It is the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war and lots of people are writing their analyses. I don’t have the time to do a proper review – and others have done it better. Three of the best may be this one by Robert Kaplan and these two (here and here) by Max Boot. (I realize it is a little unusual to reference two articles by the same person, but they are different and both include important points.)
I want to mention just one point about how the Iraq war was fought. But what I am talking about is not what happened in Iraq. Rather, I am talking about the fighting in the United States about Iraq. With respect to that fighting, i.e., the argument in the United States over the Iraq war, the Bush administration was, to a large extent, incompetent. I wrote about this point previously, and what I said then is still true today, if not more so. Here is what I said (in part):
“[I]n July [of 2010], 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. … Of course, all of them [i.e., Democrats] 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 ….
[I]t 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. …
[T]he 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. … 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.”
This is where we are today. Because President Bush did not respond to the charge that he lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction (as opposed to being honestly wrong), that charge has become truth to many people.
While all of the mistakes that were made in how the war was fought from 2003 to 2006 are the main reason for the way the American people think about the Iraq war today, the decision of the Bush administration to not respond to the claims that it lied about Saddam’s WMD has contributed to that thinking. It was a terrible mistake at the time. And its consequences will last for quite a while.
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*Karl Rove, “My Biggest Mistake in the White House,” The Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2010.
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