President Obama announced that he’s bringing the remainder of the troops in Iraq home by the end of 2011. It just goes to show how easy wars are to get into and how hard they are to get out of. The authorization of force against Iraq vote was made almost exactly 9 years ago; a vote that absolutely had to take place – for some reason – in October, 2011, before the 2002 midterm elections. (Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, said “from a marketing stand point, you don’t introduce new products in August.”) All of the Republicans and about half of the Democrats in Congress supported the resolution.
What I, and I believe many others, saw as a spinelessly political vote by DLC Democrats, particularly in the Senate by the likes of Evan Bayh, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, ultimately led to the primary defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election. In 2002, the leadership of what I like to call the Daschle Democrats was just awful. This was directly responsible for the popularity of Howard Dean – not because his policies were especially liberal, they weren’t; but because he showed some spine.
Bayh, Daschle, and the other finger-to-the-wind Democratic leadership recalled the Springsteen line, “you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much; till you spend half your life just covering up.” The later career paths of Bayh and Daschle suggest that a permanent cringe wasn’t the only factor; they also had to keep the door open for cashing in when they were finished with their “public service.”
As part of the conditions of the Iraq authorization of force resolution, the Bush administration gave a pinkie swear that it would try diplomacy before going to war. When it became clear that further investigation might seriously undermine their overblown claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Bush administration charged into war without giving the UN Security Council the opportunity to vote on whether to have UN resolutions enforced.
Between October 2002 and March 2003, War against Iraq was marketed very effectively. Among other things, Bush administration repeatedly mentioned 9/11 and Iraq in conjunction with each other while being careful to avoid explicitly stating that there was a direct connection.
In October 2002 the U.S. Congress passed a “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq”. The resolution authorized the President to “use any means necessary” against Iraq, Americans polled in January 2003 widely favored further diplomacy over an invasion. Later that year, however, Americans began to agree with Bush’s plan. The U.S. government engaged in an elaborate domestic public relations campaign to market the war to its citizens. Americans overwhelmingly believed Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction: 85% said so, even though the inspectors had not uncovered those weapons. Of those who thought Iraq had weapons sequestered somewhere, about half responded that said weapons would not be found in combat. By February 2003, 74% of Americans supported taking military action to remove Hussein from power.
When the French suggested further inspections, the American response was a juvenile orgy of anti-French commentary among lawmakers, including “Freedom Fries” replacing “French fries” in the House cafeteria. Our media failed us, with ostensibly liberal (but demonstrably not) publications like the New York Times hyping administration proclamations of danger on the front pages and consigning reports undermining those claims to the back pages. Times reporter Judith Miller, in particular, gained notoriety for being a pipeline for administration propaganda masquerading as “anonymous source” reporting.
What have we gained and was it worth the cost? We’ll have to let some history pass and run the numbers to be sure; but my preliminary answers are the same as the answers I was giving when Andy Card’s marketing campaign was underway: “not much” and “no.” Saddam Hussein is dead, and that’s not nothing, but when compared to the billions of dollars spent, thousands of American lives spent (not to mention many times that many Iraqi lives spent), lost opportunities to address Afghanistan and al Qaeda earlier, the scales don’t come close to balancing. Hopefully, we can take away the lesson that optional wars of aggression aren’t worth the effort no matter how manly they make us feel and no matter how lucrative the military contracts we might award. Unfortunately, that kind of lesson tends to only have a shelf life of a generation or two.
From what I remember the Bush administration used U.N. Resolution 1411 as the reason to go to war with Iraq: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1441
On November 8, 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous 15-0 vote; Russia, China, France, and Arab countries such as Syria voted in favor, giving Resolution 1441 wider support than even the 1990 Gulf War resolution.
Yeah, that’s what they said; but they didn’t have any authority to implement a UN resolution unilaterally and knew they’d be voted down if they tried to have the UN vote to authorize an invasion to implement the resolution.
And when Obama says, ‘everybody’ out, he means 150 troops still there. *sigh* Well, it’s about time, in any case. The will of the people seemed to be that it was time 3-4 years ago.
And, the will of the people was that we not mess with Iraq until it was heavily marketed to them. The will of the people seems fairly malleable.
A reality check indicates it time to get out of the other situation as quickly as feasible. Messing in situations where the internal conflicts are centuries old simply are not easy to solve. If our armed troops are necessary to “keep the peace” then it is unlikely to work as we have observed over and over with what might be called mini actions on the part of any number of groups not satisfied with any government they do not control. Pouring more money and people into the situations has not produced a viable and stable government. Since WWII we have engaged in several conflicts that produced few stable situations (at least from the standpoint that we were on that side of the equation that came to be) and put our role as world police and peace maker in questionable position. A complete reevaluation of what meaningful role we can and should play is overdue. But our own internal political positionings makes it unlikely we can agree on the consistant course.
It just so happens that I am reading the very chapter of Bush’s “Decision Points” memoir dealing with the runup to the Iraq war. A lot of your description is Monday morning quarterbacking with a lot of forgetting about what things were like in 2002/ 2003.
My description is based primarily on how I saw things when it was happening. The Bush administration was deeply influenced by people involved in the Project for a New American Century. For those folks, invading Iraq had long been a goal. 9/11 provided an opportunity. With that presumption as a significant bias through which I witnessed the events, the post-event Monday morning quarterbacking looked a lot like the Sunday morning pre-game predictions.
There you go with your Rolling Stone-esque conspiracy theories again. That’s why I don’t accept anything from that magazine. ;)
Iraq was unfinished business after Sept. 11th. If Saddam had played his cards right, he could have ended up like Qadaffi, still in power until an Arab Spring uprising took him out 8 years later.
But for whatever reason, Saddam wouldn’t comply, and he had to be taken out.
I think the real issue with the withdraw is that we are giving up strategic territory. We have Iran surrounded. Iraq is pacified, and it doesn’t cost much more to keep 10,000 or so troops there than it does anywhere else. I’d rather see us get out of Europe or East Asia before I give up that strategic territory.
The worst thing is that we were already doing drawdowns. What changed in the last week that we have to go whole hog and get out of Iraq by the end of the year? Obama poll numbers?
There is really little credibility in justifying the second trip into Iraq except unfinished business from the first go round. And as to withdrawl the Iraq governing Council has set forth that there will be no protection from liability for our troops so laying the leaving solely to the President is not quite accurate. The plan has long stated that an end was to come about so while some polictical thinking may have played a role it was not new “news”. Would state again time to cut a lot of overseas involvement and that is around the world.
There is really little credibility in justifying the second trip into Iraq except unfinished business from the first go round.
A close reading of “Decision Points” validates this view. Unfinished business was a big part of it, Dubya says so.