The Iraq War’s Complicated Legacy

By Kevin Carroll

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

 

The United States pulled out of Iraq after 23 years at the beginning of October. Most news articles I read ranged from downbeat to pessimistic. I understand why, as the war was a mistake and became unpopular, but the coverage didn’t capture the full picture of what I remember. As an Iraq war veteran myself, I felt relief that no more Americans will be killed there and wonder about what our slain or wounded brothers and sisters’ sacrifices accomplished. Everyone who served in Iraq had their own distinct experience.  An amputee or someone whose friend died in their arms has a harder-earned opinion than mine and may disagree with me. But I’m glad I served in Iraq.

 

I was a reserve military intelligence captain assigned to the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in 2002, just a junior officer, but one with a view from the cheap seats as the Bush administration headed to war. We should remember what President George W. Bush knew, or thought he knew, about Iraq and about al-Qaeda between September 11, 2001, and March 20, 2003.

 

In the 18 months between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, Bush was bombarded daily with intelligence reports that 1) al-Qaeda planned further mass casualty attacks on the U.S., which was true, as the main 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed revealed when captured by the Central Intelligence Agency in Pakistan in March 2002; and 2) that the group had obtained a nuclear weapon, which was not true.

 

Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism supporting Palestinian jihadist groups. Saddam Hussein started two wars that killed several hundred thousand people, gassed his own citizens, and ran a fascist police state that brutally oppressed the country’s Shiite majority and Kurdish minority. Its military regularly shot at allied planes enforcing the U.N.-endorsed no-fly zones over Iraq. The Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush. President Bill Clinton had signed legislation committing the U.S. to overthrowing Iraq’s Baathist regime.

 

Every intelligence service in the world believed Saddam possessed chemical weapons stockpiles, and many thought he sought nuclear weapons. Intelligence from allies who did not want America to go to war, such as France and Germany, emphasized the risk of our troops suffering casualties from chemical weapons.

 

Intelligence regarding any links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden was then inconclusive. We knew that a senior member of al-Qaeda, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, had been in the IIS. Was Hadi the IIS liaison between Saddam’s secular regime and bin Laden’s millenarian terror group? Or did he become a religious radical and defect to al-Qaeda? The latter, as we found out only after Hadi was captured circa 2007.

 

An Iraqi embassy official in Malaysia, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, expedited future 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi through airport customs and to the January 2000 meeting where that attack was planned ... and then disappeared. Was Shakir an IIS officer? Doubtful, but we only learned that later from Hadi, Saddam, and documents recovered from bin Laden’s Pakistan hideaway.

 

The 16 Iraqi detainees captured in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo were regularly interrogated about their knowledge of any relationship between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, but they were all low-ranking and had no such knowledge.

 

We also knew that Jordanian al-Qaeda member Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was holed up in northern Iraq, plotting poison attacks on European subways such as the Paris Metro, which were thwarted, and the assassination of American diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, which succeeded in October 2002. Was Saddam helping Zarqawi? No, but we did not know that then.

 

Considerable thought was given to dropping the Ranger Regiment and an Army special mission unit (SMU) on Zarqawi’s mountain redoubt in July 2002 to disrupt his plots, which we knew were real, down to imagery intelligence of his men gassing goats to death. When some of Zarqawi’s operatives were arrested en route to Europe, the decision was made to cancel the special operations raid and wait until the conventional invasion of Iraq in 2003 to deal with his terror camp. That was a consequential mistake: Zarqawi was responsible for triggering Iraq’s sectarian civil war in February 2006, and his al-Qaeda in Iraq group killed thousands of American service members before special operators and an F-16 fighter jet killed him in July of that year. A successful raid, short of a full invasion, might have sufficiently deterred Saddam from giving terrorists shelter in Iraq.

 

The National Security Council staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense asked the Joint Staff repeatedly about the Iraq/al-Qaeda question. To his great credit, our boss Patrick Duecy shielded intelligence analysts from any pressure that might have been exerted from on high to reach a certain answer. Anyone with the proper security clearances could read the limited available information for themselves, he said. The reporting was smoke but not fire, as there was no evidence of a link between Saddam and bin Laden.

 

Contemporaneously, Chicago gang member turned terrorist José Padilla and fellow al-Qaeda member Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah traveled to the U.S. to plan an attack using a radiological dispersion device or “dirty bomb.” Padilla was arrested as he deplaned at O’Hare Airport in May 2002, while Shukrijumah remained at large until killed by Pakistani special forces in December 2014. Their dirty bomb plot was impractical: They lacked the radioactive material to build the device. The pair considered instead renting Manhattan apartments and leaving gas stoves on and time bombs behind them as they left. The resulting blast could destroy a building, killing hundreds of New Yorkers as they slept.

 

I was on counterterrorism watch at the Pentagon on the evening of September 10-11, 2002. Voluminous intelligence reporting indicated another attack on New York City would take place on the 9/11 anniversary. The night before, the Coast Guard reported that radiological sensors found a nuclear weapon on a cargo ship in New York Harbor, the M/V Palermo Senator. The director of defense intelligence, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, was about to wake up Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Richard Myers and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with this alarming news when a reservist, who was a nuclear scientist in civilian life, encouraged everyone to check the ship’s cargo manifest, as ceramic tile sometimes gave off a false positive for radiation. The Coast Guard confirmed that the Palermo Senator carried a cargo of ... ceramic tile. The Coasties, the Navy’s SMU, and its explosive ordnance disposal team still got the ship out of New York Harbor and searched it from stem to stern, way out at sea, just to be sure.

 

The intelligence community (IC) decided years later that al-Qaeda didn’t have a nuclear weapon, for the simple reason that if bin Laden had one, he’d have already used it. But the incident in New York was the kind of thing crossing Bush’s desk each day while he decided whether to invade Iraq. And in retrospect, a reasonable bureaucratic decision made by policymakers after 9/11 may have had an unintended effect.

 

Senior leaders formerly received just the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a product of carefully vetted intelligence analyses. After the CIA failed to give Bush actionable intelligence about the looming attack, beyond the agency’s August 6, 2001, PDB article “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” someone understandably ordered that Bush be informed of every terror threat about which the IC received information. Thus was born the “President’s Daily Threat Matrix,” which included solid human intelligence and communications intercepts on real plots al-Qaeda’s core leaders were working on, such as an airline hijacking attack on a half-dozen major office buildings on the West Coast and in the Midwest. This plan was broken up when the CIA captured Indonesian al-Qaeda member Riduan Isamuddin in Thailand in August 2003.

 

But the matrix also included a lot of bad intelligence—for example, from random “walk-ins” to American embassies who insisted on speaking with CIA officers about alleged threats. This kind of information must be recorded and disseminated within the IC but is rarely briefed to a president. I wonder whether Bush was unable to separate the signal from the noise in the matrix and so thought that the terror threat from fall 2001 to spring 2003 was even worse than it was, as he made up his mind about Iraq.

