Our determination is paying off. The Downing Street Leaks have begun to penetrate the MSM, and the American consciousness. It pays to remember that the American electorate is not hard left or hard right. Most of us are not all that politically minded. In the lead up to war I had a lot of discussions with people who expressed the following sentiment:
There were many centrist non-political Americans that felt that way, and the Downing Street Leaks reveal the level of the deceit perpetrated on them. They feel a deep sense of betrayal.
There was no anthrax, no sarin, no VX, no scuds, no mobile chem/bio labs, no terrorist training camps, no links to al-Qaeda, no uranium, no nuclear program, no drones, no immanent threat, no ongoing genocide, no threat to their neighbors, and thus, no legal justification for invading a sovereign nation.
And now some on the right are being forced into a fallback position.
:::flip:::
You can read a mostly sincere attempt at crafting a fallback position in today’s Washington Post. Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, does the best he can:
I sympathize with Kagan here, but he is trying to force us to make a false choice. Saddam had proved himself to be a deft opponent throughout the nineties. He survived the 1991 uprising, and then turned the sanctions regime into a public relations disaster for the United States and Britain. He skillfully divided the Security Council with lucrative oil concessions and contracts.
The containment policy was failing from a number of standpoints. Saddam had actually consolidated his power, rather than having been weakened. The sanctions were taking an unacceptable humanitarian toll on the Iraqi people, and an annoying economic toll on the whole region. Islamic radicals were using the sanctions as a rallying cry to recruit terrorists. The no-fly zones required that we keep air bases in Saudi Arabia, which was also a major irritant for the Sauds, and a terrorist recruitment bonanza.
If Bush had been honest, and had he been willing to share the contracts in a post-Saddam Iraq, he should have been able to take this case to the international community and explain that we could not continue with the containment policy. He could have further explained that he didn’t trust Saddam Hussein to behave himself once the sanctions were lifted. He could have explained the threat to the Kurds that would arise if Saddam was giving a free hand within his own country.
In the aftermath of 9/11, it would not have been an unreasonable request for the United States to ask the Security Council to rethink the sanctions, and to help the Anglo forces find a graceful exit that didn’t pose an unacceptable security risk.
Perhaps, we could have crafted some kind of exile package for Saddam and his family. In return, a multinational force would enter Iraq and provide security, while a new government was developed. If Saddam wouldn’t voluntarily leave, our only military goal would be to drive him from power, and capture him if possible.
Some people will object that we had Saddam perfectly contained, and we could continue that policy indefinitely. I disagree.
Others will argue that the French and Russians never would have gone along with such a plan. I remind them that we have appropriated nearly $300 billion for this war. We certainly could have convinced enough Russians and Frenchmen with that amount of dough.
What we couldn’t do is convince them to go along with a war based on a pack of lies, that never envisioned a voluntary exile, and that ripped up all their contracts and replaced them with contracts for American companies.
Greed has been our achilles heel from the beginning of the debate over Iraq up until the present day. And dishonesty about our greedy motives has turned off the entire world. There was a case to be made for regime change in Iraq. The Bushies never made it. Now that they have been exposed as liars: fixing the intelligence, using the inspectors as a mere pretext, etc., they will undoubtedly begin to revert to an argument similar to the one I just made above. But the question isn’t: ‘What would have happened if the Bush administration had not gone to war in March 2003?’ The question is: ‘What would have happened if we had made an honest case, and had been willing to make the concessions necessary to get international support?’
…speaking against the war. Diaried by Jneerikat over at dembloggers.com.
http://www.dembloggers.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2005/6/19/134632/156
Rep. Ron Paul (R)TX gives a speech well worth listening to.
http://www.house.gov/paul
http://www.house.gov/paul
Booman, I was with you most of the way, but you lost me at the end:
Support for war? There was no case for war under international treaty. With an ‘honest case’, even less so.
This is spot on:
The effects of the sactions with regards to health and nutrition were horrendous. Hundreds of thousands died as a direct cause.
What we tend to forget is the fact that the sactions helped Saddam to consolidate his power. The sanctions stifled commerce and industry – soon, the middle class (which was significant in Iraq) was basically wiped out. Saddam and his cronies, flush with funding from oil ‘smuggling schemes’ (tacitly approved by the powers that be) were able to buy up most of value in the country. The impoverished middle class started by selling off antiques and rugs, but eventually, also real estate – all at a substantial discount in a cash-starved Iraq. You should have seen what was available in antique/rug stores in Baghdad in the late ’90s! Saddam had enacted laws that prohibited export of non-contemporary objects (which, overall, was great), which obviously helped keeping the prices artificially low.
but I did it elsewhere.
