Bacon's Rebellion

James A. Bacon


 

One Year Later...

We haven't found the Weapons of Mass Destruction. In retrospect, was the invasion of Iraq justified?


 

One year ago, the world stood transfixed by televised images of American and British tanks and fighting vehicles spilling across the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. After months of prolonged and emotional debate, the die had been cast: Our two nations, with a handful of allies, embarked upon a history-making mission, the ultimate outcome of which has still to be determined.

 

In the year since, so much has changed. Many uncertainties have lifted, many questions have been answered. Although some aspects of the war, and the reasons for war, remain as murky as ever, we do know more than we did then. Indeed, there have been so many revelations that thinking people have a duty to revisit the assumptions that prompted them to support or oppose the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I, for one, see things differently than I did when I wrote, “Why War, Why Now?” last March.

 

The question I asked in the headline in March 2003 retains the same urgency today: Was the invasion of Iraq justified? In the hyper-polarized climate of a presidential campaign, it’s hard for observers to maintain their objectivity. But we must strive to be as dispassionate and objective as we can – the stakes are too enormous to do otherwise.

 

Events seemingly have provided validation of those who criticized the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.

 

  • Weapons of Mass Destruction. After an extensive search, no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) have been found. And if we are to believe David Kay, a man of immense credibility and integrity, no such weapons are likely to be found.

  • Terror connections. Little solid information has surfaced to confirm Bush administration charges of connections between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda. Tantalizing bits and pieces have emerged, but not sufficient to settle the issue conclusively either way.

  • Flowers in the streets. The Iraqis did not greet us as liberators. Well, some did, but not nearly as many as hoped. The Bush administration did not appreciate the extent to which the Shiite population, which the U.S. had urged to rise against Hussein in 1991 and then stood by as he massacred them, distrusted American promises. Nor did anyone anticipate the insurgency mounted by die-hard Baathists, much less the ongoing support they would receive in the Sunni community.

The first two issues – the WMD and the terrorist links – are fundamental. Together, they formed the justification used to sell to the American people for invading Iraq and deposing Hussein. The prospect that Hussein might share WMD with terrorists – no matter how seemingly unlikely – was a prospect that no president could ignore. If those premises don’t hold up, the publicly stated case for invading Iraq falls apart, as many people believe that, indeed, it has. However, I would caution against drawing hasty or simplistic conclusions for reasons that I will develop below.

 

On the other hand, it’s not as if the critics have proven prescient. Consider:

 

  • Military disaster. The military conquest went much more smoothly than anyone dared anticipate. Critics looked like fools predicting, 10 days into the war, that the invasion had bogged down. They compounded their error, as Americans rolled towards Baghdad, by forecasting bloody house-to-house combat in the capital. For all the dire warnings that we had sent too few troops to do the job, Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of military transformation was largely vindicated.

  • Diplomatic disaster. Other Middle Eastern nations have not turned against us. The U.S. and its allies demonstrated that a relatively small expeditionary force could easily obliterate one of the most powerful armies in the Third World, altering the political calculus for U.S. enemies around the globe. The positive “demonstration effect” on Hussein set into motion a diplomatic ripple affect as regimes throughout the region adjusted to the reality of overwhelming U.S. military superiority. Although die-hard critics are not willing to credit any positive effect to the war, most fair-minded people would concede that one factor influencing the decision of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi to relinquish his WMDs and halt his nuclear program was an extreme sense of military vulnerability.

  • Spreading the war to Israel. Saddam did not drag Israel into the war, which, had he succeeded, might have turned other Middle Eastern nations against the Coalition. Either his Scud missiles were ineffective or U.S. special operations teams managed to neutralize them. The full story has yet to come out.

  • The “Arab Street”. The so-called “Arab Street” did not rise up in its wrath, plunging the Middle East into anti-American turmoil or threatening friendly regimes. Indeed, the most notable demonstrations to date -– outside the perennially restless Palestine – have been pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran and Syria.

  • Humanitarian disaster. There was no humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were not killed. Of the several thousand who did die in the conflict, most were deliberately put in harm’s way by the Baathists who reckoned that every dead body scored a propaganda point. There was no flood of refugees, no mass starvation and no prolonged medical crisis.

