Are We Really Still Arguing About This?

You have to admit, when the Republican machine wants to get the word out, they do it in force. They all hit the news shows this weekend, all basically hitting the same talking points - both parties and two administrations believed that Saddam had a WMD program, even other countries did, the Congress voted to give Bush the power to go to war, so the rationale was correct even if Iraq had no actual weapons to be found. So how dare the Dems accuse the President of lieing to the American public! I'm shocked! You have impuned my honor, sir! What balls.

We got a hint of what was coming when normally quiet National Security Advisor Steven Hadley kicked things off the day prior to Veterans' Day. That was the opening act for Bush's speech at Tobyhanna Army Depot, where he referenced September 11th six times along with the war in Iraq:

One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war. When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support. I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn't support the liberation of Iraq. And that is their right, and I respect it. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I accept the responsibilities, and the criticisms, and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision.

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.) Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

Ah, actually Mr. President, the committee wasn't allowed to look at the other issue - whether your administration cherry-picked and distorted the intelligence given to them. Different issue. Ask your buddy Senator Pat Roberts about that one. See J.D. Henderson at Intel Dump for a good critique of the Prez's speach.

So Hadley and the Repubs all hit the talk shows  this Sunday to echo the Prez, and the right-wing blogs follow in kind. And every time I think Senator John McCain is a good decent person (he was so funny and nice on The Daily Show last week), he slavishly follows the Repub machine on this and other issues:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Democrats have a right to criticize the war but that it was disingenuous to claim that Bush lied about intelligence to justify it.

"Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French ... all reached the same conclusion," McCain said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Yes, they all came to the same conclusion - it's just that NONE OF THEM other than Tony Blair thought Saddam's broke-ass WMD program was worthy of an invasion and forced regime change. Even Blair's own supporters are feeling betrayed now, as they see what was going on within their political circles. They're talking about impeachment... what a concept.

I've dealt with the issue that this war wasn't about WMDs, it was about trying to settle the Middle East turmoil by trouncing the biggest bad boy on the block. Got it, ready to move on. Ready to declare victory and get the hell out of Iraq. Former Senator John Edwards is a good example of how the rest of Congress ought to deal with this issue. So why is the administration and its supporters fighting this issue so hard?

Comments

[Younghusband]

Yes, they all came to the same conclusion - it's just that NONE OF THEM other than Tony Blair thought Saddam's broke-ass WMD program was worthy of an invasion and forced regime change.

True, but only the US and the UK were footing the more than $40B/year containment regime for the last 12 years.

[J.]

I would seriously question that number - $40B/yr - on the basis of what we were doing specific to Iraq, unless you're counting the entire DOD presence in the Middle East. And point two, that's still cheaper in terms of money and people than the current strategy.

[J.]

YH, what I meant to say (before you cleverly sidetracked me) was, the issue isn't whether or not the US govt was right to go to war against Iraq - although some would say that is a very big issue - rather, the issue is why is the Bush administration still pretending that Iraq's WMD program was the casus belli? So they wanted Saddam out, so they wanted to start a project of rehabilitating the Middle East. Just admit it and move on, Prez. Bush!

[Younghusband]

$40B/yr over 12 years with no sight of ending in the future is quite a chunk of change. But I digress, I do agree with your original point J. They blew a one-size-fits-all argument way out of proportion, and when the evidence didn't match, they felt they couldn't back down. But in the US these days could they just say "sorry" without any kind of justification? Would the people allow that? Should Bush care since he can't be re-elected anyways?

[F]

You forgot Australia!

Can't even get credit for this travesty...

