Unending Crisis: National Security Policy After 9/11

Five: Iraq

107 F I V E Iraq I R aq In 2003 and theReafteR has cl aImed the RIchly deseRved title of poster child for misguided policy. It is difficult to summarize all the ways in which the decision to invade Iraq was in error. It is true that both candidates in the 2000 presidential election called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but there is a difference between campaign rhetoric and a national policy that leads the American people into an unnecessary, risky, and ultimately disastrous shooting war by means of misstatements and stealth. The actual reasons for the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq appear to be some combination of demonstrating to the world that the United States cannot be trifled with, securing access to oil, and the neoconservative delusion of making Israel safe and establishing Iraq as a pro-U.S. satellite democracy. If any of those motives had been presented to the American people as a reason for putting their sons and daughters in harm’s way and spending hundreds of billions of dollars out of the national treasury, it would have been overwhelmingly rejected. The Bush administration was well aware of this and therefore had to develop another reason. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz famously said that possession of weapons of mass destruction was the only reason on which everyone could agree. Hence the extraordinary effort to pressure the CIA to produce the necessary intelligence product and then for the White House to hype the threat as depicted in the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even though Vice President 108 ChAPTeR FIve Cheney made a number of trips to the CIA in an effort to shape the results, the NIE did not indicate that Saddam Hussein was in any way an imminent nuclear-weapon threat. Yet senior Bush administration officials soon were repeating “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” when referring to Iraq and WMD. Then, after dragging the United States into a war that was not necessary , the Bush administration did not prepare for what the CIA predicted would happen after the invasion and occupation—a vicious insurgency and a violent sectarian struggle between Shia and Sunni that would leave the country in ruins and Iran dominant in the region as well as thousands of U.S. military killed or grievously wounded. The U.S. Army was stretched beyond its limits, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, the victory in Afghanistan was thrown away, virtually the whole world, which had supported the United States after the 9/11 attacks, turned against the United States, and the U.S. economy was severely damaged, all this with little if any benefit to U.S. security. Even in August 2010, after all the blood and treasure expended, the departing U.S. commander, General Raymond Odierno, would say, when asked if the United States had made Iraq’s many existing divisions worse, “I don’t know. There’s all these issues that we don’t understand and that we had to work our way through. And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe.”1 On September 1, 2010, the New York Times commented on President Obama’s speech on the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq and the conclusion of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The speech also made us reflect on how little Mr. Bush accomplished by needlessly invading Iraq in March 2003—and then ludicrously declaring victory two months later. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction proved to be Bush administration propaganda. The war has not created a new era of democracy in the Middle East—or Iraq for that matter. There are stirrings of democratic politics in Iraq that give us hope. But there is no government six months after national elections. In many ways, the war has made Americans less safe, creating a new organization of terrorists and diverting the nation’s military resources and political will from Afghanistan. Deprived of its main adversary, a strong Iraq, Iran was left freer to pursue its nuclear program, to direct and finance extremist groups and to meddle in Iraq.2 IRAq 109 Andrew Bacevich was a U.S. Army officer for twenty-three years and is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. What he says in the preface to his...