If my approach had been pursued, any military action would have been approved by the UN, and therefore would have been legal.
The legal argument would have probably been twofold. Saddam was in breach of UN resolutions, and we were no longer willing to wait for him to comply.
I’ll leave the hypothetical language to the lawyers, but it could have been accomplished. Bush almost accomplished it without spending $300 billion to assure support.
But regime change in the form of voluntary exile should have been the goal, and any occupation should have been under an UN banner, and all contracts should have been either temporary or ratified by some body established for that purpose.
And to be clear, I am opposed to this type of big-footing imperialistic, paternalistic manipulation of foreign countries (even with UN support). But I didn’t support the Gulf War, and I wouldn’t have supported siding with Iraq against Iran, or in installing and supporting the Shah.
Having said that, something needed to be done about Iraq and our interminable containment policy. Just not anything remotely like what was done about it.
This is where I have a dilemma.
If you can convince enough other nations to vote in the UN that military action is justified, does that make it right? It might be legal . . . but “right” is another question. Especially when you consider the amount of bribery and extortion we engage in to get other countries to support our perverted agenda.
and when we try to deal with a problem of the magnitude of Iraq, with all that money on the table, you can be sure that it will be really ugly.
This would be true whether we did something right or wrong.
A real question that the Bushies failed to make clear was what would happen if we did nothing?
That is what Kagan is trying to raise. My answer is that there were a lot of alteratives between doing nothing and doing what we did do.
on the day when it is speculated that Japan has pledged enough “aid” to guarantee a majority on the International Whaling Commision to overturn the ban on commercial whaling.
You say we couldn’t continue the policy of containment indefinitely. That’s silly. Of course we could have.
Whether it would continue to work indefinitely is a different question.
What is your argument that containment was losing effectiveness? From all we know today, it had been a remarkably productive approach to controlling Saddam. And even if containment started to lose its value, we might have used the extra time to shape a more effective response than destroying the country.
Given the facts as we know them today, there is no honest case that could have been made. The war was preemptive and illegal. No amount of international support would have made it otherwise.
It appears that the containment policy accomplished one major positive thing. In conjunction with the UN inspection program, it effectively disarmed Iraq of WMD. And I don’t want to minimize that accomplishment at all.
But, that was the ONLY positive accomplishment of containment. When you ask the question, ‘why did bin-Laden want to attack America?’, the answers lie in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, not Afghanistan and Israel. UBL wanted us out of Saudi Arabia. We could have ignored the security risk of remaining in Saudi Arabia, we could have continued to ignore the humanitarian costs of sanctions to the Iraqi people, we could have remained indifferent to the economic damage sanctions caused to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. We could have ignored that Saddam was only getting stronger. We could have overlooked that the embargo was getting leakier and leakier.
Yes, we could have done all those things. But why would we have wanted to? As I said, Kagan offers us a false choice between war and no-war.
and I guess we’re more or less in the same place on this.
I find my personal threshold for justifying war to be extremely high these days. Of the infinite number of things we could have done to realign Mesopotamia, war would not have been on my list of options. Assasination? Maybe. Bribery and other skulldugery? Sure. But blowing up a whole frigging country to satisfy the Bushman’s desire for a memorable presidency?
My friends in Naval Intelligence insist, as you do, that Saddam was only getting stronger. I must have missed something.
I don’t believe containment was necessary more than a few years after the Kuwait war. The Iraqi nuclear program was effectively dead, and any further actions against a renewed program could be safely left to the Israelis. As for the suspected chemical and biological WMD programs, who cares? Chemical weapons are banned mostly because they are inhumane, not because they pose a global threat on a par with nuclear weapons. And Iraq’s very limited biological weapons program consisted of little more than anthrax and botulism. Anthrax, as we have seen, is very hard to weaponize, and botulism is not likely to be the source of the next great plague, either.
The very fact that Saddam had disarmed under the sanctions regime and yet maintained ambiguity about his WMD capabilities even when he could have likely averted the current war by making Iraq’s non-capabilities transparent to the world is prima facie proof of Iraq’s inability to threaten its neighbors. Iraq was so weak militarily that it needed the bluff of WMD to keep Iran at bay. What was Saddam going to do with his rump military? Invade Syria? The most Iraq was able to do was provide a constant irritant to Israel in the form of minor financial support for Hezbollah and Hamas.
This is the point that was made by many of us in favor of ending the sanctions regime before Bush came to town. Iraq was no longer a major threat, and frankly unlikely to become one any time soon. The real question is not whether we had any options in between war on the one hand and sanctions on the other, but rather sanctions were still necessary in the first place.
