Crediting the Iraq fiasco for progress in the Middle East

December 10, 2007

The shift appears to be complete. When the intelligence community concluded recently that Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program, the right’s reflexive reaction was to condemn intelligence agencies, question the accuracy of the report, and raise doubts about officials’ motives. If the NIE didn’t tell conservatives what they wanted to hear, then the NIE had to be wrong.

But that was just the initial reaction. Over the last few days, the right seems to have settled on a new talking point — the NIE might be right, but if it is, it’s evidence that Bush’s invasion of Iraq generated progress in the Middle East. Consider Bill Kristol’s latest column in the Weekly Standard:

Much as the U.S. intelligence community, the IAEA, and the EU might prefer to forget it, we did overthrow Saddam Hussein in April 2003. As Rosett puts it, that “was the year in which Saddam Hussein became Exhibit A of the post-Sept.-11 era for what could happen to terror-linked tyrants who ignored America’s demands that they abjure weapons of mass murder.”

Did anyone notice? Muammar Qaddafi did. Libya, in late 2003, gave up its nuclear weapons program (which was, incidentally, more advanced than the IAEA believed) and invited U.S. experts in to dismantle it. Perhaps Iran’s mullahs also noticed. Perhaps they noticed, too, a large U.S.-led military force just across their border.

Rudy Giuliani made a similar argument yesterday on Meet the Press, insisting that Iran shut down its nuclear-weapons program in 2003 because of us: “So now let’s look at what was going on in 2003. We had just won a big victory in Afghanistan, we had deposed Saddam Hussein. That’s around the time Qadafi was putting up the … white flag of surrender. So — and they say that pressure helped to bring Iran to that position.”

Kristol was even more direct on Fox News yesterday, saying that the U.S. invasion “sent shock waves through the region,” which stopped Iran in its tracks, and forced Libya to give up on WMD altogether. It is, Kristol said, “yet another feather in the cap for the invasion of Iraq.”

As long as conservatives are going to repeat this nonsense, we might as well take a moment to highlight why it’s wrong.

TP noted a few of the obvious flaws in the argument.

Libya did not give up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 because of the Iraq war. As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Joseph Cirincione noted, negotiations with Libya stretched “over three administrations,” resulting in a deal that “cost little, caused no deaths, and was 100 percent effective.” At the time, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair called the news a “victory for diplomacy.”

Kristol has no proof for his claims. The unclassified key judgments of the NIE never once mention the Iraq invasion. If anything, Iran has been empowered by the Iraq war.

All true, but I’d go even further and suggest the neocon argument is actually illogical.

I’m trying to imagine the scenario as Kristol and Giuliani see it — we invaded Iraq and toppled a long-time Iranian foe; Iran had a secret nuclear-weapons program, which it was having trouble with; and fearful of an invasion, Iran scraps the nuke project.

Here’s the thing: that only makes sense if the Iranian nuclear-weapons program wasn’t a secret. In other words, the Kristol/Giuliani argument characterizes this as some kind of negotiation, as if Tehran said, “If you refrain from invading us, we’ll halt our nuke program.” Except that’s not what happened at all — Iran started and stopped its nuclear initiative without our knowledge. Indeed, we found about the development four years later.

Kristol and Giuliani aren’t just wrong, they’re offering an argument that doesn’t make an sense.

And what did work in pushing Iran? International diplomatic pressure — which the Bush White House actively opposed.

Honestly, it amazes me that conservatives like Kristol and Giuliani make wild arguments in the hopes no one will notice. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

I have no doubt that after our stellar victory in Afghanistan, and world sentiment on our side after 9/11, that both North Korean and Iran begged for a deal to keep from getting invaded. What the Iraq invasion did was to destroy that aura of invincibility. So, if Iran scrapped their program in 2003, I have no doubt they have no fear about halting such a program today.

If we had simply focused on democracy building in Afghanistan, we might have achieved everything Bush wanted — a beacon of Democracy in the Arab world, and credibility to force nations to give up their nuclear ambitions. What the invasion of Iraq did was evaporate everything we gained, and then set us backwards.

  • The only useful thing about invading Iraq is that it took focus off of Afghanistan.
    No western country, since Alexander the Great, has succeeded there. If that was the
    only focus of the news, then when we fail there it would be a huge failure, now
    it will only be a failure ‘because we did not have all of our resources there, but spread
    them to Iraq as well’.

    I am not saying that this counters all the bad of the debacle in Iraq, it does not.
    It is simply the only useful thing to the whole entreprise.

  • I can see how some people might think that Iran might be deterred by threats of force more than they would be deterred by sanctions. And I can understand why Iran’s leaders would not want to expose their alleged bomb program to the west or expose any decision to stop the program to the people of Iran.

    Of course they are now fully aware of how depleted our forces are, and that our remaining military options are basically “nuke or nothin” (with nukes perhaps providing a deterrent, only if the whitehouse occupant is considered crazy enough to use them). One could also argue that our conventional military forces weren’t robust enough in 2002 to take on Iran, so if you wanted a military option at all, you almost had to go with nuclear weapons, even back then.

    In a saner world, the Bush senior policy should have been the model, where the US if necessary provides most of the forces, backed up by the rest of the world. This of course is the same paradigm which (one would assume) kept the Soviets from doing a lot of things.

