PhD in Obviousness

Today in the Washington Post, Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote a column addressing the issue of whether the conflict in Iraq has been worth the price paid so far. Mr. Kagan argues, rightly, that to answer that question, we must ask ourselves how the US would be faring had Saddam been left in power, noting that a “fact not in dispute is that Hussein remained keenly interested in and committed to acquiring weapons of mass destruction.”

I’m not sure why it takes senior associate to make such an amazingly obvious point, but of course that’s the question that Americans are already asking themselves. I think that you would be hard pressed to find many Americans who would have told you that, between the Persian Gulf War and, say, September of 2002, they ever felt that Iraq was a threat to their security. The intelligence on Iraq painted a similar picture – a brutal dictator, but one that was essentially harmless to the United States. That didn’t stop the Bush administration from making the case, and ignoring the worldwide tepid response. Cast your memory back to a Newsweek article dated March 24, 2003:

On the weekend after Sept. 11, Bush convened his national-security team at Camp David. Wolfowitz argued that if military action was to be taken against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was harboring the leadership of al-Qaeda, it should also be taken against Iraq.

These assertions, of an early fixation on Iraq, have been backed up by Bob Woodward, Richard Clarke, and the Downing Street Memo also seems support the theory that the Bush Administration was determined to invade Iraq. They made the case so publicly (remember Ms. Rice asserting that “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) that Americans came to feel threatened by Saddam. The Bush Administration, to this day, is still linking 9/11 and Iraq, despite a lack of evidence of any direct threat to the US. Clearly, we are not learning from past failures. In 1995, when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during much of the Vietnam War, spoke about his then-recently published book “In Retrospect,” one of the best nonfiction books that I have ever read. During his talk, he related an important lesson that he learned from his Vietnam experience:

[W]e didn't recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are on a mission. To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody. We think we're on a mission. We aren't. We weren't then and we aren't today. And where our own security is at stake, I'm prepared to say act unilaterally, militarily. Where our security is not at stake, not directly at stake, narrowly defined, then I believe that our judgment of what is in another people's interest, should be put to the test of open discussion, open debate, and international forum. And we shouldn't act unilaterally militarily under any circumstances. And we shouldn't act militarily in conjunction with others until that debate has taken place. We don't have the God-given right to shape every nation to our own image.