The only compelling argument for continued action against Saddam’s regime was the human rights argument, but there were and are countries that are much bigger violators of human rights than Baathist Iraq. Some of them receive quite a bit of funding from the US, as Iraq did before Saddam misjudged the US reaction to the invasion of Kuwait.
for your arguments. I’d make two points. The first is that 9/11 did change our threat assessment. I personally view 9/11 victims as casualties of the Persian Gulf War. I was against the Gulf War and the potential for events like 9/11 is the reason I gave for opposing it at the time.
But even if you don’t see the same connection that I do, the evolution of Free Kurdistan throughout the 90’s presented a difficult obstacle to lifting the no-fly zones, if not the sanctions.
It would not have been a kind thing to abandon the Kurds of Iraq for a third time in 30 years.
What 9/11 changed — or at least should have changed — was our estimate of the importance of al Qaeda. The net significance of 9/11 and al Qaeda to the issue of Saddam was nil, or perhaps less than nil, because we are deeply mired in the second Iraq war instead of devoting all of that energy to pursuing terror organizations.
As for the Kurds, the geopolitical calculation is grim and cold: we must choose between the Kurds and the Turks. In purely practical terms, losing the Turks will cost us a great deal more than losing the Kurds. Turkish radicalization could pose a direct immediate threat to the tenuous peace in the Balkans and on Cyprus, and the long-term prospects of a radical Islamist Turkey are dire for the West. For the Kurds, there is only a humanitarian argument, and even it is full of caveats. The comparatively liberal Islam of Turkey is more of a beacon for middle eastern reformers than the empty rhetoric of the American invaders and their Iraqi puppet government.
All of this mayhem has its roots in the western hegemony over middle eastern oil that developed in the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The temptation of burning through hundreds of millions of years of accumulated energy in the course of less than a century has been to the industrial west what heroin is to a junkie. Our response to any number of post-WW2 middle eastern crises should have been to pump billions into sustainable energy research from wind power to fusion, regulating energy efficiency, and moving away from personal automobile ownership and towards mass transit. Instead, our worship of Mammon has repeatedly led us to sacrifice the lives of our children on the altar of Moloch in the middle east.
The bottom line is that none of this had to happen if we had, as a civilization, been far-sighted. We could still, though with greater difficulty, pull the plug on the oil habit and let the middle east fade into utter obscurity. That there is no such ambitious goal on the agenda, in the US or even in Europe, does not bode well for us.
Cooperative Research’s Timelines show that consideration of alternatives to war were never considered. Your argument assumes a rational administration. Maybe next time.
See also: UN Programme on Governance in the Arab Region. Chronology of Events [2000 – 2004].
as an honest case for this war. C’mon, Booman, you’re wasting our time with this.
There is a fundamental flaw with all your reasoning: War is not the answer. It never was. This is classic arm-chair philosophizing from someone who never had to go to war. War sucks. It should be the absolute, last, no-other-choice, you-forced-me-into-it option. We never, NEVER were close to that situation with Iraq.
Beyond that, what makes you think that any kind of “international blessing” or consent would have changed the way that things have played out in-country? We are an occupying force — whether “blessed” or not — and the Iraqis who are fighting against us are defending their homeland from foreign invaders. You think they wouldn’t be fighting us if those “foreign invaders” had UN blessing?
You think that those countries that opposed this fiasco would have gotten on board if we threw a coupla reconstruction contracts their way?
C’mon, Booman, get real.
I don’t agree with the latter parts.
Yes, $300 billion of our children’s money would have been plenty enough money to get the blessing of everyone involved, possibly even Saddam himself.
Yes, the war would not be anything like it is today if we had framed the options as:
a) Saddam takes a retirement in a nice place with his family, the sanctions are lifted, the UN assures stability, the world community pours cash and development into the country or:
b) we chase Saddam down like a dog and then do the rest of a)
I’m not making an argument for war, but for a policy of regime change as a precursor of normalization and rehabilitation of Iraq into the world community.
It may be a waste of time, but the right is going to make the case now, that we only had two choices: what we did and how we did it vs. doing nothing. There were other options.
Frankly, I don’t even understand the comment about the $300 billion of our children’s money. First of all, we pretty much bribed most of our “coalition of the willing” to be there in the first place. Second, you must have a pretty low opinion of the morality of the rest of the world if you think that all we need to do is throw around US big bucks, and everyone will fall meekly into line. We were already doing that, and still, countries did not join us because they were fundamentally opposed to the idea of “regime change” that we were pursuing. It has nothing to do with framing, it has to do with simple morality, and simple self-preservation. If countries sign on to the idea that big powerful countries have the right to go in and change the government in another country if they don’t like it, then every country in the world is a potential target for that action.
