George W. Bush was the graduation speaker at the Air Force Academy on June 2. He took the opportunity to defend his actions in Iraq. The speech was one of the most outrageous, mendacious, and dangerous things I’ve ever heard in my life.
It required a response. I’ve broken down my objections into three categories.
Lies. History. Delusions.
I’m going to wander a bit as I address each lie or historical observation, because there is a lot of conceptual connective tissue here. Eventually I will try to tie all these things together.
Lies
I’ll start with the blatant and deeply offensive lies, since they’re the least subjective part of my argument and therefore easiest to pick apart.
The two most annoying lies are the two most fundamental ones. They are, of course, Bush’s constant repetitions that the two reasons we went to war in Iraq were to “free the Iraqi people” and to fight the war on terrorism. I write as someone who never trusted Bush but who believed, on all the available evidence, that Iraq indeed was a threat to us and that Saddam had WMD; and I believed and believe still that overthrowing Saddam was a noble cause, even if Bush’s motivations were far from noble. I supported the war for a long time, until it became clear that the results were the exact opposite of what Bush and his people were claiming.
The idea that we went to war to free Iraqis is laughable—there is no country in the world that goes to war to bring “freedom” to another people, and we’re no exception. It’s really strange how few people notice that if this argument played any role at all Bush’s pre-war rationale for the use of force, it was far down the line, because just about no one in this country or in any other country could have justified the freedom mission as being in our national interest or in compliance with international law. Besides, it raises the obvious question: if it’s our job and our responsibility to go around the world liberating people, we’d never be finished. Finished, hell—where would we start? North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Syria, Uzbekistan, Chechnya… the list is quite long. Uzbekistan has been known to execute dissidents by boiling them alive in oil, its president has appointed himself for life, and Uzbekistan is one of our closest allies in Central Asia. Yes, I know there are other considerations in diplomacy besides democracy and human rights, and yes, I reluctantly accept that diplomacy cannot always put moral principles at the forefront of policy; but let’s not be hypocritical, shall we? We go to war when it is thought to be in our national interest to do so, and sometimes (and I think Iraq is one of these cases, as we shall see) our national interest is thought by the people who run this country to involve suppressing, not defending, democratic aspirations.
The part about Iraq having been a threat to us turns out to be simply wrong. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He had nothing to do with September 11. In fact, as the dictator of an aggressively secular regime (although he pandered to the Sunni minority in Iraq since the 1991 war for political reasons) he was vilified by al-Qaeda and other Muslim militant groups. Wasn’t it only a few months before Bush’s war began that Osama bin Laden made a speech in which he called Saddam a “Satanic atheist,” and called on the Iraqi people to overthrow him?
It is telling that one of the few pieces of evidence that the Bush administration ever brought forth to attempt that show that Saddam sided with Islamic fundamentalism was the presence of the Ansar al-Islam group in Iraq, which indeed has ties with al-Qaeda. Except—and this shows just how desperate the Bush people were—Ansar operated only in the north of Iraq—that is, in the de facto Kurdish state, where Saddam had had no control for the last twelve years. This area was protected by American and British air patrols that kept Saddam’s army and government out of the Kurdish area. The Kurds didn’t like Ansar either and were fighting it; but to say that Saddam was sheltering Ansar in an area that we were preventing his troops from entering and had kept out of his control for twelve years is a bit rich.
In the last few days, after the 9/11 commission reported that Saddam in no way supported al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the US, Bush has been saying that even if Saddam never gave Osama any help, indeed there were contacts between them, never mind what kind; and Rumsfeld has been repeating this as evidence that Iraq had to be attacked, his voice dripping with contempt for anyone who might disagree, as it always does. But if any sort of contact is the criterion for being branded an “evildoer”, Rumsfeld and Bush should watch their step. There are still quite a few copies of that picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam circulating on the internet, as well as the text of the speech he made on that occasion in which he hailed the historic friendship between the United States and Saddam.
Then there’s Bush talking about how Saddam “gassed his own people” when he attacked the Kurds. Using this as an expression of outrage and proof of Saddam’s threat to us requires a very short memory indeed. Rumsfeld and Bush knew and know perfectly well that the United States gave Saddam critical intelligence and logistical assistance during that period and were in fact directly involved in helping Iraqis to target Iranians, if not Kurds, in their gas attacks. Abusing memory and history like this is truly, to use an overused word, Orwellian. Rumsfeld needs to be a little more patient with his critics, and to tell a whole lot fewer lies.
I do not believe that Bush deliberately falsified information, or ignored any direct evidence (it is very hard to prove a negative, anyway) that Saddam had disarmed. But he was so unshakeably sure that he must be right that he dismissed or did not take seriously the concerns of many intelligence professionals. Apparently his advisers, most of whom were equally intent on invading Iraq, very actively filtered the information that he received, and that it was understood that he wanted them to do this; the 9/11 commission quoted a lower-level CIA analyst who described being called before his supervisor and being told, “Look, if the President wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason.”
We now know, from the evidence of much testimony, that career intelligence officers at the CIA, the DIA, the State Department, and all the service intelligence branches were ignored, browbeaten, or outright threatened when they suggested that the evidence was ambiguous. In fact Bush was so dissatisfied with their less-than-enthusiastic presentation of the evidence of Saddam's weapons programs that he set up an independent intelligence office, the Office of Special Plans, to find the evidence that suited him, and put a strong advocate for war with Iraq, Douglas Feith, in charge of it. (Later, when it became clear that he was wrong, he indignantly began an investigation into how all the traditional intelligence agencies had misled him. After all he cannot, as he has told us, think of a single thing he himself has ever done wrong, and therefore will never take responsibility for anything.)
Indeed, one of the most disturbing things to come to light is the extent to which the Iraq war is the result of G. W. Bush's personal obsessions. I had considered this possibility in the past, but rejected it because I believed that there were simply too many constraints on the modern presidency -- too many sober advisers running war games, too many whistleblowers at State, too many reluctant generals, too many responsible gatekeepers in Congress -- for a president to go to war on a whim. Apparently I was wrong about this. Whatever else may or may not be true and objective about Richard Clarke's 9/11 commission testimony, it seems clear that the animus toward Iraq in the Bush administration had nothing to do with any present Iraqi actions or intentions. Bush's immediate demand that Clarke find a connection between 9/11 and Saddam is chilling (and diagnostic.) I don't know which is crazier: Rumsfeld's suggestion that Afghanistan had no good targets, so we should bomb Iraq, or the fact that he remained in the cabinet after making it. Bush went into Iraq before he had finished the very necessary war in Afghanistan. He went in on a whim, for no good reason beyond his personal dislike of Saddam, his desire to prove himself a bigger man than his father, and a sense that he—both personally, and as the American president—could do anything he wanted to do.
