As time passed, I came to fear that the invasion had probably been a disastrous mistake — perhaps the worst by any president in my lifetime.

That was after the WMD and the supposed Qaeda alliance turned out to be intelligence-agency fantasies grossly exaggerated by President Bush and his aides. And after the occupation turned into a blood-soaked disaster. And after many Iraqis who had initially greeted us as liberators switched to wanting us out, or dead. And after the Abu Ghraib photos. And after anti-Americanism soared to unprecedented levels around the world. And after experts confidently assured me that Iraq was doomed to civil war and chaos and would become a haven for terrorists.

I descended into dismay about Bush and his top people. I was driven deeper into it by administration claims of war-on-terrorism presidential powers that can only be called tyrannical: to seize anyone in the world, anywhere in the world; to imprison and interrogate the suspect indefinitely, incommunicado, with no semblance of due process; even (if the president chooses) to torture him. Not to mention Bush’s feckless failure to prevent North Korea from going nuclear, the Guantanamo abuses, the disdain for diplomacy, the irresponsible approach to global warming, the fiscal recklessness, the shifting of tax burdens from the rich to future generations, the swaggering refusal to ever admit error, the smirk, and more.

Now, though, I am rooting for Bush to go down in history as a great president.

That could happen, if his crazy gamble in Iraq pays off. (If it all comes crashing down, which is all too possible, he could be remembered as one of the worst presidents in history.) With the giddy success of the January elections, and with the Bush-promoted fervor for freedom suddenly sweeping through the Mideast, the hopes for a decent government in Iraq and revolutionary change throughout the Arab world no longer seem so forlorn. More and more Bush-bashers — ranging from comedian Jon Stewart to Lebanese Druse leader Walid Jumblatt, and even to some liberal Democratic senators and supercilious Europeans — are flirting with the heresy that he may just have been right.

How can we not root for Bush to win this campaign for Arab democracy, even if his chances still seem no better than even? And while celebrations are premature, shouldn’t we sometime Bush-bashers — and even the full-time Bush-haters — be prepared to give great credit to him and his neocons, if and when it becomes clear that they have engineered a historic breakthrough?

We could still, of course, assail Bush’s continuing claims of near-dictatorial power. (May the Supreme Court continue to save him, and us, from his worst instincts.) We could still trash the policies that we don’t like. We could still back a good Democratic nominee (if available) in 2008. We could still debate whether Bush is smarter than we thought, or just lucky.

But no matter how shallow, slippery, and smug Bush sometimes seems, if he ends up changing the world for the better, he will be entitled to a presumption of wisdom, even brilliance. Bush’s soaring rhetoric about "ending tyranny in our world" rang hollow to me on January 20, amid all the grim news from Iraq. Then came Iraq’s January 30 elections and the freedom ferment around the region. So when Bush spoke again of ending tyranny in a March 8 speech, the grandeur of his aspirations seemed more in tune with reality. The Arab spring has many causes, of course. But the big one was Bush’s removal of Saddam.

These thoughts are stirred by the cascade of news reports, analyses, and firsthand accounts of the hopeful developments since the Iraqi elections — in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was especially struck by two items that a Bush-doubting friend forwarded to me.

First came a March 5 op-ed in The Valley News, of Lebanon, N.H., by Haviland Smith, a retired CIA station chief who served in Europe and the Middle East and as chief of the counter-terrorism staff:

"As one who accepts containment and alliances as the … only way to deal with enemies, I have found President Bush’s implementation of the radical new foreign policy of pre-emptive unilateralism frightening, wrongheaded and doomed…. The primary rationale for the invasion — the threat of weapons of mass destruction — proved to be a farce…"Recently, however, it has become increasingly clear that things are not going as badly in Iraq as I had feared and, to be brutally honest, not as badly as some [Americans] had hoped…. I go to bed at night with the nagging worry that the crazy neocon fathers may conceivably have been right in pushing pre-emptive unilateralism. Have I been stubbornly and stupidly wrong? .."Only history can be the final arbiter of our success or failure. In the meantime, it does seem somewhat unseemly that so many Americans are waging their own battles against a policy that, although a long shot, could radically alter the situation in the Middle East in our favor and deal a major blow to those who would continue to try to do us harm."

