It Didn’t Change Things Enough
by digby
There has been a lot of chatter on TV and online in the last week about this video of Dick Cheney saying back in 1993 that invading Iraq would lead to a quagmire. It’s a great piece of video, but it’s not something we haven’t been aware of from the beginning of the Iraq war. Not that the press bothered to ask the administration about it at the time, of course. But even if they had, they would have come up with this standard reply, which Cheney was giving as recently as 2007:
Q Back in 1991, you talked about how military action in Iraq would be the classic definition of a quagmire. Have you been disturbed to see how right you were? Or people certainly said that you were exactly on target in your analysis back in 1991 of what would happen if the U.S. tried to go in —
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I stand by what I said in ’91. But look what’s happened since then — we had 9/11. We’ve found ourselves in a situation where what was going on in that part of the globe and the growth and development of the extremists, the al Qaeda types that are prepared to strike the United States demonstrated that we weren’t safe and secure behind our own borders. We weren’t in Iraq when we got hit on 9/11. But we got hit in ’93 at the World Trade Center, in ’96 at Khobar Towers, or ’98 in the East Africa embassy bombings, 2000, the USS Cole. And of course, finally 9/11 right here at home. They continued to hit us because we didn’t respond effectively, because they believed we were weak. They believed if they killed enough Americans, they could change our policy because they did on a number of occasions. That day has passed. That all ended with 9/11.
9/11 changed everything. We’ve heard it a thousand times. And maybe it’s true. But when it comes to Iraq, it was always gibberish. If anything, 9/11 made all of Cheney’s earlier admonitions against invading Iraq more true, not less. But the neocons had been agitating for war with Iraq for some years by that time and they weren’t going to stop and reevaluate their crusade in light of those terrorist attacks. They were just going to barrel ahead using the attacks as an excuse to do what they had wanted to do for years. It’s not that 9/11 changed everything. It’s that it didn’t change things enough.
I don’t know why I’m beating this drum at this late date, but it’s always driven me absolutely nuts that they never get called on this. If invading Iraq was too risky in 1991, when the world was more stable than it had been in more than a hundred years and our great rivals of the 20th century had been rendered impotent, then why in the world did anyone think it was a good idea to rush headlong into an invasion after 9/11 when the the risk of upending the stability of the region in a time of Islamic extremism was a hundred times worse?
It’s not that some sort of military response to 9/11 was out of the question, no matter what. If someone is attacked they have a right to respond out of self defense. If Saddam actually had been involved, then there would at least have been a case for what they wanted to do, even though 9/11 made the likely response even more risky and destabilizing than it would have been before the attacks. But he wasn’t, and everyone knew it. In fact, what everyone also knew was that while he was a very bad actor, he kept Islamic fundamentalism off the table in one of the biggest countries in the middle east. It’s not Kissingerian realism to simply acknowledge that invading Iraq during a period of rising Islamic fundamentalism and violence was far more risky than it had been before 9/11. (Certainly, we could have waited until the smoke cleared before stomping into the region and deposing one of the tyrants who was keeping the whole thing together. Getting the lay of the land is usually considered first before you just charge into the clearing.)
But the neocons had been agitating for Saddam’s overthrow, with the intention of installing their pal Ahamad Chalabi, their George Washington of Mesopotamia, for years as part of their larger Pax Americana wet dream. They saw 9/11 as an excuse to do what they’d always wanted to do and they didn’t consider that the world was a very different place than it had been before 9/11. That was the fundamental error.
This was the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States and now we as a nation have to find a way, in George Mitchell’s words—”to manage a disaster.” but—I would urge the president not to try to separate out the personal issues of being blamed in history for this mistake and instead recognize it’s not about him. It’s about our country and we all have to find a way to get our troops home and to prevent a regional conflagration there.
Bush and Cheney will never recognize this. The question is if the next president will either — or if he or she does, whether they will have the political will to confront it instead of building failed myth upon failed myth as unimaginative leaders often do. And in any case, I’m not sure avoiding a regional conflagration is possible. (I certainly don’t believe it’s possible with the Americans sitting right in the middle of everything recruiting enemies at a hundred times the pace they are killing them.) The Bush administration let the genie out of the bottle at the very worst time you could possibly do it. It’s going to be nearly impossible now to make him go back in.
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