  • Environmental disaster. There was no environmental catastrophe. Hussein’s lieutenants never succeeded in setting the oil wells ablaze. Indeed, the invasion of Iraq allowed the U.S. to undo one of the greatest deliberate environmental atrocities in history, Saddam’s punitive drainage of the wetlands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Remarkably, as far as I can tell, critics of the war got only two big things right. First, they were correct in stating Bush exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq’s nuclear program. As much as they make of the issue now, however, virtually none of the critics foresaw the possibility that chemical and biological weapons never would be found. They argued rather that it was essential to "let the inspections work." So, I'm not willing to give them any credit on that score.

 

Second, although the critics did not predict a Baathist insurgency per se, they did emphasize the difficulties that the U.S. would encounter in trying to bring stability, democracy and respect for human rights to the country. The occupation, they warned, could turn into a mess. They were right.

 

Equally interesting, to my mind, are the things we’ve discovered that neither side truly anticipated.

 

  • Long-range missiles. Largely overlooked in the media reports of David Kay’s findings, it turns out that Hussein Saddam had successfully developed and concealed intermediate-range missiles in violation of United Nations sanctions. U.S. intelligence, which supposedly exaggerated the evidence for WMD, managed to overlook this significant capability, which would have enhanced Hussein’s ability to threaten and intimidate his neighbors.

  • The real humanitarian disaster. The Hussein regime was even more brutal than its worst critics had imagined. The torture chambers and mass graves have been open for the world to see, revealing Hussein to be the greatest mass murderer since Pol Pot.

  • Global bribery. Iraqis newspapers have uncovered documentation that many opponents of the Coalition invasion – not only in the Arab world but Russia and Europe -- were on Saddam Hussein’s payroll. President Bush has been roundly criticized for “alienating” world opinion. Now we know one of the reasons why so many opposed us.

  • Oil for Corruption. The United Nations, it turns out, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Hussein’s “Oil for Food” program. The bureaucracy had a huge vested financial interest in maintaining the program. While Iraqis suffered from want of food and medicine – a fact that Hussein turned to his propaganda advantage -- he was supporting U.N. bureaucrats, bribing apologists around the world and building palaces for himself.

Bush administration critics say that Iraq’s nation-building should be turned over to the U.N. in order to confer world legitimacy upon the new government. Unfortunately for this idea, the U.N. has very little legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqis themselves.

Although the critics have been wrong about almost everything, the fact remains that Bush was president. His administration had access to the intelligence. His people were responsible for interpreting that intelligence. And they were the ones who insisted we go to war. The burden of proof rested on them, not the opponents of war. By seemingly getting the big stuff wrong, they have much to explain.

 

What the American people don’t need, however, are the shrill accusations that “Bush lied” or deliberately misled the nation. Back off, please -- you sound like rabid dogs. Likewise, it's time for the Bush-ites to crawl of their bunkers. The Bush administration has demonstrated a marked inability to concede that it has ever made a mistake. Its philosophy: Admit no error, confess no miscalculation. Rather than a sign of strength, such stonewalling is a sign of weakness.

 

Truth is the first casualty of blame mongering and ass covering -- and we require the truth to defeat the terrorist threat. Several critical questions still need to be answered.

 

WMD. First and foremost, what did happen to the WMD? It's one thing to say that we haven't found them. It's quite another to say that Hussein never had them. Did he destroy them? If so, why didn’t he tell the world? Why didn't he open up Iraq to inspections? If he had nothing to hide, he had everything to gain by cooperating with the United Nations inspectors. Once the world was satisfied that there were no WMD, there would have been no justification for maintaining the U.N. trade sanctions that curtailed his oil exports and his ability to rearm. Given his strategic ambitions, Hussein's refusal to cooperate makes no sense unless he actually possessed WMD, or thought that he possessed them.

 

There are two competing explanations for Hussein's behavior. First, Iraq did have WMD but hid them at the very last minute, either burying them in the desert or shipping them across the border to Syria. Either of these scenarios is entirely plausible. Hussein was convinced he could survive a Coalition invasion long enough to mobilize world opinion on his behalf. The one thing that could have torpedoed world sympathy was the actual use of WMD. Rather than deploy them, Hussein might have thought it more prudent to hide them. Unfortunately for Bush, this theory cannot be proved unless someone actually finds the weapons eventually, an unlikely eventuality.

 

The other possibility – indeed, it seems to be the reigning theory -- is that Hussein never had the WMD but believed he did, and so did his generals, scientists and most everyone else in his regime. In other words, Iraq’s totalitarian dictatorship was so dysfunctional -- everyone told the dictator what he wanted to hear -- that he fooled not only the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Britain and every other country, but he deceived Hussein’s subordinates and himself!