[Bobby]

J., you know I subscribe to George Friedman's thesis and therefore have never believed the Administration invaded Saddam Hussein's Iraq because of UN sanctions violations, Weapons of Mass Destruction programs or links to international terrorist organizations. It's always made more sense to me that the Hussein regime was targeted because it allowed the US to destroy Saddam's regime and demonstrate American resolve, thereby influencing the behavior of the *real* targets of OIF: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Libya, et. al. Because that is my belief, I can support OIF as a supporting campaign of the War on Terror (and *really* support it instead of just saying it like so many others), something that "progressives" refuse to do because they feel we could have influenced terrorist sponsoring regimes using other methods (in fact, they actually just generally choose to ignore the issue and pretend like it wasn't happening pre-OIF, one of the reasons I have found very few Democratic candidates that I could vote for-- they just don't "get it"), while nonetheless keeping an open mind on whether or not we're actually winning OIF or the GWOT (i.e, our tactics are not always supporting our strategy).

That said, Friedman argued such a policy could not be articulated publicly, partially because it would counteract the actual objective (i.e., saying I'm doing X to scare you necessarily reduces the influence of doing action X) and partially because the American public might never have agreed to such a starkly Realist foreign policy (which is what Isaacson claims was the failure of the Nixon/Kissinger Grand Design)-- even now you have a large segment of the US and world population who believe we invaded a "legitimate" and "sovereign" state (legitimate and sovereign to who is always the question that has to be asked).

I'm guessing that the first part probably doesn't matter so much now. Because we have struggled with the post-Thunder Run occupation (again, tactics not supporting the strategy), we've already seen Syria, Iran, and (to a lesser extent) Saudi Arabia backslide somewhat into their old ways-- a sure indicator that they fear US power and resolve less now than they did in, say, April 2003 (although, for the most part, they're still more jittery than they were pre-OIF). So admitting now that it was a strategy to instill fear in the hearts and minds of terrorist supporters probably wouldn't hurt as much-- making "admittal" more feasible now than it was in, say, 2003-- though it would still hurt.

But I'm guessing that (a) we could still very well win the War in Iraq, in which case the strategy will be bolstered; (b) the Administration has invested a lot of their public rhetoric in the stated (i.e., fake) causes of the War, and feel they can't simply change directions now; and (c) the reality is that the number of people involved in the realpolitik decision-making was probably very, very small (Bush, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, probably Card, Libby, maybe Luti, Marty Hoffman, perhaps even Khalilzad), while those officials who interface with the public were simply told the same reasons that they then sold (or tried to sell) to the public. In other words, the guys who are speaking weren't in the loop and probably truly believe it was all about WMDs all along (like, say, O'Reilly or Rush or the right-winger bloggers)-- to paraphrase Stephanopolous, it is impossible to understand the intoxicating influence of the President putting his hand on your shoulder and telling you, "You've gotta believe me on this one." All too often, the "Mouth of Sauron" only knows what "Sauron" has told him (as Stephanopolous later learned to his own humiliation).

My guess is that if the whole truth of this ever comes out, it will be in a long-after-the-fact memoirs (a la Bobby McNamara). But most likely this is something that will never officially emerge. Many historians believe (I am not one of them) that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen as a means of drawing the US into a war that was righteous and just, but that we might otherwise have chosen not to fight-- if that thesis is true, FDR took it to the grave with him. I'm guessing Bush will do the same.

I'll blog about this more in the future.

[Anonymous]

What was that famous comment by the German prime minister? "How can you be so certain that there are WMDs and yet have no idea where they are?"

I don't understand this claim that everyone thought the WMDs were there. If that's the case, why was Powell up in front of the UN trying to convince people that some RVs were mobile biological weapons labs? There would have been no need for that presentation if everyone already believed the hypothetical weapons were there.

[J Thomas]

"Are We Really Still Arguing About This?"

Yes. We're really still arguing about this.

If it was just bloggers we'd write them off. We keep arguing because it's the president of the USA.

I remember -- it seems like ages ago though it was probably only around 15 years -- on a local BBS we had a guy who insisted that seatbelts are bad for you. People disagreed with him. They quoted statistics. They quoted experts. They quoted people who'd been in car wrecks. They posted pictures. And no matter what they said he'd come back with "Yeah, but if it's a bad wreck you're better off getting thrown clear."

After a couple of months of presenting evidence and watching him say "No, that doesn't mean anything, seatbelts are bad for you" eventually people just stopped talking to him.