    But Iran is so much more of a threat than the Soviets ever were, according to the bedwetting neocons who now want us to think we’re out of sane options, and must therefore choose the “least bad” option. Smart people of course see that this game of chicken simply cannot end well, and thus will look at other solutions to the issues, but these smart people won’t be able to fit their ideas on a bumpersticker, so they’ll be drowned out by the warmongers.

  • It’s incredulous that these weenie warriors on the right would warrant anything but disdain, but I guess it’s simply because they say outlandish unverifiable things that their corporate sponsors allow them airtime simply for the profits. Kristol and his ilk are craven, opportunistic sycophants who are polluting our intellectual heritage. Truly patriotic Americans would work to get them off the air. -Kevo

  • There’s an old military aphorism about the height of strategy being to accomplish one’s objectives without combat. Basically, it means it’s always smarter if you can accomplish the same resut with less effort and mayhem.

    What might it mean here? Not necessarily that if we shunned fighting (but not necessarily convincing sabre-rattling) that we could have achieved the same results. But with less fighting, maybe we could have achieved better results. Maybe if Iraq was a much more targeted campaign, that was run better, but with a much more limited, better-run occupation, and maybe if we fired a few missiles over at Iran and Libya, we would have lost a lot less total lives, fired a lot less total ordinance, and brought all the adverse parties around to our way of thinking without inspiring nearly as much resistance and mayhem.

    That’s just a for-instance. It’s not for me to declare what exactly the best path might have been, because I’m not a Middle East, foreign policy, or military expert. But the comments described in this post definitely are portraying a long-haul, and a mistake-ridden, pain-in-the-ass way of doing something, as if it was a brilliant cupcake walk that predictably maneuvered us around problems we inevitably would have faced. The sorting of which problems were inevitable and which weren’t, the assumption that there wasn’t an easier and less pitfall-ridden way of achieving each goal, and the belief that our actions were the causes (and intended causes) of all the specific benefits we’ve seen since March 03 don’t seem so cut-and-dry-substantiated.

  • What Kristol is describing is the simplest of cause-and-effect scenarios, the kind of pretzel logic that conservatives lap up. Like, “x public shooting would have never happened if a decent gun-toting citizen had been there.” Or “the surge is working.” Or “lowering taxes saves the government money.” Or “teen pregnancy occurs because they took “under God” out of the PLedge of Allegiance.” It’s an easy story for simple minds to believe and repeat. And vote on.

    Also, it’s utter bullshit.

  • Basically Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz etc. forced the Iraq war on all their policy advisors because they saw windfall profits for the energy industry behind those Baathist walls, and the real smart people (the policy people such as high-ranking military officers and quality military experts) have been trying to pull the whole thing into workable shape (not just to accomplish legitimate goals, but to polish their own careers) ever since.

    They’ve stanched some of the bleeding, but the mayhem we’ve caused is still so large-scale, it’s way to early to talk about whether this passes some kind of cost-benefit test, and whether Iraq was the “but-for” cause of those developments in Iran and Libya (and whether we really needed their disarmament so badly) is just a speculation at this point.

  • I’m sure there are dozens of really smart people who were in position to influence decisions about how the Iraq war was run who for a long time now have been day-dreaming about the woulda-shoulda-coulda of the war. It’s a case that goes beyond what you always hear about warfare being unpredictable– the planning process didn’t go well and incompetent decision-making was going on by political people.

  • It’s kind of funny that we were in the process of transforming our military into something to fight a hypothetical new kind of warfare which we didn’t know quite the shape it was going to take- basically we were creating a more hit-and-run army that was incorporating a lot of new vehicles and infantry-support-using-vehicles ideas- and then we went and used that army to occupy a huge nation in a hostile-nation-with-and-insurgency situation. That’s the kind of thing military historians are going to look at as one of history’s blunders. They’re going to quote the Shinseki and Abizaid stuff (for example, about needing more troops to do the occupation than we actually used) forever and say, “Duh.”

  • Kristol twists everything to fit his distorted view. His drivel is not even worth pondering. One day justice will slap that condescending smirk off his pretentious face.

    Nothing will ever justify what we did to Iraq and consequently, to ourselves. It will remain as one of our great periods of shame for all of history.

  • “Nothing will ever justify what we did to Iraq and consequently, to ourselves. It will remain as one of our great periods of shame for all of history.” -bjobotts

    Never, ever should we live down this shame! We, the people, have allowed this. It is our cross to bear. Not Bush, US!

    Iraq ranks up there with the infamy of Germany.

  • Well, just for the amusement of it, imagine for a moment that it’s true – indulge me. Iran took a nervous look across its border, and noticed a gigantic standing army kicking the bejesus out of the neighbours. Oh, you’ll have to disregard also that the neighbours in question were Iran’s greatest enemy in the region. Then, too, you’ll have to take out the part where Iran (a predominantly Shiite nation) noticed the giant army empowering the Shiites, and putting the blocks to the Sunnis.

    OK, forget it. This just isn’t going to work. I wanted to get to the point where I could say, “Le Voila!!! The big scary army is only going to maintain its scare-the-nuclear-pants-off-everybody status AS LONG AS IT STAYS THERE!” Then I realized that (a) this is exactly what the Bush administration wants to do, and (b) trying to change the course of the Bush administration – and its worshippers – using reason has never worked before.

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