 

Congress ultimately authorized the use of force in Iraq by large bipartisan majorities, 296-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. Bush, arguably failed by his war Cabinet, then made the historic mistake of invading Iraq.

 

I never doubted the president’s good faith, though. He is an intelligent and sincere man, and only a fool or a villain would start a war on false pretenses, knowing as a small-d democratic leader that his factual misstatements would be exposed as such before he faced voters for reelection in 2004. Bush didn’t lie. He was just tragically wrong.

 

And as we now know, everyone was wrong about the WMD. Saddam ran the most effective strategic deception campaign since the Allies convinced Adolf Hitler that they’d invade his Fortress Europe at the Pas de Calais and not Normandy in June 1944. The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll sets forth how and why Saddam convinced even his own general staff that he possessed WMD. And again there were no ties between Iraq’s government and al-Qaeda, neither of which had a nuclear weapon.

 

I supported the bad decision to go to war, for whatever little my opinion was worth as a junior officer. I disregarded the wise advice of a Joint Staff colleague who warned that we had unfinished business in Afghanistan to take care of before possibly starting a new war. I replied stupidly, paraphrasing President Lyndon Johnson’s remark that America could fart and chew gum at the same time.

 

Because I supported going to war, I had a moral duty to serve in it, especially when it went badly. Instead of resuming my prewar legal practice, I joined the CIA as a case officer trainee in September 2004 and requested assignment to Iraq upon finishing training in December 2005. I arrived in February 2006, just in time for Zarqawi to start the civil war by bombing the Shiite mosque in Samarra. My job for the next year was supporting a rotating cast of Marine regimental combat teams, Navy SMU squadrons, and Army Special Forces companies. These Marines suffered heavy losses holding the Euphrates River Valley from west of Ramadi to the Syrian border. This was when the Sunni tribes’ “Anbar Awakening” began as they turned against al-Qaeda and its foreign fighters, just before Gen. David Petraeus’ surge turned the tide of the war.

 

I returned briefly as an Army reservist in 2008-09, as the surge ended, to help Special Forces advise Iraq’s Counterterrorism Command (CTC). This tour in Baghdad’s Green Zone was relatively calm. The CTC later went on to defeat ISIS in the 2014-17 war, taking terrible casualties along the way.

 

I spent 15 months in Iraq. The CIA tour was hard; my late mother said that the light went out from behind my eyes over there and never came back. It’s hard to forgive myself for being unable to collect enough intelligence to save more Marines. I cannot accept thanks for my reports that saved American lives and limbs without accepting my concomitant share of responsibility for the more than 80 youngsters in the units I supported who did not come home to their families, and hundreds more who did not make it home whole.

 

Like many other Iraq veterans, I got the usual party gifts from my tours: failed romances, mild cases of post-traumatic stress, and “burn pit” cancer, the latter from our military’s curious practice of burning enormous piles of human waste and other garbage with diesel fuel. I’ll tell you, folks,  there’s nothing quite like the smell of billowing black clouds of burning feces on a day that’s already 125 degrees and humid.

 

All who fought in Iraq need to decide for themselves whether their service was worth it. It’s a deeply personal question, especially while acknowledging that the war was a mistake, given the wrong intelligence analyses upon which it was predicated.

 

There is no getting around the human cost of war: 4,418 uniformed Americans dead and 31,994 wounded, thousands more coalition soldiers, and an untold number of Iraqis. In any war, civilians are killed, and innocent women, children, and older or disabled people suffer the worst.

 

We made serious mistakes in Iraq. Poor prewar intelligence damaged America’s credibility abroad, postinvasion planning was insufficient, de-Baathification went too far, and the implementation of the successful counterinsurgency strategy developed by Gens. Petraeus and James Mattis was delayed for far too long. The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib was shameful. Our pullout of forces in December 2011 by President Barack Obama was too hasty, as our military soon had to return to help defeat ISIS. Our intense focus on the Middle East over the last quarter century has left us militarily ill-prepared for potential future conflicts with China and/or Russia.

 

Meanwhile the national debt, fueled in part by trillions of dollars in Iraq war spending, ballooned from about $6 trillion in 2000 to $40 trillion today. This taxpayer money could have either been saved or spent on more pressing domestic needs.

 

And yet ... Saddam did support terrorism, albeit not al-Qaeda. He was an evil dictator. The world is a better place without Saddam, as most Iraqi Shiites and Kurds, and even many Sunnis, would agree. Iraq was a dystopian, totalitarian state under his leadership and is a democracy today—flawed, and strongly influenced by our enemy Iran for religious and geographic reasons, but a democracy all the same. That is something to take pride in. Good leaders came to the fore during the war, such as Petraeus, Mattis, Stanley McChrystal, John Kelly, William McRaven, and others. The U.S. military is leaving Iraq only because we’ve been asked to do so by its elected government, and we’re not an empire. An American Embassy remains in Baghdad, unlike in Kabul, Afghanistan.

 

Something we’ll never know is whether any of the thousands of foreign fighters who flocked to Iraq to try and kill us Americans there would otherwise have attacked the U.S. at home. I suspect so, but perhaps that’s more of a hope or just a rationalization. A sentiment I heard expressed was that it was better these fanatics threw down with us in Iraq, heavily armed and well-trained as we were, rather than with American civilians back home. One SEAL jokingly referred to himself as being a “bug-zapper” in that sense. Maybe he was right.

 

An enduring memory of the war is my admiration for the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers I observed. They’d patiently stand a post in excruciating heat, while wearing dozens of pounds of gear, knowing they could be hit by a sniper or a rocket. They’d stoically roll out on convoys or patrols, again and again, knowing that roadside bombs might lie in their path to maim them.

 

Two of the eight Medals of Honor awarded in Iraq went to men killed elsewhere during my long tour there, Specialist Ross McGinnis of the Army’s First Infantry Division and Petty Officer Michael Monsoor of SEAL Team 3. Both selflessly jumped on grenades to save colleagues. That’s a special kind of bravery, properly recognized as such.

 

The quiet day-in, day-out toughness shown by less-heralded young men and women is another form of bravery I also deeply respect. Knowing that strong character is what so many good fellow Americans of different backgrounds are made of, all of them home now, most raising families and working in new professions, gives me hope for our country in the difficult times ahead.

No, the Iran Bombing Is Not ‘Just Like Iraq’

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

 

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power. 

 

The elder president Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, Bill Clinton, used American power—in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere—with the general approval of the media and the public.

 

But when the younger Bush, Clinton’s successor, launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Vietnam syndrome came back with a vengeance. Barely three weeks after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2002, famed New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple penned a piece headlined “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam.”

 

“Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past,” Apple wrote, “the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.”

 

“Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?” he rhetorically asked. “Echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable,” he asserted.

 

Over the next 12 months, the newspaper ran nearly 300 articles with the words “Vietnam” and “Afghanistan” in them. The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times ran articles mentioning Iraq and Vietnam at an average rate of more than twice a day (I looked it up 20 years ago).

