The attack on the WTC provided a convenient excuse to the neo-con policy makers to do what they had been wanting to do ever since the end of the first gulf war, take out Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith all signed a public letter in 1998 calling for Hussein's overthrow. And I remember being stunned when I read a Sunday NY Times Magazine written by Wolfowitz before the WTC attacks making his case why we should invade Iraq and oust Hussein. An administration official was making a case for preemptive war.
It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that the so-called debate about whether to attack or not attack Iraq was mere window dressing and the actual decision was as good as made long before the official one.
Completely coincidental is a quote a stumbled upon today attributed to Bismarck: "a preventive war is like committing suicide out of a fear of death."
I lifted what follows directly from Paul Krugman´s column today because it is important to remember what really happened and not to accept at face value the assertions made by those who would rewrite this history. Or, put another way, because it expresses exactly what I remember, and I couldn't say it better.
Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.
Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.
There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.
So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.
The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents — but they were out of the mainstream.
The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration. This was true in political circles; it was equally true of much of the press, which effectively took sides and joined the war party.
CNN’s Howard Kurtz, who was at The Washington Post at the time, recently wrote about how this process worked, how skeptical reporting, no matter how solid, was discouraged and rejected. “Pieces questioning the evidence or rationale for war,” he wrote, “were frequently buried, minimized or spiked.”
Closely associated with this taking of sides was an exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority. Only people in positions of power were considered worthy of respect. Mr. Kurtz tells us, for example, that The Post killed a piece on war doubts by its own senior defense reporter on the grounds that it relied on retired military officials and outside experts — “in other words, those with sufficient independence to question the rationale for war.”
All in all, it was an object lesson in the dangers of groupthink, a demonstration of how important it is to listen to skeptical voices and separate reporting from advocacy. But as I said, it’s a lesson that doesn’t seem to have been learned.
2 comments:
One of the things that Mr. Krugman (who seems to routinely leave out critical facts) doesn't recount is that Saddam Hussein claimed WMD. And, he used such a weapon against his own countrymen, the Kurds.
Why is it lost that the perp actually invited it? Yes, it was his boastful claim, and the naysayers are now ubiquitous.
It was a poor decision. Not the first, not the last. We need to have more of a spirit of recovery from poor decisions, a culture of expecting more correct decisions and less of the critics who, as someone said, simply wait around to shoot the survivors.
While you are at it, aren't you going to bring up Bush's appointment of a head of FEMA who was over his head? Nobody brings up the poor appointments of our current administration. Maybe there have been no poor ones, everyone from Chicago is competent?
Jeez, not your best effort here. I think you're trying to prove my point.
Saddam never "claimed" he had nuclear weapons, but he did play games with the UN inspection program, and he never positively asserted that they were destroyed.
It is a rewriting of history (proving one of the points of my post) to assert that the US invaded Iraq even remotely on the basis of any claims made by Saddam Hussein.
To assert this was just a "poor decision" that any honest analyst could make also misrepresents the push for war within the administration...as if oh, you know, hindsight is always 20/20, and everybody with a brain in their head supported the administration's screw-the-world, we're-going-in program of aggression.
Oh, yeah, and all the critics are just the usual Bush-hating crowd, so you can ignore them.
And, finally, because you have a real fondness for introducing false equivalencies, there is the Chicago reference. The post is about the 10th anniversary of one of a most disastrous decisions, and you want to talk about Rahm Emmanuel, I guess.
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