Then came a copy of a March 8 e-mail from Iraq, written by Manal Omar, an American of Arab ancestry who is the Iraq director of Women for Women International. Some excerpts: "I wish everyone a wonderful International Women’s Day! … I always use [it] as a time of reflection … I switch back and forth from disappointment to hope to depression to optimism so quickly and frequently that I have developed mental whiplash…"I never imagined it would get as bad as it did…. The months filled of kidnappings and deaths of people close to me, both international and local, left me with an unbearable feeling of being defunct…"But … the Iraqis taught me the most valuable lesson — despair is not a bottomless pit, but hope was — for once a person throws themselves into complete hope, it will provide an endless source of energy. I could not share their hope they felt for the elections…. The Iraqis were determined to prove me wrong — and they did…"Phone call after phone call from throughout Iraq reported the long lines at the voting stations. I was amazed…. One Iraqi wrote, ‘It was such a beautiful experience! It was something amazing watching the crowds walking miles and miles just to get to these boxes and vote. I saw people on wheel chairs, I saw blind people guided by their families, I saw very old people with smiles on their faces…. ‘

"Many explosions in the morning made me … wonder if the elections would have a turn out or not…. The stories of tragedy were balanced with the stories of true heroism…. A security guard at one of the voting centers that noticed a suicide bomber, and sacrificed his own life by tackling the bomber and running with him to minimize the fatalities…"I can’t hold back my own reservations…. For close to two years I have seen too much lipservice, too many smokes and mirrors, too many unfilled promises, and way too many unnecessary deaths to allow myself to fall into the trap of unmonitored hope…. But Iraqis have hope, and Iraqi women are determined to safeguard their rights…"Iraqis did their part, and now the international community must do theirs…. Although we should not ignore mistakes of the past, if we continue to focus on events two years ago, we will miss the very important present; a present that will determine the situation for women for decades to come."

Nearly two years ago, in one of his last articles before he died in a Humvee with American forces racing toward Baghdad, the best and bravest journalist of our time reflected (in The Atlantic Monthly) on the awesome military thrust that he had so fervently championed:

"The argument concerns whether the employment of this almost unfathomable power will be largely for good, leading to the liberation of a tyrannized people and the spread of freedom, or largely for bad, leading to imperialism and colonialism, with a consequent corruption of America’s own values and freedoms. This question is real enough and more: Probably the next hundred years hinges on the answer."

During all the dark days since we lost Michael Kelly, a question has haunted many of his friends. What would Mike think? Somewhere, I now dare hope, Mike is peering into a future that we can only dimly discern, and is thinking that it was worth it.

The post Opening Argument – Revisiting Iraq, and Rooting For Bush appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

Bush’s May 24 speech to the nation was all too typical: No honest coming to grips with the seriousness of the crisis we face. No acknowledgment of the administration’s blunders that have aggravated that crisis. No pledge to expand the clearly overstretched occupation force. No plan to turn the tide against the insurgents, other than a pathetic, too-little, too-late proposal to replace the Abu Ghraib prison with a kinder, gentler lockup. No serious move to persuade foreign leaders to help. No hope of stemming the crescendo of America-hating around the world that Bush has inflamed with his arrogant diplomacy and cowboy posturing.

The best that can be said of the speech is that it was less appalling than Bush’s recent news conference, at which he ranged between utter unresponsiveness, feckless fumbling, and vacuousness. He has refused not only to talk with reporters, but also to engage with the Republican lawmakers to whom he spoke on Capitol Hill on May 20, only to flee the scene without taking any of their anxious questions.

