It's the 20th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War Against the Terrorist Saddam Hussein, and many people think this is a good time for retrospectives. Personally, I'd prefer to forget about the whole thing, but I suppose that's a bad idea.
Still, although I've explained before why I eventually turned against the war,¹ I'm not sure I've ever explained why I initially supported it in the first place. It's no secret or anything, just something I've never gotten around to mentioning on the blog.
It's pretty simple, really. I grew up against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. US involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, but in 1980 we began arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan. In 1983 we invaded Grenada. During the mid-80s we were arming the contras in Nicaragua. We armed Iraq against Iran. In 1989 we invaded Panama. In 1991 we invaded Iraq. In 1992 we sent troops to Somalia. In 1999 we bombed Yugoslavia. In 2001 we invaded Afghanistan.
All of these were things I paid some attention to, but not much. Like most people, I had other things to keep me busy, and the constant use of US troops throughout the world seemed like no more than the normal background hum of daily news reports. It was just the way the world was.
So when 2002 arrived, and the Bush White House rolled out its marketing campaign for invading Iraq, it seemed like just another US war. Obviously 9/11 was fresh on everyone's mind, and even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with that he certainly seemed like a very bad guy. Which he was. So sure, why not take him out? He certainly deserved it as much as Manuel Noriega or Slobodan Milošević.
This, then, is the real answer: I didn't examine the war super closely, mostly thinking of it as just another American military intervention. Nothing to get too excited about.
Oddly enough, it was blogging that put paid to that way of thinking. It forced me to pay a lot more attention to what was happening, especially the fact that the Iraq war was pretty obviously not a "last resort" against an implacable enemy who was hostile to important American interests. Rather, it was the longstanding desire of a particular ideological group that finally had a good excuse to sell it to the public.
All this seems sort of obvious now, but I suspect that the vast majority of Americans at the time, both pro and anti-war, didn't think all that deeply about this stuff. All I can say is that when I started to do that I concluded that American military intervention really should be used only as a last resort against implacable enemies who are hostile to important American interests. And that's where I remain today.
¹My support steadily diminished throughout 2002 and early 2003. At the beginning of March, after Paul Wolfowitz's speech and the forged yellowcake documents and, I think, the announcement of some ridiculous drones that were being touted as WMD delivery systems, I'd finally had enough and turned against the war. Two weeks later we invaded.
I don't know if everyone had a solid, etched in stone opinion because it all happened so fast. It started to stink when they started to change stories, when the inspectors didn't find anything, and all of that.
But at first it did seem like having a reckoning might be a plan. I think if we had gotten bin Laden right away, Iraq would have made at least some sense, if done right, in a non-retrospective look.
But the fact that we just started to ignore the people who actually hit us was borderline treasonous.
I dunno, I was 26 and it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was a terrible idea on a whole other level than any of those interventions, (by which I mean it was transparently clear the whole thing was based on phony trumped-up allegations and the invasion timetable had been fixed in the Spring of 2002). I will admit that the relative success of the 1991 war made me think that the GWB administration would execute things at that same level of speed and competence, so that turned out to be the secondary mistake (turns out Bush 41 was smarter than Bush 43, to nobody's surprise).
In re: your final parenthetical sentence:
Sadly, it turned out that Bush 41 was smarter in two ways--how to execute the objective quickly and efficiently AND how to get out when we were finished.
41 was smarter in just about every way that one person can be smarter than another. He was a reasonably competent establishment guy. 43 was pure failson.
I agree with your first point. The invasion and desire to occupy Iraq was very different than Grenada (Grenada FFS?!?) and the rest of Kevin's list, with the possible exception of Gulf War I. It was clear the designs that the PNAC crew had were of a very different sort than anything in Kevin's list. Oh, and built on just obvious lies. Oh, and taking advantage of the support Bush was getting after he failed to protect the country on 9/11 (again, how the f*ck did that happen?).