What were the consequences of this arrogance? The mess in Iraq has united the Arab and Muslim world like nothing before it, and served as an enormous recruiting tool for militant Islamic groups that Saddam had vigorously fought—for his own reasons—before the war. Iraq, free from the rule of law, is now a paradise for terrorists and terrorist recruiters—in other words, thanks to Bush, it is what Bush claimed it was before he started this war. Bush has given the international terrorist movement focus, ideological appeal, and a base of operations in Iraq.
But all this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many ways in which Bush’s adventure has damaged our national security—if our national security is defined as defeating terrorism and not, say, winning the election for Bush. Iraq may have had more factories for Rumsfeld to bomb, but the people we really need to kill were – are – in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Going to war in Iraq at this time was at best a huge strategic mistake, tying down 135,000 active troops and who knows how many support units that are not fighting a resurgent Taliban, not undertaking security and civil engineering and military training duties in Afghanistan, not looking for bin Laden. I read recently that Hamid Karzai, the very brave and competent president that we installed in Afghanistan, has now been reduced to making deals with warlords to keep the country from slipping back into civil war. He had no choice; we’ve given him so little support. We’ve pulled our troops out so that we could fight Saddam and we haven’t delivered the money or logistical support we promised. Why is Bush so unconcerned about creating the conditions that have already led to a resurgent Taliban?
Even more urgent than these things--the most urgent task in the world--is understanding what is happening in Pakistan and dealing with it. It's been said, and I think it's true, that Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world right now. It is extremely unstable, sunk deep into militant Islam, which pervades the armed forces. It is home to a system of madrassah education that seems to exist for brainwashing young boys and instilling hatred of America, and that is the only kind of education that is available to many Pakistanis. Pakistan is still giving surreptitious aid to the Taliban. Its military is most likely still organizing terror attacks on India, although at this point probably without President Pervez Musharraf's support (Musharraf is an Islamic militant at heart and has in the past given vital support to many violent Islamic movements, but he is also a pragmatist and he fears what he has created; he also fears US anger, although the US is as much to blame as Pakistan for reviving the Islamic militant movement during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan). Pakistan is nuclear-armed, with missiles that can strike India, also nuclear armed. It is close enough to India that its nuclear deterrent is necessarily launch-on-warning.
Now we discover that A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and a "national hero," has for years been operating a full-service nuclear shopping mart, everything you need in one convenient location, fissile material, centrifuges, missiles, manuals, the lot. He had a color glossy brochure with his picture on it, advertising his wares to one and all, no questions asked, no reasonable offer refused. Musharraf's insistence that neither he nor the Pakistani army had any idea of what Khan was up to is possibly the most preposterous and dangerous lie since nuclear weapons were invented.
Who were Khan's clients? Did he sell any nuclear technology to al-Qaeda, to the Chechens, to the Russian mafia? We don't know. Why don't we know? Because Musharraf gave Khan a full and pre-emptive pardon, and so we can't interrogate him. The Bush administration didn't have a word to say about this. Why not? Because they want Musharraf's co-operation in major military operations on the Pakistani side of the Afghan-Pakistani border aimed at capturing bin Laden just before the election. Now it would be good to capture bin Laden, but it would be much more a symbolic victory than a practical one. He (as distinct from the millions that he, with Bush’s help, has inspired) has no real ability to mount attacks now, although he is still a source of inspiration and guidance for all the other groups loosely affiliated with his Qaeda organization (Qaeda means "network" in Arabic.) Then again, capturing or killing him would probably just make him a martyr to these groups, giving them renewed motivation to kill infidels.
But capturing bin Laden would have one very important effect. It would get Bush elected. For that, Musharraf gets a pass on the most serious case of nuclear proliferation ever. For that, we pretend that Pakistan is a democracy, and that the Pakistani armed forces are committed to fighting the Taliban. For that, we put no pressure on Musharraf—and offer no aid for this purpose—to end the madrassah system and support decent public education. Most astonishingly, we have recently proclaimed Pakistan a "favored ally," the category that brings the closest US military co-operation and arms sales for any country that is not in NATO. Professional diplomats and security people were aghast at that one.
These are Bush's priorities. Getting elected is much more important than the absolutely vital security interests of the US and of the entire world.
Almost as infuriating as the lie about our national security is the way in which Bush has run away from it. To hear his speech the other night, you’d think he hadn’t, for a year and a half prior to his invasion of Iraq, talked constantly about what a threat Iraq was, what an imminent threat it was. Now not even the slightest mention of this; a powerful amnesia!
You cannot raise a tremendous warning about a threat, wage a unilateral war to “pre-empt” that threat and in the process overturn the entire legal structure of half a century of the international system, cause much of the world to hate you—and, when the threat turns out to have been a fantasy, just switch gears and blithely insist that your motivation all the time was democracy, not security. You just can’t do that and expect to retain any shred of your own dignity and credibility. It is beyond dishonest. It is despicable.
So much for Bush’s claim to have made us safer by going into Iraq. How about his claim that Iraqis will be “free” (whatever that word means to him, whatever he think it means to Iraqis)? While Iraqis may be better off than they were under Saddam (unless there’s a full-scale civil war there, which is quite likely) they will not be free—in control of their own political, social, and economic destiny—in any sense, and Bush knows this perfectly well because he’s been greatly in charge of seeing to that. The handover of “sovereignty” is a complete joke, a public relations flimflam driven entirely by Bush’s need not to look like a colonialist (and a most incompetent one) at election time. In advance of the handover, Paul Bremer dictated to the Iraqis what kind of economy they were to have. He wrote into the interim constitution that Iraq is to have a largely unrestricted market economy, that foreigners are allowed to own up to 100% of Iraqi business ventures, and that American and American-chosen contractors would continue to get the largest share of the reconstruction work. He told the Iraqis that their military would take orders from the American military, and that their Minister of Defense would report to an American general. It is understood that construction of fourteen of the largest American military bases in the world will continue and that troops will be stationed in Iraq for the foreseeable future now that we have left Saudi Arabia, regardless of what any Iraqi government might want. Do we expect Iraqis to call this democracy?
Bremer has remarked, without any apparent irony, that power in Iraq will never be held by those who try to seize it by the gun. It is a fact little known in the US that after the US invasion quite a few Iraqi villages spontaneously and apparently freely elected their own local leaders, mostly people who had earned their credentials in very dangerous opposition to Saddam for many years. When American civil affairs contractors came through—yes, contractors; this operation has been heavily privatized, and the responsibility for teaching Iraqis about democracy was farmed out to a for-profit company—they often deposed these legitimately elected new leaders and replaced them with proxies who were more amenable to taking American orders. Every day Iraqis see something like this, whether it’s Bremer’s statement about power, the occupation forces closing down newspapers that criticize the occupying forces, or, in Bush’s recent speech, his statement that US forces had defeated a local militia leader who had declared himself mayor and replaced him with a “legitimate” official, installed by US marines. Again, no sense of irony.
