An interesting conversation; thanks for directing me to it.
I have two fundamental problems with Zakaria’s argument. The first is summed up in this item:
Throughout this discussion we have assumed that there was a simple, viable alternative to war with Iraq, the continuation of the status-quo, i.e., sanctions plus the almost weekly bombing of the no-fly zones. In fact, that isn't really true. America's Iraq policy was broken. You have to contrast the dangers of acting in Iraq with the dangers of not acting and ask what would things have looked like had we simply kicked this can down the road.
This assumes, as so many here have, that full-scale war along the route that was taken and the status quo were the only two available options. This is simply not the case.
The second problem is that one of the more considerable costs of the war is not being discussed at all. Zakaria mentions “ruptured alliances” in passing, only to point out that this damage can be repaired. In the case of the minor contretemps with Europe, I’d agree with him. The damage that will be less easy to repair is to American standing in the moderate Muslim world, which has been considerable. The war has left generally pro-American regimes in the Islamic world (Indonesia and Pakistan being two prime examples) deeply isolated from their people, and made their pro-American positions harder to justify and maintain. There is little doubt that the American actions, as much by their style as by their substance, have helped to push moderate Muslims toward radicalism throughout the spectrum, and have made recruitment far easier for the radicals. The fall of Saddam may have made Syria and Libya more accommodating, at least superficially, but the subsequent surge in anti-Americanism throughout the Islamic world will vastly complicate the already complicated problem of managing key states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The sad thing about this cost is that it was in large part preventable. It is very clear that there was no immediate, desperate need to remove Saddam. There was no reason not to embark on a campaign of escalating pressure, starting with far more aggressive enforcement of sanctions. This would not in any way have precluded an eventual resort to war. It would have made it clear, though, that war was a last resort, not a preferred option. The public diplomacy surrounding the war was horribly botched. The rest of the world came away with the impression – not entirely without justification – that the US had made a unilateral decision to go to war, and engaged in a tepid after-the-fact attempt to put on a show of consultation. Our handling of the leadup to the war placed allied leaders of democratic states who wished to support us in the unenviable position of having to do so against the opposition of their constituents. This was not necessary, and it was a product less of our desire to remove Saddam than of the way we went about it. Better public diplomacy and a process of graduated escalation might have reversed that equation, and forced leaders opposing the war to do so over the objections of their own people.
This situation arose because American leaders were more concerned with presenting an aggressive, unilateralist image to the domestic audience than with the possibility that they would rupture alliances and provoke anti-American ferment in critical nations in the Islamic world.
This, from Jacob Weisberg, deserves to be read and re-read:
For my part, I have indeed changed my mind this week. I no longer think I was correct to support Bush's invasion of Iraq last March. That's hard for me to say, since as I noted at the outset, I've itched to depose Saddam Hussein by violent means, since 1991. But Bush was the wrong president to do it, and last year was the wrong moment—based on problems I didn't perceive clearly enough because of my impatience to see our unfinished business in Iraq finally completed.
The first factor impelling me to change my mind is the emerging picture of the dishonesty involved in getting the public to support the war. Members of the Bush administration truly thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as did the vast majority of its critics. But the administration contributed to the general misapprehension by suborning intelligence, exaggerating evidence, and amplifying unreliable data in ways that, as Ken Pollack has depicted, amount to deception. They did this because, absent a powerful fear of Saddam's WMD, the American people would not have supported the invasion. A democracy must not be led to war on the basis of deceit, even if the unarticulated reasons for going war remain persuasive to many of us.
I don't fault myself much for being wrong about the weapons. Perhaps I should have been more suspicious, but if Ken and other experts couldn't see through the flaws in the Bush administration's evidence, I don't see how I could have. It was a very strong argument for war that turns out to have to be almost completely wrong.
The other reason I have changed my mind is that, as I indicated yesterday, I don't think it stands up well to cost-benefit analysis available at the outset. I think that the benefits could have outweighed the costs if the Bush administration had proceeded multilaterally and on the basis of prudent contingency planning. But it should have been possible to see a year ago that Bush was going to proceed in precisely the self-undermining way he did. Unilateralism was the president's policy. The liberation fantasy that caused so much additional damage to the already wrecked society of Iraq was the obvious underpinning of the Pentagon's postwar plan.
Here I do fault myself, for not better recognizing the evident character of this administration. Another president might have taken us to war in a basically prudent and honest way. This one was not competent to do so. Facing a continuing tragedy in Iraq, but no emergency, we should have waited for a leader capable of reasoning about our security priorities and working more effectively with countries we need as allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
Since that’s been my position since the beginning, I’m glad to see Weisberg, who has always been one of the voices I’ve respected on the other side, coming around to it. |
