Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor to President George W Bush from 2005 to 2009, offers his opinions in a piece title the The Lessons of Iraq, Why we fought and What We Achieved in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscriber content). He unwittingly offers a clear example of how the cliché that truth is the first casualty of war came to be thus. Let’s examine a few of the casualties, from Mr. Hadley’s piece.
For over two decades, the regime of Saddam Hussein had threatened the national security of the United States, its key allies and the stability of the Middle East.
It’s quite interesting really to assert that Hussein had threatened the national security of the United States for two decades. The United States embraced Hussein as an ally when he rose to power. We in fact helped him achieve and maintain power (remember the famous photo of he and Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands?). Did the United States intend thereby to threaten its own national security? And how could Hussein have possibly threatened the stability of the Middle East? What stability? The stability of the corrupt House of Saud that we supported because we needed its oil? The Saudis were plenty unstable without any help from Saddam. Their instability was solely derived from their own corruption and illegitimacy.
It had invaded some of its neighbors (Iran and Kuwait) and threatened others (Saudi Arabia and Israel).
Indeed, Iraq invaded Iran and Kuwait. What a relief it must have been for all those CIA operatives that had completely screwed the pooch with the Shah in Iran when Hussein invaded to provide a counterweight to Iran’s ascendancy. Never mind that Hussein played both sides of the geopolitical fence during the Cold War, Iraq’s invasion meant that Iran would have to use up some of its stockpile of weapons we had provided when the Shah was in power. It was lovely little war that achieved quite a few strategic objectives in the Middle East. When Hussein started losing, he resorted to gassing the Iranians, and some of his own people (the pesky Kurds). Which we ignored, and helped the UN ignore as well. We supported Hussein throughout the Iraq-Iran war. It is more than just a little bit disingenuous to now claim that Hussein’s behavior in attacking Iran and using mustard gas (one of the fabled “Weapons of Mass Destruction” we supposedly deplored and used as justification of our latest invasion) comprised a reason for us to eliminate him.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Hussein did so with our blessing. He had asked us–his ally in the Middle East during the recently-concluded Iraq-Iran war–how we would view an invasion of Kuwait, were he to initiate one. His query came on July 25, 1990, in a meeting with our ambassador to Iraq, just days prior to the August 2 invasion. We replied that we “ha[d] no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts”. Meaning, “Go ahead”. Yeah, we had an ambassador representing our interests in Baghdad before the Kuwait invasion. Doesn’t sound like we felt Hussein was so thuggish we couldn’t make good use of him.
[Iraq] had produced weapons of mass destruction, used them on its own people and the people of Iran, and threatened to use them on others.
Incidentally, what sort of bomb is there, exactly, that isn’t a weapon of mass destruction? Doesn’t regular old TNT massively destroy things? How about fire bombs, such as we rained down on Dresden at the close of World War II? Aren’t all bombs “weapons of mass destruction”, the only question being one of scale? Enough TNT or fire bombs, and a city is just as destroyed as if it had suffered a nuclear attack. And mustard gas? Really? It proved so effective in World War I, until Hussein decided to try it again, with about the same feckless results. But mustard gas is all we know for sure Hussein produced and used in the way of non-conventional weapons (i.e., weapons that kill by means other than blowing up). We have no evidence Hussein ever produced or used nerve gas or biological agents. And his nuclear ambitions (though really just a highly efficient means of conventionally destroying things by blowing them up) were thwarted by the Israelis in a bold airstrike in 1981 on a nascent facility for producing them. The scud missiles that he sent willy-nilly into Saudi Arabia and Israel were never tipped with anything more exotic than TNT.
But what about the awesome goodness we accomplished through the (latest) war?
From a national-security perspective, the US objective for a post-Saddam Iraq was an Iraqi government that would not pursue weapons of mass destruction, invade its neighbors, support terror, or oppress its people. That objective has been achieved.
How do you get credit for “achieving” an objective that you’ve already attained? Hussein was incapable of doing any of those things after we lured him into the Kuwait trap and defanged him. And which is more oppressive–a strong-armed government that violently punishes threats to its internal hegemony, or a weak-kneed government that allows sectarian violence to foment?
The governments that have followed Saddam–and those that are likely to govern going forward–have and will continue to meet these criteria because the Iraqi people have concluded that doing so is in their interest.
Is there any way to short this statement, i.e., place a bet against its prognostications for the future? Before we invaded in 2003, the people of Iraq had running water and electricity. They had schools and orderly streets. Since we invaded, even after the “surge”, they have effectively had anarchy. Their civilization has retreated several decades, perhaps millenia, in the level of welfare it provides for its people. Consider this: Is the average Iraqi in Baghdad better or worse off than the average Babylonian was under Nebuchadnezzar some 2600 years ago? If the answer is “no” or very nearly “no”, it’s hard to see how the Iraqi people will continue to select governments that follow our model of what liberal democracies should look like. It’s not even clear, given the successes Iraq enjoyed under Hussein, and the alliances with him from which we benefited, that we’d want them to.