 

If this were the case, then the “Bush lied” scenario is a gross mischaracterization. Given the intelligence-gathering methods at the U.S.’s disposal -– electronic eavesdropping, the testimony of defectors and limited information originating from inside-the-regime sources – Bush would have been irresponsible to conclude that Hussein did not possess WMD. His error was not acting upon that intelligence but in characterizing his information to the American people as conclusive, not based on fragmentary and unverified information.

 

The U.S. also must consider the possibility that its intelligence agencies were fed misinformation. For instance, someone forged the infamous document – passed to us by the Italian intelligence service and made famous in the Ambassador Wilson dust-up -- suggesting that the Hussein regime was trying to procure yellow-cake uranium from the African nation of Niger. Who would have had the motive and means to forge such a document? Iraqi exiles? The Mossad? Someone needs to investigate this. We need to know whom we can trust and whom we cannot.

The Iraqi terror connection. No serious person denies that Iraq was a state sponsor of terror. By overthrowing Hussein, the U.S. had indisputably eliminated a major financier of and sanctuary for terrorists. Yet those opposed to the war in Iraq have made sweeping assertions to the effect that "no evidence has been found" linking Iraqi intelligence to al-Qaeda. That simply isn't true. There is intriguing evidence, though fragmentary and suggestive, of connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. (Rather than recite that evidence here, I would refer the reader to Deroy Murdock's article, "Saddam Hussein's Philanthropy of Terror.") The question is not whether links existed but whether those links were significant enough to warrant invading Iraq at great expense, rather than pursue the war against terror by some other means. To my mind, the question remains open. 

 

When writing a year ago in support of the war, I anticipated that one of the greatest benefits would come from obtaining the files of the Iraqi intelligence services. Between smart bombs on Iraqi facilities, the shredding of files by retreating Baathist officers and the looting following the U.S. occupation of Baghdad, it's likely that many files are lost forever. Some did survive, however, as we know from the publication by Iraqi newspapers of documents showing whom Hussein had bribed around the world with oil-for-food rake offs. I can only hope that U.S. intelligence retrieved the lion's share of files and is quietly exploiting them to unravel terror operations supported by Hussein -- be they associated with al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front or any other group.

 

Critics of the invasion observed that al-Qaeda, inspired by fundamentalist Islam, and Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator, were the least likely of collaborators. But the critics misunderstand the nature of the regime. As David Kay testified before the U.S. Senate about his hunt for WMD, Iraq was more dangerous than he'd realized before the war. Said Kay: "After 1998 it became a regime that was totally corrupt. Individuals were out for their own protection. And in a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood at some point in the future of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated." In Iraq, ideology didn't matter -- everything, potentially, was up for sale. This is not a finding that anyone in the mainstream punditry, from my observation, has found worth pursuing.

 

Post-war Planning. The other set of questions demanding an answer is this: Could the U.S. have been better prepared to administer Iraq after the war? What have we learned from our experience in “nation building” that can be applied in future conflicts?

 

Clearly, the U.S. was not fully prepared for challenge of rebuilding the Iraqi civil society and economy. But that’s not to say, as critics have charged, that the Bush administration had “no plan” for the end of the war. The administration did have a plan – a plan devised to prevent all the catastrophes predicted by its critics before the war! In this, the Bush-ites succeeded admirably. No scuds reached Israel. There was no humanitarian disaster. The oil wells were never set on fire. The invasion plan anticipated all of these problems and dealt with them successfully. None of the worst-case scenarios transpired.

 

The problems that arose were of a less urgent nature, all related to rebuilding the infrastructure, economy and civil society of Iraq. Critics of the Bush administration show little appreciation for the enormity of the challenge. Operating in a foreign country where few Americans even speak the language, we had to set up an administrative apparatus for governing country the size of California. Remember, Iraq was a socialist country where the government controlled everything. In the space of a year, the Coalition has created from scratch mechanisms to govern education, electricity, finance, foreign affairs, health, housing, human rights, oil, public works, agriculture, transportation, telecommunications, economic policy, youth and sports, the media, displaced persons, and on and on.

