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Confessions of an Iraq War Monger

[additional-authors]
September 9, 2015

I admit it.

I supported 2003’s Iraq War, just as at the time did virtually every Democratic U.S. Senate luminary. Now, according to a critic in the Journal's Comments  of my joint piece with the Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper on the Mideast background of the current European refugee crisis, this is sufficient for indicting me as an unrepentant neocon apologist for the failures of the George W. Bush administration. I speak here for myself, not Rabbi Cooper, in explanation more than self-defense.

I did not support the Iraq War because I thought that Saddam Hussein was weeks or months away from developing a nuclear weapon. Maybe Colin Powell believed this. I did not. I was, however, surprised by the post-U.S. invasion revelations that the Iraqi nuclear program had been largely stymied by the Saddam’s family mafia’s internal contradictions in ruling Iraq. What I did believe then—and still do—is that Saddam was pursuing a comprehensive WMD program across a broad front. Earlier Saddam had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the the Kurds, and further evidence was uncovered in abundance by American occupation troops.

In addition, I knew that Saddam had flaunted a score of UN Security Council inspection resolutions, and was financing, independently of Al Qaeda, terror against Israel and more widely across the region and even beyond. That was enough for me to support war. I did so in the context of the post-9/11 world which, I hoped, had created an opportunity for the U.S.—not to reinvent Iraq—but to midwife a federalized Sunni-Shia-Kurd regime strong enough to be a counterbalance to Iran.

My confidence in the Cheney-Rumsfeld team behind the Bush national security presidency proved exaggerated. Partly, this was the result of bad luck: the Turks—our NATO ally and today President Obama’s Mideast favorite—betrayed us by denying entry through Northern Iraq into the Tikrit region where Saddam’s loyalists were concentrated. Rather than deliver a decisive blow, we allowed them to disappear into the woodwork and reconstitute as a deadly Sunni insurgency. The disastrous postwar Regency of L. Paul Bremer—who managed to alienate rather than coopt or destroy Saddam’s surviving Army—made things much worse.

The Surge Strategy under General Petraeus, starting in 2007, was a partial success, creating a precarious stability that allowed Vice President Biden to boast in 2010 that—under Obama’s leadership—Iraq had become “an American success story.” In fact, the dicey situation required tough, competent leadership from the Obama Administration to prevent a final unraveling. None was forthcoming. The result was the rise of ISIS and our current grave dilemma.

I believe that there is a difference between “good” and “bad” wars. The bad wars are unmitigated disasters. The good wars are mitigated disasters. For example, World War II saved the world from Hitler, but laid the ground for 70 years of Soviet occupation of Eastern European and Mao’s savage revolutionary rule of China.

The Iraq War was not a good war. Yet the disaster was not—and need not have been—totally unmitigated. During the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S.’s display of intimidating military power convinced Libya’s Qadaffi regime to dismantle its nuclear program and Iran’s theocratic regime to halt temporarily its nuclear program. Then the Obama Administration, in cahoots with the Europeans, caused the unintentional unraveling of Libya. And now we have an Iran nuclear deal that, at best, delays by a decade Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapons capacity.

Having admitted my errors regarding the Iraq War, I await Obama’s apologists to admit the grievous failings of his Middle East policies and their terrible spillover consequences now into Europe.

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