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What Might Have Been
Kevin Drum makes the important point that however bad the intelligence may have been in October 2002, by March 2003 inspectors were on the ground and it was obvious that it had some serious problems. We went to war because Bush decided it would be better to go to war, not because any sort of bad intelligence forced it (a point that can also be made by looking at the chronology). It should also be pointed out that some similar considerations apply to the humanitarian elements of the case for war. The Kurds, as you'll recall, had a pretty decent deal in the until March 2003 -- technically they were subjects of Saddam's regime, but they were de facto independent; protected by Anglo-American airpower and their own lightly armed pesh merga. We could have done what Michael Walzer proposed and simply push for the creation of a similar situation in the Shia south. Then we probably would have found a much more cooperative local population than the one we got, and, in other words, reap most of the humanitarian benefits that the real world had for a fraction of the cost.
July 13, 2004 | Permalink
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Comments
An important factor in the run-up to war, is that Bush/Rumsfeld were shipping men and materiel to Kuwait and other bases well before the Congressional resolution. By the time that the UN Team reported that they hadn't found anything, the US had so many forces in that area that Bush couldn't back away from the war without looking very foolish to the US, our allies, and most importantly - to the US military.
Bush backing down was never an option to BushCo.
Lesson: Congress should not let the Pres. deploy major forces before the Congress has reviewed the policy and strategy, because after deployment the US can't back away (if you have a Pres. that can't admit error, and can't use force to enforce diplomacy without actually going to war).
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Jul 14, 2004 12:15:16 AM
And so Matt Yglesias unwittingly endorses the Wayne Downing plan advocated by Wolfowitz and Feith.
Posted by: praktike | Jul 14, 2004 1:57:16 AM
Anybody who doesn't rejoice in the fact that Bush had the balls to take out Saddam Hussein is most likely a liberal. Liberals are hormonally challenged. They are for the most part butch women and nelly men who don't share the values of real Americans. What are those values? Honor, truth, decency, love of country and love of family. Mention any of those to a liberal and he will cringe like a vampire faced with the light of dawn.
Posted by: Joe Willingham | Jul 14, 2004 2:12:07 AM
On March 17, 2003, Bush claimed that, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
I looked through the recent report by the Senate Committee on Intelligence to see what it said about the intelligence referred to by Bush. As far as I can tell, there was no such intelligence. I couldn't find any reference to any analysis of the Iraqi WMD question which took into account the findings of the U.N. weapons inspectors.
I think that Kevin Drum overstates the case when he writes, "We had been on the ground in Iraq for months and there was nothing there. There was nothing there and we knew it." What we knew was that there were no weapons in the places that the inspectors had looked. But that includes all the places pinpointed by U.S. intelligence sources.
Posted by: Kenneth Almquist | Jul 14, 2004 2:40:08 AM
Signed up to fight in Iraq yet, Joe? What a big, strong, testosterone-fuelled armchair warrior you are.
Posted by: ahem | Jul 14, 2004 2:49:04 AM
To Ken Almquist: You fail to mention the fact -- pointed out by Drum -- that France had already proposed sending in far bigger inspection forces, backed up by military units, to complete the search -- and Bush turned the offer down. Either he was already absolutely convinced that Saddam did have biological and chemical WMDs even if we couldn't yet find any sign of them, so that further inspections would just be a waste of time, or -- as Drum says -- he knew that they didn't really exist and decided to invade Iraq anyway. Either way, his judgment was certainly skewed by his silly overconfidence that Iraq could be cheaply and easily reformed.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw | Jul 14, 2004 8:01:52 AM
In some respects I view this as Bush's biggest failure. He made the case on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then, when he had an opportunity to show that he was sincere in his stated beliefs that if Hussein would destroy his weapons he would not fight the war, he showed to the whole world that a popular American President could take the greatest military in the world to war on a whim based on a fiction. American credibility is destroyed, and the incentive for countires with terrorism problems to cooperate is thrown out the window, and the incentive to make sure you have nuclear weapons so that the US will not invade skyrocketed.
Here is Robert Wright in 2002 (Slate):
"There is no basis for the Bush administration's claim that Iraq per se poses some kind of urgent, eminent threat. I'm not aware of any reputable expert who believes that Saddam Hussein now has a true weapon of mass destruction—i.e., either a nuke or a highly contagious germ for which there is no vaccine. Besides, there's no reason to believe he'd give such things to al-Qaida, whose long-run plan is to eliminate regimes like his. So we can afford to calm down and play this thing coolly, with the long-run goal in mind.
"I'd support a war against Iraq that was in the service of this goal—a war that was part of an earnest effort to a) get an intrusive inspection team into Iraq; b) shore up respect for U.N. inspections mandates generally; and c) make some progress toward the evolution of a viable international weapons policing mechanism. But I can't support a war that uses an insincere inspections ultimatum as a pretext for pre-emptive "regime change." "
http://slate.msn.com/id/2071670/entry/2071855/
Posted by: theCoach | Jul 14, 2004 9:00:16 AM
I think that the never-never-land quality of the whole episode comes from the fact that there is a completely intelligible justification of the war which can't be used. I think that the National Greatness Conservatives have a rationale based on the emulation of Julius Caesar and the founders of the British Empire -- the successful imperialists who weren't too monstrous and actually governed well. (Not Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, or Chinggis Qan).
