I. The cause
The anatomy of a mistake is difficult to dissect. It’s easy to tell why people do the right things at the proper times – the results bear out their decisions in a coherence of intent with action. It’s much harder to reach why wrong decisions were made because the chaos of the result often obliterates the intent of the original decision. To paraphrase Kennedy: a good war has many fathers, a bad one is an orphan. Who will adopt this child of Iraq?
The world’s support was squandered quickly. After the terror attacks against the US on Sept. 11, 2001, the world was unified in sympathy behind us and the mission ahead was clearly marked. Once we knew who was behind it, a group called al Qaeda, and where they were, in Afghanistan, protected by an illegitimate, brutal and fanatical regime called the Taliban, there could be no doubt what we would do. The President spoke eloquently on the topic. We would search them out and bring them to justice. The nation was perfectly united in this simple, just and straightforward precept. Using an armed faction of the Afghani opposition our military and this administration soon devised and executed a brilliant strategic dismantling of the Taliban.
Then the policy mysteriously begins to lose its way. Apparently tiring of doing the nation’s business the Bush Administration decided to engage in a little of its own. The arch-sociopath, Osama in Laden, and his key henchmen were beleaguered and on the run, perhaps even ill or wounded, in the Tora Bora mountains in Northern Afghanistan. The US, with the best, largest and most mobile military establishment in the world, our sacred honor at stake, because we didn’t even bother putting enough troops on the ground to do the job, farmed out the operation of capturing the villains to a bunch of shadowy warlords with allegiances as shifting as the results were predictable. They allowed him to go free and he remains so today, years later.
The only reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place was not to fight the Taliban, they were incidental to our purpose, but to capture the ones who had attacked us, the leadership of al Qaeda. We did not fulfill the President’s oft-repeated boast, “they can run but they can’t hide.” So far, as of this date, by its own logic, in service of the national interest, the war in Afghanistan has failed in its purpose.
It is impossible to roll back history. But imagine for an instant that we had captured bin Laden and then not gotten sidetracked and lost in the war in Iraq. If we had just gone home with a clean and decisive victory and not immediately afforded the terrorists another angle of attack against us, can you conceive of a more salutary and imperious message to have sent to the world? If you attack us, wherever you are, even half way around the globe, we will come get you, rout your supporters, drag you out of the hole you’ve crawled into and bring you to calm, transparent, deliberate and certain justice for your crimes. If we had just done the simple and obvious thing instead of what we have done, we would today be more feared by our enemies and more respected and trusted by our friends. But we didn’t and so we aren’t. I know it’s impossible to quantify but hard to escape the thought that this was our last best chance for a shortened war. It is not hard to believe that 85% of the war on this sub-sect and super extreme brand of international terrorism could have been won with just one well timed and decisively placed blow against it at the outset.
Every war has its jugular, every enemy its weakness and you generally only get one chance to cut it. Yet when the jugular was there for the severing, exposed to our grasp, inexplicably, the Bush administration did not strike. It did not even seem to realize its importance. Why did they say one thing while doing another? What distracted us from our stated purpose, the one that we had all signed on to while at the same time abandoning victory in Afghanistan almost to chance? Was this a catastrophic dereliction in leadership or a failure of will or just the limits of our understanding?
For whatever reason the Bush folks secretly decided to go a different way and fight the war they had always wanted to fight rather than finish the one they had already started fighting. The first casualty in the war in Iraq then might legitimately be said to have been victory against the real terrorists in Afghanistan. How this bait and switch in purpose from one theater of war to the other happened is only made clear from tracking the symptoms of the fatal illness back to their obscure sources. It seems there were five main strains of thinking which led us to the decision to go to war with Iraq how and when we did. I present them here in reverse order of precedence and influence.
1) The National Interest – Once all other rationales given for the Iraq war evaporated – self-defense, getting al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), imminent threat of nuclear war, etc. – we have been left with only one man standing. That is the incongruous and doubtful principle of spreading democracy undemocratically, preemptively, contrary to our history and whether they want it or not, through force of arms. Yet tearing a nation down to the ground and building it back up again, particularly when done unilaterally, on the strength of bad information and in the teeth of the whole world’s opposition, was an astonishingly expensive, unjustifiable and unsustainable policy from the outset. This war has never had a national interest to it because for the US its benefits could have never possibly outweighed its costs.