But I'm not so sure I agree on the the last bit about GHWB getting out. I'll say that I certainly thought it was right to get out at the time, so this is a hindsight thing for me. Occupying Iraq after the first Gulf War would have been justified and would have had more international support than Gulf War II had. Saddam had just invaded another country, after all. And the reason I think this is that it would have been better to have troops in Iraq directly ensuring Iraq behaved than having them in Saudia Arabia indirectly ensuring Iraq behaved. Remember having an army of infidels in the holy land was one of the biggest things that pissed off Osama bin Laden and his followers.
My problem with the Iraq War was I was afraid we would lose (in kind of the same way Russia is losing in Ukraine). I believed Colin Powell and thought Iraq had a stockpile of poison gas. I saw the news reports that showed American soldiers trying to get in to gas resistant equipment and thought that in the first gas attack they would be routed. I was glad that didn’t happen, of course, but realized I had been lied to in the justification of the war.
The study of military history would have come in handy. Gas was surprisingly ineffective, back in WWI. It was horrific, but not great at helping anyone achieve a military objective. This is why the taboo has mostly stood up for over a century. It occasionally gets dragged out as a mass terror weapon, but any general worth his salt, contemplating its use as a military tool, quickly concludes that it isn't worth it.
I had been out of service for two years and knew that the fix was in. I was listening to a broadcast of the propaganda while writing up a report in a room for that in a hospital when a doctor remarked, "This isn't my war."
I told him, right or wrong, it is your war if you are a citizen. He was quiet. Later I learned he took vacation and joined some of the protests in Washington. I'm pretty proud of that guy.
Anybody who bought Powell's UN speech was stupid. The threadbare nature of the "solid intelligence" was obvious to all. Read this nonsense: (my emphasis THINGS)
- - - -- -
"And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there. Remember the first message: evacuate it."
This is all part of a system of hiding THINGS and moving THINGS out of the way and making sure they have left nothing behind.
You go a little further into this message and you see the specific instructions from headquarters: "After you have carried out what is contained in this message, destroy the message because I don't want anyone to see this message."
"Okay."
"Okay."
Why? Why? This message would have verified to the inspectors that they have been trying to turn over THINGS. They were looking for THINGS, but they don't want that message seen because they were trying to clean up the area, to leave no evidence behind of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. And they can claim that nothing was there and the inspectors can look all they want and they will find nothing.
This effort to hide THINGS from the inspectors is not one or two isolated events. Quite the contrary, this is part and parcel of a policy of evasion and deception that goes back 12 years, a policy set at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime.
- - - - -
"THINGS" =/= wmd
That was considered proof by idiots like Richard Cohen ("Only a fool or a Frenchman could think otherwise."). Kevin's peroration today is embarrassing: (nobody has agency, or a brain)
"All this seems sort of obvious now, but I suspect that the vast majority of Americans at the time, both pro and anti-war, didn't think all that deeply about this stuff."
UN speech transcript
https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2003/17300.htm
The evidence in that speech was threadbare. But Powell gave it anyway. I supported the authorization to use force at the time because there had to be something there, though not shown, if Powell risked his reputation by giving that speech. Instead, it was all lies.
Powell was tasked with covering up the My Lai massacre, too. He would do and say anything that he was ordered to.
One of the few positive things to come out of the Iraq war: it destroyed any presidential asperations Colin Powell had.
I didn't know what to think about the war but I remember telling someone on 1/31 that there was nothing Iraq could do to satisfy the Bush Administration. It was very obvious to me by that point that we were going to war.
I still am not sure why Bush was so determined to invade Iraq. But I can't go back 20 years and try and figure things out.
Turns out, it was on their to-do list from day 1. 9/11 and Afghanistan was a distraction.
Anybody that knew about the idiotic open letter to Bill Clinton from "The Project For A New American Century" should have known conquering Iraq was the first item on their to-do list. I marched in 3 or 4 anti-war marches knowing full well the fix was in and it was a waste of time. The one thing I did learn was how completely useless the MSM is at "objective journalism" as the NYT's version, at least, is "accurately repeat what wealthy and powerful people tell you".
