My buddy over at Newsrack Blog has an interesting post on regrets from folks who initially supported the Iraq invasion (including himself). I give them all a lot of credit. It’s not easy to admit a mistake.
But what mistake is it? Doing it, or not doing it right? Some of us continue to occupy a minuscule spit of land in the American political landscape: we opposed the impending Iraq invasion even if it might turn out to be successful (or should I say, especially if it were successful). Even if the US army had found evidence of a nuclear weapons program (which we doubted existed—why didn’t more “experts” call Saddam’s bluff?); even if the population had embraced the invaders as liberators and immediately formed a House of Representatives and a Senate (with two [virtually indistinguishable] parties and two parties only) and a Department of Health and Human Services and a Baghdad Chamber of Commerce and a Fox News Network etc.; even if the US ended up with military bases in a new, friendlier Iraq in order to project its democracy-building power in the rest of the region; even if a lot of supposedly good things came out of it—we would have been against the invasion. Especially if all those things came to pass. This sort of success in Iraq, a reward for invasion, would have harmed the United States—would have corroded its soul and besmirched its former ideals—more than its current failure.
This is not to say the failure in Iraq makes us happy. This is not to say we’re certain we were right to think what we thought then (and still think now). Maybe the imperial theorists have it right. Maybe we’re naive. But we certainly are sad about what we (the larger American e pluribus unum we) have done and what we have become, and disappointed that we (back to the little we) couldn’t prevent it. Maybe, amid the destruction and self-destruction, we’ve “done some good” in Iraq, as unrepentant war supporters insist; but what a way to do it. What a way to do good.
Amen, brother!
But what mistake is it? Doing it, or not doing it right?
I think there’s a third kind of mistake: “doing it, but based on deceit and self-deception.” That is, the war could have been vindicated (on my terms) by discovery of an active WMD program (in violation of longstanding UN resolutions, it should be remembered). A moderately competent reconstruction would have been a bonus. But it turned out that neither outcome was ever in the cards: Americans were actively misled by a thoroughly dishonorable, incompetent, deceitful administration.
That seems important to me: as a citizen, I’ve tended to give a president the benefit of the doubt when it comes to speaking of “smoking gun mushroom clouds,” feeling that at the end of the day I’m not privy to information the president has, nor are any number of think tank experts. In the event, I was very wrong to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. I think the threat that was painted in such bright colors was a persuasive one, and one that arguably warranted a war given Saddam’s track record. I don’t see which ideals would have been besmirched in that alternate reality. But the threat was a lie.
Put another way, if we’d had an honorable administration, they wouldn’t have been willing to push the war as they did in the absence of firm information. If there had indeed been WMD or WMD programs, they would have been able to prove it to the Senate, to Americans, and to the world in a way that would have made for more allies, which might have either led Saddam to back down, or made for a bigger occupation force, or at least made for a sense of the whole thing being worth it now (for me and I think most, but not for you).
But that’s all science fiction, because we didn’t have such an administration.
You make some good points (as usual), but I remain unconvinced that an invasion was proper and appropriate given the publicly available facts at the time and the known unknowns (as dear Rummy might put it). Doubt was not a benefit to be given to POTUS. It was there to be nurtured; a proper skepticism should have helped bring the facts to light. Doubt is given to us to compel more creative thinking and more collaborative action. (Most Americans would disagree, of course—positive thinking is good, negative thinking is bad; sunshine is good, darkness is bad; up is good, down is bad; all that crap. George W. Bush is their man.)
A lot of people had a hand in painting the fearful scenario of a Saddam left untoppled—Congress and the American press stoked the fear pretty well. When are we going to stop being afraid? That’s the question. Maybe around the same time we stop thinking we can do whatever we damn well please around the world.
I remain unconvinced that an invasion was proper and appropriate given the publicly available facts at the time and the known unknowns.
Nor am even I convinced of that. I should have put a “these guys stole the 2000 election, why wouldn’t they make this up, too” mental sign in front of the whole thing, but I didn’t. I separated the not-that-hard-to-believe (but obviously also the never-quite-proven-either, come-to-think-of-it) WMD message from the known-crook messenger, thinking the office and the responsibilities led to some kind of seriousness. A stupid, gullible thing to do.
You rightly speak of stopping being afraid; I think that’s true re terrorism generally. But the particular “Saddam+WMD” threat was a combination devoutly to be avoided, I think; the guy was (is!) ruthless, cruel, and above all both fairly irrational and utterly uncontrolled. A Stalin minus the smarts, given to gambles, with a long “productive” life with nukes or anthrax (I thought) ahead of him.
But we were already avoiding that. And I herewith stop (once more) with retrospective justifications of fictional situations.