A long post on Iraq war retrospection and the virtues of intuition

Slate is now running a series of essays by prominent neocons who supported invading Iraq and now regret it. They are worth reading. And I want to say that I truly appreciate the thoughtfulness and brutal candor that went into these. They got me thinking about the most fatal misjudgments the Bush enablers made in the run up to war.

1. Thinking Bush and Co. follow the same moral rules as the rest of us; lacking an immediate negative gut reaction to the notion of giving these people war powers

Andrew Sullivan's essay is headlined, "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality."

...my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions.

In my view, that misjudgment was the central failure of neocons and liberal hawks leading up to the war. They focused on the facts more than the personalities involved--and call me cynical, but in politics that is never a good idea.

The facts: Saddam Hussein is a real asshole and the world would be better off without him. He has WMDs, or at the very least is going to get them as soon as he can (as far as we knew at the time). And he is a ticking time bomb in the middle of a region that we, the US, need to stabilize.

--->OK, now let intuition step in here. That all makes some sense, even ignoring the bogus Iraq-al Qaeda connection. But wait. We're going to go to war...against Iraq again?...at the urging of this guy and his pack?

That's where it all breaks down. There are some people that just should not be behind the wheel of a vehicle like the focused might of an invading American military, and George W. Bush is one of those people. That's because he's not like us. Guy might run down a pedestrian if it fits his kooky world view. Do you really want to be part of that?

There's a reason we have political reflexes. They keep you from getting burned, as when you pull your hand away from a hot stove, and I trust them a good deal of the time.

Tragically, as Sullivan points out, the knee-jerk reaction of many liberals to the prospect of war with Iraq may have only helped push prominent neocons into the pro-war camp. He writes,

When I heard the usual complaints from the left about how we had no right to intervene, how Bush was the real terrorist, how war was always wrong, my trained ears heard the same cries that I had heard in the 1980s. So, I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it entirely with the far left—or boomer nostalgia—and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington. I wasn't wrong about some of this. Some of those reflexes were at work (which is why I find Obama's far more pragmatic opposition so striking in retrospect). I became much too concerned with fighting that old internal ideological battle and failed to think freshly or realistically about what the consequences of intervention could be.

Morality is one thing--competence at waging war is another. Sullivan seems to disagree, but I am completely with Jeffrey Goldberg in his own misjudgment about the wisdom of giving the Bush administration the OK to fight Iraq. I would never have expected this level of clusterfuck either, much as I hate those guys.

If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.

2. Buying into the idea of opportunistic democratic state-building in the Middle East

Besides who was making the case to attack Iraq, the whats of the situation set intuitive alarm bells dinging for people like me. Not being the most dedicated student of U.S middle east policy, I admit, I can only call the connection between the following things a little fishy.

a) The U.S. and particularly, we may speculate, the Bush family, have a well-earned grudge against Saddam Hussein. Some of our friends (?) in the region also have a problem with him.
b) All of a sudden, after 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan. A move, by the way, that I supported then and still do. The clear tie between al Qaeda and the Taliban seemed to justify this invasion.
c) Then, all of a sudden, not only do we discover that Saddam Hussein has WMDs, but also that he has been supporting al Qaeda. We have to go in there. It just seems a little...I dunno...too convenient.

Neocons like Richard Cohen not only failed to hear the alarm bells. They agreed that this was a convenient excuse to invade Iraq, another great misjudgment that helped drive us toward this war. Cohen writes,

[After 9/11] I wanted to go to "them," whoever "they" were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us....Saddam was a sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.

That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war in Iraq. It did not take me all that long, however, to have second thoughts—and I expressed them in my column. It was clear that Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden...So, the only justification left was, really, what the neocons had started with: a war to reorder the Middle East. This had a certain appeal, since the region was unstable, undemocratic, repressive, and downright dangerous.

3. Failing to consider the full potential costs of war

And finally, the misjudgment that is acknowledged in almost all of these essays: underestimating the potential costs, in blood and treasure, as they say, of the Iraq project. Ooops.

Andrew Sullivan:

...what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in a truly serious moral argument. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.

Jacob Weisberg:

...if I'm going to advocate occupying another country, I'd damned well better learn something about its history and culture. Were I part of the generation that lived through Vietnam, I might have avoided this blunder.

Josef Joffe:

By destroying Saddam's armies, the United States flattened the strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion. By empowering the Shiites, it opened the way to an ideological alliance between Najaf and Qum, the two centers of the faith on either side of the Iraq-Iran border. And by entangling itself in an open-ended war in Iraq, the United States squandered precisely those military assets that would have kept Iran in awe. Would the Ahmadinejad regime grasp so boldly for nuclear weapons if U.S. power and credibility were still intact?