This kind of a post is exactly why Kevin is one of the best bloggers on the internet. I think a lesser writer would be extremely tempted to construct some sort of principled-sounding narrative about his Core Values and how they informed his initial thinking, only to be subsumed by the cold evaluation of subsequent evidence.
It's ok to admit that you, like a lot of people, didn't really take it very seriously at first and hadn't thought about it that much. It's a key way that all of us were and continue to be misled about a great many things, and it's good to be honest about that.
I tend to judge wars based on whether they will likely result in a better outcome than not going to war. And you have to be realistic about how much the US is actually going to invest in the war.
Iraq was never going to look like a great choice based on that. Hussein was awful, but it didn't look like Iraq had durable enough institutions to build and maintain a democratic state, and the risk of civil war was very, very high. Plus, the US was not at all interested in investing enough to tamp down the risk of civil war. So we ended up with a mess for many years.
Contrast that with Ukraine, which currently has a democratically elected leader and some experience with democratic institutions, a significant portion of the public who is interested in reform and aligning with the West, and a Russian-run alternative that would be extremely awful. That war is a good bet in my books. I think there is a very high likelihood that Ukraine in 20 years will be much better off due to our involvement than it would be without it, and an emboldened Russia is nothing but bad for us. Just like the handful of Marines W sent to help Charles Taylor decide to leave Liberia was a good bet (even though a stable, peaceful Liberia isnt all that necessary for us), and US involvement to stop genocide in the Balkans was a good bet.
I think Afghanistan was an even worse idea.
I have some sympathy for the idealism that neocons can sometimes have - democracy is good, all people deserve it. But they often forget the practicalities. Democratic institutions are really, really hard to create and it's tough to keep new ones going.
It only took 35 years for the Korean War to result in a democracy in South Korea.
I think my position is similar. The Iraq war offered the promise of democratizing a country in the middle of the middle east. Or at least putting a US military and intelligence base in the middle of all that oil. And then Katrina wiped out New Orleans, and we didn't democratize Iraq (nor Afghanistan, nor Libya), and the war was very costly.
Since we are not able or not willing to create democracies, and since we have plenty of issues at home to take care of, military intervention is a failed strategy.
The thing is that the lies were obvious and sloppy. The yellowcake, the stovepiping, the drones and the katyusha rockets that were laughably called centrifugal tubes. The Powell speech was remarkably vacuous. The real question is how all this baloney got through the media.Through the whole process not an iota of evidence was ever presented and let’s not start with Judy “squeaky mouse” Miller reporting. The saddest part, apart from the half million dead, is perhaps the lack of introspection on the part of the media. Both sideism continues rampant like an incurable disease.
Yup. And notice how the name "Hans Blix" doesn't arise. It was pretty hard, back in the day, to be aware of his existence and not recognize the shoddy lying.
The red flags started popping up because the administration's arguments were following the exact plan of a con job: 1) there's something that requires out-of-the-ordinary investment, 2) there's no time to argue, we must act now, 3) anyone who raises questions must have ulterior motives.
And the reason for the invasion kept changing about every two weeks: the U.N. inspectors aren't trustworthy, we KNOW they have weapons of mass destruction, we must bring democracy to the middle east, etc. All signs that hint that the answer was in stone, now let's keep changing the argument until they let us invade.
Any system, even those set up by America, that doesn't give us the answer we want, needs to be tricked, lied to, or pushed out of the way. Sound familiar?
In the end W. Bush intentionally offered Sadam a deal he couldn't afford to accept.
Wish I was blogging then so I'd have a good record of what I was thinking. As best I can remember I was dubious of Afghanistan, given the Soviets failure there, our failure in Vietnam, etc. But it went surprisingly well, and the aftermath seemed to be working well with Karzai getting support.
So with Iraq I was torn. The Post had a reporter who was filing good stories challenging the official line. I still had some skepticism about war. But on the other hand Bush did have Blair on board, and Blair seemed capable and had worked well with Clinton. So I think my attitude when the bombs began to fall was to the effect: I don't think I'd do this if I had the power, but I don't so I hope you're right and can do as well in Iraq as you seem to have done in Afghanistan.
