The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, a supporter of Bush’s Iraq policy who was advising Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has been wrong about the war pretty consistently since, well, the beginning. But that doesn’t seem to stop him from weighing in on the issue at every available opportunity.
In his latest salvo, O’Hanlon takes on Barack Obama’s opposition to the war in a Wall Street Journal piece yesterday. O’Hanlon accuses Obama of not being “inclusive” enough, because he rejects the pro-war arguments of people like O’Hanlon.
[Obama] seems contemptuous of the motivations of those who supported the war. While showing proper respect for the heroic efforts of our troops, he displays little regard for the views of those many Americans who saw the case for war in the first place — even as he has called for a more civil and respectful political debate.
This is unfortunate. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst and most dangerous dictators of the late 20th century. The basic proposition of unseating him was hardly an unconscionable idea, even if President Bush’s approach to doing so was unilateralist, arrogant and careless. With our last image of Saddam a resigned figure heading for the gallows, it is easy to forget who this monster was.
He had used chemical weapons against his own defenseless people, as well as the armies of Iran; he violated 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions that demanded his verifiable disarmament; he had the blood of perhaps one million people on his hands; he transformed his country into what Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya famously called the “republic of fear.” (Saddam’s behavior didn’t improve when we tried the kind of high-level diplomacy Mr. Obama favors by sending envoys like Donald Rumsfeld and April Glaspie.)
Saddam’s worst may have been behind him by 2003 — but he was grooming his sadistic sons Uday and Qusay as successors with unknowable consequences. His WMD programs were in limbo, we now know. But before the war even German intelligence thought him only half a dozen years from a nuclear weapon.
O’Hanlon concludes that Obama should consider “non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom,” which presumably would lead the senator to agree with O’Hanlon.
This is all wildly unpersuasive.
O’Hanlon’s central beef seems to be that Obama should be nicer to people like O’Hanlon and other war supporters who were wrong. Why? Because Saddam Hussein was an awful, brutal thug.
Look, it’s 2008. This argument is over. It’s been over for quite a while. Re-litigating the now-obvious mistake of invading Iraq is more than just silly, it’s useless. O’Hanlon still wants to debate how close Saddam was to get nuclear weapons? Now?
O’Hanlon offers up a thinly-veiled defense for analysts like himself who offered tragically wrong advice in the war in March 2003 — O’Hanlon cannot seem to face up to the fact that he lined up on the wrong side of the arguments on Iraq, and America has suffered serious damage to its national security as a result.
O’Hanlon argued against the war at certain points in 2002 and even outlined a long list of preconditions before going to war in a policy paper he co-published called “Getting Serious About Iraq” (most of these conditions were not met). But then he forgot many of his own arguments and naively accepted the information and arguments presented by the Bush administration on the eve of the war. (He said about Bush’s case for war in the 2003 State of the Union address the president was “convincing on his central point that the time of war is near.”)
It may be that people are contemptuous of those who posture and profess to offer expertise on the right path forward on Iraq like O’Hanlon does, even though their track record is awful. In most professions, there are consequences for bad performance. Doctors face the threat of medical malpractice suits; policy analysts like O’Hanlon get to make mistakes again and again with impunity, as do journalists who quote him and publish his pieces.
If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s the realization that should Obama win the presidential race in November, there’s no way on earth he’ll hire O’Hanlon for a job in the administration.