Well, Iraq does not seem to be going very smoothly. There are no easy answers, but the strategic importance of the country demands success, and this is still entirely possible.
Given what is happening over there, I suppose rehashing the same old arguments about how we got there seems irrelevant. Nevertheless, one day historians who write a comprehensive history of this time period might wonder who, if anyone, they can argue is ultimately responsible for this conflict. No doubt many will balk at this question, arguing that of course Saddam Hussein started it, but without any stockpiles of ANY WMD, no physical threat to the US or its allies, and the apparent realization that Saddam was, more or less, behaving himself (with added tougher inspections to boot) I don’t really think that the argument is very sustainable.
No, the war was initiated by the United States, a war of choice as they say, and thus the answer to the question of “blame” must fall there.
There is a lot of blame to go around. The President, who exaggerated and distorted the evidence; the intelligence community, whose leaders insisted that the case was a “slam dunk,” despite the lack of conclusive evidence; the Republican Party who blindly followed an adventure at odds with its historical antipathy towards nation-building and being the worlds police; the Democratic Party for failing to expose any concern or hesitation about the conflict for fear of electoral punishment; certainly the media who, despite the successful conservative campaign to brand as liberal, beat the war drums perhaps as much or more as the administration (one example of many, remember the MSNBC show ominously titled “Countdown Iraq?”).
Ultimately however, the United States is a democracy, and as such the real blame for the conflict in Iraq, for better or for worse, must be shared, if not monopolized, by the American people. Personally, I don’t blame people for supporting the war early on in the face of such misconception. Even after the war, according to PIPA, 60% of Americans believed that evidence of an Iraq-bin Laden was irrefutable, evidence of WMD had been found, or world opinion favored the conflict. Of the people who did not hold ANY of these misconceptions, only 23% actually favored going to war (note that watchers of Fox News were the MOST likely to hold these misconceptions).
In other words, if PIPA is correct, the implication is that had Americans had all of the facts, almost 80% of the public would not have supported the war. Other polls bear me out on this. In 2004, PIPA reported that only 35% of Americans disagreed with the argument that invasion was still justified without any WMD’s.
So if Americans simply lacked correct information, how is it that they should be in any way accountable for the current conflict? The reason is that they chose not to hold accountable those who distributed this information even after the truth started making its way on TV (from print and on-line sources, the truth had always been there for anyone to see). The fact of the matter is that just as President Bush awarded the Pat Buchanan said in his endorcement of Bush for a second term despite his ideological disagreements with him. "No matter the quarrels inside the family, when the shooting starts, you come home to your own)
However, another part is psychological. In late 2003, 62% of Americans supported war with Iraq. The fact that so few does today means that many people who once supported the war no longer do. I give these people credit.
It’s hard to admit that you were wrong. A short review of my past debates on the HNN reveals that people who supported the war from the beginning have not changed their tunes one iota, despite the obviously changing reality. People do not want to admit that perhaps they were mistaken and so they refused to believe it. Far worse however, is that people did not want to admit that, especially in a post 9/11 world, the American government may have been wrong! If the war is wrong, than American troops have died needlessly (or worse, died to institute a major foreign policy failure). This is a troubling prospect. It is far easier to assume, as this administration does, that the “mistake” is the fault of someone else. The blame lies with Iraq, or some hidden, faceless thing called “intelligence.” Certainly however, it wasn’t the administration, or military leaders, or intelligence leaders. Hmmm, maybe we can just blame the media, that almost always works, right? I don’t think so.
I am not arguing that Americans should vote for Democrats in order to hold someone accountable (although in point of fact this is my own intent). I would not ask conservatives to support non-conservatives for revenge. I would ask, and expect however that Republican voters hold their leaders accountable by supporting some other candidate, perhaps in state and local primaries, which has been unsoiled by pro-war herd mentality.
In 2004, Americans by and large rewarded those who were most responsible for the conflict in Iraq and that is why they must share in any evaluation of what went wrong the process. The elections of 2006 are coming and I have no reason to be optimistic, but we shall see.
