At the end of August President Obama spoke on the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and what we were going to do in Afghanistan. I talked about the Afghanistan part of his speech a couple of times (President Obama Gets Afghanistan Wrong – Again and Part 2). Now I wanted to talk about Iraq. (I realize this is late. President Obama’s speech was over a month and a half ago. But these comments are less for current debate and more, perhaps, for the history of it all.)
1.
In his speech the President tried to make it sound like what has happened in Iraq over the last 20 months was his plan, that what happened was what he wanted all along. Which is not true. What has happened in Iraq since January of 2009, with U.S. troops withdrawing to their bases and combat troops leaving by September 1, 2010, was agreed to between the U.S. government and the Iraqi government while President Bush was still in office. And when the rest of our troops leave by the end of 2011, that too will be as provided in the plan President Bush entered into with the Iraqi government.
In fact, what has happened in Iraq is not what Barack Obama wanted to do when he was a candidate for President. It is true that President Obama’s plan, as a candidate, was to withdraw from Iraq in, I believe, 16 months. But Barack Obama did not want to leave Iraq in 16 or 18 or 20 months from January of 2009. He wanted to leave in 16 months from January of 2007. He did not want to leave once we had succeeded. He wanted to leave while we were failing. His plan was to not do the surge and the change to a counterinsurgency strategy. His plan was to get out – now!*
Fortunately, Barack Obama did not get to decide in January of 2007; George Bush did. And during the two-year period from January, 2007 to January, 2009, the surge and the switch to a counterinsurgency strategy changed the course of the war. Even though then-Senator Obama predicted the surge and the counterinsurgency strategy would fail, they succeeded. Which allowed us to start leaving after having succeeded, instead of while failing.
2.
I have mentioned this point before, but I feel obligated to do it again: I am tired of hearing people say that President Bush (and British Prime Minister Tony Blair) lied to the American people (and the British people) by saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, when he did not. They did not lie. The fact Saddam Hussein did not have WMD does not mean people did not honestly believe, before the invasion, that he did have WMD. There were a few reports, here and there, questioning whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, but the vast majority of people (and the vast majority of other countries) believed Saddam had WMD. They were wrong, as were President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. But the fact President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were wrong, does not mean they lied.
3.
What brings up another issue: Back in July, Karl Rove wrote in The Wall Street Journal** that his biggest mistake in the White House was to not insist to President Bush that they had to respond to Democratic charges that President Bush had lied about Saddam Hussein and WMD. Teddy Kennedy was among the first, if not the first, to make the charge: “All the evidence points to the conclusion [that the Bush administration] put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth.” Others followed: John Kerry, John Edwards, Jay Rockefeller, Al Gore. Of course, all of them had previously said that Saddam Hussein had WMD, but that did not stop them from later saying, in so many words: “Bush lied, people died.”
Mr. Rove notes: “At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past.”
As Mr. Rove how says, this was a mistake. Actually, it was a huge mistake; it was a mistake on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start. But let me try. First, and least, not responding to these attacks was unfair to those of us who supported the President’s decision to invade Iraq. We were with the President when he needed our support for his decision to do something about the risk of Saddam Hussein. When President Bush was attacked for allegedly lying about the WMD, it was as if we were being attacked, too – because we had supported a lie. When President Bush did not respond, we were left on our own to explain why the decision to invade Iraq was the right one. And it was harder to do with the President not defending himself.
Second, it was wrong because it weakened the American people’s support for the war in Iraq. If one side criticizes and the other side does not respond, eventually some people will start to believe what the opposition is saying, no matter how wrong it is. After all, if you aren’t willing to fight back, some people will believe it is because you think you are wrong.
Third, the men and the women in our Armed Forces deserved a President who was willing to defend his decision to send them to fight. When President Bush accused of sending troops to die because of his lies, he needed to respond. They did not think they were fighting because of a lie, and he needed to defend the basis on which they were fighting. If he wouldn’t respond for himself, he needed to respond for them.