Bush is seen by a widening circle of Democrats, independents, and even Republicans as alarmingly unequal to the demands of his office — a shallow-minded ideologue impervious to the lessons of experience and incapable of thoughtful reflection.

As one who advocated President Clinton’s impeachment and who has grave misgivings about John Kerry, I have strained to give Bush the benefit of the doubt — especially since 9/11 dramatized the enormity of the jihadist threat to our civilization. I supported the Iraq invasion based on the misleadingly selective presentation of what turned out to be badly mistaken intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons. And I have not quite given up hope that Bush may yet come to grips with his mistakes, shake up his administration, and somehow reclaim the trust that he has so badly squandered.

Symptomatic of Bush’s unwillingness to correct mistakes — let alone admit them — is his failure to fire any of the people responsible for four of recent history’s biggest debacles: the intelligence agencies’ incompetence that exposed us to the 9/11 attacks; their wild exaggeration of Saddam’s doomsday weapons programs; the Pentagon’s reckless refusal to commit the forces necessary to win the peace in Iraq; and the apparent degeneration of a covert coercive interrogation program for captured Qaeda leaders into wholesale abuse of thousands of mostly harmless Iraqis.

George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney are able people doing their best. But their best has quite clearly not been good enough. They, and Bush, have blown it badly in Iraq.

This is not to suggest that Bush should offer up the groveling apologies demanded so tiresomely by so many reporters. No president has ever apologized to the nation for policy mistakes, as far as I know, and to start doing so now might convey weakness. But in the words of Washington lawyer John Nolan, who was a top aide to Robert Kennedy, effective leaders "are able to acknowledge imperfection with grace. They can talk about tough situations honestly, in fact-specific, real-world terms. They can acknowledge that they didn’t know everything and state how the problem is being addressed. Tony Blair, for example, does this," Nolan says.

"By contrast, the message can be delivered in abstract phrases, rhetoric rather than specifics, numbingly repeated to the end of the day. This is what [Bush spokesman] Scott McClellan does, and often, it’s President Bush’s style. Strong leaders in government, business, law, or wherever may spin, but they don’t spin in a rut. It erodes credibility. And most importantly," according to Nolan, "when rhetorical denial is the response to every difficulty, it blocks analysis and rational decision-making."

Bush has offered little but rhetorical denial of failures, including these:

• The unqualified claims by Bush, Cheney, and others that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, was on the verge of being a nuclear threat, and had close ties to Al Qaeda appear to have been false — and made with far more confidence than was justified by the fragmentary and disputed intelligence.

• Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were disastrously wrong in brushing aside warnings by Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and many others that they had sent grossly insufficient forces and resources to pacify Iraq. In the words of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative writer Mark Helprin, the number of U.S. troops per Iraqi is the same as the "number of uniformed police officers per inhabitant of the City of New York. But the police in New York … do not have to protect their redoubts, travel in convoys, maintain a hospital system, run a civil service, reform a government, build schools, supply electricity, [or] battle an angry population that speaks an alien language, lives in an immense territory, and is armed with automatic weapons, explosives, suicide bombers, and rocket-propelled grenades."

• Most of the Iraqis who Cheney predicted would greet us as liberators now tell pollsters they want us out. Millions see us — understandably, if unfairly — as occupiers who have betrayed our promises, have made their lives more dangerous than Saddam did, and have killed, imprisoned, mistreated, and even tortured many innocent civilians.

• Evidence is accumulating that the torture at Abu Ghraib was far more than the aberrational misconduct of "a few American troops," as Bush portrayed it on May 24. The torture appears to have been a foreseeable outgrowth of systematic abuse of thousands of Iraqi civilians by many frightened, angry U.S. troops who have no way of knowing which Iraqis are insurgents. That abuse appears, in turn, to have grown out of high-level decisions to employ in occupied Iraq, without careful supervision, extremely harsh interrogation techniques initially developed to squeeze information out of known Qaeda leaders captured in or near Afghanistan. And the indiscriminate use of such harsh techniques was facilitated by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s extremely narrow reading of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

• Bush has cast aside the decent respect for the opinions of mankind enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, and he comes across to many onetime admirers of America overseas as a simpleminded, bullying international scofflaw. He has alienated potential friends, driven new recruits into the arms of our enemies, and brought hatred of America to unprecedented levels.

