Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003?
It could not have been to protect ourselves and our allies from the Iraqi regime's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, its nuclear weapons program that was on the verge of being able to produce a mushroom cloud, and its unmanned aerial drones that were capable of delivering these weapons to distant targets. None of these things existed, but, more to the point, once everyone knew that they they did not exist, and this fact was acknowledged even by the Bush Administration, which had led the country to war on the confident claim that they did exist, there was no detectable anger directed against the sources of the faulty intelligence. Instead, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Colin Powell, who harangued the United Nations regarding his various conclusive proofs that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction ("there can be no doubt"), said he was "disappointed" to learn that in fact Iraq had not possessed any such weapons. We have now been at war for more than four years, have suffered around 40,000 casaulties, more than 4000 fatalities, witnessed the erosion of our reputation on the geopolitical stage, and spent more than half a trillion dollars. (I won't say how many Iraqis have been killed: no one knows for sure, partly because the Administration isn't interested.) If the people who brought us to war had done so on the belief that Iraq's weapons indeed posed an imminent threat to the United States and its interests, then they would be more than "disappointed" about the false beliefs that set them on a catastrophic course--and Powell's "disappointment" is the strongest reaction we know about.
I think it is hard to overstate the duplicity of Team Bush regarding Iraq. What they now call bad "intelligence" was more like a branch of the White House's public relations effort. It was not a case of independent intelligence analysis driving policy. The policy had been set and it was the job of the "intelligence" agencies to produce "analysis" to support the policy. As the Downing Street memo had it, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." When there turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Team Bush naturally blamed the faulty intelligence, but there were really no consequences or recriminations for what was, if the Administration's account is credited, a monumental error. That would make sense if the Administration knew that the work product of the intelligence agencies had been corrupted by the pressures it had itself exerted. Absent knowledge that the intelligence had been corrupted, there is no way to understand the equanimity with which the Administration received news that it had launched a war for reasons that were all grounded in error.
If Iraq's weapons were the reason for going to war, then the fact that there were no weapons means the war is a mistake. But of course the Administration insists that the war is not a mistake, that we are "making significant progress" and are going to "win." Its efforts to finesse this paradox have been notably lame. For example, in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." The graceless expression is intellectually incoherent. What we are looking for is the real reason. That is what the weapons were until there turned out to be none. Then the weapons became the "core reason," with the suggestion that there were many other reasons championed by diverse people who, while unable to agree with each other on this rationale and that one, were, generally, in full agreement about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. So we went to war for some combination of reasons, different ones held by different officials, none of them wholly agreeing with one another, which were not put forward in the debate leading up to the war on account of the divergence of opinion on every possible rationale except for the weapons--which, as we now know, were phastasmal? This is how the world's greatest democracy arrives at a decision to make war?
Taking Wolfowitz at his word, we are back to our original question.
The Administration's problem, I think, is that any forthright reason it might submit for having gone to war in Iraq would naturally be measured against what we have so far accomplished there with our very considerable investment of blood and treasure. For obvious reasons, that is not an activity the Administration wants to encourage. Meanwhile, the reality-based community is free to make conjectures, since the people who know have nothing sensible to say. I subscribe to the Oedipal complex theory advanced by Hendrik Hertzberg:
. . . Bush II is just a twerp. He's a bundle of resentment. He's never had any real interest in political ideology. It's all an Oedipal drama. And ultimately that's how it will be understood. I don't think it's comprehensible in any other way. His dad raised taxes, so he's not going to raise taxes. Dad didn't go to Baghdad, so he's going to Baghdad. Dad hated Rumsfeld so he made Rumsfeld secretary of defense.
It will be criticized as a specimen of what the wingnuts call Bush Derangement Syndrome, but that is why they are the wingnuts. If the invasion of Iraq is comprehensible some other way, let them set it out. Hertzberg's Oedipal-drama theory takes account of the known facts, which, again, is more than can be said for anything emanating from Bush, his various spokespeople, or any of the Administration's defenders in the blogosphere.
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