The US objective was also to leave behind an Iraq that would be able to govern itself, defend itself, sustain itself and be an ally in the war on terror. That objective has also been achieved.
And I suppose having achieved all these metrics is why we are leaving 50,000 troops in a country we are “leav[ing] behind”?
Perhaps the most critical moment was President Bush’s decision in January 2007 to add over 20,000 American combat troops and change the military strategy….
…Following Mr. Bush’s decision, US military forces and diplomats forged an unprecedented partnership to implement the new strategy and break the back of an insurgency that threatened to tear the country apart.
The necessity for a “surge” was about like a fireman starting a fire and then offering that he might be able to solve the problem by turning his hose on it. From 2003 until 2007, we caused, and then allowed, anarchy to reign. We fumbled around, not sure either militarily or diplomatically, what in the hell we were doing there. We had from the very beginning the means to quash any insurgencies through the application of force–that’s what governments do, and we were the de facto government in Iraq. We refused to do so. Bush wished instead to fuel the flames of insurgency by adamantly refusing to do what it took to impose our will on the ground. The policy was criminal in its disregard for the welfare of the troops and the Iraqis that had to live and serve in a violent, unpredictable hell for four years just because of the fecklessness of leadership Bush exhibited.
We got to the point of anarchy requiring a surge because Bush and his neo-con twits in the Defense Department (Hadley among them) believed 10,000 years of military history could be ignored, and refused to clearly enunciate a militarily achievable objective for Iraq, except to say “Depose Hussein”. The neo-cons apparently believed in some Lockean fantasy that freedom from an oppressive ruler was all that was required in Iraq in order to unleash all the goodness in the otherwise violent, sectarian Iraqi soul. They didn’t understand that Iraq’s factionalized polity existed in a Hobbesian war of all against all that could only be controlled by a powerful central government such as Hussein had personified. There are many forms of government but only a few that would work in Iraq. Liberal democracy is not one of them, unless it is mandated by an outside power capable of imposing its will on the population by force, which thereby makes the idea a farce not worth the trouble.
Having distastefully served in the first Gulf War, I have often pondered over why we went the first time and then returned to Iraq–but the real reasons, not the ones the Administrations proffered. The only answer I can surmise resolves on the White House and its occupant at the time. Iraq never presented anything of an existential threat to the US, not before the first Gulf War, and certainly not before the latest one. Hussein was a thug, but he was our thug and ally, until we decided we didn’t like him anymore. The decision to act against him seemed solely a function of the personal preferences of the White House occupant.
Bush 41 seemed intent on personalizing international conflicts, perhaps a result of his days in the late seventies as head of the CIA. He made an international relations policy out of turning on former allies, ousting the former CIA operative and US ally Noriega, and then punishing and defanging former ally Hussein. He mostly ignored domestic affairs, focusing, like a super hero, on battling the evil leaders of the world. Never mind that he’d once embraced them as allies. I often wondered whether the Noriegas and Husseins knew some secret truths about him that he was attempting to keep concealed. It seemed under Bush 41 that the worst thing a world leader could be is a former ally of the US.
His son, Bush 43, appeared incapable of feeling presidential without asserting his role as the role as commander-in-chief, particularly after 9/11 gave him the excuse to do so. But the return to Iraq seemed almost Oedipal for him–an attempt to show his daddy how he was a better president for actually getting rid of Hussein, instead of just defanging him. That he quickly ignored the necessary war for this war of choice says a great deal about his motivations.
Obama will speak tonight on the end of combat operations (haven’t we done this twice before?) in Iraq. I’m sure it will be a well-thought, immaculately- presented speech that won’t say much of anything. But it matters what Obama and his Administration think about military interventions in places that pose no threat to us existentially. In wars of choice, it is the commander-in-chief that gets to choose, and with the most powerful, mercenary (more on that later) military in the world, he has great leeway in choosing his conflicts.
For a more objective view of the situation in Iraq after seven years of conflict and American occupations, I highly recommend reading “Iraq’s Uncertain Future” from The Economist, an excerpt of which follows:
The biggest failure of all is political. Building a state with a democratic government and institutions that work was central to President George W. Bush’s vision of the new Iraq. The country has ended up with a travesty of good governance.
It is an excellent, un-biased bit of journalism that objectively examines some of the issues facing Iraq as we prepare to cease “combat operations”.