Heck, I opposed the war against Afghanistan. Innumerable responsible folks, including Al Gore and our allies at the time were saying it was a police action. Go after al-Qaeda; take out the leadership and its relatively few members. Plus, the United States were offered lots of help in doing so. If I recall correctly, even Saddam Hussein offered to share intelligence!
But no. And after a slapdash invasion and contracting out the important stuff to the local tribesmen, who knew a mark when they saw one, the US hustled off to Iraq ... for what?? "Somebody said he tried to kill mah Daddy!!" Really? And old Dick Cheney had all the oilfields in Iraq mapped out and was divvying them up among the big American petroleum companies from his first day in the White House. Which would have been a war crime, but IOKIYAAR, right?
I could rave some more, but instead, will go back to working on the taxes.
I think Kevin needs to get specific. If I recall correctly, he believed the Bush admin's arguments that Iraq had chemical weapons, and maybe biological weapons and/or an active nuclear weapon program. While he saw that their arguments had some big holes, he figured that the Bush admin and the US intel agencies wouldn't make the case for war unless they had solid evidence that Iraq had chem/bio/nuc weapons.
Kevin's bad judgement wasn't that he figured, another war, why not. Or figured, Saddam Hussein's a terrible ruler, why not invade to depose him. He defended the case being made for war repeatedly. He criticized every one to his left, worked to tear down the arguments against the war. I recall his arguments being of the sort, sure this piece of evidence is weak, that piece is sketchy, but add it all up, and Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, so there is a good case for the US to invade Iraq.
His judgement was poor, he believed the wrong people, gave credence to the wrong arguments, and he only wised up after the invasion when the it turned out the Iraq didn't have WMDs, not even a few chemical weapon depots. Keven was the epitome of the failure of centrism and moderation.
Kevin f**ked up, he trusted W. Bush.
With all due respect to anyone here who supported the war, I believe you displayed an egregious lack of good judgment and a reckless disregard for the human cost of the debacle to come. It was clear (99% certain, give or take) the decision had been made by the time GWB gave his "axis of evil" SOTU in 2002. The rest of that year was among the most shameful episodes in our history, as a president and his team took a nation grieving in loss, and the world reaching out in support, and led fed them all a crock of distortions and lies to build the case for war against an innocent people. If the war was about WMD, we had our chance at the end to inspect again. But no. Bush and his men wanted war. Most of the country (3 out of 4) was for it -- one of the most tragic and epic blunders in American history. They trusted the wrong people. Maybe that's you. If so, I would think some soul-searching is in order, if you haven't gotten there already.
The Axis of Evil thing was so absurd. North Korea, Iraq and al qaeda had little in common and for the most part didn't even like each other.
Gotta say, Kevin, I find your explanation pretty terrible. As I read it, it seems like you're saying
1) you didn't pay attention to or care about the impending war because the US starts lots of wars so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and
2) based on all those previous war (including vietnam and afghanistan) your default position was that it was a good idea to start another in iraq
That is almost as bad a basis for supporting the iraq invasion as i can come up with. That said, i do appreciate the honesty.
That's nice, Kevin.
As Inspector Harry Calahan said in Magnum Force:
"A man's got to know his limitations."
It seemed pretty straightforward to me. First, we already had an active war in Afghanistan. A second seemed like a bad idea. But mostly, war is a serious business, fraught with risk. Doing it under the leadership of a feckless twit didn’t seem like a good idea.
Are we not allowed to enter links? I've lost two posts now.
tinyurl.com/2yw5pbcu
In any case, the tinyurl seems to be working, was only saying that some of us were warning in the lead up, and I should add too that I don't put any blame on anyone who didn't, just the actual perpetrators of the con.
billmon's blog which I don't remember the actual name now was almost like an interactive video game sometimes with the ongoing debates between those for and against the war, every few seconds there would be new posts going the other way and I've honestly never seen anything like that ever again, the debate was fast, fierce and furious, and at a time before most blogs starting banning people with opposing views (especially on the "other side")
i remember listening to colin powell's speech at the UN, waiting for some piece of evidence that was fresh to justify the claims that saddam was a threat. i heard none.