Your idea of a Saddam retirement is a pure fantastical pipe dream, so despite your protestations to the contrary, you are making an argument for war, because the simple fact is that regime change in Iraq could be accomplished no other way (except for a Saddam death).
So it goes back to my original question, which you never answered, what makes you think that when we invaded Iraq to change the Hussein regime — regardless of whatever international “frame” (lipstick on a pig) you tried to put on it — that the Iraqi people would act any differently than they are now to the presence of foreign invaders? Read a little history, pal. The way they’re treating us is the way they have treated every foreign invader (and, frankly, the way WE would treat a foreign invader, no matter how much for our own good they tried to frame their actions).
Finally, I could give a flyin flock about the arguments the right makes. If they are principled arguments, I will respond to them in a principled way. If they’re bovine excrement, then I’ll ignore them. The fact that some right wing pontificator tried to frame the debate in the way you suggest is no reason to come up with phony justifications or “frames” for going to war.
Yes, there are other solutions. A re-framed war is not one on my list.
that I have a low opinion. But not of other nations. I have a low opinion of the people that make foreign policy decisions for those nations.
Bush got a unanimous vote for Resolution 1441. He would have won a majority vote for a war resolution if everyone hadn’t known that France would veto.
He would have gotten those votes in return for a relatively paltry sum of money compared to what we have spent to wage the war in Iraq.
Saddam accepting exile might have been a pipedream, but we’ll never know. He certainly could not have survived any other way, and a coup would have become near certain if enough pressure was applied by a unified international community with dollar bills flowing out of their suit pockets.
Moreover, the insurgency, if we must call it that, took shape over many months. It certainly would not have evolved the same way with different circumstances.
I accept your difference of opinion, but there was a way to try to force Saddam out without invading. And there was a way of invading that did not lead to a nearly unilateral multi-year occupation.
And my point is: that the right can make an argument that we couldn’t just do nothing, and I’ll be inclined to concede the point. But that in no way mitigates our responsibility for what we did do.
because it’s your place, but you’ll find I’m pretty much a last-worder regardless of whose house I’m in.
I enjoy the conversation đŸ™‚
On #2: Honestly, Bush probably would have had a hard time. But that is because he and his advisors are assholes and can’t engender any trust. I have little doubt that Clinton could have quietly gone to Beijing, Moscow, and Paris, and pitched regime change through a united stand in the security council for forced exile, combined with a large peacekeeping force, and a mega bonanza aid package that spread out the reconstruction dollars equitably. He might have even done a US military buildup in conjunction with this diplomatic effort to add urgency and credibility to this threats. But with $300 billion it should not have been a problem.
on #3: some problems can be solved with money and some cannot. When it comes to Iraq, we stole a lot of people’s money while asking them to support the theft. Doing the opposite would have a larger impact than I think you are calculating.
on #4: disbanding the army did more than anything else to feed the resistance. There would have been some resistance no matter what. But our current state of affairs was not inevitable.
on #5: mostly agree. This applies more forcefully to 1991.
I think you’re totally underestimating the world’s revulsion at “regime change”. No amount of US dollars or silver-tongued Clintonesque diplomacy was going to convince the governments of most countries in the world that it was ok to violate the sovereignty of another country and dispose of a government you didn’t like, regardless of how oafish the leader of that government might be. Also, just for the record, it’s against international law. If it was a workable freakin scenario, then the Bushies would have run with it. They had to concoct the WMD fantasy because “regime change” was DOA as far as any UN backing was concerned.
I served in Vietnam as an advisor, and I’ve been in the international development busines for the last fifteen years, so I believe I have a fair idea of what does and doesn’t work as far as development goes. I reiterate my previous statement; if you are (or are perceived to be) a foreign invader, then you cannot defeat a resistance movement with bucks and aid packages.
I know I’m the one sounding like a broken record now on this, but I think the idea that we could have eliminated the resistance movement by somehow changing a few tactics here and there is naive. Look at the history of the country, man. This is the way they have responded to every outside invader. As an invading force, our current situation was inevitable.
Anyway, it’s 1:30 am here in Manila. Time for bed. Enjoyed the back and forth.
but: Iraq was not just another country. We were controlling the airspace over it, and blockading it.
You can’t just treat Iraq like any other country in the world that we might want to invade. It was a special case because of the ill-advised war in 1991.
Because of that, we had more of a case to make that we wouldn’t continue to contain him, nor would we tolerate him uncontained. I’m being simplistic, but you are too.
so closely echoed in another.
My thinking had crystallized into:
ergo
Saddam has to go.
Can the Bushes do it?