Fourth, the decision to not respond was wrong as a matter of history. It is not only important to do what is right, it is important to explain why what we did was right – so those who come later will understand why we did what we did. That means explaining, again and again, if necessary, that what we did in Iraq was right. By not responding to these charges, President Bush let his opponents write the first draft of history. Sometimes first drafts can be corrected, but it takes time – and sometimes it doesn’t happen. By not responding to these charges when they were made, the Bush Administration has increased the chances that the history of our involvement in Iraq won’t be written correctly. And that could lead future generations to make mistakes of their own because they didn’t understand what really happened in Iraq and why.
4.
Here is a point that I almost forgot, but that is very important: The fact we did not find any WMD in Iraq does not mean the reason for the invasion changed. The reason for the invasion is still the same: We had every reason to believe, and most people and most counties did believe, that Iraq had WMD in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and that Saddam Hussein could no longer be trusted with WMD. The fact that Iraq and Saddam Hussein did not have WMD does not change anything. In particular, it does not mean the belief that Iraq had WMD in violation of UN resolutions was not an appropriate justification for the invasion in 2003. Decisions made in 2002/2003 could only be made on the facts as we knew them in 2002/2003. The fact that some of those things turned out to be not true does not mean that they were not an appropriate basis for decisions made at that time.
I don’t think the Bush administration understood this. Once we didn’t find any WMD, they seemed to think they had to come up with another reason/justification for the invasion. Instead of defending the honest belief that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had WMD in violation of UN resolutions, and that Saddam Hussein could not be trusted with WMD, as the proper reason for the war (they didn’t even respond to charges that President Bush lied about the WMD – see above), they started talking about bringing democracy to the Middle East and Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorists as reasons for the war. But those weren’t the reasons. And it is doubtful that these reasons were an appropriate or sufficient justification for an invasion.
Maybe it seemed, shortly after the invasion, when things were going good, that bringing democracy to the Middle East was a great goal. The Cedar Revolution was happening in Lebanon. Even Egypt was loosening political restrictions. Democracy in the Middle East is a worthy goal, but it is not, and was not, a proper justification, either legal or political, for sending U.S. troops (and the troops of our allies) to invade Iraq.
Similarly, Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorist groups were not, by themselves, a sufficient reason for invasion. It is true that his connections with various terrorist groups increased the concern about what he might do with WMD, and that this concern, when combined with WMD held in violation of UN resolutions, provided a legal justification for invasion. But when you combine his ties to terrorist groups with concerns about what he might do with WMD, you are really just back to the fact of WMD held in violation of UN resolutions, and a legitimate concern about what he might do with them, as the basis for the invasion.
Also, the shifting of the reasons/justifications for the invasion made it look like we really didn’t have a good reason for the invasion. Changing the explanation probably lost the US support for what we were doing in Iraq. It certainly gave some tangential support to the argument that President Bush lied about the WMD.
We had a perfectly good reason for invading Iraq. We should have kept stating it and kept explaining the invasion on that basis – because it was the best explanation and because it was the real reason.
5.
In discussing Iraq with President Bush in the summer of 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell talked about the so-called the “Pottery Barn rule”: You break it, you own it. And he was right, to a large extent. You can’t go into something, tear down the system, and then just leave. If you break something, you have to fix it.
What this meant in Iraq was that, once we invaded, we had an obligation, before we left, to establish some kind of decent government to replace the one we had destroyed. The fact that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD, didn’t mean that we could say: “Oops, sorry, excuse us.” And just leave. It’s not like we could put Saddam Hussein back in power because there weren’t any WMD. Maybe the other things he did were not enough, on their own, to justify his removal, but once we invaded, they were enough to justify keeping him out of power. (Please note I am not talking about his trial or his execution; those I do not know enough about those to have an opinion.)
