Surprise!
It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother
of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to
Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion
we should have had a decade ago.
But
many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not
have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the
political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes,
the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible
mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.
Well,
let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was
involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war
wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of
intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because
the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the
invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We
were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.
The
fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time:
the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway.
So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical
weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the
constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.
And
at this point we have plenty of evidence to confirm everything the
war’s opponents were saying. We now know, for example, that on 9/11
itself — literally before the dust had settled — Donald Rumsfeld, the
secretary of defense, was already plotting war against a regime that had
nothing to do with the terrorist attack. “Judge whether good enough
[to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] ...sweep it all up things related and
not”; so read notes taken by Mr. Rumsfeld’s aide.
This
was, in short, a war the White House wanted, and all of the supposed
mistakes that, as Jeb puts it, “were made” by someone unnamed actually
flowed from this underlying desire. Did the intelligence agencies
wrongly conclude that Iraq had chemical weapons and a nuclear program?
That’s because they were under intense pressure to justify the war. Did
prewar assessments vastly understate the difficulty and cost of
occupation? That’s because the war party didn’t want to hear anything
that might raise doubts about the rush to invade. Indeed, the Army’s chief of staff was effectively fired for questioning claims that the occupation phase would be cheap and easy.
Why
did they want a war? That’s a harder question to answer. Some of the
warmongers believed that deploying shock and awe in Iraq would enhance
American power and influence around the world. Some saw Iraq as a sort
of pilot project, preparation for a series of regime changes. And it’s
hard to avoid the suspicion that there was a strong element of wagging
the dog, of using military triumph to strengthen the Republican brand at
home.
Now,
you can understand why many political and media figures would prefer
not to talk about any of this. Some of them, I suppose, may have been
duped: may have fallen for the obvious lies, which doesn’t say much
about their judgment. More, I suspect, were complicit: they realized
that the official case for war was a pretext, but had their own reasons
for wanting a war, or, alternatively, allowed themselves to be
intimidated into going along. For there was a definite climate of fear
among politicians and pundits in 2002 and 2003, one in which criticizing
the push for war looked very much like a career killer.
On
top of these personal motives, our news media in general have a hard
time coping with policy dishonesty. Reporters are reluctant to call
politicians on their lies, even when these involve mundane issues like
budget numbers, for fear of seeming partisan. In fact, the bigger the
lie, the clearer it is that major political figures are engaged in
outright fraud, the more hesitant the reporting. And it doesn’t get much
bigger — indeed, more or less criminal — than lying America into war.
But
truth matters, and not just because those who refuse to learn from
history are doomed in some general sense to repeat it. The campaign of
lies that took us into Iraq was recent enough that it’s still important
to hold the guilty individuals accountable. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal
stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people
who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war.
So let’s get the Iraq story right. Yes, from a national point of view the invasion was a mistake. But (with apologies to Talleyrand) it was worse than a mistake, it was a crime.
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