And with perhaps a boost from the once-influential but now unfashionable ideas of Carl Schmitt, who made war the state's raison d'etre.
"We have the greatest military advantage of anyone since Chinggis Qan. What should we do with it? Just let it sit there?" (Jack Handy, pre-9/11: "Rather than spending billions and billions of dollars on more weapons of mass destruction, I think that we should just learn to use the ones we already have more efficiently".)
The trouble is that almost the whole U.S. believes that wars should be defensive. Especially the Jacksonians, the most warlike group, who think of war as protecting their family and home against invading bad guys. (Trivia: around 1950 the name was changed to Dept. of Defense from Dept. of War. Big mistake.)
A lot of the warbloggers and PNAC types really understand (deep down inside) that the war they're proposing is imperialist and not really defensive, but the taboo is so strong that only a few of them dare come right out with it.
A side effect is the need to ridiculously exaggerate the actual threat. In 1938 Stalin and Hitler were both securely in power and both had aggressive intentions. Are we in greater danger now than then? No, but to justify progressive imperialism we have to claim that we are.
Posted by: Zizka | Jul 14, 2004 10:52:05 AM
Um, no, Matt. There were no inspectors. W said so.
From "The President of Good and Evil."
"The possibility that Bush did not really understand everything he was saying may provide an explanation of the utterly bizarre account of the reasons for attacking Iraq that he gave to reporters three months after the war ended. Speaking in the White House's Oval Office, in the presence of the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, Bush said, of Saddam Hussein, 'we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power....' Anyone who can, in all seriousness and sobriety, offer such a totally fictitious account of events of global significance that took place only three months earlier, and in which he has been the central figure, can hardly have had a firm grasp of the situation that he was supposedly directing. Perhaps Bush was not sober, or had ingested mind-altering substances, or was having a psychotic episode. None of these explanations is at all likely, but in the absence of some such explanation, Bush's astonishing statement makes it seem possible that on Iraq, he really was someone's puppet."
p. 223
also:
"'We believe that human suffering in Africa creates moral responsibilities for people everywhere.'"
-W, July 2003 (p. 204)
And remember, MY -- if you don't want to support any and all war of aggression, you're a pathetic homo that should be packed off to camps with other traitors. Joe knows.
Posted by: MattB | Jul 14, 2004 11:06:00 AM
By that point, Bush was faced with a choice: what the inspectors were finding did not match in the slightest what he and his advisers had been arguing for months was unquestionably in Iraq. A rational, disinterested observer would have seen this, been alarmed by the discrepancy, and concluded that the inspectors needed more time to figure out what exactly was going on (he also would have concluded that his advisers were Nimitz-class fuckups, but that's another story). But this opened up the possibility of the inspectors finding nothing, which would have made Bush look like the biggest fool to ever occupy the White House. This, obviously, was unacceptable, so Bush, understanding that it's better to look strong and foolish than simply foolish, invaded, and a two-pronged media campaign began, simultaneously ridiculing the competence of the UN inspection teams and arguing "enough already, let's go to war."
As you may recall, the possibility that Iraq had no WMD--aka the truth--was effectively bullied off the table in those days, with various comments a la "no sane person could possibly believe that." Without the possibility that Iraq didn't have WMDs in play, it was hard to rationally argue that the UN inspectors were competent and should be given more time.
Folks, we were bamboozled.
Posted by: Adam | Jul 14, 2004 12:54:06 PM
So basically, what Kevin is suggesting is that we should have continued (and expanded) our low level war, well, forever (or at least until Saddam and his sons all croaked).
The funny thing is, when you play rough defense for long enough in someone elses back yard, you start looking like the aggressor. The sanctions were falling by the wayside, and Saddam was starting to cry to the UN about our actions. The US and the British were the only ones left still containing him (and it looks likely many of our allies were giving him military aid of one sort or another). Something had to give sooner or later.
One of the points of this invasion was to lend some finality to the situation. It doesn't look like that finality will come as soon as Bush thought it would, but maybe in 2 years or so we'll no longer be taking regular military action, even if we're still there.
Posted by: Tom | Jul 15, 2004 2:34:14 PM
That's something I'd been thinking too. First time I've heard it articulated by someone else. I thought that a good alternative to all out war would have been an occupation of the Kurd and Shiite areas and just let the Saddam rule the Sunni area while it whithered on the vine with no oil.
Of course, we also have to understand the drawbacks to such a situation. It would REALLY inflame the jihadists. Not that I care, but there are some folks who base their strategy mainly on whether it will make the jihadists angrier.
There is also the small matter of what to do if Hussein chose to resist the occupation by force. We'd probably end up having to go into Baghdad to finish the job anyway.
Posted by: Adam Herman | Jul 16, 2004 4:55:26 AM
