So now that we have moved fully to the phase of the war where everyone wonders who has the damn plan, let’s look back at my standard for the war being worthwhile.
The exception being smallpox. If we don’t turn up evidence of a nuclear program and/or smallpox, this war was pointless. Nukes are the only real WMD and if he didn’t have an active program (and I believe he did), containment would have worked just fine, thank you.
So pretty much, the war wasn’t worth it. When I take Shrub’s position and I’m wrong, it just hurts all the more.
I still believe we would have been in a war with Iraq eventually, but there is no excuse for not building up more international support for action given what we know now.
That said, there could be a legitimate defense of acting in good faith on bad information. Is that what the administration did? Yes and no. Yes, they thought there was more of a threat. But no on two counts. They pushed the edge of intelligence. More importantly, they didn’t act with caution.
What does this mean? As I’ve long argued, the country would have been well served to follow Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, and Joe Biden’s move to require the President to seek out more international support. I don’t think that is a mistake Congress will be making in the future. For one, Dick Gephardt won’t be there to undercut such efforts in the future.
Poor planning is especially egregious in a planning agency as Jacob Weisberg points out in one of his far too few columns since becoming editor in chief of Slate.
the big idea The thinking behind the news.
Occupational Hazards
How the Pentagon forgot about running Iraq.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Thursday, Nov. 6, 2003, at 9:44 AM PT
The shooting down on Sunday of a Chinook helicopter, which claimed more American lives than any episode since the fall of Saddam Hussein, confirms what the Bush administration has spent weeks attempting to deny: The occupation of Iraq is going badly.
It is not at all surprising that we’ve run into trouble over there. The difficulties we have faced, from looting to the lack of viable institutions, were largely to be expected from a devastated post-totalitarian society in a part of the world overwhelmingly hostile to the United States and its interests. What is surprising?amazing, in fact?is how unprepared we were for these problems. Much of the discussion in the postwar period was focused on the question of where those weapons of mass destruction went. An even more important question is how the Bush administration failed to prepare for what it knew was coming. How did the world’s greatest military power plan the invasion of a country without also planning its occupation?
David Rieff’s Nov. 2 article in the New York Times Magazine offers pieces of an answer. The neoconservative Iraq hawks inside the Pentagon?Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith?thought our troops would be welcomed as liberators and that the Iraqi National Congress could run the country for us (a view Gideon Rose demolished in Slate back in April). Wolfowitz, in particular, was known for his view that fixing Iraq would provoke a reverse-domino effect of democratization throughout the Middle East. Those who bought into this wishful thinking didn’t want to hear about the potential problems.
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The hawks’ big mistake was not in thinking that optimistic scenario might be borne out. Their mistake?especially stunning because the Pentagon is essentially a planning agency?was not preparing for alternate scenarios that were, at the very least, equally likely. The neoconservative architects of the invasion seem not to have, at any point, seriously engaged the question, "What if things do not go the way we hope they will?" What if the Iraqis are glad to be rid of Saddam but not glad to have the Marines as neighbors? What if Ahmad Chalabi turns out not to be the next Vaclav Havel? The Pentagon spends hundreds of millions of dollars staging elaborate war games to help anticipate unexpected turns in battle. Somehow, it neglected to game out the postwar peace.
Is Iraq going as badly as the loudest naysayers? No. But it isn’t as good as it should be with better planning of the operation and for the contingencies that have developed.
For those who heard McCain on NewsHour the other night, he made an essential point
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Yes, and if we say we’re withdrawing then obviously that sends another bad signal. I think we should not announce withdrawal. I think we should say we’re going to do what it takes. We’re going to find out where it is that we need more people.
We have got 130,000 troops there. At any time there’s 30,000 of these on patrol — of the 130,000 that are there — because of this tooth to tail ratio that we call in the military. So we need more in that area, more active, more proactive and frankly, when Iraqi mothers are afraid to send their children to school, then I think that the bad people have attained a degree of influence, which is disturbing.
JIM LEHRER: Senator, you have gone public with this in the last few days. You have just repeated it and expanded on it here for us. Have you said this privately to President Bush or Vice President Cheney or Secretary Powell or Secretary Rumsfeld or anybody else in the administration?
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: When I came back in August, I made public statements about the need for more troops. I talked with Dr. Rice. I talked with Secretary Rumsfeld. I talked with Secretary Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about this and I was very public in my comments then. I was hoping that I was wrong. But in August, which was several months ago now, I said, look, unless we change this equation, then things are going to get measurably worse.
And, time is not on our side in these things of Jim. We have a habit to a degree of treating Iraq the same way we treated Japan and Germany. We should be treating them more like Italy and France as liberated countries rather than conquered ones.
More good stuff in his comments on the situation in Russia.
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