The Boundries Of Our Power

by digby

I’m glad to see Steve Clemons being quoted saying this in today’s harsh Philadelphia Inquirer editorial:

Before Iraq, said Steven C. Clemons, a useful mystique surrounded the strength of the United States. Clemons heads foreign policy studies at the New America Foundation.

Rogue nations such as Iran didn’t know the boundaries of our power. This blundering war of choice in Iraq has revealed them.

I’ve been saying this for a long time and it still seems to me to be the most salient strategic argument for not going into Iraq after 9/11. Back in February 2004 I wrote:

I get the impression from casual conversation and reading the papers that a lot of Americans understand that Junior lied to get us into Iraq, but they don’t think it really hurt anything. In fact, since Saddam was a prick and it didn’t really cost us much to take him out (well, except for the loss of life and the billions spent), it was a pretty good thing to do, on balance. Kicking a little butt after 9/11 probably sent a message we needed to send.

The problem with this is that they don’t understand what a huge error in judgment the Iraq operation was in terms of our long term security and readiness. Nor do they understand the extent to which we damaged our alliances and how dangerous it was to blow our credibility at a time like this.

[…]

… Wes Clark and others made the argument some time ago that Iraq was a distraction from the real threat and it has been said by many that the invasion would lead to more recruitment of terrorists. And, there have been other discussions about the effects of a stretched thin military of reserves and national guard troops. But, I haven’t heard any talk about what an enormous amount of damage has been done by the conscious exposure of our intelligence services as paper tigers.

Regardless of whether they hyped, sexed up or pimped out the intelligence on Iraq, the fact is that by invading Iraq the way we did and being proved complete asses now that no WMD have been discovered, one of our best defenses has been completely destroyed. It may have always been nothing but a pretense that we had hi-tech, super duper satellites with x-ray vision and all-knowing eavesdropping devices that can hear a pin drop half a world away but it was a very useful pretense. Nobody knew exactly what we were capable of. Now they do. It appears to everyone on the planet that our vaunted intelligence services couldn’t find water even if they fell off of a fucking aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

It’s this kind of thing that makes really crazy wackos like Kim Jong Il make mistakes. When a hugely powerful country like the United States proves to the entire world that it is not as powerful as everyone thought, petty tyrants and ambitious generals tend to get excited. This is why mighty nations should never fight wars unless they absolutely have to. It is always better to have enemies wonder whether they are as omnipotent as they appear. They should not risk proving otherwise unless they have no choice.

The Bush administration (and frankly, many in the country) believed that it was necessary to make a strong show of force in order to deter more terrorist attacks.It didn’t matter where, just that it was done. But Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and others who had been nurturing ever more bizarre, ivory tower theories of American power over two decades believed that it would be better to do it with fewer troops than the professionals considered necessary. Not finding WMD was never considered a serious problem, because they had never really felt it would make a difference one way or the other. Indeed, on some levels, it was better if they didn’t. To prove to our enemies that even if we lie, even if we send in a handful of troops, even if we don’t prepare and even if we go it alone with only Great Britain and Poland as our allies, we still win — well, that’s power.

(They have used this theory of power quite effectively in domestic politics. They prefer to win with a slight majority and then declare a great victory, rub the other side’s nose in it, because it creates a sense of helplessness to constantly lose narrowly.)

Take another look at that famous comment by the anonymous Bush aide in the New York Times magazine article by Ron Susskind:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This was not metaphorical. They literally believed that they could create their own reality. I don’t think people really understand that. And why wouldn’t they? It’s what they had done for some years with great success in this country.
It’s their worldview. They believe that if the act like victors, if they say they are strong, if they procalim victory — then it’s true.

The mantra on the right remains that everything changed after 9/11. (Dick Cheney said it again today.) Let’s assume that’s correct. If so, then undertaking this war was a recklessly dangerous experiment in psychological warfare that failed and left this country much weaker than it was before 9/11. All this money spent, all this fighting, all this messianic freedom rhetoric has actually made this country weaker than it has been at any time since the end of WWII. We have proven that we are a befuddled, undisciplined giant that allowed a radical political faction with half-baked delusions of grandeur to hijack the country. Either we make a precipitous course correction pretty soon, or the rest of the world will start banding together to get us under control.

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