 

The tragic irony is that President George W. Bush did what his father couldn’t: He exorcized the specter of “another Vietnam”—but he also replaced  it with the specter of “another Iraq.”

 

That’s what’s echoing in the reaction to  President Trump’s decision to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. We’re all familiar with cliches about generals fighting the last war, but journalists and politicians have the same habit of cramming the square peg of current events into the round hole of previous conflicts.

 

Trump’s decision to bomb Iran—which I broadly support, with caveats— is fair game for criticism and concern. But the Iraq syndrome cosplay misleads more than instructs. For starters, no one is proposing “boots on the ground,” never mind “occupation” or “nation-building.”

 

The debate over whether George W. Bush lied us into war over the issue of weapons of mass destruction is more tendentious than the conventional wisdom on the left and right would have you believe. But it’s also irrelevant. No serious observer disputes that Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapon for decades. The only live question is, or was, How close is Iran to having one?

 

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told Congress in March—preposterously, in my opinion—that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” On Sunday, Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Vice President J.D. Vance, “So, why launch this strike now? Has the intelligence changed, Mr. Vice President?”

 

It’s a good question. But it’s not a sound basis for insinuating that another Republican president is again using faulty intelligence to get us into a war—just like Iraq.

 

The squabbling over whether this was a “preemptive” rather than “preventative” attack misses the point. America would be justified in attacking Iran even if Gabbard was right. Why? Because Iran has been committing acts of war against America—and Israel—for decades, mostly through terrorist proxies it created, trained, funded and directed for that purpose. In 1983, Hezbollah blew up the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, killing 63. Later that year, it blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. In the decades since, Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies have orchestrated or attempted the murder of Americans repeatedly, including during the Iraq war. It even authorized the assassination of President Trump, according to Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

 

These are acts of war that would justify a response even if Iran had no interest in a nuclear weapon. But the fanatical regime—whose supporters routinely chant “Death to America!”—is pursuing a nuclear weapon. 

 

For years, the argument for not taking out that program has rested largely on the fact that it would be too difficult. The facilities are too hardened, Iran’s proxies are too powerful.

 

That is the intelligence that has changed. Israel crushed Hezbollah and Hamas and eliminated much of Iran’s air defense system. What once seemed like a daunting assault on a Death Star now seemed like a layup by comparison.

 

None of this means that things cannot get worse or that Trump’s decision won’t end up being regrettable. But whatever that scenario looks like, it won’t look much like what happened in Iraq, except for those unwilling to see it any other way.

After the Iraq War

By John R. Bolton

Thursday, March 16, 2023

 

The 2003 invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein were accomplished rapidly, with consummate skill and professionalism, and with thankfully low U.S. casualties. This period of major combat operations (March 20 until May 1) was close to flawless. Saddam’s day was over, and Iraq’s potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was foreclosed, effectively in perpetuity. We achieved our goals.

 

These key facts are essentially indubitable. Instead, critics dispute whether deciding to invade, and American policy after toppling Saddam, were correct and justifiable. These are no small matters. But the critical point, typically ignored or misunderstood, is that the “Iraq War” is not one indivisible, 20-year-long block of granite that can be judged only all or nothing. Instead, the ongoing U.S. presence there embodies a long, complex history, some of which Washington got right and some it didn’t.

 

The reasons to invade were clear and compelling: Saddam directly threatened U.S. security by pursuing WMD and supporting terrorism. After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors found Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program far more advanced than indicated by previous intelligence assessments. Despite the physical destruction of centrifuges and other assets by the U.N. and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the mid 1990s, Saddam retained the program’s core intellectual base: over 3,000 nuclear scientists and technicians, his “nuclear mujahideen,” to re-create it later. Under Security Council Resolution 687, Saddam also declared large supplies of chemical weapons and related assets. Pressed repeatedly by the U.N., Iraq claimed to have destroyed its chemical-weapons program but obstructed U.N. inspectors, refusing to supply any proof of its claims, leading essentially all observers to believe that it retained large chemical-weapons capabilities. Biological weapons, the easiest of the WMD to conceal or destroy, were suspected but not proven. Iraq’s ballistic-missile programs had continued.

 

All this WMD activity was undertaken against the day when U.N. economic sanctions were lifted and weapons inspectors departed. Indeed, sanctions were already collapsing when President George W. Bush was inaugurated. Proposals to “fix” the problem, such as “smart” (more-targeted) sanctions, were at best fig leaves, acknowledging the U.N.’s disarray (both politically and operationally) and its essentially inevitable failure. There are only two kinds of sanctions, but they are not “smart” versus “dumb.” The real dichotomy is between crushing sanctions, swiftly and massively imposed and then rigorously enforced, and all others. Most sanctions historically fail and become mere virtue-signaling. The lesson of twelve years of failed Iraq sanctions between 1991 and 2003 is that sanctions can help avoid war only if they are enforced cold-bloodedly. The U.N.’s Iraq efforts, especially the oil-for-food program, failed in every material respect.

 

No one lied about WMD. In the wake of 9/11 and the still-unresolved anthrax attacks, Saddam’s murderous history, domestically and abroad, made it entirely prudent to ensure that he could never again threaten America, the region, or the world with weapons of mass destruction. Melvyn Leffler’s recent book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, while not flawless, should be compulsory reading on President Bush’s pre-war decision-making. Post-war findings about the actual state of Iraq’s WMD do not invalidate the pre-war reasoning. Saddam’s real threat was not merely his intentions and capabilities in 2003 but what they could be in the future if he retained power. This was well understood and endorsed across America, which is why congressional and public support for the invasion was overwhelming. Indeed, in hindsight, Saddam should have been removed in 1991 after his unprovoked aggression against Kuwait.

 

In fact, the brunt of contemporary criticism focuses not on pre-war decision-making but on U.S. policies and what came after May 1, 2003. Certainly, the rapid, near-total collapse of Iraq’s government and the resulting disorder are facts. The real issue, however, is whether Washington should have moved immediately to turn governance functions over to Iraqis, or created, as it did, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which kept America intimately involved in Iraqi politics far longer than initially expected. Important decisions such as de-Baathification, the dissolution of Iraq’s army, and the broader efforts at nation-building and democracy promotion are also all debatable, especially with 20/20 hindsight. Nonetheless, despite the innumerable difficulties encountered and missteps U.S. authorities made, by embracing the 2007–08 “surge,” President Bush in fact reduced internal insurgency to a manageable, marginal level.

 

The key point, however, is not that these or other individual decisions were right or wrong but instead that they did not inevitably, inexorably, deterministically, and unalterably flow from the decision to invade and overthrow, and the rationale for it. Whatever Bush’s batting average in post-Saddam decisions (not perfect, but respectable, in my view), it is separable, conceptually and functionally, from the invasion decision. The subsequent history, for good or ill, cannot detract from the logic, fundamental necessity, and success of overthrowing Saddam, a threat to American national security since he invaded Kuwait in 1990.