• While disdaining Clinton’s failed attempt to bribe North Korea into ending its nuclear weapons program, Bush appears to have done nothing, and to have no viable plan, to slow the race by that charter member of the "axis of evil" to build a major nuclear arsenal and become a nuclear Wal-Mart.

And that is not to mention Bush’s embrace of Ariel Sharon, which has depleted American credibility as an honest broker in the Mideast; his disdain for due process, which seems likely to bring him a succession of Supreme Court rebuffs next month in cases involving two U.S. citizens and other indefinitely imprisoned "enemy combatants"; the looming fiscal disaster that Bush would accelerate by freezing in place his extravagant tax cuts disproportionately favoring the wealthiest Americans at the expense of our children and grandchildren; the pandering proposal to amend the Constitution to bar voters (as well as judges) from ever creating a right to same-sex marriage; and other unwise Bush departures from mainstream policy.

All presidents make mistakes. But no other president has publicly eschewed reading newspapers on the grounds that he can learn all he needs to know from his advisers, an unusually insular group that — with a few exceptions — acts as an ideological echo chamber and seeks to suppress dissenting voices rather than learn from them. Nor has any president in memory been so unwilling to adapt his preconceptions to the inconvenient realities of the real world.

In fairness, undue presidential sensitivity to what Bush calls "nuance" might bring paralysis or invite parody, a la John Kerry. Perhaps Learned Hand’s wisdom that "the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right" is incompatible with presidential decisiveness and constancy. Perhaps I am too imbued with the parochial disdain of the intellectual class for a man who eschews nuance even when he has a script, who is lost without one, but who understands voters’ low tolerance for complexity. Perhaps Bush will turn the current crisis around. Perhaps he will prove that I have underestimated him. If so, I will be very, very happy to admit my mistake. 

The post Opening Argument – Has Bush Learned Anything From His Mistakes? appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

The two questions are related. A plausible (although unattractive) argument can be made for continuing the apparently systematic use of extremely rough interrogation techniques to "soften up" large numbers of prisoners, without taking much time beforehand to sort out those who are innocent civilians. The argument is that indiscriminate brutality is our best hope of suppressing the insurgency in Iraq, and that suppression in turn is essential to stopping the jihadist barbarians from destroying our civilization.

And when it comes to getting information out of prisoners, the urge to be as brutal as necessary to break them becomes more palatable if we presume they are all enemies, as President Bush has explicitly decreed in the case of those at Guantanamo Bay, among others.

The more comprehensive argument for indiscriminate brutality, as I have heard it, goes something like this:

It’s very bad that so many of the Iraqis we expected to greet us as liberators have ended up hating us. But it would be incomparably worse to let them drive us from Iraq in defeat. Such a show of weakness would bring legions of new recruits into the jihadist mass-murder movement. With America reverting to its pre-9/11 defensive crouch, triumphal jihadists would swarm the globe. It would be only a matter of time before they got nuclear bombs, obliterated New York and Washington, and thereby depopulated our other cities, destroyed our economy, and brought our way of life to an apocalyptic end.

The only way to avoid such a chain of events is to make Iraqis and other Arabs fear us more than they hate us. That requires unflinching brutality. We must make an example of Falluja. We must spill as much civilian blood as it takes to get at the insurgents. We must ally with Shiites and Kurds to crush the Sunnis without mercy. When we take prisoners, we must break them — how else to sort out the innocent civilians from the terrorists? — to obtain intelligence. And all this legalistic second-guessing by the media and Congress will only cripple our warriors’ fighting spirit.