2) Politics – The public, rumors to the contrary, loves a good war. Military action is invariably rewarded with unblinking nationalistic support and an upsurge in the polls for the instigators. It is prickly to criticize a president engaged in it. This war was conceived with politics as one of its primary motives and sold like any common, third-rate legislative initiative. The enabling legislation was hastened to a vote prior to the midterm elections, effectively tamping all illuminating debate down to a democratic minimum. This was done the way it was done when it was done primarily to allow the party in power to dictate the issues in the 2002 elections, by successfully substituting swagger for good sense, jingoism for substance.
3) Big Money – as in the Military/Industrial/Petroleum complex. Eisenhower famously cautioned against letting powerful, big money interests exercise too much influence on governmental policy. In this government the outside has been incestuously brought indoors. There is no clear arm of separation between contractors and government anywhere at all. The Bush administration is the M.I.P. Complex and it is them and together they are cheating us. It is sobering to realize that despite the massive costs of this war to the taxpayer nearly everyone close to and personally involved in this government, especially those most rabidly and publicly in favor of the war, stands to profit personally from it, one way or another; before, during or after.
4) Ideology – Clearly certain ideologues in the White House and Defense Dept. wanted this war long before a rhetorical need and basis for it could be contrived. These are heirs to the same bully cabal which has authored all our greatest foreign policy fiascos, which they never learn from. A short list attributable to them running through the Cold War to the present would include the McCarthy red scares, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iran-Contra and now Iraq. They always feature the same irrational paranoia, coupled with wild exaggeration, huge errors in judgment, and deep cynicism in action. They take place in minor theaters peripheral to the main cause of concern and, against a backdrop of wholly imaginary crisis, they propose we overreact wildly to the smallest provocation in absolute inverse proportion to the actual nature these threats potentially represent.
It’s because of the perennial lack of perspective of a certain few of our political class that our greatest defeats and most self-destructive behavior always comes against our weakest enemies. Thus you have the persecution and blackballing of everyone from Hollywood scriptwriters in the fifties to the Dixie Chicks today. And foreign policy preoccupation and overreaction to such international featherweights as Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Danny Ortega and the aging Saddam Hussein twelve years after his nation’s resources had been pulverized in the Gulf War.
5) George W. Bush – Absent the odd obsession of the Commander-in-Chief this war would not have occurred. Upon election he surrounded himself with advisors who frankly despised the successfully internationalist orientation of his father’s foreign policy. He seemed to possess an unseemly, oddly oedipal desire to undo or redo or outdo the greatest triumph of his father’s presidency and put his own stamp on it. In public his supporters spoke of the Gulf War victory as disrespectfully as if it had been a great defeat. Yet the most profound error which his father’s advisors had been wise enough to avoid, creating a power vacuum in the heart of the most volatile and anti-American region of the world, the son plunged headlong into at his first available opportunity. Never has a president taken and sought such personal responsibility for a war prior to it and then so facilely and disingenuously denied all responsibility for its disastrous consequences afterwards.
II. The rationale
Although it steadfastly has tried to deny it, it is inarguable that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a primary goal of this administration from the start. All available evidence clearly shows that the wheels for war with Iraq were ineluctably set in motion in the President’s mind a few days after 9/11 and never stopped turning thereafter.
There are many independent accounts of how high administration officials worked to cook the books on intelligence on Iraq, turning rumors quickly into facts, conjectures into certainties and sheer illusion into policy. We need not recount all the instances here but the very necessity of having to engage in such obvious distortions to locate a reason to go to Iraq illustrates just how self-consciously aware they were of how weak their real justifications were. By July 23, 2002, leaked British documents with no reason to exaggerate the point, state unequivocally, in a telling turn of phrase, that “facts were being fixed around the policy” to justify it.
Their first ploy was to knot Saddam to bin Laden as inextricably together as a snake with a head at each end. Unfortunately, the only field contact they could locate was one al Qaeda guy going to Iraq for personal medical treatment and then leaving again. There was far more evidence of al Qaeda operatives in every country in Europe and most states in this country than all the intelligence agencies of the world between them could find evidence of in Iraq. That did not stop our government from sticking without proof to their allegation of intricate ties between the two, even to the point of implying that Saddam had somehow been personally complicit in the 9/11 attack. Vice President Cheney spoke alarmingly and meretriciously of the danger of Iraq serving as the geographical nexus where weapons of mass destruction would “likely” unite with terrorists unless we acted hastily. But, in fact, as we were soon to learn, Iraq happened to be the one nation in the world, since neither necessary element was present, where this eventuality was least likely to occur.