 

The biggest “Iraq War” mistake was Barack Obama’s catastrophic 2011 military withdrawal, which even Obama recognized as an error, reinserting U.S. forces in 2014 to counter the rise of ISIS. Withdrawing, obviously, was precisely the opposite of Bush’s decision to attack, which makes it hard to see these polar opposites as parts of the same block of granite to be judged as a unity. Moreover, other unforeseen post-2003 events had significant negative impacts on the Middle East, such as the Arab Spring’s rise and especially its collapse, and the resurgence of radical Islamism. How can a 2003 decision be faulted because of subsequent events that completely surprised the world?

 

Equally wrong was the Bush administration’s failure to take advantage of its substantial presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to seek regime change in between, in Iran, before Tehran’s own WMD programs neared success. Those who say invading Iraq distracted from Afghanistan, or that attacking Iraq rather than Iran prioritized the wrong target, should still agree that we had a clear opportunity to empower Iran’s opposition to depose the ayatollahs. Unfortunately, however, as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon.

 

In any case, Iran policy, like so much else, was not predetermined by the 2003 invasion decision. Lumping everything together as “Iraq War” critics do disserves careful analysis of what America accomplished, or didn’t.

The Iraq War, 20 Years Later

By Eli Lake

Tuesday, March 07, 2023

 

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush announced to the world the beginning of a war to “disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” With these brief remarks, Bush inalterably changed the trajectory of his presidency and U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. On March 19, 2003, the vast majority of Americans supported the war to end Saddam Hussein’s regime. That support wouldn’t last.

 

Today, it is a matter of banal consensus that the war for Iraq was a blunder. This narrative is bolstered by the fact that the war and reconstruction were riddled with mistakes: Shortly after a victory against an impoverished and disloyal Iraqi army, everything began to unravel. The weapons of mass destruction that Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council Saddam had concealed were never found. The U.S. military was unprepared to administer a country of what was then 30 million people. L. Paul Bremer, the second American proconsul, disbanded the Iraqi army, which provided a steady stream of armed young men for an insurgency led by the remnants of the Baath Party and al-Qaeda. A war that Bush and his cabinet had promised would cost less than $200 billion has now, 20 years later, cost more than $2 trillion. And there were abuses. The most notorious of these scandals was the torture and humiliation of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. The U.S. Army and the CIA partnered with thugs after the fall of Saddam’s regime. Even John McCain, for years the most unflinching advocate for Iraq’s liberation, came to view the war as an error. In his final memoir, published in 2018, the year he died, McCain wrote, “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

 

With all due respect to the late Senator McCain, his confession was premature, at least in one key respect. Despite massive corruption and the reverberations of a political crisis that began in 2019 with widespread protest, Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.

 

In 2003, the World Bank estimated that Iraq’s GDP was a paltry $21.9 billion. In 2021, Iraq’s GDP was nearly $208 billion. During Saddam’s reign, only a small number of Iraqis had cellphone subscriptions. As of 2021, 86 percent of the country had a wireless telecom plan. Several measures of quality of life, from literacy rates to life expectancy, have gone up. Just one example: Before the advent of Covid, life expectancy in Iraq had risen to 72 years. In 2001, it was 67.

 

Despite two Sunni Jihadist insurgencies, not to mention reprisal campaigns from Iran’s Shia majority and Iran’s proxies and agents, Iraq has held six consecutive parliamentary elections since 2005. Its representatives have drafted and its people have ratified a constitution. And while Iraq’s political system is blemished by corruption and sectarian demagoguery, the country’s elections are competitive. The outcome is not known in advance, as were the pageants staged by Saddam Hussein during his reign.

 

Iraq’s Kurdish provinces have enjoyed a level of autonomy since the fall of Saddam, even though the ruling Talabani and Barzani families remain enriched in Kurdish areas through graft. The Kurds make up as much as 20 percent of Iraq’s population of 42 million. And the creation and continued existence of a Kurdish provincial government—which began after the first Gulf War in 1991—has given Iraqi Kurds almost unprecedented security. The Baathist regime’s forces massacred Kurdish forces at the ends of both the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s and the first Gulf War in 1991. In 1988, Iraqi forces gassed Kurdish civilians  at Halabja, the last time a state used chemical weapons in the 20th century.

 

Even more startling, despite all signs that Iraq would become a vassal of Iran after Barack Obama withdrew U.S. forces at the end of 2011, there remain significant limits to Iran’s influence in Baghdad. In 2019, a protest movement emerged that in part targeted Iranian meddling in the country. The struggle of Iraqis against Iran’s designs for their country was bolstered in the first days of 2020 by an unlikely figure, Donald Trump. When he ordered the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds force (as well as the head of Iraq’s popular mobilization forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis), Iran’s campaign to control Iraq was dealt a serious blow.

 

Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed al-Sudani (chosen by Iraq’s elected parliament in October 2022), has so far shown he is not Iran’s cat’s-paw, even though he was selected by a Shia political coalition with historic ties to Iran. In January, al-Sudani told the Wall Street Journal that he did not support a policy to force out the 2,000 U.S. soldiers currently stationed in Baghdad and the Kurdish provinces. And in July, before al-Sudani’s ascendance, Iraq signed a deal with Saudi Arabia to connect to its electricity grid, a move that would make the country less dependent on Iran for its energy.

 

All of these hopeful signs do not mask the most significant threat to the Iraqi state today: corruption. At the end of 2022, al-Sudani held a press conference flanked by stacks of Iraqi dinars worth $250 million that had been recovered from former high government officials who had looted $2.5 billion in tax revenues from the state-owned Rafidain Bank. The tragedy here is that the $2.5 billion swindle was a drop in the bucket compared with the amount of money stolen from the Iraqi treasury and U.S. financial assistance since 2003. Some estimates put that figure north of $200 billion.

 

This endemic corruption is one of the negative legacies of the U.S. intervention. The federal reserve, since 2003, has exported between $1 billion and $2 billion a month to Iraq to help pay salaries for government employees and provide capital for foreign trade agreements. These cash shipments ended up fueling a system that has created a class of billionaires who secure loans for imports that are never shipped and for businesses that exist only on paper.

 

But while corruption is the most significant challenge to Iraq today, that in and of itself is a testament to the progress the country has made in the past 20 years. Consider that the Iraqi state has survived two terror wars since the fall of Saddam Hussein. When I was last in the country, in 2015, at the height of its second terror war, I went on the front lines with an Iraqi military unit that was taking orders from the leader of the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia with deep ties to Iran. There I encountered a grocer named Assam al-Hashem who had fought for Saddam’s army in the 1980s, manning an anti-aircraft gun. Al-Hashem said he was grateful to fight alongside a militia that was trained and equipped by Iran because there was no alternative. “What choice do we have?” he asked. 

 

To understand his perspective, one must recognize the barbarity and cruelty of the Islamic State and its earlier incarnation, al-Qaeda in Iraq. One gruesome story from 2006 was that a local sheik in Anbar who had refused to give his obeisance to a local jihadist found at his home a cooler with the severed heads of his children. The Islamic State was known for rounding up the women of a town it had conquered and “marrying” them off to the victorious warriors. When facing such a foe, one will accept aid from anyone willing to provide it.