Support for a war like Iraq is not based on good or bad logic, it is based on susceptibility to instinctive nationalism (tribalism). Most people are susceptible to this, if even some flimsy justifications are given that our country is threatened, or even just insulted. Kevin has shown in other matters since Iraq that he is one of the (many) susceptible ones.
I was 18 and it was obviously bullshit. I am not by my nature anti-war but the evidence was ridiculous and if you are lying to get us into a war that is enough right there.
I did support Afghanistan.
I was an active blogger back in those days, at the Australian 'Road to Surfdom'. By and large the leftist internet community in Australia was completely opposed to our participation in what we saw as a straightforward war of aggression. But John Howard gloried in being Bush's BFF, and trotted out all the hackneyed crap about fighting them over there so we didn't have to fight them over here.
To their credit, the opposition Labor Party was against sending Australian troops. The Labor leader Simon Crean made a courageous speech which triggered howls of fury from the right and the Murdoch press. But Labor's position was thankfully recorded for posterity.
This was my final post at 'Road to Surfdom'. I think it stands up reasonably well today, even as we see the hapless politicians from both parties pathetically eager to shelter behind a wall of American nuclear submarines. https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20090108043355/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/49572/20090108-0945/www.roadtosurfdom.com/2008/11/03/rudds-foreign-policy/index.html
The Vietnam war loomed larger in my thinking than it did for Drum. In terms of what I would consider fairly major military conflicts:
- The United States lost the Vietnam War.
- The United States won the Gulf war in 1991, but contrary to Drum's recollection, that success was in part due to the fact that we did not invade Iraq at that time.
- The outcome of the recently started Afghanistan war was undetermined at that time.
Minor military conflicts:
- Grenada = U.S. victory
- Panama = U.S. victory
- Somalia = U.S. defeat
- In Yugoslavia, we didn't put forces on the ground, and I've read that the bombing was counterproductive.
Excluding two instances where the United States sent weapons but didn't take military action, Drum's own list shows a success rate of about 50% on the use of military force. So “just another U.S. war” wasn't necessarily going to end the way that the United States wanted. Meanwhile, it would pull attention and resources away from the war in Afghanistan, which also was not necessarily going to end well for the United States. (In particular, we has Arabic speaking special forces in Afghanistan who were developing relationships with the locals. That ended when Bush pulled them out so they would be available for use in Iraq.)
“Obviously 9/11 was fresh on everyone's mind”--but if I understand your account correctly, it was not sufficiently fresh for you to think to ask whether invading Iraq would be good or bad for al Qaeda. For whatever reason, once Bush started talking about Saddam, al Qaeda became yesterday's news--not forgotten, exactly, but not seen as relevant to the current debate.
Always thought Letterman’s comment on all this was the pithiest: post 9/11 “we just wanted to hit somebody back and we trusted that Bush was choosing the right target.” Oooops.
Like +20! The United States had been punched in the nose, and somebody HAD to pay for it. Didn't much matter who. A large segment of the population wanted blood.
This, by the way, is why the founders instituted a legal system here, with laws, and procedures, and open trials, and (competent?) legal representation of both parties. Because lynch mobs don't actually want justice.
Great point about lynch mobs
Note the Democratic liberals who supported the invasion of Iraq with their disinterest protested more vigorously against bringing war crimes charges against W. Bush and the generals. Anathema upon them.
Sure it's kind of a dorm room bull session point, but wouldn't it ultimately have been more useful to invade North Korea in 2003?
The key difference is we were attacking a Muslim country and that was a political necessity at that time.
There's a way to tell if a person is drawing incorrect conclusions from insufficient evidence. Attach EEG electrodes to their scalp. If you detect brain activity, then they are. If there is no brain activity, then they aren't.
There's a way to tell if a person is wise. If you tell them they're wrong and they get curious and recognize they're wrong on occasion, then they are. If they get angry and they're never wrong, then they aren't.