Supposedly then, as a head on assault against al Qaeda, even though we knew exactly where the actual head of the snake of al Qaeda was hiding, our government diverted our primary attention away from those who had viciously attacked us in our own country and swore they would do it again, to direct twenty times the force against a nation that not only didn’t have al Qaeda, but hadn’t attacked us, didn’t claim they wanted to and hadn’t the capability to attack us if they had, and called this a vital body blow against terrorism.
Surely this gives new meaning to the _expression “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” Aside from any temporary disorientation they may have felt at being attacked somewhere other than were they were, it’s impossible to see how invading Iraq inconvenienced our enemies in the least but easy to see how it has greatly assisted them since. You must understand then, if you are to understand anything about this war, that the war in Iraq was not done to advance the war against terror but done contrary to the purpose of that war, distinct from it and at its ultimate expense. The war on terrorism may have served as cover for the war in Iraq but by no means was it a part of its logical extension.
Having once determined to fight a war in conjunction with the war on terrorism which had nothing to do with the terrorism we were at war with, many other reasons were feverishly auditioned in favor of it, most designed to engender irrational fear and haste, to excite a mob temperament and to confound public opinion beneath a blizzard of extraneous facts impossible to refute in the shortened time frame available. The sum of all this, by cynical design, was to curtail normal and legitimate democratic debate, subvert any reasoned analysis and quell all calm public deliberation in our rush to war. For the record none, not one, of the rationales advanced for this war prior to this war have turned out to be true.
III. The run-up
Before the start of the war, once he had accumulated all the best evidence in favor of it, George Tenet, the director of the CIA, displayed it to the President. Frustrated with what he saw, Bush told Tenet that the case was not nearly persuasive enough. This has been used by some as proof that the President was honestly trying to get at the truth of the matter. But then, on the strength of no additional evidence (and what legitimate evidence could there have been to prove something which didn’t exist?), just a few moments later the President was suddenly persuaded when Tenet assured him that it was a “slam dunk case.” Tough sell. Apparently it was a basketball metaphor and believable public relations, more than any actual additional facts, on which the decision to take us to war ultimately rested. From that point on there was apparently no further meaningful consultation, just fatal preoccupation, unnecessary preemption and belligerent notification.
In the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA presented a similarly flawed analysis to the Kennedy Administration. Eisenhower, who had made many difficult command decisions in his life, asked Kennedy if he had set up a coherent vetting process in the White House in which all the pros and cons of the case could be properly assessed by all the relevant experts available. Kennedy hadn’t. George Bush didn’t either. Kennedy, though his efforts at consultation and honesty far surpassed Bush’s, apologized to the public for his loose mismanagement and poor judgment. George Bush hasn’t bothered.
As if all this were not duplicitous and incompetent enough the Bush people had even more dire ammunition to scare the public with. Right before the war was to start, in response to a question about its costs, the President replied with disdain, “Hey if Saddam attacked us with nuclear weapons that would be bad for the economy too, wouldn’t it?” This is an interesting statement as it stands but half way through it George Bush stopped and corrected himself, “I mean, if “a” Saddam were to attack us with nuclear weapons… etc.” A journalist might have asked, “But Mr. President, if it’s true that it would be bad to be attacked by “a” Saddam-like tyrant who had a nuclear weapon, and who could argue with that, then how come we are preparing to attack “the” actual Saddam Hussein whom we know perfectly well doesn’t? And since he doesn’t why raise the terrible specter of nuclear conflagration to a nation still queasy and uncertain after 9/11 unless to frighten the American people into support for a war which has no military justification or moral legitimacy and whose timing couldn’t be worse for our country or for our standing in the Muslim world? But, of course, the question wasn’t asked.
But with the addition of a simple qualifying article “a” George Bush seemed to show that he knew perfectly well where the actual truth lay and where it didn’t but, as if it were a game he was playing, the truth was something for him to know and for us to try to find out.