 

The bargain that Iraq’s leaders made in 2014 and 2015 with Iranian-backed militias to save their state from a new caliphate is the antecedent to the corruption problems and the militias that plague Iraq today. But as daunting as those challenges are, they are better problems than the ones faced by Iraq from the jihadist insurgencies before.

 

All of this gets back to Bush’s original reasons for starting the war. Let’s start with Bush’s most obvious error. He promised to disarm a country that was not stockpiling the chemical and biological weapons that U.S. intelligence agencies, as well as almost every other foreign spy service, believed Saddam was hiding. In the past 20 years, barrels of ink and thousands of acres of forest land have been spilled and milled to forward a tendentious theory that the Bush administration lied in the run-up to the war when it claimed to know that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. No subsequent reports from either Congress or various bipartisan commissions have confirmed the deception, though it is true that some dissenting analyses on this question were not included with the more alarmist public estimates of Iraq’s WMDs. That said, it was not as if Iraq was innocent and simply the victim of Western plotting. Saddam never complied with the 17th UN Security Council resolution that required him to demonstrate that he had disarmed. Rather, his military shot at surveillance planes. He barred scientists from speaking with UN inspectors. The 2004 report from CIA weapons inspector Charles Duelfer concluded that “Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized.” It also said Saddam had had an interest in convincing his neighbors and his own people that he possessed the apocalyptic weapons he had in his possession before his 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

 

Did the war “free Iraqis”? If you compare their lives with those of Belgians or Americans today, then Iraqis are not free. But that is primarily because of the presence of sectarian militias and the reality of staggering corruption. Indeed, these are the two main reasons Freedom House ranks Iraq as “unfree,” despite its contested successive elections. But are Iraqis freer in 2023 than they were under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny? Without question, they are. Saddam created a Stalinist nightmare in Iraq, empowering the secret police to disappear citizens. Neighbors spied on neighbors. Bureaucrats lived in constant fear. When Saddam’s son Uday was placed in charge of Iraq’s Olympic committee, he would often torture at a private prison in the committee’s offices the athletes who were bested in international competition.

 

Finally, is the world safer now that Saddam no longer is in charge of Iraq? If you asked that question in 2006, before Bush chose General David Petraeus to oversee a new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, the answer would have been no. In 2006, al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian-supported death squads were engaged in a competitive ethnic cleansing that risked spilling over into a regional war. But by the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, al-Qaeda’s insurgency was largely defeated and Iraq was on a better trajectory. After 2011, when Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq, its Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Malaki, persecuted the Anbari tribes that sided with America against al-Qaeda. This created another opening for al-Qaeda’s successor, the Islamic State. After the Islamic State took over Mosul and was threatening Baghdad in 2014, there would have been merit in denying that the world had been made safer by the Iraq war. But the Islamic State’s caliphate was defeated as well.

 

In 2023, Iraq still has much work to do. And yet its current condition represents a historic achievement that has not been recognized. Iraq has continued to have successive elections, its economy has grown, and Iraqis have managed to save their country twice from fanatic terror armies seeking to rebuild a lost caliphate. To evaluate the war that rid Iraq of a sadistic crime family, one must imagine what Iraq would have resembled had Saddam or his sons remained in power. In that light, the plagues of corruption, ethnic militias, and Iranian influence look like a bargain.

Trump without Trumpism

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, January 14, 2022

 

On a recent podcast with Conan O’Brien, the comedian Zach Galifianakis said America’s obsession with celebrity culture was a “mental illness” that explained why we ended up with Donald Trump, a celebrity president.

 

Given how tired and ineffective Joe Biden looks right now as president, my guess is that Republicans will be awfully tempted if Trump presents himself for election in 2024. He’s still more relatable than all other elected Republicans, funnier, and freer to say what he thinks. The problem for Trump is that he’s now all about Trump. He’s lost the political substance of his first campaign and is now stuck dwelling on the unfairness of the Russiagate investigations, or his zany theories about the 2020 election that he lost.

 

Trump’s celebrity certainly was a major factor in his rise. But while it may be difficult or painful to remember in the year 2022, when Donald Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in 2015, he was an issue-driven candidate. He ran against the record of President Barack Obama, but even more so, he ran against the record of former president George W. Bush.

 

Bush’s second term had turned into a disaster, largely because of his policy choices. The Iraq War began to turn into a quagmire, empowering a government in Baghdad that was too close to Iran and not in control of the Sunni Triangle, where radicals seized the advantage. Instead of Iraqi democracy leading to a domino effect of democratic revolution across the region, the War on Terror was producing more opportunities for terrorists.

 

But it wasn’t just the Iraq War. Bush had pursued an unpopular reform of Social Security that blew up in his face. He also pursued a form of comprehensive immigration reform that, like Reagan’s attempt in the 1980s, put an amnesty for illegal immigrants up front, and promised enforcement and border security later.

 

Donald Trump’s promise in 2015 was to reverse the polarity of the party. On the issues where George W. Bush had run to the center, such as immigration, Donald Trump would move decisively to the right-most flank of the party. On issues where George W. Bush had been further to the right, on reforming entitlements, Trump was going to be a moderate. A vote for Trump in the Republican primaries was a vote to change the direction of the party, and it proved irresistible to a larger and larger number of Republicans. What made Trump’s a populist campaign is that Republican elites and institutions were heavily invested in that polarity never reversing.

 

Precisely because Trump came from outside the culture of electoral politics, it was easy for a very large pool of voters to project their fantasies onto him. The businessman-as-president appeal already had deep roots in the Republican Party and among centrist populists who had voted for Ross Perot decades earlier. Maybe Trump placed in such a high office really could build the best roads and airports in the world. Maybe he could reform American medicine and “take care of everybody.”

 

It would be much harder for so many diverse groups of voters to fall under the same spell again in 2024. They’ve now seen what a Donald Trump presidency looks like. The wall was not built. Mexico did not pay for it. It took Joe Biden to come into office before the troops came home from Afghanistan.

 

Trump has a more hostile relationship with most elected Republicans now than he did seven years ago, namely because they do not take his claims of election fraud seriously and are unwilling to make them the central issue defining the party’s politics.

 

This week Trump sat for an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, and he obsessively pressed his claims that there had been incredible, can’t-believe-it revelations in Arizona, Georgia, and other states that he lost in 2020. All he could talk about was the supposed conspiracy against him. “How come Biden couldn’t attract 20 people for a crowd?” Trump asked. “How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch, but all of a sudden he got 80 million votes? Nobody believes that, Steve. Nobody believes that.”

