Heh, I almost feel badly that Christopher Hitchens has given this book a good review ... could be the kiss of death in some circles. I shall, nonetheless, add it to my book list.

Currently, I'm reading Understanding Terror Networks, which is a bit of a slog. I could use a spot of good writing.

Thanks.

mp

I'm gonna continue to object to this formulation whenever I see it (from the link):

The first was essentially an honest mistake; almost all knowledgeable observers thought Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons programs, although they disagreed about how to handle the problem and the fears proved overblown.

While this characterization was true at the time of the Senate vote on giving Bush authority to wage the war, it was absolutely clear, before the invasion, in March 2003 that it was inaccurate.

According to the UN reports by alBaraedi and Blix  there was no threat from any prohibited weapons program,  there was no nuclear program,  there were no weapons where the US had  said there were and it was entirely possible that there were no weapons or programs whatosoever.

To claim that the invasion took place during a point in time when there was a consensus that Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons program is entirely wrong. 

How can the prospect of spreading democracy via the barrel of a gun be exciting to liberals?

Luigi, the US spread democracy via the barrel of a gun to Italy, Japan and Germany. More recently, liberals were rightly enthusiastic about sending US troops to Bosnia to enforce a settlement of the civil war there and attempt to create a stable democratic government. Liberals supported the NATO war against Serbia over Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. When the Milosevic government fell in the aftermath of the Serbian defeat, we rightly felt that the war had been decisive in bringing genuine democracy to Serbia. Finally, liberals supported the US/Northern Alliance war against the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which has brought a tentative and struggling democratic government to that country.

Liberals who rightly opposed the Iraq war from the get-go did so because it lacked a. a legitimate casu belli, hence b. international support, c. any reasonable likelihood of success to outweight the lives that would be lost, and d. it was being run by idiots, so it was foreseeable that it would degenerate into madness and chaos. But it would be a tragedy if the criminal negligence that is the Iraq war were to dissuade liberals from supporting future military action in a genuine political and humanitarian emergency, such as the genocide in Darfur or defense of democracy in Taiwan. The notion that force of arms is never necessary or useful in the defense of stability and democracy against chaos and fascism is just as dangerous a fantasy as are the imperialist daydreams of the Bushite neocons who launched the Iraq war.

The frequent assertions before the war, and still today, that Saddam was a "psycopath" are very misleading and unhelpful rhetorical flourishes without precise meaning.  If intended only to convey that Saddam was a ruthless killer, then they are accurate.  But they often seem to carry the suggestion that Saddam was an impulsive and unpredicatable madman, who was capable of anything, no matter how foolish and self-destructive. And that is not born out by the evidence

Saddam was indeed ruthless, and took Stalin as his model, but he was also a cold, calculating political survivor.  His behavior was "rational" in the sense that his actions represented plausible assessments of means, in light of his own selfish ends.  He had certainly miscalculated in the past, but had never done things that were completely nutty and inexplicable.  He had never attacked the United States.  At the time of the invasion, he seems to have been following a complex strategy of persuading his neighbors that he was not so weak that they should consider attacking him; while at the same time trying to convince the United States that he was not so strong that need fear him.  He was not implicated in terrorism against the United States, and the Salafist jihadists so active in other parts of the Arab world were not much welcome in Baathist Iraq.

His regime in 2002 and early 2003 was a wreck of its former self.  He was boxed in on two sides by no-fly zones, and had lost much political control over the north and south.  His army was a wreck; his economy in shambles.  All indications were that he was simply engaged in a desperate struggle to hold onto his regime and his personal power.  He was a has-been.

Our own CIA had concluded that there was little threat to the United States from his regime.  While they thought he had some small remaining cache of WMDs hidden away somewhere, they thought he was very unlikely to use them against the US unless attacked, and existed mainly to deter his neighbors.

So, the US invasion, which was both expensive and very risky in terms of its regional and geopolitical impact, was grossly disproportionate to the actual level of threat from Saddam's regime.  There must have been other strategic considerations involved.  I believe that Saddam's regime was put at the top of the hit list because of its weakness, not it's fearsome, threatening nature.  Iraq was attacked not because it was a threat, but because it was desperately weakened and centrally located, and the best target of opportunity for establishing a Middle East foothold for the US.

I admire Dan K.'s analysis.  It makes sense and is consistent with my memory of how things looked then.

However, I have found that no explanation I have ever read or heard for the invasion of Iraq completely convinced me.  I have read so many well-written explanations, the fact that I am not fully satisfied with any of them intrigues me.

The invasion was not only stupid (from the standpoint of those executing it) but bizarrely stupid.  One reason none of the explanations I have heard fully convince me is because at some point or another, they assume rationality - either political or psychodynamic - without being able to proove it.

I suspect that the reasons for the invasion of Iraq will mystify and intrigue historians for a long while, particularly if it winds up becoming a turning point in history.  