Then, almost in spite of themselves and to their apparent consternation, even while dismissing the U.N. with their usual knee jerk claims of fecklessness and vacillation; when compelled by public opinion, the administration put their case to the United Nations, they actually won a 15-0 vote in the Security Council putting weapon inspectors back on the ground in Iraq. After claiming that international sanctions had never worked, they worked. Halleluiah! Saddam would be reshackled, we could win his disarmament without a shot being fired, all our options in the war on terror would remain open and time was once more firmly on our side. We had reasserted our world leadership and now we could win the war in Afghanistan and deal with Saddam from a position of renewed strength at our leisure. If WMD were found they would be destroyed on the spot. If proven not to exist, a costly and mistaken war would be averted, countless lives saved. And if it turned out we had to go to war anyway it would be with right firmly on our side and a much stronger and more united international coalition at our back.
Yet, strangely, no sooner were the weapons inspectors in place than the administration began to denigrate and abuse them as corrupt and dishonest for not being quicker to uncover proof of that which had never existed. Even as it became more and more evident that the evidence wasn’t going to materialize to support our allegations, we chose to attack anyway. If it was true that we were only going to war as a matter of last resort, as the administration claimed, only reluctantly, after all other options had been exhausted, then clearly this behavior was senseless. If we had only waited six months the last remaining cause for hostilities would have been removed.
We acted in such haste that one would have almost thought the administration didn’t really believe its own propaganda. After all, who better to understand the weakness of their slam dunk case for war than those who had had to work so hard to manufacture it all the while suppressing all the far more persuasive evidence to the contrary? Clearly the Bush Administration’s impatience for war can only be explained by an unutterable fear, not fear that WMD existed and would be found, but fear that it had never existed and wouldn’t be. This administration wasn’t concerned that they would be forced to go to war nearly as much as they feared that they wouldn’t be allowed to.
After spending so much wasted time and effort wildly overestimating the martial prowess of Iraq, presumably so they could later exaggerate the magnitude of their triumph in the euphoria of an easy win over an astonishingly weak and nearly defenseless adversary, the false momentum the war hawks had engineered toward preemptive war had grown too alluring for them to resist. The troops had already been prematurely maneuvered into place, the no-bid contracts to their friendly contractors had already been let and their political credibility had already been too deeply invested for them to turn back from this “defensive” war they said had been unjustly thrust upon us.
Therefore, knowing full well that in war success often provides its own cover and justification, the Bush Administration chose a preemptive attack on Iraq whether there was any demonstrable cause for the attack or not. In other words, the administration attacked Iraq solely in the hopes that a quick victory would make people forget about why we went to war in the first place. They took us into war almost assuredly with the full knowledge that all the reasons they had given as to why we needed to go war at all were totally invalid. There can be no other explanation for their actions.
IV. The execution
If the run up to war was not discreditable enough, its execution may have been even more distressing. It has seldom happened in history that a nation has fought a nearly identical war against the same foe twice in the space of twelve years. This makes the costs and results of the two wars uniquely able to be compared. Yet even though we had very successfully fought almost precisely the same war twelve years earlier, this Bush team deliberately chose to take everything that had worked to near perfection then and do exactly the opposite now.
This was unusual strategy. It can’t be that the two administrations in question were not well acquainted with each other. They are of the same political party, most of the names of the key players in both wars are the same and this Bush is son and namesake of the previous president. If any other president had been confronted with the unpleasant prospect of another war with Saddam surely, just for the sake of continuity, the first persons they would have contacted would have been George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker to coordinate policy and profit from their vast and invaluable first hand experience of waging war in the region.
Yet not only is there no sign that such consultation took place but rather that it was conscientiously avoided. Perhaps they believed that in warfare, unlike anything else in life, too much knowledge and preparation might actually be a bad thing. In truth, it is hard to avoid the thought that members of this Bush Administration felt themselves in some sort of dire competition with the previous Bush Administration. What that competition might be and what benefit their winning this imaginary competition would offer the American people is hard to conceive. Unfortunately, the cost for their losing it is something we are all still too deep in the throes of to fully understand.
How else can anyone explain diplomacy that was not really diplomacy at all, but a series of crude and arrogant ultimatums delivered by our President to the rest of the world? The thrust of it was something on the order of: “Do what we say, how we say it, when we say it with no say in it or we will do it by ourselves and put the entire burden on the American taxpayer and hope to get even with you later.” When you also understand that all these demands we were so belligerently making were all predicated on artificially engendered duress and bogus intelligence, it is hard to imagine a presentation less intelligently designed to galvanize the support of the world behind us.