Which leads us to the third lie in Bush’s speech, his repeated insistence that the only people who are fighting us in Iraq are “terrorists and thugs,” men of the past, who “want to deny Iraqis freedom.” Certainly this may well describe many of those who are fighting us. But for Bush to keep repeating the obvious nonsense that these are the only people who are fighting us is sounding more and more like panic. Yes, Iraqis are glad Saddam is gone, as well they should be; but to expect them to be glad to be occupied by us does not at all follow. Why should they believe that Americans are good and kind and democratic, when in very recent memory this president’s father told the Kurds and Shi’ites to rise up and overthrow Saddam, assured us that we would help them—and then stood back and did nothing while Saddam slaughtered them? Why should they believe us when we say that we love freedom and we’re here to give it to them, when we supported Saddam all those years, sold him the factories to make the poison gas he used to attack the Kurds, shared military information with him during his disastrous war with Iran in which a million people died? All Iraqis have seen that picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that Bush sincerely is concerned about Iraqi self-determination, can we realistically expect the Iraqis to believe him? Why wouldn’t they fight against occupiers who have shown themselves many times in the past to be so uninterested in their welfare?
We made our intentions perfectly clear in the first few days we controlled Baghdad, during which we defended the Iraqi oil ministry and did nothing while looters made off with the ancient cultural heritage of Iraq, the key to its peoples’ identity, real or imagined (and subjectively, in terms of what people will fight to defend, there is little difference between real and imagined). How many know that the organization that was given the contract to run the public news channel for the Coalition Provisional Authority—you’d think this was a vital assignment that ought to be taken seriously—was an evangelical, proselytizing Christian organization? I don’t know how much proselytizing they actually did in this capacity, but the fact that they would even be considered for a job like this shows that the Bush people had no respect for Iraqis as an autonomous people who had their own culture and beliefs and worldview and who could be or should be in charge of their own destiny. Or maybe they just weren’t thinking at all.
We have now killed, at best estimate, over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in a society in which the force of institutional law is tenuous, and in which, therefore, order and survival customarily depend on blood feud and blood debt. It is also a country in which people feel strong ties with large extended families, whether defined by blood or tribal affiliation. We can therefore comfortably say that with ten close relatives per victim, perhaps 200,000 Iraqis are now bound by honor and tradition to kill an American or Brit. Even if they don’t actually want to go that far, can we expect them to trust us, to be grateful to us?
We launched a war against Afghanistan because a small minority of the people who lived there were involved in the World Trade Center attacks. We launched another war against Iraq because Bush told us that there was some connection with the attacks, although he never (because he could not) spell this out. Somewhat over 3,000 people in a country of almost 300 million died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. How would we have reacted if we were a country of 26 million and troops from the most powerful nation in the world came and killed 20,000 of our civilians and who knows how many of our soldiers? Would we greet these people with flowers?
Given all of this—and especially the ways in which the basic powers of a state for defense, control of its own territory and resources, and its economic regulation have been explicitly denied to Iraqis—is it any wonder that Iraqis react with cynicism and disgust to claims that they have been “liberated”? I used to think that Iraqis who took up arms against the occupation were just idiots. Now I can understand why not only terrorists and Ba’athists want to fight the occupiers. The latest opinion polling in Iraq shows that only 2% of the population now believes that we came as liberators. Even worse, 54% believe that the behavior of the Abu Ghraib prison guards is typical of all Americans. Why is it so incredible that ordinary, non-fascist, non-terrorist Iraqis are fighting us now?
Next lie, which expands on the previous one: Bush saying that we had used a “measured and proportionate” response to put down a “revolt” in Falluja. You’d have to really have no idea about what happened in Falluja to go along with this one.
Falluja was a stronghold for Ba’athist and tribal leaders who loved Saddam because he favored and protected them; not a very nice place. A few months ago the people of Falluja staged on ambush and killed—and then disgustingly butchered—four men whom our government refers to as “civilian contractors.”
Stop for a moment. What is a “civilian contractor”? Some of them are truck drivers, teachers, engineers, cooks. But these guys, as it happens, weren’t. They were former elite commando troops working for a private contracting company called Blackwater USA, and they were paid to go into combat zones and do what they did when they were commandos. In the days when words meant something, they were called mercenaries, hired soldiers. Much of what has always been the job of the state, and only of the state, and for very good reasons—fighting wars, killing people—has now been farmed out to entrepreneurs.
Machiavelli warned almost 500 years ago against using mercenaries, who had no particular loyalty beyond their paychecks and nothing invested in the cause they served, to fight wars. Beyond that, it is a very serious thing for a government to cede any part of its traditional monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, something at the core of the modern conception of the state. Could or should a mercenary who kills at the order of the military that hired him be charged with murder in a civilian court, unlike a soldier for whom the taboo against murder is legally suspended? It hasn’t been tried yet. But if the government said he couldn’t be charged—that it was OK for him to kill on command, even though he wasn’t a soldier—does that mean that the ancient sanction against killing, except in defense of oneself or one’s fellow citizens, is now dispensed with?
Or does it just mean that it’s OK for a person to kill if the government pays him, in a private capacity, to do it? In that case “legal hit man” might fit better than “mercenary.”
Using mercenaries is more expensive than regular troops and less efficient. But there are particular benefits for the government. If the mercenaries are not legally government employees, the government has no responsibility to them or for their actions. It can disclaim involvement in what would otherwise clearly be war crimes, for example. It can deny that its fighters took part in a failed or diplomatically tricky mission. It is not obligated to provide health care or death benefits, or any sort of reparations to innocent victims of the mercenaries.
And since Rumsfeld wants to claim that Afghan irregulars are not subject to the Geneva Conventions because they don’t wear uniforms or belong to a national army, I’m curious as to how he musters outrage at the treatment of the Blackwater guys. Apparently we can do anything we want to captured “illegal combatants,” including summary execution.
In short, using mercenaries gives the government power without responsibility. Is this not the deepest fear of traditional conservatives as well as of liberal democrats? But there are no traditional conservatives left; or more accurately, I should say, there are no traditional Republicans left. Would Eisenhower or Goldwater or even Bob Dole have been blind to the dangers and the moral corruption of using mercenaries? For that matter, what might Goldwater have said about a president who believes he has the right, on his own authority, to lock up American citizens indefinitely without trial, without access to a lawyer, and without charge? But I digress.
For our present purposes there is an essential point to be made. These men were not soldiers, but neither were they exactly civilians. They had come expecting to kill, prepared to do so, voluntarily going into situations in which they could be told to do so. Falluja, as a bastion of resistance to occupation, had many people for whom these men were the enemy, legitimate military targets. What the Fallujans did to the mercenaries was terrible, disgusting, sadistic and hateful. But to the extent that inherently violent undertakings like war can be subject to legal rules of engagement, the targets were legitimate.