 

While it is true that many Republicans have a bone-deep belief that the electoral system is somehow unfairly stacked against them, the obsession with these claims reverses the polarity of Trumpism itself. When he first ran for president, Trump genuinely promised to do things that voters wanted, to make the country great, proud, and prosperous again. Now, he is essentially asking Republicans to do something for him, to restore his tarnished honor and make credible his belief in his own victory. All that is left of Trumpism are Trump’s grievances and aspirations.

 

This is not an agenda that will win him high office, help his party, or accomplish anything for his countrymen.

Giving Up on the Good-Enough War

By Eli Lake

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

America’s longest war, we are being told, should be remembered for its pain and its folly: the suicides of veterans, the sham of Afghanistan’s military, the greed of the contractors, the immolated wedding parties, the pederast warlords. The valor to be celebrated is now reserved for the airlift that commenced after the fall of a Potemkin regime, not the 20-year mission that allowed that government to survive until it didn’t. As the New York Times news alert to mark the exit of the last soldier put it: “The U.S. Occupation Ends.”

 

This is President Joe Biden’s narrative, a narrative in which America is no different from the past empires whose headstones dot the landscape of Afghanistan. The narrative claims they too tried to tame an untamable country, and we followed foolishly in their footsteps. As Biden quipped to a reporter on July 8, “it’s up to the people of Afghanistan to decide the government they want, not us to impose the government on them.”

 

It is an appealing pose for Democrats looking for a reason to support their president’s betrayal. It also suits the purposes of the America-Firsters who dance to the beat of Donald Trump’s drum. Why are we building schools for girls half a world away when our own schools are failing? they ask. Besides, the Afghans never wanted democracy. If they did, their army would have fought for it, and their government wouldn’t have collapsed.

 

How does this theory account for Afghans such as Hamed Kohistani? He is a doctor at a Kabul hospital who, in 2018, waited for five hours to vote in his country’s parliamentary elections. He told the New York Times, “The problem is not waiting, the problem is security. The longer you wait in line, the more the risk is.” That risk was the Taliban. Throughout the seven national Afghan elections since 2004, the Taliban waged a vicious war on voting itself. They warned Afghans on social media and official communiqués not to show up on Election Day. They targeted poll workers and police chiefs. They sent volunteers and conscripts with suicide vests and car bombs to polling stations. And in the territories the Taliban controlled or contested, they outlawed voting entirely.

 

Yet millions of Afghans showed up to cast their ballots anyway. This fact is all the more remarkable considering how corrupt those elections were. The Taliban’s campaign of terror made it nearly impossible for outside monitors to observe vote counts. A national voter registry was riddled with errors and easily manipulated. Every major Afghan election featured accusations and counter accusations of fraud. Thus, the act of voting itself must be seen as a protest against its potential negation.

 

Successive elections were not the only or even the most important achievement of American and Western arms in Afghanistan. The war was waged in Afghanistan to prevent the next 9/11, and in this respect it succeeded. But the resilience and courage of Afghan voters put the lie to the glib slander that millions of Afghans did not want democracy.

 

Think of the women in the larger cities such as Kabul and Kandahar. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan before their ouster in late 2001, girls were banned from attending school. As of 2020, 3.5 million out of 9 million students were girls. Between 2005 and 2017, the female literacy rate nearly doubled from 20 percent to 39 percent. As of 2020, there were 70,000 women teachers.

 

The gains were not limited to women. As the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said in a recent report, “the lives of millions of Afghans have been improved by U.S. government interventions.” In 2018, the SIGAR noted that life expectancy had jumped from 56 to 65. Between 2001 and 2019, the mortality rate for children under five decreased from more than 50 percent to 28 percent. And Afghanistan’s overall Gross Domestic Product tripled between 2002 and 2019.

 

These successes are most apparent in Kabul. Under the Taliban, it was a joyless, culturally barren city. After the American and NATO intervention, Kabul hosted film festivals, art exhibits, and new universities. In 2014, a group of young female orphans formed the Zohra Orchestra, named for the Persian goddess of music. In August, as the Taliban swept to power, the orchestra’s 24-year-old conductor, Negin Khpalwak, prepared for the worst. According to a heartbreaking Reuters dispatch, Khpalwak “grabbed a robe to cover her bare arms and hid away a small set of decorative drums. Then she gathered up photographs and press clippings of her famed musical performances, put them in a pile and burnt them.”

 

It’s a mistake to say America fought a 20-year war only for Negin Khpalwak’s orchestra or female literacy or Kabul film festivals. But it’s also true that the war to keep the Taliban in their caves created the space for civil society to grow, particularly in the big cities.

 

Initially, counterterrorism and nation-building were meant to be complementary. As former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told SIGAR in a report released this year, “The goal was to help Afghanistan build a government, provide a prosperous life for the Afghan people, and thus create a resiliency against al-Qaeda’s return.” In other words, nation-building was America’s exit strategy.

 

This may sound ludicrous in 2021. But in the early 2000s, it was conventional wisdom. As George W. Bush put it in his second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” This is one reason why Biden’s and Donald Trump’s joint theory of Afghanistan—that this “graveyard of empires” proved the burial ground for the American empire—is wrong. When Soviet special operators invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they installed a puppet. America had the vision and hubris to attempt to make Afghanistan freer. At least that was the stated goal of the Bush administration—and, ironically, the Obama administration in its first term.

 

* * *

 

But there was a catch. Or a glitch. Or an internal policy catastrophe. Take your pick. It’s important to remember that the first forces to land in Afghanistan after 9/11 were not soldiers in the U.S. Army, but CIA officers. The agency had real experience in Afghanistan. It had worked in the 1980s through Pakistan’s military intelligence service to fund and equip the Mujahideen warriors who drove the Soviets out of the country. The CIA learned during that proxy war that Afghanistan was more a patchwork of clans than a nation-state. So it aligned with some of the country’s worst brutes to rent their militias in a war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

 

The conduct of one of those brutes serves to exemplify the wider CIA approach. In November 2001, a militia commanded by Abdul Rashid Dostum summarily executed 2,000 Taliban fighters who had surrendered, by placing them in shipping containers and then firing their rifles into them. The CIA ended up building him a mansion. And he later went on to serve as a vice president to President Ashraf Ghani. Men like Dostum may be necessary to defeat a vicious foe like the Taliban. But they can play no meaningful role in the founding of a democracy.

 

If George W. Bush had been more like his father, it’s likely the Afghanistan war would have remained in the shadows, aligning U.S. Special Operations forces with local warlords. But after 9/11, Afghanistan was briefly a whole-of-government project for an angry and idealistic nation. America was fighting two wars in Afghanistan—one to build a resilient, centralized democratic state, the other to crush al-Qaeda through an alliance with the country’s regional warlords.

 

This is where the Democrats got it wrong. The problem with Bush’s handling of the Afghanistan war wasn’t, as John Kerry had claimed in 2004 when he dubbed our greatest enemy “Osama Been Forgotten,” that the pivot to Iraq deprived the Afghan conflict of presidential focus and resources. It was that Bush’s publicly stated goal of building a democracy was undermined by his own CIA’s campaign to align with the country’s regional tyrants.