The post-Iraq nightmare sketched above is all too possible. And if brutalizing thousands of Iraqis really were the best bet for averting apocalypse, the argument for doing so would be strong. At least as strong as President Truman’s justification for incinerating Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and some 200,000 of their inhabitants to end World War II.

But the anti-American firestorm over the torture — and the killings, and the alleged rapes — of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere shows that in a war that is televised worldwide, and in which the battle for hearts and minds is critical, indiscriminate brutality brings strategic disaster. Short of slaughter on the scale of a Saddam or a Stalin, it will reap more hatred than fear.

None of this is to suggest that either Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has overtly endorsed indiscriminate brutalization of prisoners. But by speaking and acting in a way that inverts our law’s foundational principle — that all prisoners should be presumed innocent until proven guilty — they may have fostered a climate conducive to such brutality.

The Pentagon has authorized the "softening up" of at least some suspected terrorists for interrogation by techniques such as holding them naked in frigid or sweltering cells, depriving them of sleep, forcing them into "stress positions," menacing them with dogs, and employing sensory deprivation and "sensory assault." If such techniques were carefully restricted to interrogations of proven terrorists who may have potentially life-saving information, they would be defensible, both morally and, under a narrow reading of international human-rights law, legally.

But the Bush-Rumsfeld presumption that our prisoners (at least those at Guantanamo) are guilty until proven innocent may have been seen by some as a green light for indiscriminate brutalization of any and all prisoners who might possibly be terrorists. No cause-and-effect connection has been established, and the military’s written interrogation rules for Iraq do require high-level authorization for the tougher techniques. But the signals from the commander-in-chief have surely communicated little respect for international law or for the presumption of innocence.

"The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." So said Bush last July, in response to a reporter’s question about whether the 660 suspected Qaeda and Taliban members then imprisoned at Guantanamo (aka Gitmo) were "getting justice." The "bad people" included three Afghan boys between 13 and 15 years old who have since been released as harmless, after many months in captivity.

Bush’s assertion was of a piece with his rationale for classifying all Gitmo detainees as "unlawful combatants" — and thus outside the protections of the 1949 Geneva Conventions — without the impartial tribunals that are required by international law and Army regulations for all detainees who raise any doubt about their status. The military has conducted thousands of such hearings in other wars. It could easily have done the same for the many Gitmo detainees who claimed to be POWs or innocent noncombatants, and thus immune from even mild pressure to provide information.

Bush decreed in January 2002 that no Gitmo prisoner would be allowed to go before a tribunal, because it was clear beyond doubt that every single one of them was an unlawful combatant. This was ludicrous on its face. In the fog of war — against enemies without uniforms who hid among civilians, while dishonest bounty hunters collected rewards for all the "terrorists" they could grab — many of those detained will inevitably turn out to be civilian noncombatants. Indeed, anonymous officials have asserted that, despite supposedly careful screening in Afghanistan, dozens, if not hundreds, of men were sent to Gitmo by mistake. And the Pentagon has released more than 130 Gitmo detainees.

Now consider Iraq. Rumsfeld claims to be honoring the Geneva Conventions there. But the Red Cross’s finding of systematic violations is supported by massive evidence. And the military in Iraq has adopted many of the interrogation techniques used at Gitmo. Indeed, last year, the Pentagon famously sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib and squeeze more information out of its prisoners. Miller, who was then the commander at Gitmo, now heads our prison system in Iraq.

It’s unclear how many of the 43,000 people we have imprisoned in Iraq have been abused or subjected to tough interrogation techniques. It is clear that more than 30,000 of them were eventually classified as harmless enough to be released — in many cases, after harrowing treatment by their American jailers and interrogators, according to media interviews. The Red Cross found that 70 to 90 percent of all prisoners in Iraq "had been arrested by mistake."