So four mercenaries were brutally murdered and dismembered in an orgy of violence. In response, American marines subjected the city of 320,000 to severe aerial bombardment and artillery attacks, and then had snipers shoot at anything that moved in the rubble for a week. Americans don’t want to believe things like this about their military. Sadly, I’ve read descriptions in too many credible sources to think that this is not what really happened. More than 600 men, women and children were killed. Enormous damage was done to the infrastructure of the city.
Bush has the audacity to claim that this was a “measured and proportionate” response? Sure, if the lives of four American mercenaries who came to fight and chose to be there balance equally against those of 600 mostly non-combatants who were trying to survive in the rubble of their own town. Iraqis listen to Bush’s speeches; what must they have thought of this?
The strategic results of this slaughter were as one might expect: it united most of Iraq, Sunni and Shi’ite, against the occupation, seriously damaging our national security and proving, yet again, that Bush is indeed a uniter, not a divider. Pressing on to win this battle, which would have meant leveling Falluja, would certainly have lost Bush the war.
Recognizing this belatedly, and needing a face-saving way to get out of town, Bush brought in former Ba’athist troops under a former high-ranking general in Saddam’s army—proudly wearing his Saddam-era uniform—to come in and create order. In his ignorance and his appalling lack of regard for human life, in his inability to take Iraqis fully seriously as human beings, Bush had backed himself into a corner in which the only thing he could do was to completely sell out his supposed concern for Iraqi human rights and democracy. And that was, in fact, the best option available to him after all his blundering! What a great leader he is. What a great man.
Now there are reports that Ba’athism and Islamic fundamentalism are flourishing in the ruins of Falluja, unchecked. What a surprise.
The next lie was about the torture at Abu Ghraib. And make no mistake about it, it was torture, by any legal or customary or cultural definition, ours or theirs. Rush Limbaugh is on record as saying that it was merely on the level of a “harmless college prank.” Well, sure, if you think that rape and murder—well documented during Abu Ghraib “interrogations”—are harmless pranks.
Specifically, his lie was that “a few sick men and women dishonored their country”; that the behavior at the prison had nothing to do with American policy. But the policy went right to the top. It was Rumsfeld’s policy. He and a small group of legal advisors at the Pentagon had developed a plan for using pain and humiliation in interrogations in Afghanistan, much of it based on a book by Raphael Patai called “The Arab Mind,” in which Patai argued that sexual humiliation was the most painful experience for Arab men. Based on this information, Rumsfeld and his friends worked on very particular ways to use sexual humiliation coupled with pain, starvation, exposure to heat and cold, and disorientation to extract information.
The program was originally put in place in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, and was brought to Iraq by the former administrator of Guantanamo, General Geoffrey Miller. The wing of the prison where most of the abuses took place was run by military intelligence supported by, again, “civilian contractors” who took part in interrogations of high-level suspects, something which until recently would be considered a grave breach of security. The MI guys had explicitly told the Reservists pressed into prison guard duty to “soften up” the prisoners for interrogation and had given them instructions on how to do this, another grave breach of military and police practice. Prison guards and intelligence guys have very different jobs and they are not supposed to do each others’ jobs, for very good reasons.
The Red Cross had complained frequently about what was happening at Abu Ghraib since then, and Rumsfeld knew about it perfectly well and had told Bush. For both of these mendacious characters to claim that any of this was news to them—that their own policies were news to them—is not only disgraceful but cowardly. But it fits the pattern. As he has throughout his entire business and political life, Bush finds someone else to take the fall for him. In this case it happens to be young army reservists from poor areas of North Carolina and Pennsylvania who are making maybe $20,000 a year plus room and board in Iraq, many of whom have lost their steady jobs due to the enforced long absence, whose benefits this “patriotic” president has cut, who live in fear of death every day on the job. But the most powerful man in the world blames these kids—who did indeed behave disgracefully—for carrying out policies designed by his Secretary of Defense and approved by him. Bush will never take responsibility for anything.
The Abu Ghraib situation is a tremendous disaster for the US in terms of good will lost in the Arab world, immensely important political capital that would have been a great asset in rebuilding Iraq and that it will take us generations to recoup. The torture was inflicted mostly on people who had been rounded up at random and hadn’t committed any crime. And it didn’t even reliably retrieve useful information: professional interrogators know that torture is not a useful tool, since people being tortured generally tell the torturers anything they want to hear, true or not. Check out this link for more details. The foreign press, for some reason, has been paying much more attention to this than the American press has.
Seasoned professional interrogators report that the best way to get reliable information from detainees is just to ask nicely. Obviously, this doesn’t work on hardened terrorists and zealots, but they’re a small minority of detainees. This seems to make no sense at first, but if you think about it, it does.
Abu Ghraib was a long time coming. It didn’t happen in a political vacuum. This president has made clear from the start that he and the United States were not to be bound by any treaties, any expectations, any rules. He withdrew early on from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, a profoundly important document for world peace and stability. He withdrew from the Kyoto Treaty on global warming after he had got the advice he’d bought and paid for that global warming wasn’t really a problem, advice that represented the junkiest of junk science. I believe, indeed, that one of his prime motivations in going to war was simply to show the world that the US, as the biggest kid on the block, could do anything it felt like doing, regardless of the implications for anyone else in the world. Soft power—the very important diplomatic tools of persuasion, education, example, economic development, aid, trade, exchanges—means nothing to Bush’s people. They think only in terms of conquest.
This bully’s philosophy is at the core of Bush’s foreign policy advisers’ view of the world. Indeed, many of them were involved in drafting the Project for a New American Century document, a recipe for American global domination well into the foreseeable future. It’s a horrifying, deeply anti-democratic and anti-liberty document (if one takes the radical position that the democracy and freedom of other people in the world besides Americans has any value.) It is refreshing in one way, however; it does not even make a pretense of caring about such things. It argues for American supremacy so that Americans and their allies can enjoy the benefits and resources that flow from supremacy, nothing more, and for American accumulation of devastating military superiority so that America can defend its preferential enjoyment of benefits and resources that, without such superiority, others might want to have some share in. It’s a sickening document, but honest.
Many Iraqis, of course, have read this document. It’s publicly available at www.newamericancentury.org. Cheney and Perle and Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, the neo-conservative authors, are proud of what they’ve written.
Bush first denied Geneva convention protections to Afghan combatants, and then abrogated them with Iraqi prisoners, whom even he and Rumsfeld admitted were covered by the conventions. Rumsfeld issued instructions to military administrators in Iraq that certain prisoners were not to be listed in manifests given to the International Red Cross, the agency that monitors and supports the Geneva Conventions. The idea was that they couldn’t uphold the internationally recognized—and US recognized—rights of anyone they didn’t know existed. Again, this is a government that seeks absolutely to be free of accountability and oversight.
But Rumsfeld went further: apparently his lawyers had found a loophole for him to show to Bush that allowed the president to not comply with the Convention Against Torture. Yes, that’s right: Bush was told that he had the right to torture people, regardless of any treaties the United States had entered into, regardless of the fundamental human right—recognized in theory if not in practice all over the world—not to be tortured. There was a long piece on this in the Times of June 8, 2004.
OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that terrorists—or people we believe to be terrorists, or people picked up randomly on the street by American forces—should not be protected by the Geneva conventions. Suppose we go further and say that they should be tortured. Even if we ignore all the obvious moral problems with this, what’s still wrong here?
Why did almost all the countries of the world ratify the Geneva conventions? Not because they cared greatly about their enemies’ soldiers or civilians. Because they cared about their own.
If there are international standards and international law in place to govern the treatment of prisoners, and if one country adheres to those standards and those laws in its treatment of prisoners, it can reasonably expect that its enemy will do so too with the first country’s prisoners, and for exactly the same reason. Reciprocity.
But Bush and Rumsfeld have always wanted to have it both ways; they’ve always wanted other countries to respect the rights and dignity of American prisoners while they themselves accept no responsibility for decent treatment of enemy captives. In other words, they insist that their enemy value American lives more than those of its own people.
Bush and Rumsfeld are also failing to learn the lessons that the Israelis have been failing to learn for almost 40 years. Suppose, for example, the Shin Bet hears of a terror threat. They round up 400 young Palestinian men from the neighborhood where they believe the threat originates, and torture them all until someone spills the beans. They catch the bomber.
They can then say that they’ve had a tremendous success for security! They’ve averted a bombing. It’s a nasty business, but this is war, and the Middle East is not Canada.
But in the process they’ve humiliated, infuriated and radicalized 399 suspects—and their families—who may have had nothing to do with the attack. In the desperate atmosphere of the Israeli-occupied territories, many of them may have been teetering on the edge of becoming suicide bombers, waiting for a good thing to pull them back or a bad thing to push them over the edge. If this horrendous experience was decisive for only 1 in 50 of them, there were four new suicide bombers created as a result of this sweep, a net gain of three. Yet the Israelis feel safer doing this than not. Undoubtedly many of the Abu Ghraib detainees are out there making roadside bombs right now.
In addition to creating enormous political problems across the Arab world, Abu Ghraib has created enormous military problems. Yet Bush and Rumsfeld don’t even see that they’re asking for it. Bush gets outraged because Al Jazeera showed some American POWs being interrogated on television, arguably counter to the Geneva conventions; yet has no qualms about ordering the severe mistreatment and humiliation of prisoners even in areas that it acknowledges are subject to the Geneva accords, orders that have led to 26 deaths in custody and large but unknown numbers of rapes and other forms of sexual abuse.
Again there is no sense of responsibility whatsoever, in any context. And there is no discernable ability to connect cause and effect. How can one govern—how can one do anything—without that sense?
Last lie. For a speech that was, I think, no more than 20 minutes long, it was pretty packed.
Bush said, “In Iraq, we sought the support of the United Nations every step of the way.”
Now this is just insulting. Does he think the nation has lost its collective memory? Does he really have that little respect for the ‘Murican people?
Sure, he sent Powell to the UN to make a speech that was a mishmash of lies that you could tell Powell was embarrassed about at the time, and that he has more or less admitted to be even more embarrassed about now. But we all know that this was only because Powell, as the one person in the administration who doesn’t just feel that we can do whatever we want to do because We’re Number One, insisted on it. Cheney, who has much more influence over Bush most of the time, was disgusted by this meaningless gesture. Meaningless because it was perfectly clear that Bush would go to war with Iraq whether or not he got approval, and in fact he did just that. What’s the point of asking permission if you’re going to do it anyway? What does Article 7 of the UN Charter mean in that case?
And not only was it a matter of policy disagreement among equals. Bush took it as a severe personal and national slight that any ally could disagree with him, that anyone would dare to go against the interests of the United States. The contempt heaped on France (which had indeed behaved contemptibly, but that no way limited its sovereign right to not necessarily agree with the US) would have been amusing in its bizarity were it not so embarrassing in its vulgarity, from “freedom fries” in the US Senate cafeteria to patriotic Bush supporters pouring fine French vintages into the gutter. To this day, the biggest bully in American politics, Tom DeLay, thinks he is insulting John Kerry by saying that he “looks French” and referring to him as “Jean-Francois Kerry.” (DeLay’s pronunciation is terrible, of course—as a matter of red-blooded ‘Murican pride.) The vicious childishness is mind-blowing. Hey, Kerry even has the nerve—the effrontery!—to speak French fluently. Is he gay, or just a traitor? Oh, a Democrat, so both.
History
There is a certain patriotic narrative to the war in Iraq that is entirely predictable. The Middle East has never known democracy; this was fine so long as it only meant the impoverishment and brutalization of its own inhabitants, but now that we live in an age of international terror we have to do something noble and generous for the benighted Middle Easterners; we have to give them freedom and democracy, the unique gifts of the American people, because that’s the only way we can defend ourselves from fanaticism and because that’s our fated mission as Americans anyway.
Note that in the versions of this narrative that Bush presents he is careful not to say that there is inherently anything anti-democratic in Islamic or Arab culture; he’s a uniter, not a divider, and certainly not a bigot. Even the hard core in this administration can’t quite come out and speak of the White Man’s Burden, although they come close when they talk about the universal benefits of capitalism and free trade.
Although he doesn’t display it himself—well, not in public—Bush has tolerated extreme Christian chauvinism in high-ranking people he is capable of ordering to shut up, such as General Gerald Boykin (who called the war on terrorism a holy war against infidels) and Tom DeLay (who said that Christianity was the one and only acceptable plan for human life.) Not disciplining Boykin and DeLay and the many others associated with Bush who have said such things is a huge tactical mistake for Bush in the war on terror, although it may be a canny move in the war on reason and Democrats, AKA Bush-Cheney 2004.
But as to the chauvinistic narrative of the mission itself: let us pause and pay our respects—and I’m not being facetious here—to the political power of ignorance. I have always said that Bush is not as stupid as many think he is. He is certainly smart enough to never know very much about what he is talking about. That way he can sincerely connect to people who know as little as he does, and be known to them as a straight shooter. It is obnoxious, but not dumb, to boast of his C average at the school he didn’t deserve to go to, at which he lazily squandered the opportunity bought by privilege, an opportunity that a harder-working person with fewer connections might have better appreciated. But Bush learned early on that he didn’t have to work for a living.
So it doesn’t matter that the narrative is historically incorrect. Listening to Bush—never mind smart people like William Kristol and the editors of the Wall Street Journal and Commentary—you would never know that, while the British, French, and Ottoman empires were engaged in their century-long slow-motion collapse, there were passionate and popular movements for liberal democracy in most of the political territories that came to make up the modern Middle East. There were democratic parties and leaders committed to human rights and peaceful reform, separation of religion and state, an end to arbitrary and unrepresentative monarchies. In these “benighted,” intellectually and politically backward places and races, which, the story goes, were completely ruled by unquestioning allegiance to Allah, there were thriving and influential constitutionalists and women’s movements.