But you don't just give up like that when it's the President and he's spending something like 7 billion dollars a month on it and he has the US military literally pounding sand.

[nixon did it]

I agree with the above post from Bobby in some respects. It's clear that the goal of the Iraqi adventure was always power projection and a perceived need to show American resolve (manhood?). A side benefit was unfettered access to some really great oil fields. Saddam was merely the convenient excuse, as were the ephemeral WMD. Moving in step with Bobby, I understand the realpolitik argument and I can envision how I might have supported the Iraqi adventure. After all, I would really like to see a little calm in the Middle East; I also drive a couple of gas hogs, so oil is important. Actually, I always knew the true objective and I always wondered if those in charge would admit it.

They never have, have they? Envision it: The tiny cabal, led by Dick Cheney, saying, "trust us on this, Mr. President, we've got this wired. CIA's on board, we've got 9/11 as a launch pad, and we can scare the shit out of the public and the Congress by talking about WMD. Doesn't matter that WMD encompasses everything from old mustard gas canisters to nukes, fact is when they hear WMD, they think nuke. This is a slam dunk. Don't worry about the Euros. You the man. You'll make history. Nobel Prize. You can do this."

Where I differ with Bobby is that I have a problem with realpolitik done in my name when I don't know it's being done. And I'm not alone. A lot of Americans apparently dislike it when they might have supported an action based on false threats to the nation (a lot of us really care about the nation and trust presidents to tell us the truth about threats). Then, after seeing our youth dying and our national treasury bleeding, our president says, "hey, that was then, this is now. We've got a new cause now. Trust us."

I also differ with Bobby in that I don't think the strategy of which he approves is going to work. In fact, it's backfiring now and the only thing that keeps me from enjoying what one might term just deserts is the fact that no one in charge is paying any sort of personal price for it. Our troops are. And we are. Bush goes on, unfazed, apparently determined to fight a hundred years war. Bobby supports that, thinking that somehow Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a bunch of guys strutting around with stars on their uniforms are smarter than Lawrence and a whole lot of others who warned us. Just like Vietnam. We were warned there, too.

An old truth, known to every good interrogator. Liars always have problems and can be caught out because they never remember the story exactly the same each time they tell it. Those who tell the truth never have that problem. Where is this administration and its supporters right now? The story changes on a daily basis.

I don't care about any presumed benign motives behind the obfuscation and lying from this administration. Bobby may be willing to accept it for what he sees as a greater good, but I'm not. Nowhere in our Constitution or in our founding documents do I see where it is expected that a president can be less than fully truthful with me or my elected representatives about taking my country to war.

So, yeah we're still arguing about this. Not a whole lot more important in our nation right now. It's clear that the administration was less than forthcoming about the whole thing, certainly did not share all intelligence (good and bad, from their perspective) with the Congress) and started a war under false pretenses. And then managed to butcher it. So, where does one most fault them? Credibility? Or competence? Hard to tell which has been worse with this gang.

And to think of all of the uproar about a simple BJ.

[Matthew Shugart]

I would not take that Sunday Herald story on impeachment of Tony Blair too seriously. That some opposition within the fringe nationalist parties (Scottish Nationalists and the Welsh Plaid Cymru, which actually dropped its own impeachment campaign several days before the Sunday Herald article) would try to initiate such a procedure is a sign of how weak the support for ousting Blair specifically over this issue is, not how strong it is.

In the U.K if the Commons majority wants to be rid of the chief executive, it need not charge him with a crime. It need not try him in the upper house. It can dismiss him for any reason at any time, for the PM serves at their pleasure.

In fact, the process of impeachment itself in the UK is a totally archaic procedure that goes back to the days before the entire executive was dependent on the confidence of the Commons.

And don't take the 200 signatures claim too seriously, either. Even if it were true--which is unlikely--that would be 100+ short of what it would take to actually oust (or impeach) Blair.

Everyone knows he's on his way out. The only question is when and how the party can orchestrate it so it does not look like he was pushed, which would damage the party as a whole.