Colin Powell used the rule as a warning about going in. I use it as a statement of our responsibility once we were in: After the invasion, we had an obligation to the Iraqis to help set up some kind of decent government before we left. It didn’t have to be perfect, but we couldn’t just abandon them. Who knows who or what might have gained power in such a situation. Plus, it would have been wrong for us to just leave. It is not the kind of thing that Americans do. We couldn’t just leave because the going was tough. We had an obligation, to the people of Iraq. And that obligation didn’t go away because things got hard or we got tired.
6.
Finally, a few comments on whether, knowing all that we know now, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was the right one.
In The Wall Street Journal of September 2, 2010, Daniel Henninger discussed what would have happened “If Saddam Had Stayed” (in the words of his headline writer). Mr. Henninger said, in part:
“Let us assume that Mr. Obama's ‘smarter’ view [back in 2002] had prevailed, that we had left Saddam in power in Iraq. What would the world look like today?
Mr. Obama and others believe that Saddam and his nuclear ambitions could have been contained. I think exactly the opposite was likely.”***
I agree with Mr. Henninger. First, though, it is important to understand – and accept – that, between the initial invasion, which seems to have gone fairly well, and the arrival of General Petraeus and his new counterinsurgency strategy in early 2007, the situation in Iraq was handled very poorly.
The question is, given all of the mistakes we made, would it have been better to never have invaded at all? The problem with trying to answer such a question is that we do not know what would have happened if we had not invaded. We know what happened in the event of an invasion (because that is what we did), but we don’t know what would have happened if we had not invaded.
There is a tendency, when trying to determine whether a particular policy worked out or not, to compare what did happen with the way things were before anything was done. That assumes that, if nothing was done, everything would have stayed just as it was. That, of course, is wrong. Things would have changed, in any case. The question is: How?
By the fall of 2002, the sanctions in Iraq had been in place for over a decade, and they were weakening. Human rights groups worried about the impact of the sanctions on the people of Iraq. Countries and companies wanted Iraqi business.
Evidence discovered after the invasion showed how Saddam Hussein used the United Nations-run Oil-for-Food program to mitigate many of the effects of the sanctions and to secure support for their end. The Oil-for-Food program had been set up to allow Iraq to sell oil to buy food and medicines for the Iraqi people. But Saddam Hussein didn’t care about the people of Iraq. Instead, he used the program to give oil vouchers to people who he thought could help Iraq end or evade the UN sanctions. Vouchers went to officials at the United Nations and to officials in countries such as France, Russia and China, countries that favored weakening or even ending the sanctions on Iraq.
It is likely that, if the United States had not invaded, the sanctions would have continued to weaken, either officially or effectively, if they were not abandoned entirely. Once it was possible, it is probable that Saddam Hussein would have tried to rebuild his WMD capability, this time including missiles, too.
But it’s not just what would have happened in Iraq. Consider some of the second order effects of not invading Iraq:
- Would Libya have given up its nuclear weapons? (Here.)
- Would we have ever discovered the secret nuclear weapons supply network run by Dr. A. Q. Khan of Pakistan? And if we wouldn’t, how far would the network have distributed equipment for building nuclear weapons by now? Who would have nuclear weapons that would not otherwise have gotten them? (Here and here.)
- If the sanctions on Iraq had collapsed, or effectively become a sieve, what would the effect have been on the efforts to stop Iran from getting a bomb?
- For that matter, if Saddam Hussein had stared us down, what would the effect have been in Afghanistan – or anywhere else in the world?
In other words, we don’t know what would have happened if we had not invaded. We know what did happen. It was a lot worse than it should have been, but it has also turned out better than it could have. We don’t know yet whether the ultimate results of invading are better or worse than what would have happened if we hadn’t invaded. Perhaps a quote from Zhou Enlai best answers the question of whether we were better off to have invaded or whether it would have been better if we had not done so. In response to a question about the effects of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied: “It is too soon to say.” (And here.)
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* I apologize for not identifying some links here. There are plenty out there. I just don’t have the time to look.
**Karl Rove, “My Biggest Mistake in the White House,” The Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2010.
*** Daniel Henninger, “If Saddam Had Stayed,” The Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2010.
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