What the point was of the curious stratagem of treating all of our closest and oldest friends more like enemies than allies is hard to fathom. Even Don Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, not exactly renowned for his diplomatic skill and finesse, got into the act by gratuitously dismissing most of NATO as “old Europe” in the sense of being doddering, unenlightened and unworthy even of being taken seriously. Just prior to the war he even did his best to strip us of our sole great support left by dismissing Great Britain as an unnecessary appendage to our efforts in Iraq. Fortunately for us, Britain was big enough to overlook this small minded insult and British troops were there at our sides when the shooting started. If they hadn’t been, the black hole this administration has plunged us into would have been dug even deeper and darker.
Although it seems insane to suggest it, from their behavior one would have almost thought that this government didn’t want real allies in this war. It almost seemed as if they were willing to let the American military and American taxpayer suffer a lack of allies rather than subject the commercial and political interests they must believe they really represent to fair competition for the limitless spoils and glory they envisioned flowing their way in great profusion post war.
In retrospect it’s easy to see that the Gulf War of 1991 actually improved our position in the world. It strengthened old alliances and created new ones with old enemies. By operating in strong concert with international and world organizations we provided renewed support to the rule of law in the world – the only effective and enduring bulwark that civilization has so far devised to defeat the evil and chaos we are fighting. In addition, we accomplished the stated goals of the war, proved our military’s superiority and got our troops out in good order with many taxpayer costs defrayed by the non-military partners in the coalition. True to our great history, it was surely on the strength of such careful consultations and skillful diplomacy, such good neighborliness and sound leadership, that the rest of the world was there to offer their support without our even having to ask for it after 9/11. It is far from certain that such unqualified support would still be there for us under similar circumstances today, just five years later.
This Iraq war, however, so artfully designed to be the mirror reverse of the first Gulf War, has succeeded remarkably well at that at least. It has undercut international law, harmed our position in the world community and left us worse off diplomatically, militarily, financially and in the war against terror than we were before it. And all of this against a ruined nation with an aging, spent dictator that didn’t represent but a tenth of the threat in 2003 that the previous Bush faced in 1991. And sure enough, as anyone could have predicted, pretty soon George W. Bush, hat in hand but with nothing to offer, came back to all the same nations he had treated so cavalierly prior to the war to ask for their help after it. It has not been readily forthcoming.
And if the diplomacy was bizarre how can one square the military strategy in this war with the last? As former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the first Gulf War no one had more expertise of strategic matters in Iraq than Colin Powell. Slavish in their devout avoidance of experience and excellence, however, this administration gave their own Secretary of State no role in either planning the war or winning the peace in Iraq. They left that to Don Rumsfeld, who has displayed military abilities every bit the equal of his diplomatic ones. Instead of simply building on the military tactics that had worked so exceptionally well in the past that they had actually been named the Powell Doctrine, Rumsfeld, as if in a childish fit of pique, unaccountably chose to fight his war with underwhelming force, with no significant allied support and no hint of an exit strategy anywhere to be found.
There is a pattern evolving which might be called the Bush/Rumsfeld Doctrine. This administration has started two wars, both conceived on the cheap, each open ended affairs, putting neither enough troops in them to win them nor with the faintest idea of where the fulcrum point of force might be applied in either to ever successfully end them. Unsurprisingly, both still rage on unresolved and their costs to the American people and military continue to climb.
Meanwhile, all the good analysts and honest generals who actually did their jobs properly and had all their projections right before the war have been rudely shushed or disgracefully replaced so that the Bush Administration’s tyranny of intellectual and moral mediocrity may perpetuate itself unquestioned. Both George Tenet and Don Rumsfeld have received the same faint praise from the President for job performance, “Superb,” he said. Perhaps a greater overstatement of dramatic underperformance has never been uttered in our nation’s history.
What can it possibly be about this war that causes all our honest, well-intentioned statesmen to act in ways not only precisely contrary to the nation’s best interests but to all their own publicly stated beliefs? When George Bush ran for office in 2000 in one of the debates with Al Gore he delivered one of his few foreign policy statements of the campaign. He said that he was categorically opposed to the stationing of troops overseas for long, open-ended deployments. He was unshakably against the very concept of nation building. Then he looked straight into the camera and into the eye of the American people and told us that he believed in a “humble” foreign policy. With the war in Iraq he broke each of these rules in turn.
