Last Chance?
Michikio Kakutani has a review in today’s NYT of a new book about the Iraq war entitled Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. The author is Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. He suggests that “George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.”
It’s hard to argue with that assessment. One might go even further and say that
One of the witnesses at the hearing was Kenneth Pollack, Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution (click here for his testimony). Some of you may remember that Pollack was the author of a very important book published during the run-up to the invasion entitled The Threatening Storm, in which he argued that the United States should consider invading Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons and possibly initiating another regional war on the scale of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
There is something almost tragic about Pollack. He was the quintessential “liberal hawk.” He clearly had little sympathy with the worldview of the neoconservative intellectuals in the Bush administration. But his reading of the evidence—as he understood it at the time—led him to the conclusion that the choice was between fighting a war now and fighting one later. The tragic part is that despite his intellectual honesty, Pollack turned out to be simply wrong about a great number of things, including the extent of
To be fair to Pollack, the war that Bush fought was not the one Pollack envisioned. Pollack believed that the
Pollack is still deeply committed to making the reconstruction of
Here’s one proposal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/opinion/25galbraith.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Galbraith suggests withdrawing U.S. troops to Kurdistan. The last two grafs of the piece:
“From Kurdistan, the American military could readily move back into any Sunni Arab area where Al Qaeda or its allies established a presence. The Kurdish peshmerga, Iraq’s only reliable indigenous military force, would gladly assist their American allies with intelligence and in combat. And by shifting troops to what is still nominally Iraqi territory, the Bush administration would be able to claim it had not “cut and run” and would also avoid the political complications — in United States and in Iraq — that would arise if it were to withdraw totally and then have to send American troops back into Iraq.
“Yes, a United States withdrawal from the Shiite and Sunni Arab regions of Iraq would leave behind sectarian conflict and militia rule. But staying with the current force and mission will produce the same result. Continuing a military strategy where the ends far exceed the means is a formula for war without end.”
What is tragic about Pollack is how such a smart man got it completely wrong! And then there’s the hubris of his thinking he’s still got it right!
Margaret:
To say that Pollack got it completely wrong might be to overstate. His analysis of the challenges involved in containing or deterring Saddam Hussein were very much on the mark. By the late 1990s, the containment policy was on very shaky ground indeed and there was much evidence to suggest that Hussein was not the risk-adverse rational actor favored by most deterrence models. Those of us–including myself–who opposed the war from the beginning probably have some obligation to consider how we might have handled the challenge posed by Hussein differently.
But the fact that deterrence was difficult did not mean that it was impossible. In a review of Pollack’s book in the NYRB, Brian Urquhart, a former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, questioned one of Pollack’s most powerful comparisons, i.e. to the situation faced by France and Germany vis-a-vis Hitler in 1938:
“I am wary of this analogy. For one thing Hitler had already committed aggression—in the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria—that would have amply justified the military reaction of France and Britain, so there was no question of preemptive action. Unlike today’s United States, the strongest military power in history, Britain and France were practically, psychologically, and politically unprepared for war and by no means certain of their military superiority. And unlike the United States they did not possess, as a deterrent, the last-resort capacity to destroy an adversary at one blow. In fact, in 1938 Britain and France had little or no capacity, let alone policy, to contain or deter Hitler. In 2002 the United States, if it decides to use it, has overwhelming military power and is therefore in a far better position to exercise peaceful pressure, patience, and restraint.”
Here is the link to the Urquhart review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15911
Okay. He got it mostly wrong. But so did Colin Powell, I guess. And both for the same reason: They were misled by false intelligence or they were willing to go along with intelligence they knew or suspected was weak or wrong or unverified.
The containment/deterrence argument doesn’t really wash. Iraq was being contained as Hans Blix and Mohamad ElBaradei reported to the UN before the U.S. invasion.
We now know that that was true. Furthermore, Colin Powell was ready to go to the UN to work for “smart” sanctions in reponse to complaints about the civilian fall-out from the then current sanction regime. The no-fly policy kept the Iraqi military contained in Central Iraq.
As books by Clark, Susskind and several others show, Cheney and Co. had decided there would be a war against Iraq. The containment/deterence issue was simply a rhetorical argument for going to war, not the reason for going to war.