 

This paradox came to the fore in Obama’s first term. He had campaigned on Afghanistan’s being the good war, and upon taking office, agreed to a surge in forces. General Stanley McChrystal wanted to re-create the counterinsurgency strategy that had quieted al-Qaeda in Iraq. Like Hadley, he wanted to nurture resilient, legitimate local institutions that would win over the population cowed by the Taliban.

 

But when he arrived in Afghanistan, McChrystal found that in the rural provinces in particular, the real power resided with warlords. Their corruption and criminality at times were so rampant that many locals preferred the Taliban, in much the same way that a majority of Palestinians in the 2006 elections supported Hamas over the party of Yasir Arafat.

 

General Michael Flynn, who oversaw military intelligence for McChrystal in Afghanistan, was characteristically blunt about the problem in the first months of the surge. “If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan and we are perceived as backing thugs,” he said, “then we are just undermining ourselves.” And undermine us we did. For example, according to SIGAR, the U.S. spent $8.6 billion on efforts to eradicate Afghanistan’s poppy crop and heroin trade. Even as we did so, the CIA was paying off people such as Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the country’s first president, Hamid Karzai, and himself a major drug kingpin. As a result, opium-poppy production in Afghanistan soared after 2002. The U.S. government was literally funding both sides of Afghanistan’s drug war. 

 

This was a pattern. Too often, America was inadvertently funding both sides of its war in Afghanistan. McChrystal, for example, discovered that a major source of revenue for the Taliban was collecting protection money from the truck drivers who supplied U.S. and Afghan forces. The U.S. supply chain became a cash cow for the enemy. Between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. lavished Pakistan’s military with more than $20 billion in subsidy and equipment. All the while, Pakistan’s military intelligence service played a double game, occasionally helping to arrest Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, but also providing sanctuary, funding, and training for the Taliban in its war in Afghanistan.

 

By 2010, McChrystal was gone. After he and his senior staff voiced their contempt for Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, in a Rolling Stone cover story, General David Petraeus took over command. And even though he had helped devise the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, Petraeus was never able to make it stick in Afghanistan. He did recapture territory from the Taliban, but as the subsequent years showed, the Afghans had difficulty holding that territory.

 

Obama’s Afghanistan surge was accompanied by another spending spree. According to SIGAR, by 2010, U.S. funding for reconstruction exceeded Afghanistan’s entire gross domestic product. David Marsden, a former official for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told SIGAR the aid money was “like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows that funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground.” Take the “justice centers,” walled compounds that housed police stations, courtrooms, and jails. As soon as U.S. forces retreated, these buildings became dormant and rotted away. The power brokers in much of Afghanistan’s countryside had no interest in participating in transparent, Western justice. The old ways were better.

 

By Obama’s second term, he was looking for a way out of Afghanistan. The mission was significantly reduced, to focus on counterterrorism. And despite a much smaller military surge in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, even his hawks, such as his second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, were no longer trying to build a modern, free Afghanistan. Instead, McMaster pressed the president to embrace a “good enough” strategy that would keep a small contingent of troops on the ground, primarily to conduct counterterrorism and advise a wobbly Afghan military in their war against the Taliban.

 

Trump grew impatient with Afghanistan by the end of his first year. He wanted to get out as quickly as possible. So in 2019, his envoy, war-on-terror fixture Zalmay Khalilzad, bargained away the one red line Trump’s predecessors would not cross: the legitimacy of the elected government in Kabul. He began direct negotiations with the Taliban, cutting out Ghani’s government in the process. It was ironic that Khalilzad would deliver such a blow because he had helped shepherd the process that led to the first national election for Afghanistan since its days as a parliamentary monarchy in the 1960s.

 

When Biden came into office, he was not obliged to continue with Trump’s strategy. He had an opportunity to slow things down and give the “good enough” plan a shot. He inherited a very small U.S. military footprint and a government that could at least secure a kind of freedom for Afghans living in the big cities. He could have pressured Pakistan, which armed and trained the Taliban and gave it sanctuary, to end that treachery. But he decided it was not worth the candle. He finished what Trump started and surrendered to the Taliban.

 

Today, Biden and his administration spin this surrender as prudence. They say the betrayal of Afghan allies was an inevitable consequence of ending a pointless war. They tout an airlift that left so many behind. And they hope Americans will soon forget that for 20 years our national might cultivated a fragile democratic experiment that today lies in ignominious ruins, under the boot of the Taliban. 

The Presidency as Foreign-Policy Theater

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

 

The American retreat from Afghanistan, with its whimpering and scurrying and its generally cringing tail-between-the-legs posture, would have been debacle enough without the Biden administration’s having added a massacre of children and innocents to it.

 

The fact that it was a massacre enabled by incompetence does not improve the situation.

 

General Frank McKenzie, who is in charge at U.S. Central Command, confirmed last week that a drone strike carried out in Kabul in order to ward off an imminent attack from ISIS-K actually killed a carload of civilians, mostly children.

 

“I offer my sincere apology,” General McKenzie said. Oh, at least it’s sincere. He affirmed that he is “fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome.” If General McKenzie is fully responsible, then perhaps he — or someone above him — should act like it and see to it that he is, at a minimum, fully relieved of his responsibilities.

 

But is General McKenzie really fully responsible?

 

“The strike on 29 August must be considered in the context of the situation on the ground,” General McKenzie said, “in Kabul at Hamid Karzai International Airport following the ISIS-K attack that resulted in the deaths of 13 soldiers, sailors, and Marines, and more than 100 civilians, at Abbey Gate on 26 August. And also with the substantial body of intelligence indicating the imminence of another attack.”

 

That is a useful context to consider, because it is not a relevant military context at all — it is a political context.

 

The horrifying attack on August 26 confirmed only the general sense that violent attacks against U.S. forces and those under their protection were likely, if not inevitable, during our headlong retreat from Afghanistan. It told us what we already knew. The events of August 26 did not tell us anything about whether that particular vehicle — packed with an aid worker and his family — was likely to be part of an ISIS-K operation. The events of August 26 are unlikely to have shed any light on whether the intelligence, if we can call it that, preceding that drone strike ought to have been judged credible.

 

The events of August 26 are relevant mainly for political — or, we might as well say, cosmetic — reasons.

 

And it seems to have been the politics that we were responding to.

 

The collapse of the Afghan government and the surrender of U.S. forces to the Taliban (and we might as well call it what it is) already was shaping up to be a fiasco. Subcomandante Malarky boasted that the Afghan military had been so well-trained and splendidly provisioned by the U.S. government that its ability to hold off the Taliban was a near certainty. “They have an air force,” Joe Biden said of the Kabul government. “The Taliban doesn’t.” Someone might have reminded him that the Taliban already conquered Afghanistan once without the benefit of an air force, and that the attack on the United States that precipitated our involvement in Afghanistan was carried out by means of box-cutters and building schematics.

 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was even more emphatic: “We are not withdrawing. We are staying. The embassy is staying. Our programs are staying.”

