There are a couple of good magazine pieces this week on Iraq, why it turned out he way it did and what it may mean for the future.
Joshua Marshall, in a New Yorker essay that surveys recent books and draws on his own extensive reporting on Bush administration policies, argues that the architects of pre-emptive war and American global domination have overlooked a few important facts of imperial life.
“American power is magnified when it is embedded in international institutions, as leftists have lamented,” says Marshall “It is also somewhat constrained, as conservatives have lamented. This is precisely the covenant on which American supremacy has been based. The trouble is that hard-line critics of multilateralism focussed on how that power was constrained and missed how it was magnified.
“Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, ‘domination’ gives way to ‘hegemony’—brute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate ‘force multiplier,’ in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the force multipliers you can get.”
Unfortunately, the most ideological officials of the Bush administration, and their amen crowd in think-tanks and the media, just don’t get it.
“Not all conservatives have been chastened by the setbacks of unilateralism; some have been stoked to greater outrage and resolve. This much is clear from ‘An End to Evil’ (Random House; $25.95), by David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, who helped coin the phrase 'axis of evil,' and Richard Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Rising disapproval from abroad doesn’t lead Frum and Perle to question their policies. It just confirms them in the belief that America has even more enemies than it realized. …
“The authors advise toppling more regimes in the Middle East, treating the French and the Saudis as the enemies they are, squeezing China, and launching an air and naval blockade against North Korea. At home, they propose aggressive reform in the State Department, the C.I.A., and the armed forces. 'Friends and Foes,' the penultimate chapter, turns out to discuss only foes. In sum, the prescription amounts to war, cold or hot, against pretty much everyone, everywhere, all the time—until everyone relents. And, if that doesn’t do the trick, more war.”
Such hubris.
At the Atlantic, Ken Pollack, a former Clinton administration official who supported the Iraq war and has a new book on prewar intelligence failures, in an interview reviews what went wrong with U.S. intelligence on Iraq and its weapons (or, rather, lack of them), and the administration’s misuse of intelligence to support the war.
Pollack says U.S. intelligence was wrong because it was next to impossible to get reliable human intelligence from within Saddam Hussein’s tight-knit, paranoid regime and because it simply failed to consider the possibility that he actually had no serious weapons programs as the U.S. prepared for war.
He saves most of his sharpest criticism for how our intelligence, such as it was, was used to prod the nation into a war that certainly was avoidable and probably was unnecessary:
“There are certain members of the Administration who did a disservice to the American people. I don't want to fault the entire Administration, because I think there were a lot of people in the Administration who were saying things that were completely true and what they were doing was completely above-board. But there were others in the Administration who really weren't.
“The thing that upset and disappointed me the most was that there were some Administration officials, and particularly some high Administration officials, who were making statements that weren't the whole truth. The one thing for which I can find no excuse is this question of not telling the American people the whole truth. The nuclear issue is the most important example of this. The judgment of the intelligence community, expressed in a number of written documents, some of which have been made public, was that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons programs and that he could possibly acquire a nuclear weapon in one to two years if he managed to get fissile material on the black market. The intelligence community felt that it was much more likely that he would not be able to acquire a nuclear weapon for five to seven years. In making the case for war, a number of high-level officials in the Administration stressed the one-to-two year figure, which made the threat from Iraq seem imminent. The intelligence community couldn't rule it out, but the best judgment was that it was a more distant threat.”
Why’d they do it?
“I think the Administration was only telling part of the truth to the American people because it was trying to justify a war in 2003. The intelligence estimates just didn't really support that imminence. The Administration could have said, ‘Look, the intelligence community thinks it may be five to seven years away, but they do think it's also possible that they could get it in one to two years. After 9/11, we shouldn't take even that kind of a risk.’ I think that would have been a much more honest way of presenting it to the American people.”
Honesty, however, might not have gotten the desired result.
“ … My sense is that the Administration recognized that that kind of argument would not generate the same enthusiasm for a war in 2003 as the argument the way they cast it did. As far as I'm concerned, these are not political arguments. This is an argument about U.S. national security and about going to war. That's supposed to transcend politics. Of course, I've lived in Washington long enough to know that it's rare that national security actually does end up transcending politics—but that doesn't make it right.”
Indeed. But when you have a president who asks, “So what’s the difference?” whether Saddam actually had weapons, right is not what you get.
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