Although I’ve pretty much stopped reading Christopher Hitchens on Iraq, curiosity made me peek at his last Slate column. After two years, I wonder how he would stand up for his friend, Chalabi, whose speech he attended last week.
Although the column is written in Hitchen’s now normal tendentious tone, a mix of scorn and insult that gives the effect of Captain Bligh giving his last speech to the crew of the Bounty, and though, of course, Hitchens is simply a lunatic about Iraq, he does have a valid central point about the Democratic claim to being mislead about Iraq.
Hitchens simply points to a long line of legislation, going back to 1998, as well as Clinton’s own actions, to make the point that the Dems were on board the regime change ship (hey, having thrown in Captain Bligh, I’m sticking with this metaphor, sailor!). I think this is fairly accurate. The rush to war was a peculiarly D.C. moment. The DLC wing of the Democratic party – from Lieberman to Clinton – let Bush carry the message; nor did they scream or yell when it became obvious, in the countdown to the invasion, that other means of settling the question of the weapons of mass destruction – letting the inspectors do their job, for instance – were counterproductive not to Saddam, but to Bush’s policy. This is what Daschle said on October 7, 2002, quoting from the Houston Chronicle:
“Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said the Democratic-led Senate, over the next week or so, will overwhelmingly approve a resolution giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq if necessary to eliminate any effort to develop or use weapons of mass destruction.
"We've got to support this effort," Daschle said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "We've got to do it in an enthusiastic and bipartisan way." Daschle said the vote would be lopsided, with roughly 75 senators or so supporting the resolution.
But lawmakers are nervous about handling the issue correctly, Daschle said. "This is the first pre-emptive, unilateral authorization of the use of force that we've ever passed."
The root lie, the one Hitchens doesn’t talk about for all his quoting of previous resolutions, was the lie that Bush did not want war. This is a sore point. Since the war’s supporters did, visibly, want war in that period, defending the truthfulness of Bush’s claim that he didn’t means discussing why he didn’t. And those supporters have long claimed that the WMD was merely the mask thrown over the complex of reasons we went to war, which definitely leaves the impression that Bush’s gang was playing the American people for suckers. In fact, on October 7, 2002, Bush, in his key speech in Cincinnati, made it clear that the resolution of Congress did not necessarily mean war:
"Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable," Bush said. "The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and it is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something."
That, of course, was the lie. Bush did everything he could to make military action both imminent and unavoidable. What, one wonders, would it have taken to avoid war? Bush’s answer was that it would have taken complete disarmament by Iraq – but that simply isn’t true. It would have taken Iraq’s complete surrender to Bush, Saddam’s removal and the removal of the Ba’ath party leadership. In other words, the conditions that Bush claimed to be setting for the American audience would always be set a little higher for the Iraqi audience, so we would have our war. The pro-war crowd – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. – found nothing wrong with this. And the D.C. consensus viewed it, at the time, as the necessary buildup to a necessary war. The Dems under Daschle admitted that they were voting for a unilateral military action on intelligence that consisted of “might be”s – Iraq might possess this, and it might possess that. The talk about what might be is such that it baffles our notion of direct truths – rather, we have to talk about what is plausible and implausible. When, in the same speech, Bush said "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," he was distorting the evidence – a minor lie, since it was by no means clear – but he wasn’t lying about it in the traditional sense if he was saying that, in his judgment, it was clear. In September, 2002, the dossier on Iraq compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies was published. That study concluded, as it turned out correctly, that nuclear weapons “seem the furthest from Iraq’s grasp,” and that Iraq possessed, at best, residual WMD capabilities in chemical and biological arms.
The point, then, is that if we are to go back (again and again and again) to how we got into Iraq, the question of intelligence is subordinate to the question of intention. And all of these questions are academic if they don’t lead us to get out of Iraq, now. To create excuses for our failure in Iraq while remaining as a failing force in Iraq is the kind of malign joke that we do not want to see played on American soldiers or Iraqis.
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Roger,
ReplyDeleteWhat was stated as inevitable was that Saddam Hussein would finally comply fully and unambiguously with his disarmament obligations - or face certain dethronement. An invasion was "inevitable" in the sense that a reasonable person would err on the side of expecting SH to remain true to form. Hence planning was undertaken as if the invasion was assured.
