Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is often – no, almost always - on the same beam as me, and I have never challenged any of his assumptions until today. As regular readers of this blog know, Richard’s columns are often cited, always glowingly. But in his column in today’s paper I’m convinced that he has built his argument on a false premise, namely that the United States might have succeeded in Iraq but for the incompetence of the Bush Administration. Richard is big and brave enough to say that he was wrong on buying into the Iraq adventure but, again, for the wrong reason, the incompetence thing. This is not to say that Bush was competent in this social and military experiment, rather that incompetence was but a secondary problem in the sad state in which we find ourselves.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/03/AR2006040301609.html?referrer=emailarticle
While Richard recognizes that the generals who counseled we could not attain our objectives with the number of troops being assembled and that a force of far greater magnitude would be required to occupy and pacify the country after the Saddam regime was toppled were right, it is there that the columnist makes his mistake. It was not the incompetence of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, et al that drove the Hummer off the cliff; instead, it was the hubris of those same people who believed that we could enter into the heart of Islamic civilization, Iraq, and expect to make that the linchpin of our success in the war on terror.
By diverting our attention from Afghanistan where we were engaged in overthrowing the Taliban and hunting down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, a war in which we were supported by almost the entire civilized world, by cooking the intelligence to the show that Iraq was a threat to us and in cahoots with those who had attacked us on 9/11, and by believing that we could reshape Islam and gain strategic advantage over the Persian Gulf that we went wrong.
The neocons provided the intellectual muscle for this idea, and it was Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon gurus who believed that our military would show to better advantage in Iraq. Their salesmanship to the true believer, George W. Bush, set the nation into the abyss that Richard describes so well.
Turning Richard’s argument around, it is my view that if we had instituted a draft and enlarged the military beyond the numbers ever dreamed of by the generals and if we had sent a force even greater than that suggested by former Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki that we would have ultimately wound up pretty much where we are today. Our troops would have to come home someday and spending at a rate double the disabling figure that we expend today would make withdrawal an even greater imperative than we now face. And with withdrawal would come the political situation with all its sectarian and tribal strife similar to that we lament at present.
So instead of fighting al Qaeda and those governments like the Taliban that directly supported it, we went for broke and decided that we could transform the world and enhance our strategic position in the Middle East and the world – and we failed. Not just incompetence, Richard, it was the hubris that did us in.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
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Bill,
I am surprised to hear you say you are almost always on the same wave-length as Richard Cohen, since I am often on the same length with you, and basically see red most of the time that I read him on the Middle East.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that Cohen totally missed the point today. It was certainly the hubris of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith people and the neoconservatives in general that is the tragic cause of the war. But Richard Cohen does not look “big and brave” to me in admitting he was wrong. He says only that the war advocates, like him, “are humbled” and that aside from overestimating the Bushes, they “underestimated the enemy.”
Nowhere at all is there the slightest inkling that he knows that the whole enterprise was profoundly morally wrong. Who were we to think we had the right to go into this ancient part of the world, and bomb these people into going our way, into satisfying our view of where the Middle East should be?!
I believe that a central element in all this so-called strategic thinking was what the neoconservatives thought was good for Israel, a goal repeatedly expressed by Richard Cohen, and lots of other opinion-makers, a view that has led not only to this tragic enterprise but other mistakes in the Middle East, such as the shameful actual abandonment (despite some lip service to the contrary) of concern for the humanity of the Palestinians and the appalling idea of bombing the Iranians because they want nuclear power.
The Israel question is, in my view, the virtually unacknowledged elephant in the living room (or however the expression goes). The major newspapers and many of the think tanks not only do not address it; when the issue is raised by others, it is almost always countered by the hideous accusation of anti-Semitism. Fortunately there are still a few courageous people who do challenge the insane the-US-must-support-whatever-Israel-wants-or-does philosophy even though merely raising the issue can bring great opprobrium upon the challenger.
But until we divorce our Middle East policy from the concept that some in our country (perhaps more so than in Israel itself) see as the passive and unquestioning relationship between Israeli policy and United States foreign policy, we will continue to go tragically wrong in this part of the world, wrong, not only strategically, but more fundamentally, morally.
April 5, 2006
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