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March 17, 2005
The Most Nested Doll
As I hinted a few weeks ago, I feel the need to dredge up an old and possibly dead issue: the real motivation for the invasion of Iraq. In the eerie, slow-motion car crash that was the year leading up to the March 2003 invasion, the Bush administration offered a slew of reasons to invade Iraq: regime change, human rights explanations, connections to al Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups, WMD, etc. One day, regime change seemed hot and was plugged by every administration mouthpiece. The next day, WMD was the ticket and was spouted in front of every microphone in DC. There seemed to be little connection between each reason, and the constant shifting diluted the weight of each individual rationale. It was if the administration was throwing mud at a wall, just to see what would stick. Indeed, the presumptive head of the World Bank basically admitted that this was the strategy -- after the invasion. It was such a bizarre period, made possible only by an unprecedented confluence of factors: the direct attacks on the United States of 11 September and the elective nature of the Iraq war. Without the shock and awe of 11 September, it is improbable that Bush would have been able to mobilize any kind of support for an outright invasion of Iraq. He manipulated the genuine feelings of vulnerability felt by Americans after the attack, leading many to believe (and never correcting any of them) that Iraq was responsible for the attacks. This was supposed then, and is known as nearly a certainty now, to be patently false. And by all accounts -- and indeed, by Bush's subsequent admission that Iraq really wasn't involved in the 11 September attacks -- Bush knew what he was doing.
Consequently, and regardless of intent, the supposition that Saddam was behind the 11 September attacks and/or was harboring al Qaeda was suffused throughout the whole pre-war rationalization process. Such accusations, while widely believed, were pure bunk, and most people of power and information knew this. But where did the plethora of other reasons fit into the broader pro-invasion argument? One of the most insightful analyses of this came from a lecture I attended by Anne-Marie Slaughter. She portrayed the administration's argument for war as a series of nested rationales, in a manner I like to visualize as not too different from Russian matryoshka dolls. The most-exterior argument, the one that could bear not only public scrutiny but also that of the United Nations and the international community, was WMD. Indeed, Saddam Hussein was in violation of a number of Security Council resolutions, and the endgame to invasion played out largely on the east side of Manhattan. But such an argument only went so far; Bush couldn't get UN backing for his invasion. Remove that exterior layer, and one would find another argument for invasion: human rights/regime change. Saddam was a nasty guy who did nasty things to his people. This argument could be, and was, made very publicly, and it garnered a fair number of adherents. In many ways, this was the quintessential neoconservative argument: use American power to restore human rights and to spread democracy. It's a very tough case to challenge, but despite that, it was not one that could be made at the UN. No one on the Security Council (well, probably no one) actually liked Saddam or thought he was a good guy. But there was no UN resolution compelling him to be a nice guy. So this second argument could be made publicly, just not at the UN.
One must peel away another layer of rationalization, the analogy continues, to reach the nub of the pro-invasion argument: pure geopolitics. This argument, due to its archaic and nearly unjustifiable nature and in marked contrast to the two preceding arguments, could not be made publicly. Through the 1990s, neoconservative scholars and out-of-work policymakers spoke often that the United States' post-Cold War foreign policy should focus on retaining global supremacy and deterring or defeating challenges to such supremacy. They were organized most notably as the Project for the New American Century, and they declared their aims in PNAC's statement of principles:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
In addition to its general principles, PNAC was particularly interested in regime change in Iraq. When George Bush was elected in 2000, many PNAC luminaries -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Perle, and others -- quickly formed the administrative and policymaking core of his administration. Not long after, some people began to make the connection.
So what does this mean? I've always thought that Wesley Clark put it best in an interview during his ill-fated presidential campaign:
But, in the odd kind of geopolitical chess board game this administration seemed to want to play, they seemed to assume that you could get your forces into Iraq, and, like a game of checkers, you could skip across the Middle East -- plop, plop, plop -- as though in some metaphysical sense, it was easier to come ashore up through the Euphrates and Tigris valleys into the heart of the Middle East and southwest Asia, and then cross into the mountains of Iraq -- excuse me, of Iran -- or pivot and go towards Syria. It was analytically, geometrically satisfying, even though those of us who understood the situation at the time said it made little sense. It was old-think. It was 19th century geostrategy -- [emphasis mine]
And if you don't believe a Democratic presidential candidate, why not take it from the Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy itself:
The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S. commitments to allies and friends. Through our willingness to use force in our own defense and in defense of others, the United States demonstrates its resolve to maintain a balance of power that favors freedom. To contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. forces. [emphasis mine]
Fundamentally, I believe the Bush administration invaded Iraq for the sake of invading Iraq. It put U.S. power in a vitally important part of the world. Everything else -- links to al-Qaeda, WMD, human rights, etc -- was ancillary to this central cause. Again, this is not to say that Saddam Hussein wasn't a bad person who did horrible things, nor to suggest that he didn't have a documented history of WMD production, use, and obfuscation, nor to say that such matters didn’t genuinely concern people in the Bush administration. Rather, in my mind, the only consistent, logical explanation for Bush's rationale to invade was geopolitics -- we wanted to be in Iraq because we thought it was necessary to preserve our position of global supremacy. This is why I am always amused when politicians and pundits alike talk about an "exit strategy" from Iraq -- will we be out in 6 months? 2 years? 5 years? It's ludicrous, because we went into Iraq to stay in Iraq. U.S. forces, God-willing, will be drawn-down substantially and will face less danger as time passes. But we will never completely leave, not in the near-term, at least. It's funny, in a way. Many pro-war pundits looked to Germany and Japan as examples of how post-war reconstruction could be done right. As it happened, we bungled the Iraqi reconstruction. The Germany and Japan models, however, can still apply, in a very different way -- 60 years on, and U.S. forces are still there.
So why bring all of this up now? The invasion of Iraq was preceded by the attack on Afghanistan, an altogether more justified and transparently rationalized war. Yet it was still directed by the same folks -- PNAC alums and Bush administration stalwarts -- who brainstormed the Iraq operation. So when something like this comes along, I have a hard time feeling surprised. Indeed, it's probably a harbinger of things to come in Iraq.
Posted by Daniel Widome at 06:16 PM to Middle East,