 

Did the Bush administration plan perfectly? Of course not. The U.S., for instance, under-estimated the poor condition of Iraq’s physical infrastructure. No one realized how badly the Hussein regime had let critical electric, petroleum, telecommunications and water-treatment capacity degrade. Repairing it was more expensive and time consuming than anticipated. Was this miscalculation a mortal sin? Only if your standard is omniscient perfection.

 

The reasonable measure is this: How did we adapt to the realities on the ground? The answer, it strikes me, is that we responded very well. A year later, despite widespread looting and sabotage, Iraq’s infrastructure is in better shape than it was before the invasion. They economy is growing and Iraqis are creating a civil society in preparation for a turn-over of power.

 

The biggest challenge in nation building is restoring security. To my mind, the Bush administration should have foreseen and prepared for the possibility of an insurgency, as indeed some elements of the intelligence community did. The U.S. would have saved the lives of many of our troops if we’d equipped them from the beginning with everything from better armored Humvees to greater intelligence-gathering capabilities. Yet that criticism must be tempered by the fact that, once the military understood the situation, it shifted tactics quickly. The insurgents have been losing ground since late last year.

 

How telling was the failure to anticipate the insurgency? Again, I judge the Bush administration not for its failure to achieve the standard of omniscience -- as is commonly said in the military, no plan survives first contact with the enemy -- but for its ability to adapt quickly to new circumstances.

 

We should not hold our war planners to the standard of never, never making a mistake. 

A military that lives in fear of setbacks being punished on the basis of 20/20 hindsight will become risk averse and prone to inaction – which is precisely what happened before 9/11. The military was so paralyzed by its fear of failure that the Clinton administration never responded to al-Qaeda’s atrocities with anything more forceful than cruise missile attacks. Bush, who has a predisposition for action rather than inaction, has made his share of mistakes and miscalculations. But at least he has acted forcefully.

 

I have heard nothing from members of the loyal opposition that inspires faith in their ability to lead us through a lengthy, grueling war. Paralyzed by uncertainty, nuance, ambivalence and risk, the critics are inclined to inaction and timidity. Even more alarming, they have abandoned their powers of reason. The lodestone by which they navigate is their animus for George W. Bush. Their single unifying principle is that, whatever he does, Bush is wrong. Their critique of Bush’s War on Terror is to throw every conceivable criticism against the wall and to see what sticks. They lack any coherent doctrine or set of principles to guide them in a war against terrorism.

 

If the critics, especially those in the media, were guided by principle, we would have seen inquiries into the “other” war – the war the U.S. fought four years ago under the auspices of the Clinton administration, the war that the Democrats and mainstream media almost unanimously endorsed. Let’s look at the reasons cited to oppose the invasion of Iraq and see how they apply to the war against Serbia.

 

o        No imminent threat. Iraq was no imminent threat to the United States; there was no reason to invade it. Of course, the conflict between Serbia and the Albanian insurgents in Kosovo posed no “imminent threat” to the United States either. But the imminent-threat “principle” apparently doesn’t apply to Democratic presidents.

 

o        United Nations sanction. The Serbs had few allies, but one was Russia. And, as long as Russia occupied the U.N. Security Council, President Clinton had no hope of mobilizing coercion against Serbia under the U.N. banner. While President Bush strove for months to win U.N. support, Clinton made no meaningful effort whatsoever. But the “principle” of winning the U.N.’s blessings apparently doesn’t apply to Democratic presidents.

 

o        Intelligence failure. President Clinton justified his air war against Serbia on the grounds that the Serbs were engaged in “ethnic cleansing” – a conclusion that the news media uncritically reinforced. It turns out not to be true. The Serbs did employ brutal tactics to suppress a Muslim insurgency, killing thousands and displacing tens of thousands of civilians. But the brutality was limited mainly to regions where Kosovar partisans were active. Furthermore, it turns out that many of the reports of massacres were either totally untrue or highly exaggerated.

 

Immediately after NATO took over administration of Kosovo, fact-finding teams fanned across the country in search of mass graves. Have you seen a final accounting of the ethnic cleansing? I haven’t. Have you seen the cover stories and photos in Time and Newsweek? I haven’t. Has anyone, other than a handful of far left-wing activists, accused Clinton of “lying” and “misleading” the country into war? No, the “principle” of holding presidents accountable for intelligence failures apparently doesn’t apply to Democratic presidents.