But the inherent love of Arabs for dictatorship and fundamentalism won out, right? Since that’s what the Middle East looks like today.
Not exactly. What happened was that the British and French, and later the United States, so genuinely concerned with freedom and popular rights at home, made every conceivable effort to crush these democratic movements. How could Arab or Persian nationalism be acceptable? It would, after all, lead to the insistence of these peoples that their natural resources should be used for their own benefit and not the benefit of outsiders, a scenario that was explicitly discussed and planned against in the British and French foreign offices. The United States came to the game in the Middle East late, but with some urgency: George Kennan wrote a memo in 1948 in which he said,
…we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction… We should cease to talk about vague… objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. - PPS/23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy. Published in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Volume I, pp. 509-529
But the British, and then the French, got serious about the Middle East back at the turn of the last century, with the British decision to power their warships with oil rather than coal. In a competitive international environment, this forced the French and Germans to do the same—and they all had to look aggressively for sources of oil that they could control.
In the 20th century alone, the British and French faced major insurrections in Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria, Morocco, Algeria and Libya, insurrections that had nothing to do with reactionary Islam or with hatred of Western wealth, philosophy or products, but everything to do with resentment of foreign control and exploitation. Usually these revolts, and almost always in the territory of modern Iraq, lasted until they were put down by massive and indiscriminate air power. This must certainly bring a sense of déjà vu among Iraqis nowadays, who belong to a culture in which memory is valued. After having to kill a lot of revolting Arabs with air power, the British placed the Hashemite king Faisal on the throne of Iraq in 1921 and kept him and their military bases there until the populist Ba’ath coup of 1958. I note in passing that the recent signing of the Iraqi interim constitution, orchestrated by the Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer, made a big deal of conducting the ceremony at King Faisal’s old desk, which I assume Bremer took as some sort of symbol of a restored Republic. But Faisal was the anti-democratic, indirect-rule, convenient agent of the British, and every Iraqi is taught this fact from his earliest school days. The incident was, to me, a symbol of everything that the United States does not understand about the history and politics of Iraq; unless, of course, Bremer is wittier, cleverer, and more cynical than even I give him credit for.
The difficulty in controlling their colonial properties led inevitably to a certain schizophrenia among the occupiers, especially the British, who had a long tradition of democracy at home and who were coming to the end of their ability to justify colonialism as such; they were, by the mid-20th century, clinging to the idea that they had to educate their subjects in democracy before the inevitable cutting of the cord, but this education would take time, of course, a lot of time during which—for their subjects’ own good—they had to remain in control. Duty above all, old chap! But it was hard to square this with what they had to do in opposition to violent demands for democratic rule, and it led to a rhetoric at cross purposes with itself:
[After choosing] the most prominent tribes which it is desirable to punish, the attack with bombs and machine guns must be unrelenting and unremitting and carried out continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle. Wing Commander J.A. Chamier, in The Use of Air Power in Replacing Military Garrisons, on the Iraq uprising of 1920.
Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five planes which offer them no real target and no opportunity for glory or avarice. The RAF’s Notes on the Method of Employment of the Air Arm in Iraq.
Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators… It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may arise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth. General Maude, Commander of British forces, Baghdad 1917. Maude was speaking, just a little earlier, of the same conflict referenced in the quotations above.
In juxtaposing these quotes I am not trying to say that the British were hypocrites or violent fools, although some of them, at some times and places, may have been. The more interesting and important point is the way in which a brutal and exploitative policy can be understood—quite sincerely—as being for the good of the victim.
But that was the British and French, the unabashed old-school colonials. What does this have to do with American policy? We were never blatant conquerors in the region. We even intervened against the British, French and Israelis during their aggressive land grab of 1956, we restrained a strike against Arab independence and dignity; in some ways that was our finest hour in the region. What have they got against us?
Like the British, we value and respect democracy at home. But at least since 1898, and arguably since the days of the Monroe Doctrine, we don’t work that way abroad. The funny thing is that the entire rest of the world absolutely knows this and hardly even bothers to laugh when Bush speaks about America’s great democratizing mission. At this point there is a lot of stale stuff that people who really do believe in democracy are obligated to bring up: Cuba, the Philippines, Dominican Republic, Chile, China, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Zaire, Iran, etc., etc., etc. The list of places in which American meddling has stifled democracy in the name of our national interests (or the interests of our ruling classes) is long, and I don’t bring it up in the usual way as a slap at our hypocritical attitude toward human freedom. I bring it up as an example of how this rhetoric is a strategic mistake. No one outside of the US believes it, and it therefore does not inspire allies or potential friends among the people of potential target states.
Certainly two of the most important examples, the CIA-supported coup that overthrew the popularly elected Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Moussadeq in 1953 because he dared to nationalize Iranian oil, and the CIA-supported coup that brought Saddam Hussein to the presidency of Iraq in 1979 are worthy of specific mention in this context. Not only because they so vividly portray what Bush means by democracy, but because they cast into sharp relief the reasons why democracy in the Middle East would be completely against the US national interest as presently conceived, and therefore an implausible goal of US warfare.
Because, of course, what would genuine Middle Eastern popular democracies demand? They’d demand full control of their oil wealth, for one thing. They’d want US and European troops out of the region. They’d demand a fair deal for the Palestinians. They’d get rid of a Saudi kleptocracy that has kept oil flowing reliably to America.
They might even, fed up with everything else that has been imposed on them, vote for a strict Islamic government, following the slogan of the Islamists that democratically contested—and democratically won, causing the government to annul the results and declare martial law—the Algerian elections of 1991: “One man, one vote—once.”
Within certain limits imposed by international law, all of these things would be the right of the people of the Middle East. Do we want that? If we were truly interested in democracy, we’d be planning for how we could accommodate the results of democracy, democracy as it actually would be and not as we would like it to be.
Yet Bush thinks that he knows just what they want. Recently he told the press, “As president, it’s my job to make the world a better place.” It is? Now this is from the president of a party that has an ideological commitment to the belief that the federal government of the United States has no right to tell the states of the United States what is good for them, because “one size does not fit all” when it comes to governance. Yet Bush knows what is best for the whole world! If so, he should submit to elections in which the people of the whole world have the right to vote on his presidency. Hmmmm. I wonder what the result of such a vote would be? Well it just goes to show that non-Americans are too stupid to know what is good for them.
The problem with Bush running his mouth about “freedom” is that the world looks quite differently to many of the people on the receiving end of American intervention. The following is worth quoting at length because it suggests to me the reality that Iraqis are facing today, and it suggests a far more “real” near-future reality than the one Bush has in mind when he writes “Let Freedom Reign” (sic.) The following passage describes Iraq in the wake of the British installation of King Faisal in 1921.
…This [oil concession] accord was along the lines of the disadvantageous terms of the agreements with Iran, and was similarly unpopular in Iraq. When brought before the Iraqi cabinet for ratification, two ministers resigned in protest, although the agreement was finally approved, rushed through before an Iraq parliament could be elected.
