Tony’s Dilemma

Matthew Yglesias has a great post up about the assertion in the Tom Friedman column today that Blair couldn’t make the real case for invasion because of the British public’s shallow dislike for George W. Bush’s personality and because they hadn’t gone through 9/11.

I think that antipathy to the government of George W. Bush is a perfectly sound reason for doubting the humanitarian case for war that Friedman and others on the left have been pushing. The argument would, in short, be that before the war Bush had been given the opportunity to govern one country and he basically made a hash of it. We’ve seen bad budgeting, crony capitalism, social intolerance, large-scale dishonesty, and a wavering commitment to democratic procedure, liberal transparency, and all other norms of good government. Now as Friedman has repeatedly been at pains to point out, winning the peace in Iraq will be a difficult business and it seems eminently reasonable to ask whether or not the person in charge of the operation is up to the task.

I agree that questioning this particular administration’s ability to carry out such an ambitious nation building plan was always perfectly reasonable, even if you agreed with the goals on humanitarian terms. I always thought that the Iraqi people were tough enough to hold out for another couple of years until we could get someone competent in office.

But, I also think that Friedman has completely misunderstood Blair’s dilemma with respect to why he had to make the imminent threat argument. It wasn’t because the British hadn’t experienced 9/11 and therefore needed to be persuaded that they were under threat. The reason Blair had to make the phony case for terrorist ties and WMD was because Americans needed to be persuaded that 9/11 had something to do with Iraq. He knew that this opportunity to remove the tyrant only existed because Bush was willing to frighten the American public into believing that Saddam was involved and that he was planning to launch biological, chemical and nuclear weapons at the US in his next attack.

Imagine if Bush had said in his SOTU, “We were just dramatically attacked by Islamic fundamentalists who have declared holy war on our country. We removed the government that was providing them haven in Afghanistan, but many of them are still hiding there and in Pakistan and their influence continues to grow throughout the Muslim world. Kim Jong Il of North Korea told us that he has nukes and is ready to sell them to terrorists to feed his starving population. Despite these huge immediate challenges, I think this is the perfect moment, with only our good friend Great Britain by our side, to launch a completely unrelated operation to liberate the Iraqi people from the Stalinist tyrant who we have allowed to remain in power for more than 30 years. We think that if we build a democracy in Iraq that terrorists will see the error of their ways eventually.”

In the unlikely event that Americans agreed that this was a good time to begin launching humanitarian operations only very tangentially related to terrorism, he would have run right up against another argument against invading Iraq right after 9/11 which was that invading a middle eastern country immediately in the wake of 9/11 would potentially alienate many of the Arab states that had been helpful in tracking down al Qaeda and was likely to create even more resentment and be a recruiting bonanza for terrorists.

A majority of Americans might have then concluded that a long term and extremely expensive humanitarian mission in Iraq was not worth throwing away our long term alliances and the support of the entire world after 9/11 just when we needed as much global cooperation as possible to combat terrorism. Certainly, people might have at least asked for more than happy talk about “sending messages” and “setting examples” if the cost of unilateralism as measured in lives and tax dollars — much less national security — had ever been discussed.

Friedman, however, persists in his completely unsubstantiated conclusion that America and Britain invading and “building a more decent Iraq would help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive political track and send a message to all the neighboring regimes that Western governments were not going to just sit back and let them incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians, whose fanaticism threatened all open societies.”

He has said this over and over again.

Can someone please explain to me why he thinks Iraq’s neighbors would learn the lesson that the invasion proved that the West was not going to let them “incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians whose fanaticism threaten all open societies” when Iraq featured none of those problems?!! Does he think that Arab leaders are as stupid as the Americans who bought the mawkish tripe that Saddam was behind 9/11? For Gawd’s sake…

The lesson is that America invaded an Arab country that posed no threat, and had nothing to do with 9/11 because it saw the opportunity to get away with it. As for building “a more decent Iraq,” I’d feel a little bit more confident if that hustler Ahmed Chalabi wasn’t taking over the intelligence apparatus and using it to settle old scores — with Wolfie and Rummy’s enthusiastic permission, evidently.

I admit that as a hater of totalitarians here and elsewhere, I generally agree with Blair that if we have the capability of getting rid of a tyrannical dictator with minimal loss of life and the support of the international community, that it is a worthy goal. Nobody has to make the humanitarian argument to me. But as the British people wisely understood (and you have to wonder why Blair and Friedman didn’t) the problem in this instance was that the President of the United States was an incompetent puppet, his advisors were either ineffectual milquetoasts or radical nutcases, and his timing was cynically opportunistic and counterproductive.

As Yglesias points out, there was absolutely no reason to think that they were going to be any more prudent or competent in this arena than in any other. It was obvious from the beginning that the competing factions of the foreign policy shop in this White House were engaged in a constant tug of war for the ADD-led brain of President Treadmill. The President’s own father had to have his friend Brent Scowcroft write an op-ed piece in the NY Times to persuade him to muzzle Mad Dog Cheney in the run up to the war. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that they weren’t exactly a well oiled machine over there.

I don’t know if Americans will ever face up to the fact that Bush and his cronies either didn’t give a damn about 9/11 or, even more frightening, actually believe that Saddam was behind it. But, Tom Friedman should know better.