The Bush administration has not restricted its inversion of the presumption of innocence to its overseas prison systems. In 2001 and thereafter, Attorney General John Ashcroft repeatedly implied that most, or at least many, of the 762 mostly Middle Eastern men rounded up in the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks were terrorists or criminals. But as he knew, no evidence connected the vast majority of them to terrorist activities. They were simply caught in an understandably broad net that was thrown after 9/11 to disrupt any planned follow-on attacks. Yet many whose harmlessness could have been quickly established were held for months in punitive and degrading conditions, including being subjected to serious physical abuse. And Ashcroft dismissed complaints by smearing these men — most of whom had committed only minor, noncriminal immigration violations — as "law violators."

The administration has also applied a presumption of "enemy combatant" status to two American citizens, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, whom it has detained indefinitely in a South Carolina naval brig and subjected to more than a year of incommunicado interrogation. It has urged the Supreme Court to rubber-stamp such detentions without meaningful judicial review of whether the prisoners are in fact enemy combatants — or whether they have been tortured. "Where the government is on a war footing," Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement told the justices during oral arguments on April 28, "you have to trust the executive."

That same evening, CBS broadcast the first expose of the torture at Abu Ghraib.

The post Opening Argument – Must We Become More Like the Barbarians To Save Ourselves? appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

Aside from the mounting evidence that Saddam Hussein had few, if any, weapons of mass destruction, the "Bush lied" boomlet has been fueled both by the president’s own obstinate refusal to acknowledge the massive intelligence failure that now sits in plain view and by his obtuse, at times outlandish, answers to legitimate questions. When Diane Sawyer of ABC News asked him on December 16 to justify prewar claims stating "as a hard fact that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that [Saddam] could move to acquire those weapons," for example, Bush shot back: "So what’s the difference?" Fatuous arrogance: not a good way to regain lost trust.

Or take Bush’s assertion that he had invaded to remove Saddam because "we gave him a chance to allow inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in." That was egregiously false when he said it on July 14 of last year. It was still false when he said it again on January 27, declaring that Saddam "chose defiance [and] did not let us in." A devious strategy to bamboozle clueless voters? Random chatter from a clueless president? Or what? Beats me.

Still, the charges that Bush, Cheney, and Secretary of State Colin Powell lied us into war are, at best, recklessly irresponsible hyperbole. While most of their WMD claims now appear way off base, none of the claims were without support in the intelligence agencies’ prewar assessments. And there is no evidence that Bush, Cheney, or Powell did not believe their own prewar assertions.

Democrats should remind themselves that Bush and Cheney were not the first to make such claims about Iraq. "The U.S. intelligence community’s belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons," Kenneth M. Pollack, who served on President Clinton’s National Security Council, wrote in the January/February issue of The Atlantic Monthly. That was also the view of some European intelligence services, all of which also thought that Saddam probably had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

It was Clinton who warned on February 17, 1998, that, unless restrained by force, Saddam "will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And someday, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal." It was Clinton who made "regime change" official U.S. policy and who called Iraq "a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed." It was Al Gore who asserted in September 2002, "We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."

This is not to say that Bush and his aides have been commendably candid. Nor is it to accept on faith the statements by former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, internal CIA reviewer Richard Kerr, and some congressional intelligence committee members absolving the White House of charges that it bullied the intelligence agencies to paint a more dire picture. These are complex questions on which the independent investigative commission now being formed should (although it probably won’t) shed clarifying light before the election.

The record is littered with unduly confident and conclusive administration assertions about Iraqi WMD, as well as about Saddam’s much-touted but unproven ties to al Qaeda. Bush, Cheney, and Powell purported to be certain of "facts" about which the intelligence was far short of certain. They omitted the intelligence agencies’ caveats, cautions, and dissenting views. And they stretched the findings of Hans Blix and his U.N. inspectors, who now appear to have been far closer to the mark than the administration officials who portrayed them as patsies. Examples:

• Bush and others repeatedly stressed that Iraq "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" if it "is able to produce, buy, or steal" highly enriched uranium, as he told the U.N. on October 7, 2002. He ignored the intelligence community’s view that Iraq was highly unlikely to get enriched uranium in less than five years.