Parliamentary rule was one of the features the British were obliged to accept as part of their shift to indirect rule, and in keeping with their commitments to the League of Nations… The Iraqi Parliament, although it later on came to have a reputation as a rubber stamp for the measures proposed by the monarchy and its British overlords, was not an entirely tame body at the outset. The first issue facing the newly-elected parliament was a treaty with Great Britain, which consecrated its position in the country, regularized its military presence, and formalized Iraq’s subordination (including obliging Iraq to accept the “advice” of the high commissioner “on all matters affecting the international and financial obligations” of Britain). Earlier governments had resigned in protest against the treaty, and the High Commissioner had governed the country with emergency powers for years, until he could put together a cabinet that would satisfy the draft treaty. However, the newly-elected deputies raised furious objections to the unequal provisions of the treaty, and there were large street demonstrations against its terms and against the British. It was only through employment of the most rigorous measures of compulsion, such as a draft law produced by the high commissioner giving the king the power to dissolve parliament, that that body was eventually compelled to vote for the treaty. In the event, it passed with only thirty-seven votes in favor, with twenty-eight against and eight abstaining… Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (I highly recommend this book, by the way.)
Perhaps many Iraqis are now feeling, as Michael Moore has shown us Bush himself saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… um… well, you don’t get fooled again!” Lincoln said something similar, and with more elegance, but this is not an elegant age.
So when Bush talks about “freedom”, what this word suggests depends on the hearer. I frankly have no idea what it means to him. I think it’s another one of those words that he’s heard all his life without every really having to understand it, because, thanks to his family’s wealth and privilege, he was about as free as a human being can be, free to go to the best schools and waste his time there, free to get rich while the companies he ran tanked, free to avoid combat service during an unpopular war that he never questioned, free to drink and drive, free to use cocaine and not go to jail. Since he never had to value it, he can’t really think what the fuss is if others are forced to accept this decidedly one-sided version of it. As a comic-book general once said, “Stop whining. I’ve shot lots of people. It doesn’t hurt.” So those who fight are terrorists and Ba’athists, all of them.
Indeed, some of them certainly are. But others may simply be pragmatists, or to use a word from a frame of reference somewhat foreign to me, patriots. Consider (and this is not meant in any way as a defense of terrorism, merely as an observation): the tiny rag of sovereignty that the Iraqis got a few days ago, pathetic as it is, is considerably—significantly—more than Bush was planning on “giving” them just a few months ago. There is a much larger role for Iraqi military forces, courts, control of the captured dictator Saddam. Would any of this have come about without the violent insurgency? I think it’s a pretty safe bet that if the Iraqis had been nice or even largely passive, they would have been essentially ruled directly from Washington, even more obviously and egregiously than they are now. The “patriotic” wing of the insurgency (and all the evidence suggest that indeed there is one, fighters who fought for democracy against Saddam and who are now fighting for democracy against the Americans) can honestly claim credit for that, I think. To get where they want to go, they’ll have to fight the Islamists and Ba’athists that they’re now fighting alongside sooner or later, of course. But me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the foreigner.
Delusions
Politicians who start wars for no good reason, and the generals who have to wage them, would do well to study the history of self-deluding assumptions about knowing what is good for other people. I actually agree with Bush when he says that all people everywhere want to live in freedom, but he and I understand that differently. Because I would add that all people everywhere understand what freedom means to them—which is to say, they understand their voluntary and involuntary rights and obligations vis-a-vis government, religion, society, family, clans, and other institutions in varying ways. Bush makes no allowance for this. He is like Jack Kemp, who once referred to Adam Smith’s economic proposals as if they were laws of physics rather than cultural values. This suggests to me that Bush and Kemp have much more in common with Osama bin Laden than any of the three of them suspect, and yes I mean this absolutely literally, not metaphorically. Because Osama sincerely believes that the laws of God as he understands them are universal and unbending and apply equally to everyone everywhere; for all his faults, Republicans cannot accuse Osama of moral relativism. And like Bush and another famous Republican, Ronald Reagan, he is willing to fight for what he believes to be true and good, and he’s willing to wreak some collateral damage for the greater good. I don’t think Osama enjoys killing innocent civilians, any more than Reagan did. They both just had an unshakeable belief that in the long run, the world would be a better place if these civilians died in these circumstances than if they didn’t. Reagan killed many, many more innocent people than Osama ever has or could (unless he gets nuclear weapons); hundreds of thousands of people, in fact, counting the US-supported wars in Angola and Guatemala. So was Reagan a terrorist? No more, and no less, than Osama.
Bush believes that everyone, everywhere, wants only to be an American. Why settle for less? So Osama must be motivated by hatred of “freedom.” Why read what a seasoned (and for obvious reasons, anonymous) CIA operative wrote in the recently-published Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror: that bin Laden hates us "because of our policies and actions in the Muslim world" and that “Al Qaeda's attacks are meant to advance a set of clear, focused and limited foreign policy goals: namely, an end to American aid to Israel: the removal of American forces from the Arabian Peninsula; an end to the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq; an end to American support for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia; an end to American support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; and an end to American pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.”
These goals indeed represent part of bin Laden’s idea of freedom, and this is what Bush fundamentally fails to grasp. This does not mean that we have to accept bin Laden’s worldview or yield to his demands (although we might well benefit from carrying out some of them, not because bin Laden threatens us if we don’t, but because it would be the right thing to do, and in our long-term national interest, wisely understood.) We cannot effectively fight extremist Islamic terrorism if we don’t understand it, and if we don’t have a sense of what we have done to encourage it. Republicans criticize the Clinton administration’s “holiday from history” because, they say, Clinton waged his wars in the wrong places. But Republicans want to escape history entirely, pretend that it doesn’t exist. Indeed, to bring it up is to be a traitor. Jay Nordlinger of National Review reserves his deepest contempt for those who dare to talk about “root causes” in the context of 9/11. They attacked America. What else do you want to know?
This attitude will lead to our disastrous loss in the war on terror. I am sure of this.
This is why John Derbyshire, also of the National Review, may be a bad Christian (he professes to be such) when he writes “I do not greatly care what the Arab world thinks about us, any more than I care what the Bushmen of the Kalahari think; but I believe that it would greatly behoove the Arabs to care what Americans think about them”, but more importantly, he is advocating very bad—the worst—foreign policy. Many, many serious political thinkers, some of them, such as John Mearsheimer, associated with the political right, have made this point.
Probably the most poignant thing Bush has ever said—and I truly feel for him here, because he’s so at sea—was when he described himself as “a president who sees the world as it is.” It’s no lie, because he really believes it, and that’s what would be so sad if it weren’t so terrifying.
I admit that I was among those who expected the Iraqis to be grateful for their liberation—and yes, for all its faults, it was a comparative liberation, if only to a more benign form of arbitrary rule. This was foolish of me, even though I knew the background of lies and manipulation and theft going back hundreds of years, a list that is quite familiar to ordinary Iraqis. Too late I have come to see what journalist Mark Danner meant when he said in a debate on the Iraq war, “People want to make their own history.”
