Required Reading: Iraq
Why are we in Iraq?
The Administration’s Defense Department-based Iraq hawks – Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz – came into office determined to oust Saddam. Before 9/11, they weren’t winning the argument inside the Administration with the more reasoned State Department forces led by Colin Powell. After 9/11, they argued that the U.S. can’t afford to let Saddam remain in power for fear that he would distribute his weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. See these two New Yorker articles from before 9/11 and just after 9/11.
But were there any WMDs?
No. The international intelligence community had concluded that Saddam must have WMDs because he threw the inspectors out in 1997, but this wasn’t based on any actual evidence, except some second-hand claims made by Iraqi exiles and their front organization, the Iraqi National Congress, which was busy lobbying the U.S. to topple Saddam and install the INC in power.
This is why we must rely on the kind of intelligence that’s in at least some of our brains to interpret the intelligence that the spies come up with.
Let’s see, why else might Saddam have wanted the inspectors out in 1997? Perhaps because he simply wanted to plant seeds of uncertainty within Iraq and the Middle East that maybe he DID have such weapons, to keep domestic opposition under control. The weapons inspections were emasculating to Saddam, which isn’t a good thing for a dictator who relies on terror to hold power. If he didn’t actually HAVE the weapons, however, he could keep the Gulf War alliance and the UN off his back indefinitely.
Not to toot my own horn – because I’m far from a foreign-policy expert – but my colleague Langdon H. and I were making this very point by e-mail during the fall of 2002. Now, it’s something close to the conventional wisdom as to why Saddam kicked out the inspectors but didn’t revive his WMD program. Of course, he never calculated that 9/11 would happen, and that a new Bush Administration would use 9/11 as a pretext to settle old scores in Iraq.
Or you can read Ken Pollock's piece in the Atlantic. Pollock is the guy who wrote a book about why we should topple Saddam. Now he says,
"The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action."
And were there any connections between Ql Qaeda and Saddam?
No. This was obvious to most careful observers from the beginning. Al Qaeda is based on Islamic fundamentalist ideology; Saddam was motivated solely by the thirst for power. By all accounts, Osama hates Saddam. While Al Qaeda’s ideological aims were furthered by attacking the U.S., teaming up with Al Qaeda on a terrorist strike against the U.S. would be the last thing Saddam would want to do, because it could have so easily deprived him of the one thing he wanted/had – absolute power in Iraq.
What about the aftermath of a war to topple Saddam?
Whatever happened to the concern with what would come after Saddam? The above-referenced New Yorker article from late 2001 quoted a former senior foreign-policy official as saying,
"We have no idea what could go wrong in Iraq if the crazies took over that country… Better the devil we know than the one we don't."
And James Fallows writes in the Atlantic that despite significant efforts to assess and plan the aftermath of Saddam’s ouster, the Cheney-Rumsfeld forces in the Administration systematically and blithely ignored it, dismissing any postwar planning by saying they couldn’t predict the future. Yet, as Fallows points out, the postwar planning documents actually DID a pretty good job of predicting the problems that we now face in Iraq.
The Administration’s Defense Department-based Iraq hawks – Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz – came into office determined to oust Saddam. Before 9/11, they weren’t winning the argument inside the Administration with the more reasoned State Department forces led by Colin Powell. After 9/11, they argued that the U.S. can’t afford to let Saddam remain in power for fear that he would distribute his weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. See these two New Yorker articles from before 9/11 and just after 9/11.
But were there any WMDs?
No. The international intelligence community had concluded that Saddam must have WMDs because he threw the inspectors out in 1997, but this wasn’t based on any actual evidence, except some second-hand claims made by Iraqi exiles and their front organization, the Iraqi National Congress, which was busy lobbying the U.S. to topple Saddam and install the INC in power.
This is why we must rely on the kind of intelligence that’s in at least some of our brains to interpret the intelligence that the spies come up with.
Let’s see, why else might Saddam have wanted the inspectors out in 1997? Perhaps because he simply wanted to plant seeds of uncertainty within Iraq and the Middle East that maybe he DID have such weapons, to keep domestic opposition under control. The weapons inspections were emasculating to Saddam, which isn’t a good thing for a dictator who relies on terror to hold power. If he didn’t actually HAVE the weapons, however, he could keep the Gulf War alliance and the UN off his back indefinitely.
Not to toot my own horn – because I’m far from a foreign-policy expert – but my colleague Langdon H. and I were making this very point by e-mail during the fall of 2002. Now, it’s something close to the conventional wisdom as to why Saddam kicked out the inspectors but didn’t revive his WMD program. Of course, he never calculated that 9/11 would happen, and that a new Bush Administration would use 9/11 as a pretext to settle old scores in Iraq.
Or you can read Ken Pollock's piece in the Atlantic. Pollock is the guy who wrote a book about why we should topple Saddam. Now he says,
"The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action."
And were there any connections between Ql Qaeda and Saddam?
No. This was obvious to most careful observers from the beginning. Al Qaeda is based on Islamic fundamentalist ideology; Saddam was motivated solely by the thirst for power. By all accounts, Osama hates Saddam. While Al Qaeda’s ideological aims were furthered by attacking the U.S., teaming up with Al Qaeda on a terrorist strike against the U.S. would be the last thing Saddam would want to do, because it could have so easily deprived him of the one thing he wanted/had – absolute power in Iraq.
What about the aftermath of a war to topple Saddam?
Whatever happened to the concern with what would come after Saddam? The above-referenced New Yorker article from late 2001 quoted a former senior foreign-policy official as saying,
"We have no idea what could go wrong in Iraq if the crazies took over that country… Better the devil we know than the one we don't."
And James Fallows writes in the Atlantic that despite significant efforts to assess and plan the aftermath of Saddam’s ouster, the Cheney-Rumsfeld forces in the Administration systematically and blithely ignored it, dismissing any postwar planning by saying they couldn’t predict the future. Yet, as Fallows points out, the postwar planning documents actually DID a pretty good job of predicting the problems that we now face in Iraq.
posted by JFH @ 7:57 AM
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