Despite the fact that he has backed us into the most complex and ambitious nation building exercise in our nation’s history, the President apparently still doesn’t believe in nation building. Or at least not in doing it well, or he wouldn’t have put Don Rumsfeld and his staff, who’ve always derided such niceties as effeminate, in charge of it. Out of all the capable people in the country with experience in such matters, in addition to the burden of all their other duties, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and their collection of ideologues might be the least able people in the country with the diplomatic craft and patience, or the historical perspective and religious nuance, necessary to make such a complicated endeavor work. Before the war George Bush gave a speech about the future of Iraq in which he failed to devote even one passing word of acknowledgment to the thousands of years of extraordinary history in the region, as if present time were a blackboard eternally wiped clean, leaving the past and future devoid of any apparent relation to one another. Apparently this administration’s master plan for peace in Iraq was so ingenious in design that it required no planning at all.
One might excuse these massive oversights, as frightened apologists excuse any governmental malfeasance nowdays with the banal catch-all, “Ah well, since 9/11 everything’s changed.” Not true. Fundamentals are never changed by crisis, except that they become much, much more important to pay much, much closer attention to.
So at the very same time our leadership was on their one hand extolling Saddam Hussein as the greatest warlord in the world, if not in history, in bed with al Qaeda and in possession of unbelievable amounts of terrible weaponry; on their other, since they knew this was just copious smoke they were blowing, they proceeded to plan for this war as if it would be a walk in the park on a Sunday afternoon. While they frightened the American people into thinking we had no option but to fight this fearsome nuclear beast before he attacked us in our homes; in private planning our leaders broke the cardinal rule of military science, they underestimated their opponent and didn’t even bother to plan contingencies if things didn’t work out as splendidly as they hoped.
Even less forgivably, as if this were not already enough, while they cut corners diplomatically and militarily with such ruinous results to our troops, they have also cut corners ethically to the detriment of the nation’s reputation and the imminent danger to all Americans, particularly those living and traveling overseas. When the strictures of the Geneva Convention, one of the true load bearing pillars of international law and order, to their weak and unimaginative minds, stood temporarily in their way, they simply chose to ignore its jurisdiction. They had fatuous papers written by legal hacks dismissing it as “quaint” and bent the definition of torture to be acceptable to anything this side of a prisoner’s actual death at the hands of his captors.
After they sanctioned its use at the highest levels when, for the first time in our history, widespread torture and prisoner abuse was reported in our military prisons on three continents and became embarrassingly public to the world through photos, the White House disingenuously denied culpability. Blandly the President replied that he had secretly supported the Geneva Convention all along and then proceeded to keep in place, promote and praise the very ones who had authored the abuses. He authorized an investigation/cover-up which caught a few soldiers and one female National Guard general in a web woven so loosely that you might have thought it was designed expressly to let all the higher-ups actually responsible for the implementation of the policy slip through its cracks.
The irrepressible Rumsfeld, with his genius for the absurd in the midst of astonishing incompetence, for his part, at a Congressional hearing when asked about these abuses, pretending as if he had just had a thought, turned to a subaltern and asked out loud, “Wait, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we consult an attorney on these matters?” As if like a forged note from his mommy in second grade, permission from a lawyer on his payroll could grant him preemptory exoneration for all of his irresponsible acts.
To this day, since it is not technically US soil, the Bush administration still prefers to claim that at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba no laws apply at all, not American, not International, not even natural law, apparently, none. Naively, many Americans had trusted that wherever the American flag flew there American law and American standards and principles of justice would prevail. Apparently this administration has found an amoral loophole in the law which from their vantage point renders our flag into just another rag hanging on a stick.
V. The result
Democracy doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however, and if this war was so obviously contrary to the public good in retrospect, then where was Congress, where was the Press beforehand? It will be hard for someone in years to come to understand how the horror of the attacks of 9/11, especially among opinion makers in New York and Washington where these horrific attacks took place, infused events with a kind of second hand smoke which clouded all subsequent deliberations in a haze of fear and easily manipulated doubt and uncertainty. This led to a kind of strange intellectual enervation, a rare gullibility, which allowed even the most specious, jaundiced and insupportable assertions to stand unchallenged by our fatally traumatized opinion makers.
Within the administration itself the terror attack had the immediate effect of transferring power away from the more knowledgeable and contemplative State Department into the hands of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense. In a major foreign policy crisis this meant that control of our foreign policy actually shifted away from those with greatest experience and acumen in foreign affairs and gave it to amateurs and ideologues that had the least. This led to a disconnection into which a kind of hubris grew which exacerbated all the preexisting flaws in the make-up of this administration which might in calmer times have stayed submerged harmlessly in the background and elevated them to the forefront.
