By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the
back-and-forth recriminations continue, but in all the “not me” defenses, we
have forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we invaded
in the first place. The war was predicated on six suppositions.
1. 9/11 and the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush administration
made the argument that in the post-9/11 climate there should be a belated
reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had continued to sponsor terrorism, had over
the years invaded or attacked four of his neighbors, and had killed tens of
thousands of his own people. He was surely more a threat to the region and to
his own people than either Bashar Assad or Moammar Qaddafi was eight years
later.
In this context, the end of the 1991 Gulf War loomed
large: Its denouement had led not to the removal of a defeated Saddam, but to
mass slaughter of Kurds and Shiites. Twelve years of no-fly zones had seen
periods of conflict, and the enforcement of those zones no longer enjoyed much,
if any, international support — suggesting that Saddam would soon be able to
reclaim his regional stature. Many of the architects or key players in the 1991
war were once again in power in Washington, and many of them had in the ensuing
decade become remorseful about the ending of the prior conflict. The sense of
the need to correct a mistake became all the more potent after 9/11. Most
Americans have now forgotten that by 2003, most of the books published on the
1991 war were critical, faulting the unnecessary overkill deployment; the
inclusion of too many allies, which hampered U.S. choices; the shakedown of
allies to help defray the cost; the realist and inhumane ending to the
conflict; the ongoing persecution of Shiites, Marsh Arabs, and Kurds; and the
continuation of Saddam Hussein in power.
Since there was no direct connection between Osama bin
Laden and Saddam, take away the security apprehensions following 9/11, and
George Bush probably would not have taken the risk of invading Iraq. By the
same token, had the 1991 Gulf War ended differently, or had the U.N. and the
NATO allies continued to participate fully in the no-fly zones and the
containment of Iraq, there likewise would not have been a 2003 invasion. The
Iraq War was predicated, rightly or wrongly, on the notion that the past war with
Saddam had failed and containment would fail, and that after 9/11 it was the
proper time to end a sponsor of global terrorism that should have been ended in
1991 — a decision that, incidentally, would save Kurdistan and allow it to turn
into one of the most successful and pro-American regions in the Middle East.
2. Afghanistan. A second reason was the rapid victory in
the war in Afghanistan immediately following 9/11. Scholars and pundits had
warned of disaster on the eve of the October 2001 invasion. Even if it was
successful in destroying the rule of the Taliban, any chance of postwar
stability was declared impossible, given the “graveyard of empires” reputation
of that part of the world. But the unforeseen eight-week war that with ease
removed the Taliban, and the nonviolent manner in which the pro-Western Hamid
Karzai later assumed power, misled the administration and the country into
thinking Iraq would be a far less challenging prospect — especially given
Iraq’s humiliating defeat in 1991, which had contrasted sharply with the Soviet
failure in Afghanistan.
After all, in contrast to Afghanistan, Iraq had
accessible ports, good weather, flat terrain, a far more literate populace, and
oil — facts that in the ensuing decade, ironically, would help to explain why
David Petraeus finally achieved success there in a manner not true of his later
efforts in Afghanistan.
Since the U.S. had seemingly succeeded in two months
where the Soviets had abjectly failed in a decade, and given that we already
had once trounced Saddam, it seemed likely that Iraq would follow the success
of Afghanistan. History is replete with examples of such misreadings of the
past: The French in 1940 believed that they could hold off the Germans as they
had for four years in the First World War; the Germans believed the Russians
would be as weak at home in 1941 as they had seemed sluggish abroad in Poland
and Finland in 1939–40. Had Afghanistan proved as difficult at the very
beginning of the war as it did at the end, the U.S. probably would not have
invaded Iraq.
3. Everyone on board. A third reason was the overwhelming
bipartisan support in Congress, in the media, and among the public — for
reasons well beyond WMD. In October 2002, both houses of Congress passed 23
writs justifying the removal of Saddam, an update of Bill Clinton’s 1998 Iraq
Liberation Act. Senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid were among
those who not only enthusiastically called for Saddam’s removal, but also
warned of intelligence estimates of Saddam’s WMD arsenals. Pundits on both
sides, from Thomas Friedman to George Will, likewise supported the invasion,
which on the eve of the war enjoyed over 70 percent approval from the American
people. Bush, in that regard, had achieved what Clinton had not on the eve of
the Serbian War — he had obtained a joint resolution of support from Congress
before attacking, and had taken nearly a year in concerted (though failed)
attempts to win U.N. approval for Saddam’s removal. Had Bush not gone to
Congress, had he made no attempt to go to the U.N., had he had no public
support, or had he been opposed by the liberal press, he probably would not
have invaded Iraq.
4. WMD. A fourth reason was the specter of WMD. While the
Bush administration might easily have cited the persuasive writs of the
bipartisan resolutions — genocide against the Kurds, Shiites, and Marsh Arabs;
bounties for suicide bombers; sanctuary for terrorists; attempts to kill a
former U.S. president; violations of U.N. sanctions and resolutions; etc. — it
instead fixated on supposedly unimpeachable intelligence about WMD, a “slam
dunk,” according to CIA director George Tenet, a judgment with which most
Middle Eastern governments and European intelligence agencies agreed. This
concentration on WMD would prove a critical political mistake. Note in passing
that the eventual public furor over missing WMD stockpiles (although there is
solid evidence that Saddam was perilously close to WMD deployment) did not
fully develop with the initial knowledge of that intelligence failure, but only
with the mounting violence after a seemingly brilliant victory over Saddam.
