The other day I took a swipe at Democracy Arsenal’s Michael Cohen for acting as if he was born yesterday.
Here’s why I’m annoyed: five years ago, in September 2002, Charles Paul Freund, writing in Reason, summed up what he called “the state of play in the Baghdad War Before the War”:
The U.S.’ actual intentions in Iraq may have very little—perhaps nothing—to do with the reasons that have been offered by the administration, either before the UN or in the domestic debate. The U.S. may actually be pursuing a strategy it is unwilling to articulate in public.
Critics of the White House’s Iraq strategy have been arguing that it makes no sense. Among other things, they assert that Saddam’s Iraq is actually less well armed than such states as Syria, has neither nuclear weapons nor the means to deliver any, poses no imminent military threat to its neighbors or the West, has no known link to the terrorist attacks of last September, and is less involved in state-sponsored terror networks than is Iran or Syria.
A major objection to moving against Saddam involves timing. According to this argument, we are already engaged in a long-range War Against Terrorism. Why engage in a simultaneous and potentially very expensive war against Saddam that may tie the U.S. down and divert vital resources from the real war against such enemies as Al Qaeda?
Despite the fact that many of these objections have been raised by high-ranking members of past Republican and Democratic administrations, and despite the fact that many traditional American allies have been cool to the case advanced by Washington, the administration has been notably diffident in its various responses. The reason may be that a regime change in Iraq is not a distraction from the U.S. response to terror attack, but rather its centerpiece. That is, the administration may be less concerned with Saddam’s arsenal than it suggests, and more concerned with forcing profound, long-range change in the Middle East. For reasons involving both geography and oil, Iraq might be the key to such change. [e.a.]
And what was the administration’s rationale for moving in the Middle East?
A fundamental response to 9/11 has been the reconsideration of American power. Critics of the U.S. charge that the attacks were “blowback” for the misuse of American might in pursuit of unjust aims. But others argue that the attacks were the result of an often overcautious, frequently ineffectual application of power (lobbing missiles into Lebanon following the bloody attack on the Marine barracks, throwing missiles at empty training camps or aspirin factories in response to murderous attacks on U.S. embassies) that led enemies to conclude that the U.S. was decadent, weak, and stupid.
The administration obviously inclines toward the view that U.S. power has been ineffectually used, and now appears ready to assert the nation’s immense power in the Middle East—not, perhaps, to bring closure to the Gulf War, but primarily to disrupt and if possible to destroy those elements in the region that present a continuing threat to the West.
One can, of course, make a magnificent case that five years later U.S. power has still been “ineffectually used,” but no one writing about foreign policy today should be surprised to find out that we’re going to be in Iraq for a long, long time. Bush will not retreat from his own doctrine, not even in the face of its manifestly disastrous consequences.
Many of which Freund saw the potential for in September 2002 (though not, of course, the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq with its new challenge for us to meet: stay and fight or allow our credibility to suffer even more in the eyes of our enemies). Read the whole thing.