The more these so-called neo-cons waved the flag and spoke hollowly of the great cause of democracy and America’s historic mission in the world publicly, privately their least democratic tendencies were unleashed within the administration’s bureaucracy to shore up their own bases of power. This has let in-fighting power brokers operate with too much autonomy, to the exclusion of information sharing, oversight and consultation with other moderating branches of government. And ultimately eventuated in an unprecedented personalization of policy, a politicization of intelligence, a polarization of the electorate and freed all manner of personal prejudices to creep into policy decisions on all levels, even while the public, like the proverbial mushroom, has been left more and more in the dark as to their government’s true intentions and beliefs.
At the same time the President’s own paranoia, as sometimes happens when events grow to large for one’s mind to grasp, turned inside out and translated into an odd and disturbing messianism based less on fact than on misconstrued faith, less on knowledge than on self-destiny colored with wishful thinking and less on democratic management than on a presumed (but non-existent) dictatorial prerogative.
And I suppose some supporters might have been forgiven for actually believing that the unlikely pipe dream of an easy win in Iraq was coming true when, in probably the most grotesque example of grandstanding in American presidential history, George Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln (apparently oblivious to the potentially unflattering irony of the comparison) in his never used flight jacket and prematurely declared, in essence, that he and he alone had already won the war he had so needlessly manufactured the need for. The sailors and soldiers around him were but pawns to his oedipal dream, his mano a mano face off the mighty Saddam, and the military might of the nation just an expendable tool to his grandiose design.
That was three years ago and yet from all this mass litany of loss not one tangible benefit has returned to the American people to balance the incalculable sacrifice of our troops from the debacle in Iraq. When George Bush used to speak of the war he bragged, “Iraq is much better off today than it was before the war.” Notice that he and his supporters have long since left off making such a debatable claim but notice too, that they have never once dared claim that the United States is better off on account of this war.
VI. The aftermath
As for our troops they have been left with no end in sight and no clear way home. They are stretched too thin to accomplish the mission they have been given. Their bodies are transported home in secrecy, their names reduced to numbers and no senior official of the Bush Administration is even willing to attend a memorial to honor their sacrifice.
This leaves only one stark question left to be answered: did high members of the Bush Administration use the war on terror to deceive the American people into a separate war whose purpose and necessity they intentionally misrepresented? The short answer is yes, of course they did. No one expects 100% accuracy in governmental policy, some mistakes are bound to creep into any complex endeavor. We prefer perfection but don’t demand it. However, as hard as it is to be 100% right about something in life it is nearly as rare to be 100% wrong about something. No matter how sordid your intention some truth or competence will invariably seep into it from somewhere, even if by sheer chance.
Therefore, rather than waste time and generate endless controversy about whether, when and if this administration may have lied about the war in Iraq, it is probably more profitable to ask when, whether and if ever, anyone in this administration has said anything in public about the war with Iraq that has actually turned out to be true. If on a bet someone had been intentionally trying to get everything wrong they could not have achieved a more thoroughgoing triumph at it than the Bush Administration has achieved in Iraq by accident. If you can believe it, their best defense for all their errors is that they were not dishonest at their jobs but merely supremely incompetent at them, as if (as they seem to expect) we should take some comfort in that.
In fact, malfeasance in office this comprehensive and pernicious can have only two possible explanations – incompetence or dishonesty – either separately or together, there is no other conclusion to be drawn. What percentage of responsibility you choose to assign to either of these options to account for their errors is up to you. But to the exact degree they weren’t dishonest they must have been incompetent and to the precise extent beyond which they didn’t know what they were doing then they have to have lied. As far as the public is concerned it can hardly matter, either way, no matter what, neither explanation is acceptable.
Still, even late coming critics of the war in Washington try to maintain the fiction that their rabid support for the war prior to it was an “honest” mistake, one that might have happened at any time and to any administration in our past. That’s not true. This has been a perfect storm of incompetence and deceit, shot through with ulterior motives of fear and greed, poor judgment, bully politics and bad management. The entire Washington political establishment has sold us out in this war, including the majority of the Press and both political parties. Only the troops in the field may be said to have adequately performed their jobs. And though all but the most obstinate and self-serving agree now that the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake, make no mistake about it, there has never been anything even remotely honest about it.
