone else calling for this path. And had there been another large scale terrorist attack on the US under such a policy, those heads would have been handed over on a silver platter.
The next most amount of force would have been to attack Afghanistan and root out the Taliban and al Qaeda, put in place a relatively benign government, then pull out. Looking at this in retrospect, it’s clear that it would not have worked. If people were so ready to pull out of Iraq, a much more strategically important country, the odds of us being in Afghanistan for any length of time were about zero. We would more likely have taken out the Taliban and al Qaeda just we did, but then pulled out and gone home, declaring victory. And it would have been a victory, but in the same narrow sense that the 1991 Gulf War was, that our immediate objective was obtained. And in the same way as the 1991 Gulf War, it would have been a failure as well, because by now, 2009, al Qaeda and the Taliban would have been back in control of Afghanistan, with the added cachet of having “driven out” the US military, thus bolstering the propaganda line they had already been using against us as having no stomach for any fight after the first immediate engagement. Had we followed this course, we would today be in the same shape we were in in 2001, except that our enemies would be stronger.
Every example after this assumes first destroying the Taliban hold on Afghanistan just as we actually did. For brevity (hah!), I have not actually included this in each option. Just assume it’s there.
The next would have been attempting to stop the state sponsorship of jihad by the application of both military and non-military pressure. This would have been only partially by force; we would also have used other methods. By itself, this would have been of at most limited success: does anyone truly believe that, had we not attacked Iraq, Libya would have changed its behavior? Does anyone believe that Iran, under much less pressure if we hadn’t attacked Iraq, would have changed its behavior for the better, when in fact it has only escalated its attempts at jihad, now that its Sunni rivals have been so weakened? Given the very limited cooperation from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia with us actively engaged, does anyone believe that, by itself, these methods would have change Saudi and Pakistani behavior for the better? And would Iraq have changed its behavior if we hadn’t toppled Saddam? The only way that we could have done this effectively was to use ever-increasing amounts of military force, escalating from nothing to raids to blockades to outright major attacks, particularly on Iraqi and Iranian targets. Making big explosions is certainly satisfying, but this option would almost certainly have been terribly ineffective. And frankly, I don’t think that the American public would stand for a series of inconclusive but bloody battles, with the dead civilians (and un-uniformed enemies claimed to be civilians) trotted out for a willing American and world Press event after every attack, as is happening in Gaza right now.
Next up the ladder would have been to pick an example country and do whatever was necessary to end its support for terrorism. Afghanistan was too far from the center of the Arab world to make a trenchant example, and too easily dismissed (despite the Soviet experience) as an easy win for the US. So the target country would have to be Arab, very supportive of jihad (not just Islamism, or it would too easily be seen as an attack on Islam instead of the jihadis), within the arc from Egypt to Iraq and Saudi Arabia, would have to be not directly engaged in fighting Israel (or it would have been too easily seen as direct support of Israel rather than a defense of our own interests), and finally would have to be a country against which we could make a sufficient case for invasion to not run too far afoul of international opinion. This really only left Iraq as a target. Iran is not Arab; the case against Saudi Arabia was weak (funding terrorism, yes, but not officially as a state policy); Syria was fighting Israel, and had we invaded, would have launched a massive conventional and chemical bombardment of Israel (and yes, that’s a bad thing); Lebanon was both fighting Israel (well, Hizballah was) and fairly irrelevant , though attacking Hizballah specifically might have been a useful way to put a lot of pressure on both Iran and Syria; Egypt is essentially friendly to us and hostile to Islamism and jihadis; the other countries of the Arabian peninsula were too peripheral to have an effect; Pakistan is not Arab. And given our preexisting grievance with Iraq, and their flouting of more than a decade’s worth of UN resolutions, that was where our best case was for using force in a way that would change the dynamic of support for jihad.
Now, that last was obviously the major thrust of our strategy, though elements of the earlier options have also been incorporated. And while this strategy didn’t require it, we have also chosen to attempt to build a new, democratic civil society in Iraq. I didn’t really think of this, and would have been fine with us just occupying Iraq as a protectorate, but it was a good idea; in fact, it’s the thing that we have done that has the best long-term chance of changing the underlying Muslim attitudes towards jihad and modernism.
The next option up the ladder would have been to repeat the last option in sequence on one terror-supporting country after another, until there were no more terror-supporting countries. This might in fact still be our long-term strategy, just at a slower pace than it would have been envisioned at the time. (Had we built up our army to the size it was in our previous wars, and just occupied countries along the way, we would have been occupying Iraq, Syria, and possibly Iran by now.) This is a bloodier way to go about things, and frankly, the US public probably doesn’t have the will, absent an immediate and ongoing threat on the scale of WWII, to fight the way we would need to to win wars like this. It would likely have also been the most effective approach, because it would have been at a faster OPTEMPO than the enemy could sustain, and would have atomized him. If we were sufficiently adept in our occupations (i.e., like Iraq’s latter, not earlier, stages), we could certainly have been much further along in eliminating the jihadis as a threat, though it’s likely that we would be engaged in long and bloody occupations for some time to come.
So before anyone tears down the Bush administration as having made the wrong decision (and I’m not accusing AL of doing that; far from it), I’m curious to hear what they would have done instead. Most of the time, though, it seems that what Bush’s domestic opponents do is act as if there were some perfect option, with success guaranteed and neither risk nor cost. No such options existed. So without relying on deus ex machina, humans changing their essential natures, the jihadis actually being more like hippies with guns than genocidal maniacs bent on establishing a theocratic tyranny, or removing the ability of any entity other than the US to act on its own behalf (the Prime Mover fallacy), how then should we have proceeded so as to remove the threat of terrorist attacks on the US? Personally, I think Bush probably had it about as right as a human could get it, given his knowledge at the time, and the resources and constraints he had to work with. I would likely have gone for an immediate, broad declaration of war against any jihadi group or nation that sponsored the jihadis, and would have begun building up the army and issuing ultimatums. In other words, I would have picked the last option short of genocide. In retrospect, that would have been more costly, and only a better solution over the short term. In the long term, it would have done violence not only to the enemy, but also to our perception of ourselves as fundamentally good and more interested in human freedom than military domination. But what would the critics have preferred?
Moreover, the question of where we go now has the same set of possible answers. We still have roughly the same options now that we did in 2001, in terms of calibrating our force levels to achieve our goals, though of course the background landscape is better for us now than it was then.