On “Meet the Press” Tim Russert has asked every Congressman who voted for the Iraq war resolution whether knowing what we know now, if they would still have voted for it. Almost without fail all of the Congressmen equivocate and dodge the question, often saying things like “the past is the past”.
This is crazy.
I propose that the litmus test for people who want to be taken seriously on issues of national security from here on out is that they should answer unambiguously “no, of course not” to this question. Anyone who doesn’t take this stand clearly suffers from an inability to conduct rational calculus and exercise reasonable judgment.
Here’s a partial list of the things we know now three and a half years out:
1. Iraq had no WMD and was essentially contained
2. Iran has been one of the major beneficiaries of the Iraq conflict and is continuing with its nuclear weapons program unabated
3. At minimum almost 3,000 U.S. men and women have been killed and more than 20,000 seriously injured
4. The costs of the war are nearly 400 billion and rising, with estimated costs of at least 1 trillion when future medical costs for veterans is included
5. Iraq has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists around the world and increased the threats of terrorism
6. At minimum tens of thousands of Iraq civilians have been killed (with numbers perhaps as high as many hundreds of thousands)
7. The provision of basic services in Iraq, such as electricity, water, sewage, and oil production are now lower than under Saddam’s rule (making everyday life worse)
8. Iraq is in the grip of a terrible civil war and on the verge of complete collapse
9. The Iraqi government has sided with Shiite extremists, in league with death squads, and has praised Hezbollah
10. The U.S. military is stretched thin with many servicemen and women serving their third and forth tours
12. Episodes of abuse, such as at Abu Ghraib have helped to lower the U.S. image abroad to historic lows
12. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan because we don’t have sufficient resources in that country
13. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have displayed criminal incompetence at every turn and didn’t even begin plans for “winning the peace” until two months before the invasion
And the list goes on and on….
Anyone you still clings to the notion that perhaps this will all turn out well is simply in a state of denial or incapable of updating their prior beliefs based on new information.
There are two other issues, however, worth considering; whether the Iraq operation could’ve been executed better (and was therefore still sound in theory) and what to do now.
Even many of the original architects of the Iraq War now accept that given what we know now they would not have supported the invasion, but they argue that how things have played out is not their fault. They say that with a more competent administration we could’ve built a stable democracy in Iraq. Kevin Drum essentially dissects this folly, showing how the neocons never paid attention to issues of nation-building; in fact, they often disparaged it. They are not on the record having offered alternatives as to how the war could’ve been waged better and rarely did they ever mention democracy promotion.
What they are engaged in is little more than collective rationalization for a tragedy largely of their own making. To the oft-heard claim that if we had had more troops from the beginning the war would’ve been successful a report from the National Security Archives on a 1999 war game exercise for the invasion of Iraq puts this myth to rest. The games concluded that even with an invasion force of 400,000 the likelihood of stability was low.
The question of what to do now is obviously the most pressing. No matter how horribly conceived and executed this war has been, it is what we are stuck with. It appears that are only options are ‘bad’ and ‘worse’, but that “stay the course” is no longer one of them. Depending on the election results this Tuesday, we are poised to enter a new phase of the conflict, which I predict will be characterized by a slow draw-down of U.S. troops and more responsibility for the Iraqis to secure their own country and stop the bloodshed. Stay tuned; unfortunately, things could get much worse.
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Jason Scorse