The assumptions are dangerous not only philosophically and morally. Many observers have pointed out that the Bush people seemed to have no plan for how to deal with Iraq once they “owned” it. On the contrary: as George Packer has pointed out in the New Yorker, and James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly, there were very detailed and well-thought-out plans, plans that Iraqis and Americans and political, economic, and social experts from all over the world had put together with a great deal of effort. Apparently they run to more than 10,000 pages—Fallows read them so I didn’t have to—and were organized into sections produced by committees on just about every aspect of Iraqi social, economic and political life. Furthermore, they warned about the very things that we’ve seen happening over the last year and a half—an opposition to foreign occupation, a rising nationalism, sabotage, religious extremism—and proposed solid policies to ameliorate or counter such things.
Why didn’t these plans work? We don’t know, because they were never tried. None of the people sent to rule Iraq had read them or even heard of them, or had any time for the authors. This was the result of the belief in themselves and their world view of the people at the top of this mess, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the aptly-named Feith. Iraqis will greet us with flowers, because they want only to be ‘Muricans; why bother with plans? This is, as a Bush insider put it recently, “faith-based foreign policy.” It reminds me of Philip II of Spain and his plans for the invasion of England. The Armada was only a distraction; the real invasion force was to come over from Philip’s possessions in the Hapsburg Netherlands, by boat, an enormous army. As part of his planning, Philip must have prepared these boats to transport his soldiers, right? No, he didn’t. He was a Catholic prince attacking a country of apostates; surely God was on his side. Surely God would provide.
Bush was overheard to say, as early as 1993, that he believed that “God wants me to be President.” He is mightily beholden to a fundamentalist Christian constituency that may determine the next election, a part of which believes that the “rapture” is imminent and that, for it to be fulfilled, Israel must regain all of its Biblical lands. This belief is actually driving US policy on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and most likely played a role in Bush’s recent complete acceptance of the illegal Israeli West Bank settlements as what Ariel Sharon calls “facts on the ground” and what others might call the death-knell of a negotiated, two-state solution. Talk about stabilizing the Middle East, encouraging democracy, and reducing opportunities for terrorism. If Bush were truly interested in these things, he might want to revisit his cave-in on US policy towards Israeli settlements of occupied land. I promise him that it would be much more helpful in accomplishing these goals, and much less costly in every conceivable way, than an invasion of Iraq.
Commentators such as Victor Davis Hanson, the hysterical apologist for every military blunder made in the name of Bush’s imperial folly, repeat again and again that Iraq will be better off in the long run with Saddam gone than it would have been otherwise, and that this is the unanswerable argument of those who support this war. I think it is probably true that Iraqis will be better off, as I said above; barring full-scale civil war, the worst-case, most complete subjugation to the corporate interests of Halliburton would probably be more humane than rule by Saddam and then his sons and grandsons. But this really misses the point, and I can’t believe that intelligent commentators, men like Hanson who have studied history, really don’t get it.
Sure, Iraqis will probably be better off, if not “free”, if not living in a democracy, if not living in political dignity. The question is whether we are better off. Has the war in Iraq accomplished Bush’s stated goals of bringing stability and democracy to the Middle East, stopping Saddam from getting WMD, and advancing the war on terror?
The answer to the first question is absolutely not; all he’s done is alienate a generation of democratic activists who might otherwise have been well-disposed toward the US, but who now are much more likely to ask the very legitimate questions of when the US will stop funding the anti-democratic regimes that oppress them, and whether the US will ever, ever say no to any Israeli outrage. The answer to the second question is no, since it was based on a false postulate. The answer to the third question is best summed up by this remark from “Anonymous,” the CIA operative I mentioned before: “[The invasion of Iraq was, for bin Laden,] a Christmas present you long for but never expected to receive… [a gift that] will haunt, hurt, and hound Americans for years to come." He points out the obvious: Iraq, thanks to Bush, is becoming another breeding ground for Al Qaeda, and a recruiting tool for anti-American fighters from all over the world.
So are we safer? And are we better off, really, in a world in which the principle of international law has been successfully challenged, and it’s now every state for itself once again? The Europeans whose developmental heritage we share decided at the end of the Thirty Years War that a) states ought to play by a set of rules, and b) religious wars are bad. But Bush, you know, isn’t much of a reader.
I am no pacifist. I believed, and I still believe, that there were scenarios that would have justified an invasion of Iraq, in compliance with international law or not. If Saddam had really been trying to acquire nuclear weapons, that would be one such scenario. But I do not believe that it is right for a government to lie about these efforts, to ignore contrary evidence, and to wage war basically on the whim, and the political calculations, of its leaders. While I do not expect a country to adhere rigidly to what is called international law if there truly are imminent threats, I do not think a desire to overturn the very concept of international law, to return the world to the time before the First World War—no, to a time before the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648—when the only restraint on a state’s power to act was the resources it could marshal, is a good or wise policy, or that it will bring us real security.
Real losses and serious consequences for democracy, at home and abroad, flow from Bush’s mistakes. George Packer put it most eloquently in a recent New Yorker commentary:
In the last years of the twentieth century, with the liberation of Eastern Europe, the tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda, and the qualified success of Kosovo, a new conviction began to stir in certain quarters of the liberal democracies—that regimes don’t have an absolute right to slaughter their own citizens, that the democratic powers should intervene when it’s feasible to stop the worst atrocities and create the kind of security in which democracy has a chance to grow. This was always a fragile minority view, and it has become a significant piece of the collateral damage inflicted by the Administration’s blunders in Iraq. The war has everyone from George Will to Michael Moore sounding like an unsentimental realist with no patience for any American involvement in moral messes overseas. The closest analogy to the Iraq war is the aftermath of the First World War: we’re in for a bitter reaction against “liberation” and “humanitarianism” and the other lofty words that sent American troops into Falluja and Najaf. The Administration has given idealism a bad name, and it will now take years to rescue Vaclav Havel from Paul Wolfowitz.
We now all have to clean up Bush’s (and Wolfowitz’s, and Cheney’s, and Rumsfeld’s, and, yes, Powell’s) mess. It will be a long and hard job just getting back on track so that we can fight the very real and very necessary war on terrorism intelligently, like adults, not like a silly little boy who wants to prove that he’s the toughest kid around. To win this we will actually have to think about history, not brush it off. Sometimes we will indeed have to be brutal, there’s no way around that. But we’ll have to be more smart than we are brutal, or we will lose, in every dimension in which it is possible to lose this kind of thing. Patriots of every party and belief, take note.
I too was most disappointed with the Dreyfuss attack on Krugman.
Interesting that most of the "mainstream" attacks on the Bush Iraq aggression criticize him for botching the job rather than condemning the war as the bloody imperialist atrocity it is.
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