The missing vast stockpiles of WMD then became the source
of the convenient slogan “Bush lied, thousands died.” Yet had the
reconstruction gone well, we would surely not have heard something like “Bush
lied — and so there was no need, after all, to depose Saddam and foster
consensual government in Iraq.”
The Bush administration apparently believed that, without
the worry over WMD, the other writs would not generate enough public urgency
for preemption, and thus it would not have invaded Iraq. Note that when Barack
Obama talks of “red lines” and “game changers” in Syria that might justify U.S.
preemptive action, he is not referring to 70,000 dead, the horrific human-rights
record of Bashar Assad, Syria’s past effort to become nuclear, or even the
plight of millions of Syrian refugees, but the supposition that Syria is
planning to use chemical or biological weapons — a crime Saddam had often
committed against his own people, and one that inflames public opinion in the
West. As a footnote, we will probably not know the full story of WMD in the
region until the Assad regime is gone from Syria — although we are starting to
hear the same worries about such Syrian weapons from the Obama administration
as we did of Iraqi weapons during the Bush presidency.
5. Nation-building. A fifth reason was the notion of
reformulating Iraq, so that instead of being the problem in the region it would
become a solution. Since the 1991 war had not ended well, because of a failure
to finish off the regime and stay on, and since the aid to the insurgents
against the Soviets in Afghanistan had been followed by U.S. neglect and in
time the rise of the Taliban, so, in reaction, this time the U.S. was
determined to stay. We forget now the liberal consensus that the rise of the
Taliban and the survival of Saddam were supposed reflections of past U.S.
callousness — something not to be repeated in Iraq.
Finally, America would do the right thing and create a
consensual government that might ensure not only the end of Saddam’s
atrocities, but also, by its very constitutional existence, pressure on the
Gulf monarchies to liberalize and cease their support for terrorism of the sort
that had killed 3,000 Americans. While there may well have been neo-cons who
believed that the Iraqi democracy would be followed by a true Arab Spring of
U.S.-fostered democracy sweeping the Middle East — something akin to the
original good blowback of Pakistan’s detaining Dr. Khan, Qaddafi’s surrendering
his WMD arsenal, and Syria’s leaving Lebanon, before all this dissipated with
Fallujah — most of the Bush administration policymakers believed that democracy
was not their first choice, but their last choice, for postwar reconstruction,
given that everything else had been tried after past conflicts and just as
often failed.
Administration officials were not hoping for Carmel, but
for something akin to post-Milosevic Serbia or post-Noriega Panama, as opposed
to Somalia or post-Soviet Afghanistan. Note well: Had George Bush simply
announced in advance that he would be leaving Iraq as soon as he deposed
Saddam, or that he planned to install a less violent relative of Saddam’s to
keep order as we departed, Congress probably would not have authorized an
invasion of Iraq in the first place. The Iraq War was sold partly on the
liberal idealism of at last doing the right thing — after not having done so
previously against Saddam or following the Soviets in Afghanistan.
6. Oil! Sixth and last was the issue of oil. Had Iraq
been Rwanda, the Bush administration would not have invaded. The key here,
however, is to remember the war was not a matter of “blood for oil,” given that
the Bush administration had no intention of taking Iraqi oil — a fact proven by
the transparent and non-U.S. postwar development of the Iraqi oil and gas
fields.
Instead, oil was an issue because Iraq’s oil revenues
meant that Saddam would always have the resources to foment trouble in the
region, would always be difficult to remove through internal opposition, and
would always use petrodollar influence to undermine U.N. resolutions, seek to
spike world oil prices, or distort Western solidarity, as the French collusion
with Saddam attested. Imagine North Korea with Iraq’s gas and oil reserves: The
problem it poses for its neighbors would be greatly amplified and far more
likely addressed. Had Iraq simply been a resource-poor Yemen or Jordan, or
landlocked without key access to the Persian Gulf, the U.S. probably would not
have invaded.
TEN YEARS LATER
The invasion of Iraq was a perfect storm predicated on
all these suppositions — the absence of any one of which might well have
postponed or precluded the invasion.
That we have forgotten or ignored most of these causes
stems not just from the subsequent terrible cost of the war. Instead, our
amnesia is self-induced, and derives from the fact that 70 percent of the
American people and most of the liberal media commentators supported the
invasion, came to reverse that support, and remain hurt or furious at someone
other than themselves for their own change of heart — one predicated not on the
original conditions of going to war, but on the later unexpected costs in blood
and treasure that might have been avoided.
Given that less than a third of the American people
initially opposed the war, the subsequent acrimony centered on whether it was
better for the nation to give up and depart after 2004, or to stay and
stabilize the country. Ultimately the president decided that the only thing
worse than fighting a bad war was losing one.
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