 

(I know the Blinken type. When one of these bloodless, dead-eyed Ivy League lawyers says he isn’t going to screw you, you’re already screwed. Blaming them for it is like blaming a wasp for stinging you — it is what they do, their nature.)

 

The seemingly instantaneous collapse of the notionally U.S.-backed regime in Kabul — a regime that had been in reality neglected by U.S. officials wearied by its corruption and inefficacy and then actively undermined by the Trump administration’s decision to bypass it altogether and conduct direct negotiations with the Taliban — calls to mind Lee Smith’s “strong horse” principle, which he applied to the Arabic-speaking Middle East but which also shapes political calculation in much of the rest of the world. As Osama bin Laden once put it, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” a sentiment Smith connects to the thinking of medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun.

 

We are the weak horse.

 

There are many factors that shape the political life of Afghanistan: religion, ideology, tribe, geography, history — but also the brute facts of brute force. That has always been the problem with setting an arbitrary deadline for wrapping up U.S. efforts in Afghanistan: Without the United States, the Taliban wins, and it is not in the interest of anybody in Afghanistan to see to it that it takes the Taliban a long time to win — if they ultimately end up on the losing side of that fight, they and their families are going to be tortured and murdered. President Biden did his best impersonation of Lyndon Johnson, who famously complained about sending “American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

 

That’s familiar stuff, and it generally shakes out the same way. The same political decision that made Taliban rule inevitable also made it imminent. This isn’t the Army–Navy football game — there are real consequences for being on the losing side of a fight in Afghanistan. It was never going to be the case that as Uncle Sam went limping back home Afghans were going to stand there and make things worse for themselves.

 

The fact that the United States chooses to be the weak horse does not change the political algebra.

 

American presidencies do not run on policy — they run on magic.

 

They run on the superstitious (and, indeed, idolatrous) belief that there is something magical about the person of the president, that he enjoys the powers of at least a demigod, and that the nation’s prosperity and security are mystically connected with his person and his ritual performances in the democratic agon. That is how the 9/11 attacks came to be, in a very strange but true sense, about George W. Bush. They became something more than an event.

 

When the nation is insulted or attacked, then the president must respond in some symbolically satisfying way or risk losing the Mandate of Heaven. Hence President Bill Clinton’s decision to blow up an empty pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in retaliation (or so he said) for terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. There were a couple of different stories told to justify that attack — some fiction about the facility being used to produce nerve gas and that it was connected to Osama bin Laden, who had lived in Khartoum a decade earlier — but the timing was perfectly Clintonian: two months after the film Wag the Dog opened in theaters and one week after the Monica Lewinsky matter became public.

 

Clinton, who had been a draft-dodging bum in the 1960s (one of the many things he has in common with Donald Trump), was intent on remaking the Democratic Party along more centrist and less McGovernite lines, and he was sensitive about looking like too much of a flower child. At the same time, anything that looked like a variation on the theme of Vietnam was, in those years, strictly off limits, especially for a Democrat. The question about U.S. military engagements in the Clinton years was never about U.S. interests — the question was: What does this say about Bill Clinton?

 

It was a difficult question to parse politically. The memory of Vietnam was alive for Clinton-era Democrats who had cut their political teeth in the anti-war movement, but in the most recent major U.S. military conflict before Clinton’s presidency, Operation Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush had if anything made it look too easy. U.S. forces drove Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait in four days of fighting, a show of force that was underlined by the ruthless massacre of some unknown number of retreating Iraqi troops — estimates run from hundreds to as many as 10,000 — on the so-called Highway of Death. President Bush’s actions were a sharp departure from those of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who must have been the most dovish hawk there ever was, the greatest peacenik ever to be denounced as a warmonger.

 

The first Gulf War left Americans with the impression — and the expectation — that U.S. forces could impose any outcome they desired, anywhere in the world, with a minimal loss of life and a money cost that was easily lost in the financial vortex of Washington. We still operate, in no small part, under that misapprehension, failing to appreciate that our ability to impose military outcomes is insufficient to secure the political outcomes that are, in fact, our actual national-security goal.

 

Clinton’s only political goals were self-serving. But Clinton nonetheless was compelled to act — politically compelled, not militarily compelled. If anything, his obviously symbolic response probably emboldened Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, persuading them that the price of attacking the United States was, all things considered, quite tolerable, a burden they were willing to bear in the service of jihad. Bin Laden, being largely ignorant of American political realities and hostage to his own messianic mania, had expected much the same thing after 9/11 — a symbolic retaliation followed by retreat.

 

Because Barack Obama had at least the good sense to more or less ignore Joe Biden out of existence for eight years, Osama bin Laden did not live to see his expectations finally come to pass. But a symbolic retaliation followed by retreat is precisely what President Biden ultimately intended to offer, at the end, in Afghanistan. After the airport attack — the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in Afghanistan in a decade — President Biden was politically compelled to do something, lest his Big Man Mojo be seen to wane and the Mandate of Heaven slip from his quavering grasp. That compulsion surely was felt all the way down the chain of command. And it resulted in taking the first opportunity to make a theatrical show of force — in this case, against a car with seven children in it.

 

Because Congress is run by Democrats, there probably will be no serious oversight effort made to learn how that decision was made and how it went wrong. But the political dynamics animating the administration are plain enough.

 

George H. W. Bush was far from indifferent to political realities, but he was a politician of an increasingly rare kind: one who was not only a politician. In the Gulf War, he understood what U.S. interests were actually at stake, identified the most direct and convenient means for securing those interests, built a grand coalition that served U.S. military and diplomatic interests, and to a considerable extent trusted — wrongly — that the contrast between his old-school competence and the low-rent shtick of the grabasstical governor of Arkansas would secure his reelection. But by 1992, our presidential politics already had become surreal: George H. W. Bush was denounced as a “wimp” — the editorial cartoonists liked to depict him as an old woman — by the same people who had five minutes ago denounced him as a warmonger, not only for his leadership in the Gulf War but even before that, for his courageous actions as an airman in World War II. (The charge was strafing Japanese lifeboats.) There has always been an element of purely symbolic exchange in our presidential politics, from George Washington on, but by the 1990s that economy of symbols had become almost entirely unyoked from the business of being president. That is the only way to understand the madness of handing power over from the experienced and capable hands of George H. W. Bush to such a man as Bill Clinton.

 

The symbolic presidency and presidential administration remain disconnected. That makes it impossible for a president to shut up and do nothing — even when that is the best course of action.

 

The prevalence of symbolism over all else means that presidents are compelled to act — even when the action is pointless or destructive. Sometimes, that is an ill-considered tariff or a ridiculous promise about Mexico paying us to build a border wall. Sometimes, it is showing up at a disaster scene as though the presidential presence brought with it mystical healing powers rather than resource-consuming distraction. Sometimes, it is the mystical laying of presidential hands upon a Skutnik during the State of the Union address.

 

Sometimes, it’s a carload of kids being burnt on the altar of muscular executive action.