PS: I am trying to find some catchy nickname for this blog and have tentatively decided to go by Cram for the time being (I no, not very catchy, but I’m still thinking)
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2 comments:
Marc:
"It’s hard to admit that you were wrong. A short review of my past debates on the HNN reveals that people who supported the war from the beginning have not changed their tunes one iota, despite the obviously changing reality. People do not want to admit that perhaps they were mistaken and so they refused to believe it."
These are some pretty decisive statements. They also do not track. What does the current situation in Iraq have to do with the truth of the causes for going in to Iraq? If there had been no insurgency, would that have meant that we shouldn't explore the causes?
Beyond that, everything you have categorically asserted is still under serious debate. There is evidence that the fighting in Iraq is having positive effects. And there was plenty of reason to go there in the first place. The "the war was fought for nonexistent-WMDs" line is as tired as it is wrong. Read the congressional resolution in support of the war. WMD is one issue among a whole laundry list. The fact that the president didn't communicate the reasons very well does not mean that they weren't there. The truth is that I have yet to hear a single credible reason of why we shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq.
You are correct that the American people are ultimately who deserve the credit or blame. And to their credit, they got what the war was about at the most basic level, and that was why they supported it for so long. The repeated distortions about our motivations and the situation in Iraq in the mainstream media have started to take their toll.
That is something you should be fighting, not supporting, because there is not a single positive consequence of this constant insistence that the American people were and are wrong on Iraq.
Let me respond a bit out of order. Yes, the reasons were primarily related to national security, although everyone noted that Saddam was a tyrant. But they were and are good reasons, and I've seen nothing to persuade me otherwise. That includes George H.W. Bush's justification for not invading Iraq in 1991. The situation changed quite a bit, as the reponses to each of your points will indicate.
1) The evidence that Iraq posed a national security threat was and is convincing, and that issue became pressing in the aftermath of 9/11. Saddam Hussein had a long history of hostility to the US (he tried to kill a former president), he had access to vast sums of money, and he had connections to terrorists (at least Palestinian suicide bombers, and very likely, as Stephen Hayes has shown, members of al Qaeda of al Qaeda-type groups).
2) Hussein resisted sanctions at every turn and consistently blocked the efforts of weapons inspectors. He acted like he was hiding something. At the same time, he was giving aid to terrorist groups.
3) Military planners were pretty certain Afghanistan was stable enough for the military to be deployed elsewhere (see Tommy Franks' book for example), and they were right. My guess is that we haven't captured bin Laden because he has hid in Iran and/or Pakistan--a problem that has nothing to do with overstretching the military.
4) For the record, I think that President Bush has made a serious mistake in not seriously expanding our military after 9/11. That said, I do not understand the logic of keeping all of our troops and money in reserve for fighting a possible war when we are already fighting a war. But the bigger point is that you are talking about a shortage of will on our part to expand the military, not a reason to avoid a conflict in Iraq.
5) and 6) These two points are premised on the belief that Saddam Hussein was not an active enemy of the US. Saddam was a destabilizing force in the Middle East. He supported terrorism and he threatened his neighbors. An unstable Iraq with a chance for some sort of democracy that is more friendly to the US is an improvement over an destablizing Iraq that is hostile to the US.
I've seen no evidence that the invasion of Iraq has increased the numbers of terrorists, and since the polls I linked indicate that the terrorists and their tactics are becoming increasingly unpopular in the Muslim world, it looks like the opposite will be the case. We might be unpopular, but I'm kind of okay with that--the French don't like us, but they don't try to blow us up. Our popularity will increase if we do what we said we'd do, and stick to it.
But we cannot do that if prominent political leaders, media-types, and intellectuals continually insist (as if it were an undisputed fact) that our reasons for going to war were wrong and that we are losing a fight that is going well in many ways. This attitude is not a conspiracy--it is the result of many factors, including overboard partisan hostility toward the president (including for too many in the media), attempts to get big scoops by journalists, and the existence of an echo chamber among people who refuse to even acknowledge that there are opposing viewpoints/explanations out there.
The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that the extreme wing of the Democratic party influences the party far too much. If the Democrats want to have a chance, they need to criticize how the war is being fought, not whether or not it should have been fought in Iraq. Because the truth is that it should have been fought in Iraq, but it could have been done better.
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