WHY WE'RE IN IRAQ
BY RICHARD REEVES
Universal Press Syndicate
October 8, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Presidents don’t declare war from the old Cincinnati train station, so it seems that President Bush’s latest Iraq speech was either a space-holder or a device to buy more time to plot or plan invasion. Whatever it was meant to be, the timing and location did not make a lot of sense and did not move the national debate forward.
In fact, the president moved back from threatening regime change. It seemed to be a disarmament speech. That may be wishful thinking. But Bush sounded more moderate and patient than he does here in the war capital. Around here the politicians, lobbyists and journalists who populate official Washington -- and the president, too -- talk and act as if Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction have reached the New Jersey Turnpike. And he’s headed south toward the Beltway that separates the capital from common sense.
What’s the hurry? What’s going on here? I hope the president knows. The rest of us can’t be sure, but watching and talking to some of the president’s men this is my guess:
The president and his folk, particularly his most hawkish advisers -- that group would include National Security Adviser Condileeza Rice, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and man of war Richard Perle -- see this as a window of opportunity to re-create the Middle East in our image and interests. Saddam, who is a monster, but a regional and contained one, is just an excuse. The real goal is stability. The Bush administration wants stable oil prices, stable Arab governments and a secure Israel . This, they think, is the right time and Iraq is the place to start.
Bush and company are ready to roll the dice. All the talk of tough weapons inspections and United Nations resolutions is for cover. Many of the people in charge are hoping there will be no resolutions of any kind, which will give them greater reason to use greater United States military power in lieu of diplomacy or any kind of regional solutions. The Middle East as it is right now is just too irrational for our purposes. Maybe we can straighten these people out.
Good luck. I am not opposed to that. Not many Americans are. We want to be the benevolent masters of a new and benevolent “democratic” colonialism. But listening to that kind of talk about a democratic Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which we would like to surround, I find myself thinking of November 1, 1963, the day we changed the regime in South Vietnam.
That was the day, 39 years ago, the day President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a military coup signed off on by President Kennedy. Diem was our boy, as Saddam was when the Iraqis attacked Iran twenty years ago, but the South Vietnamese leader resisted American control one time too often. The generals, with our encouragement, took over and proved to be incompetent fools. We meant well, really. But from that day on, South Vietnam was an American colony and our defeat and humiliation were predestined.
That analogy is not exact, of course. But we wasted almost twenty years there, trying to remake the place and its people in our image. If we try the same thing in Iraq, the result will be about the same over the long run: early victories, occupation and, one day, withdrawal.
One of the more sensible theoretical debates going on in Washington is about how long we will have to stay in Iraq if we or unnamed Iraqi conspirators are able to remove Saddam by coup, asassination or invasion. Optimists talk about five years; pessimists talk about fifty years. Okay, there is an obvious next question: How long do you think Iraqis will be there?
So who will prevail over time? I don’t know, but I know it won’t be us.
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RICHARD REEVES, author of President Nixon: Alone in the White House (October 2001), is a writer and syndicated columnist who has made a number of award-winning documentary films. His ninth book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power — now considered the authoritative work on the 35th president — won several national awards and was named the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993 by Time. His other best selling books include Convention and American Journey: Travelling with Tocqueville in Search of American Democracy.
Recipient of the 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Reeves writes a twice-weekly column that appears in more than 100 newspapers. He is a former chief political correspondent for The New York Times and has written extensively for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and New York.
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