I have assumed that there must be some complex mix of imperalist rationality (domination over the oil-rich Middle East) and ideological dynamics (neo-Cons making their mark on the world) and personal dynamics (Bush heard God tell him to do it or some Oedipal complex drove him to finish off what his father left undone).

Another possibility is that a full explanation of why the invasion occurred is not visible now because some aspect of the motivation is so widespread throughout American culture, even among opponents of the invasion, that we just can not see it.

That's simply not true, and is a rewriting of history.

But let's start with what I said. I said that the reviewer's claim, that there was near unanimous belief that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction and were a threat, is clearly false as of  March  2003. At the very least, the UN inspectors did not share that belief.  Neither did France, Germany or other members of the Security Council. (You'll recall that the US withdrew its resolution to declare Iraq in violation.)  So the reviewer's statement, while true in May of 2002 (before Iraq allowed the inspectors back in) was false in March of 2003--before the war.

As to your remark on credibility, it's true that the US was doing all it could to undermine the UN on the topic of the threat from Iraq. It may have had some domestic success in that endeavor, but I'd argue the precipitate attack following the inspectors' report indicated that the administration felt it could not hold that line much longer in the face of the accumulated evidence.

Moreover, it could not credibly undermine the inspectors' work. The inspectors' work up to 1998 was the primary source of the intelligence information they were using to make their claims of the scope and contemporary location of Iraq weaponry. US intelligence had had nobody on the ground in Iraq in the mid-90s. See, for example, Kenneth Pollack's Atlantic Monthly deconstruction of how US intelligence could have gone so far wrong.

The oft-repeated claim that everyone thought that the Iraqis were harboring WMD was essentially true before the inspectors were readmitted. US estimates assumed that the known stocks in 1998 were a baseline, and that it was prudent to assume that more had been added. This assumption of additional weaponry was not based on any actual information from the ground; the US had no assets in place to gather such information, and with the inspectors gone, their primary source was gone. It was an assumption, conservative in overstating the risk--especially so because they had gotten it wrong in the other direction, dramatically understating the risk, earlier in the decade.

The UN inspectors, following their readmission, had already demonstrated, by March, that the baseline assumptions were wrong; the weapons weren't where they had been, could not be found and there was no evidence of any nuclear program whatsoever.  To claim that there was a consensus in the period immediately before the invasion is false. To implicitly extend the pre-inspection consensus in May 2002 to the post-inspection period in the following March is misleading at best.

FWIW, this is what I think happened.

I think there was a consensus view that the invasion was worth it, with different motivations for different participants.

From DoD's perspective, they needed a reliable base for force projection in the region comparable to the Saudi bases. They doubted the long term viability of the political regime there and wanted bases in a secure, friendly location.

From State's perspective, a reliable counterweight to Iran has been sought ever since the fall of the Shah. Saddam had not proved to be particularly reliable in that regard.  Replacing his regime with one that was more clearly loyal to the US would solve that problem. Also,  while the sanctions plus air power regime may have been working in restricting the threat from Iraq, the sanctions were damaging the economy and the population, and were not indefinitely sustainable (hence "smart sanctions" as a pallative).

From the neo-cons' perspective this was about the flexing of American might--the concrete demonstration of something they'd been saying for a very long time.   The US had this force. It should use it.  And they were worried about Israel's security. Iraq had launched SCUDs, after all.

From Rove's perspective, wartime presidents win re-elections.  9/11 had saved an administration in a tailspin (remember that Rumsfeld was thought to be on his way out because he had lost his 'reengineering' battle with the Pentagon). A successful war in Iraq would cement victory.

Finally, the extraordinarily easy victory in Afghanistan--not only were the Taliban vanquished militarily at nearly no cost, but they were gone politically almost as fast--intoxicated everybody. 

This was taking place in the context of a movement called the  Revolution in Military Affairs. Maybe everything was different now..... 

To me, the really troubling thing about analyses like these is the idea that this was a legitimate foreign policy exercise that was just mishandled.  To believe that you can institute a war and have any control whatsoever over the outcome, even if you win militarily, is nothing short of insane.  That is the fact that must be faced and accepted if there is to be any hope for America.

There's a lot to respond to here, but I've only got time to make one point.




They were on the ground making unannounced inspections whereever they wanted to, including all the places where the US said weapons were thought to be hidden. They were not in the least relying on voluntary disclosures from the Iraqis. They went to the places where the weapons were supposed to be, and didn't find any.




This simply ignores two crucial facts:




1. Saddam's history of successfully hiding weapons programs (and thus, obviously, UNSCOM's inability to find them) in the past.




2. The nature of the inspections themselves. The inspections, even unannounced ones, were based on information provided either by the Iraqis themselves or, as you say, by US intelligence (mostly satellite surveillance, I believe). But these two sources could not possibly be definitive. The Iraqis were giving every indication of trying to play cat and mouse. And US intelligence had no human assets on the ground, only the talk of defectors and the evidence gathered through technical means.