For one brief period, I thought so and said as much to my wise ex. She said, “And YOU expected BUSH to get it right???!!!
Chastised I went back over my thoughts and recognized a chunk of BS.
It would be better if the war had never happened and Saddam was still in power.
Saddam Hussein would still have to go but only when the timing is right.
Even when I supported “regime change,” it was on the understanding that it be done RIGHT. Otherwise, it is not worth it.
Backtracking to your question…
I no longer think that the Bush administration is capable of making an honest case for ‘the sky is blue’ and I think the people Bush needed to convince in Europe knew that already before 9/11.
Apologies, I have not read comments yet, wanted to respond to BM immediately.
“At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including U.S. F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein’s major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan.
“Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon’s goal was clear: Destroy Iraq’s ability to resist.”
As Scahill points out, this was a month before the congressional vote and two months before the U.N. resolution. The United States hadn’t declared war. Bush had no authorization, not even a fig leaf. This pre-emptive war pre- empted Congress and international law.
Most Americans don’t know about these prewar attacks. The bombings that destroyed Iraq’s air defenses were under the radar for both the American media and American citizens.
http://tinyurl.com/aacx4
Also, I disagree with your statement:
“Saddam had proved himself to be a deft opponent throughout the nineties. “
Saddam Hussein was a seriously disturbed meglomanic devoting his time to building monuments to himself. He was teetering on the brink. He was no threat to the USA or to any of his neighbours. That he was trading oil for euros instead of US dollars, was his worst “threat” to the USA.
I encounter a lot. Saddam Hussein and his army and his intelligence agencies were not much of a threat to America. Yes, just like anyone else he could have plotted a mass casualty terror attack against us. You was just crazy enough to consider it too.
But the real problem wasn’t Saddam, it was Saudi Arabia, and the sanctions, and the no-fly zones. Those policies were what Bin-Laden said led him to attack America. Not because he hates freedom or democracy or Pamela Anderson’s tits.
So, the question was, after 9/11, are we going to continue these policies? Very few people answered that question with ‘yes’.
Once a consensus was reached that we should close down Prince Sultan Air Base, for example, the next step was to consider the likely consequences of lifting the sanctions and ending the no-fly zones. Or what intermediate steps might be made? What would Saddam do with all the money and new technology? What would he do to the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds?
The reason so many Dems went along with the war was because they agreed that it would be unwise to leave Saddam in power in a post sanctions world.
Now, that doesn’t make them right. First of all, it involved trusting Bush to handle the diplomacy, it involved trusting that he would pursue options that fell short of a full-on invasion and occupation of the country. The British made the same mistake.
All I am saying here is that the right is now going to make a new defense of the Iraq War. Their defense will be dishonest. But it will more nearly reflect what the real national security concerns were that the bullshit one’s presented to the American people, and the world, at the time.
“Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out” as he poked his head in a National Security meeting of Rice and some senators who “laughed uncomfortably” while Rice “flashed a knowing smile.”
“Taking out Saddam” was a Bush obsession not a National Security consideration. If the right were to get close to the truth they would have to acknowledge that. Do you think they ever will?
[Forgive my lack of links here, I’m just putting down information I gleaned from articles on the Downing Street Memos today – a long day.]
but here is how I see it.
It’s our foreign policy to base heavily in the Middle East. That is a bipartisan policy, it was Clinton’s policy. We have to honest about that.
If we aren’t honest about it, then we can’t understand our own party’s actions, let alone our opponents.
Even under Clinton, the keepers of American foreign policy thought the containment policy was a disaster and were trying to figure out how to topple Hussein and lift the sanctions. 9/11 only drove the point home and gave it added urgency.
The difference is that Bush wanted to invade and march on Baghdad. That had been considered a bad idea by nearly everyone that had contemplated it. But Bush didn’t worry about it.
Now, my personal feeling is that we need to stop basing our armed forces all over creation, and propping up dictators to secure marginally better deals for our corporate masters.
The Democratic Party establishment hasn’t quite come to that conclusion (although Bush’s ineptitude is leading them slowly in that direction).
But all of this is a long way of saying that we did need to do something dramatic to change our foreign policy vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia and Iraq. But we didn’t need to invade based on a pack of lies and steal billions of dollars from the treasury that could have accomplished most of the same goals with a fraction of the headaches, and many fewer ethical and moral problems.
Or we could have done nothing. That still would have been better than what we have done.
you had to be “politically-minded” to realize that they were discussing the invasion of another country.
As a strong believer in nation sovereignty I felt that we had absolutely no right to invade Iraq.
If Iraq had invaded us, or attacked us – well, that’s a different story. But, as we all know – they didn’t.