Had SH effected a radical change of heart, and/or had he been persuaded to abdicate (by, say, his friends on the UNSC), or even had a disgruntled general dispatched him to Hades and signalled a radical regime shift, there would have been no invasion. The onus lay squarely with SH. Our troop build-up in 2002 gave him a final chance to see that we meant business.
The honest thing to say about intentions, pre-invasion, would be this: SH being who he is, an invasion is highly likely, but not inevitable - he, or circumstances, might make it unnecessary. There was no dishonesty from Bush about whether SH would be made to comply with his obligations, one way or another. And Bush made clear that the choice lay with SH. Rumsfeld sagely observed at the time that the UN intriguers and appeasers made an invasion more, not less, likely - creating an atmosphere in which SH was encouraged to shirk his obligations yet again. All those marchers who thought that, out of the two, Bush was nearer kin to Hitler than was Saddam, did their part as well. Oh, the irony!
The point about SH being "true to form" is pregnant with implications; which, for example, show the complete reasonableness of the '98 Iraqi Liberation Act, as well as why only the most naive would expect the inspections ever "to work." Here one recalls Richard Butler's memoir recounting his tenure as the head of UNSCOM. He reports that Tariq Aziz had observed to him that - as the example of Weimar underscored - there has never been a successful disarmament of a refractory foe without an occupation. And our own occupation-inspections have completely borne that out: as Hitchens notes, Iraq *was not* in compliance with those obligations, and planned to restart its WMD production aggressively once the inspections had been believed to "work" and sanctions were lifted.
The invasion in 2003 was the logical and reasonable result of the incomplete end to the Gulf War, and the subsequent low-level war that ensued throughout the '90's - especially with the exigencies of 9.11 thrown into the mix.
Actually, Paul, I think your description shows exactly why the war was doomed from the beginning to fail. War isn't some legalistic thing that comes in the bottom of some rodomontade act that was passed as a sop to certain interests in D.C. and was never meant to be mean anything more than making roses the flower of Texas or something. The lack of seriousness of the 1998 act could be measured by the campaign of 2000. Did either candidate say, well, now that we have this act pushing us, guess we have to go to war with Iraq? Give me a break. If they did a poll in 2000 and asked people what they felt the nation's major problems were, how many people do you think would have said, oh, it is our current war with Iraq? A war on the scale of the war in Iraq can't be the result of anything so frivolous as the kind of move a used car salesman makes when you go back and say that the block is cracked.
ReplyDeleteThis move indicates the wholesale decadence of the D.C. clique, all the journalists and think tankers for whom this war has really been a moment of truth -- we can see them in their blind, stumbling incompetence, and if there strategy is really going to be what you've outlined, I can't see how they won't continue to fall. If we took seriously various treaties we have signed, I could easily make a case for invading Israel for having defied almost fifty years of treaties governing nuclear arms. We all know this. So it is a joke to pretend that the disarmament of Iraq was something that reached such a threshhold that we had to go and do something about it in 2002. In fact, the weakness of Saddam was shown by 9/11, not his strength. Not one Iraqi participated in an attack on the one enemy that Saddam had every reason to attack. The same is true in Tanzania, it is true in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, true in Afghanistan. And it was a joke that Bush played on the American people that he was really trying to create an international coalition -- as you say, the U.S. and the U.K were Hussein's enemies, or at least that is how it played out in the pro-war circles. And the belief in those circles was that they should have unilateral power, unimpeded by Europe, in the occupation. Be careful what you wish for.
This war was cursed by the lack of necessity, by the misleading conduct of the President, and, of course, in the end by that dark dark spot on U.S. history, the occupation of Iraq.
However, opponents of the war, such as yours truly, had moral problems to face, too -- foremost among them the balance between a sanction regime that was inhumane and condoning, by inactivity, Hussein. I've been a little disgusted by the liberal side coming out and making a hero out of (of all people) Brent Scowcraft, and Bush's father, who truly have blood on their hands -- they coldly left one hundred thousands shi'ites to die after they called on them to revolt from Saddam Hussein. Personally, I think this double illegitimacy has played itself out in the past three years. There are no bright spots. There is nothing really more dangerous than the American irrelevance in the Middle East and the amount of power that the Americans have. That's a gap that will be closed in some awful way, I'm afraid.
ps -- Paul, hey, I wasn't bs-ing about missing your blog. I meant it. I know you don't like the usual blog bonanza of chiseling controversies, but your Craddickian specialty of philosophical daydreaming was unique.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much, Roger - I'll take your encouragement to heart.
ReplyDelete