I realize I'm arguing a difficult position, given what happened subsequent to the invasion. I also think that, all things being equal, the Administration was way too hasty in invading (although the military has limited ability to keep 150,000 troops invasion-ready indefinitely). But I want to point out that regardless of what the inspectors said in their report, there simply could not be assurance that Iraq was WMD-free.




Regardless of their position on the war itself, the intelligence community sincerely believed that Iraq had, at the very least, chemical and biological weapons stores hidden somewhere. Saddam had five years to figure out how to hide them. He had a long track record of pursuing their development. His was a manifestly evil regime. At the end of the day, the case for asserting Saddam had WMDs was almost entirely circumstantial. But it was not nothing.

Simply brilliant sequence of posts, Jay. 

Andrew J. Bacevich in New American Militarismbrings together a number of the points for why the war in Iraq.  The Neo-cons seeing "Munichs" wherever they turned wanted the United States to demonstrate they would not appease latter day Hilters.  The Evangelicals,supporters of America's military to begin with see the United States as a nation specially constituted to do Gods work.  Finally you have the military gurus within the defense intellectual establishment who have been working on how to wage war in a nuclear age.  The advent of guided and more exacting weapons combined with the theory of an enemy's response to "Shock and Awe" made Iraq a perfect chance for an easy victory.

Jay

Thank for your series of very interesting posts.

One addition I would make for the mid-1990 period is Saddem's sons-in-law.  There information exposed information about Saddems weapons programs after the first Gulf War.  Their revelations allowed the inspectors to destroy more weapons that was done by American military forces.

It was Saddem's ousting the inspectors toward the end of the Clinton Administration that led them to increase their efforts to get rid of Saddem.  As you indicate Clinton, Pollack and many around the Clinton Administration seem to share four characterizations in regard to Iraq.  Prior to the return of the inspectors they believed Saddem had chemical an biological weapons but not nuclear ones.  Once the inspectors returned they wished them to be given the time necessary to determine the true state of Saddems current weapons programs.

This addtional time would allow three things.  It would have given more time to achieve a more stable Afghanistan and put more pressure on Al Qaeda worldwide.  It would also have allowed the United States to work on a diplomatic arrangement in regard to Iraq.  Given that France, Russia and Germany wanted to lift the embargo against Iraq it would have been a good idea to discover what might have won over their support.  Lastly, with Afghanistan more settled, perhaps Turkey onboard despite their misgivings about the Kurds then the United States with great allies could have and should have ousted Saddem.

That is my understanding of the Democratic Party's foreign policy establishment.  Saddem was a very bad guy, not a psychopath, who eventually had to be removed but at a time of our choosing.

When did war violate liberal principles?

War itself doesn't violate liberal principles; forcing people to adopt a political system via warfare does.    

We fought the Civil War to end slavery as well as hold the union together.  WWI was a war of the Democracies.  WWII was a war to end fascism.  Korea and Vietnam were wars to stop communism.  If there has been a change in American attitudes to waging war is the disagreement over the idea of limited warfare.

WWI and WWII America's enemies were the nations we were fighting and our war aim was to crush the enemy.  Since WWII our view has been that all peoples are good and that it is their leaders that are the problem.  Our goal has been the decapitation of political leadership and taking bows from the populace for overthrowing their tyrants.  My friend a military historian things this view of ours is ridiculous and that we should treat Iraq as our enemy not Saddem and defeat Iraq and impose a political resolution there as we did in Germany and Japan.

A cultural and political point.  Remember Bob Dole took a shot at Democrats by referring to "Democrat wars."  Also the main cause of the rift between the New Left and the Left that continues today is over the use of force to oppose communist regimes.  

What happened to Germany after WWII?  We and the allies occupied it and forced a change of its political system.  

I would not have defined the pre-Civil War South as democratic but if the continuation of slavery is not inconsistent with democracy then the war imposed another system on the South.

If you are right about being unable to impose to democracy by force it does not follow that going to war is the wrong policy.  As either ICBMs from the Soviet Union or Al Qaeda's plots have demonstrated our seas are enough to provide physical safety to Americans.  Additionally, our economy requires both oil and global markets.  Thus threats to either is potentially a deadly attack on us.  It would follow if we cannot help bring democracy to the likes of Iraq, then we are going to period have military conflicts with them.

While this is true in a narrow sense, it misses the larger point, which is that Blix and ElBaradei had limited credibility at that point.

And the Bush administration played no small part in this. They tried to discredit at every turn the inspection process. It was the height of hypocrisy that they pretended to be fulfilling the mandate of UN resolutions calling for the disarmament of Iraq while at the same time they undermined the very process that would determine if Iraq had disarmed or not. In fact, there was never going to be any inspection that would satisfy the administration because they had already decided to go to war. The facts, as they say, were fixed around the policy.