WMD issues aside, the Iraq war was still the correct strategic choice. The Middle East is a breeding ground for terrorists. The only way to ‘win’ is to wade into the swamp and drain it. The Kerry strategy is basically to get a better screen door.
In my opinion, one of the reasons the global jihadists are doing what they are doing is because they have become convinced that they can win. They believe that the west has become decadent and fractured from within. They believe that they can win because they can break our will to fight. And why do they think that? For good reason. Because for two decades the U.S. has responded to increasingly violent and brazen attacks with constant retreat.
Bin Laden has a favorite saying: “People want to follow the strong horse.” As long as wide swaths of people in the Middle East see Bin Laden as a strong horse, someone who is taking it to the man, he is going to get a flood of recruits. The United States needed to flex a little muscle in the region and start changing minds. When the average Middle Easterner sees Bin Laden as a pain in the ass who is simply stirring up trouble their backyard, funding to his organization will slow and it will be harder to get recruits. In the meantime, they have to learn that going toe to toe with the U.S. military means a rapid death and little damage to the U.S, military.
That’s another good reason. A third is that occupying Iraq gives the U.S. leverage over other nations in the region. A good example of this payoff is Syria’s agreement to withdraw from Lebanon. A good reason for that decision is the presence of a couple of armored divisions next door.
Then there’s democratic reform. Iraq was a good choice for this experiment. Among Middle Eastern countries, it has one of the more educated and sophisticated populations. The Kurds have had a functioning democracy for a long time. The Shia have shown every desire for democracy, as have many Sunnis. In fact, the only ones who don’t really want one are the ex-regime dead-enders, jihadists, and foreign fighters making up the insurgency.
A Democratic Iraq will give hope to the Middle East. It will act as a propaganda tool, encouraging reform in other countries. A prosperous, free Iraq will be a stabilizing influence, an example of how democracy can work in the Middle East.
Then there’s the legal justification. Iraq was unique in that it was the only country that the U.S. had a legal justification to attack. Technically, the U.S. and Iraq were still at war, under a condition of cease-fire. Plus, Iraq was in violation on several U.N. resolutions, and a threat from the U.N. that failure to meet them would lead to serious consequences. Saddam was also brutalizing his own people and paying terrorists in the Palestinian territories. He was also threatening his neighbors, and had attacked two of them in the recent past. So there was a moral and legal case for removing him.
You can not beat terrorists by playing defense. That forces you to be right 100% of the time, and they only have to get lucky once. You need to solve the problem. Bush is trying to solve the problem. Going into Iraq is more like going into North Africa to take out Hitler. It’s a single, strategic battle in a much larger war. It was a smart, bold strategy that may yet work.
So who is to blame? Well, certainly the intelligence community failed. Who is to blame for that? The roots of that failure go all the way back to the Church comission hearings and the repeated gutting of the CIA’s capability by a hostile Congress. The CIA was no longer able to recruit people with ‘dirty hands’, which made it impossible to put human assets in terrorist organizations and the Iraq government. The CIA was under constant threats of funding cuts, and took tremendous amounts of criticism from the left in the 1970’s and the 1980’s.
So the intelligence community screwed up. It needs fixing. The occupation has been riddled with mistakes, but let’s make something clear - this constant criticism of Bush going into Iraq ‘without a plan’ is just not true. There was a plan. There were many plans. The military and civilian planners spent huge efforts on the really important stuff. Putting out the expected oil field fires, being attacked with WMD, Dams being destroyed and flooding huge swaths of land. Immense effort was put into preparing for the expected famines as food distribution lines were cut. Does anyone remember early in the war how all the special logistics were set up to ship food into cities as they were being occupied? Remember the work done in the damaged shipyards so cargo ships could get in with supplies for the population? The lines of Iraqis getting water off of military trucks?
There was a plan, and it led to an invasion that went remarkably well, and an aftermath that prevented widespread suffering.
But no plan is perfect. I have argued many times that governments can’t run a complex economy, nor plan for every possible situation in the future. They just can’t, and that applies to occupations as well. That’s why you need to get the population up and working again and let them run their own country. I knew the occupation would be a bit of a balls-up - it’s inevitable. But it’s a necessary evil. It’s just one of the hard things you have to muddle through when you are at war, just as the U.S. had to occupy countries in WWII.