 

o        Post-war Planning. Imagine if, after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, the Shiites and Sunnis became embroiled in communal warfare with the result that, four years later, 75 percent of the Sunnis had been driven from their homes and fled to neighboring countries. Do you think that Bush’s critics would have something to say about that? Almost certainly so. Yet that’s almost precisely what’s happening in Kosovo today: Under the eyes of NATO and the U.N., ethnic Muslims have succeeded in driving the majority of Serbs out of the province. The post-war outcome of the war against Serbia has been a spectacular fiasco -- but the mainstream media in the U.S. remain oblivious. But that should come as no surprise: The “principle” of planning effectively for positive post-war outcomes apparently doesn’t apply to Democrats.  

 

Criticizing Bush’s mistakes in Iraq does not constitute a policy for the War on Terror. Given the logic of their rhetoric, the Democrats would return to the Clinton-era tactics of fighting terror through diplomacy, collaboration with foreign agencies and lobbing the occasional cruise missile -- bolstered, perhaps, by launching the occasional Predator missile (a tool unavailable to Clinton) or, if the Democrat were particularly gutsy, dispatching the occasional Green Beret or Delta Force mission.

 

Here’s the question that every American must ponder: Can the U.S. ever hope to win the War on Terror the way we fought it before 9/11? I do not believe we can.

 

We have to understand the nature of the enemy. There is no room for compromise or negotiation with the jihadists. We can try to understand them all we want. They have absolutely no desire to understand us. They are not reasonable people who, deep down inside, want the same things we want. The jihadist ideology is a messianic movement of people driven by a fundamentalist Islamic vision of bringing the society into accord with the laws of God -- as they interpret those laws. The goal of their jihad is nothing less than the transformation of the entire Islamic world. And if they succeed in that goal, which they undoubtedly would interpret victory as confirmation of God’s will, they will carry their jihad, as Muslims did in the 7th century, into the land of the infidel.

 

Just imagine Osama bin Ladin, or someone like him, overthrowing the Saudi monarchy and the oil-rich sheikdoms along the Persian Gulf. Imagine Taliban-like fundamentalists taking control of Pakistan, a nation possessing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Imagine jihadists combining the Gulf’s oil riches with Pakistan’s technological capabilities, to build a nuclear arsenal with the capability of threatening not only neighboring Muslim regimes, not only Israel, but Europe. Such an outcome would be disastrous to the entire world order and our way of life.

 

How do we not merely contain such an enemy – how do we defeat it? Kill one terrorist and another is recruited. As many have observed, we must win the war of ideas. But is that a war the United States is equipped to win? I don’t think so – certainly not in the short run, by which I mean the next 20 or 30 years. The gulf between our high-tech, 21st-century, super-individualistic world view and the pre-scientific, communitarian world view of the Islamic societies is so vast that there is no common idiom, no common language, no common conceptual framework by which we can communicate. Add to that the deep hatred that many, if not most, Arab Muslims already feel towards us, and the continued mistrust created by the abiding U.S. commitment to Israel, and I don't foretell much success from Voice of America broadcasts or advertising campaigns run on Arab media.

 

Although the United States cannot win the war of ideas directly, perhaps a free Iraq can. Right now, the peoples of the Arab and Muslim worlds are presented with only two alternate world views: Discredited nationalist police states which have failed to deliver prosperity to their peoples and the model of basing laws on the tenets of Islam -- Islam as interpreted by extreme fundamentalists. (Tentative moves towards more tolerant societies in Kuwait, Bahrein, Morocco and Tunisia are promising but isolated.) But Iraq represents a potential third way: a society built, however imperfectly, on the principles of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

 

The Iraqis are likely to take their democratic experiment in directions that Americans could never imagine -- directions that we may not even like. I, for one, don't expect to see many expressions of gratitude emanating from Iraq. But we don’t need Iraqi democracy to sound and look like American democracy to accomplish what we want it to. Given time, the moderate clerics there will articulate a third way that reconciles the tenets of Islam with those of democracy, limited government and the rule of law. Iraqis will propound these ideas with a language, symbolism and conceptual framework that potential jihadist recruits can understand. A free and prosperous Iraq can sway minds far more effectively than we Americans could ever hope to.

 

That is why the jihadists so desperately want the Iraqi experiment to fail – and why the Americans must persevere to ensure it succeeds. President Bush, for all his failings and limitations -- most visibly, his reluctance to admit to any error -- has the vision to see the war to its end. His critics do not.

 

-- March 29, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fire back!

 

You can berate Bacon at jabacon@

baconsrebellion.com

 

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