• "Iraq … has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon," Bush said in the same U.N. speech. Previously, Cheney had said (on August 26, 2002) that "we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons" and (on September 8, 2002) that "we do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon." Neither Bush nor Cheney disclosed that the State Department doubted these claims or that the State and Energy departments thought that (as we now know) the aluminum tubes had nothing to do with uranium enrichment.

• In his now-famous January 28, 2003, assertion that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush ignored the CIA’s strong doubts that Saddam had done any such thing.

• "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," which could be turned over to terrorists and used to kill "thousands or hundreds of thousands" of Americans, Bush told the nation on March 17, 2003. He ignored the intelligence community’s view that Saddam was unlikely to turn such weapons over to terrorists.

• "We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX nerve gas," Bush said on October 7, 2002. He ignored a September 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency statement that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."

• Just over two weeks ago, Cheney touted as "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi WMD programs two flatbed trailers, found last spring, that he said were mobile biological weapons labs. This certitude appears indefensible in light of Kay’s testimony the next day that these trailers were to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps rocket fuel — not biological weapons — and that this was the consensus view of intelligence officials.

Some 30 more-or-less overblown administration statements are catalogued in a 106-page January 8 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Similarly overblown, in my view, is the authors’ own grave charge that (intelligence failures aside) Bush, Cheney, and Powell "systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs."

Some degree of selective disclosure and one-sided advocacy is to be expected — indeed, unavoidable — when any president uses enormously complex intelligence findings to rally support for a war. But this administration’s outward certitude amid undisclosed intelligence-community doubts was more selective, and thus more misleading, than it needed to be. By airbrushing out the uncertainties, Bush, Cheney, and Powell denied us the opportunity to reach fully informed judgments about a matter of incalculably grave consequence.

Would many supporters of the war have been opposed had Bush, Cheney, and Powell been more candid? Not in my case. In a post-9/11 world, Saddam’s defiant behavior and the risk of Iraq’s acquiring nuclear weapons would have provided a casus belli even had I known everything Bush knew. (I might well have had a different view, however, had I also known that Saddam’s WMD were mostly a mirage.)

Nor was the administration’s intelligence-spinning deceptive in the same sense as, say, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secret, illegal (although noble) transfers of arms to Great Britain early in World War II. But a president who seeks to lead us into a war of choice owes us a more balanced assessment than Bush provided.

How far Bush and Cheney have fallen short of reasonably full disclosure is a question on which the independent commission now being formed should provide timely guidance for voters. Whether Bush and Cheney were candid enough to be entrusted with another term is a question that voters must answer for themselves.

The post Opening Argument – Did Bush, Cheney, and Powell Deliberately Mislead Us? appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

The answer may be that the Iraq war made us safer but Bush’s continuing scorn for world opinion — manifested by his defiantly uncompromising September 23 speech to the United Nations — is making us less safe. Bush may have been the right president to begin taking the fight to our terrorist enemies and to rogue regimes that seek nuclear arms. Whether he is the right president for the next phase is another question.

The past few months have been daunting for those of us who have hoped that deposing Saddam would deter other rogue regimes from going nuclear. The continuing carnage in Iraq, the unexpected strain on our armed forces, the damage done to Bush’s credibility by his and his aides’ exaggeration of the Iraqi threat and lowballing of the costs of occupation — all cast doubt on the president’s ability to muster the military muscle and the public support to launch another major war if necessary to prevent another rogue regime from going nuclear. And the rogue regimes know this.

So Bush may have exhausted whatever advantage there once was in his my-way-or-the-highway message to the rest of the world. It was one thing to cast aside the vexing constraints of multilateralism when necessary to depose Saddam’s regime. It is something else to insist on a U.S.-British monopoly of power in Iraq, and spurn the compromises necessary to win international support elsewhere, now that we so clearly need help.

The first test of whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq will deter other rogue states from pursuing their nuclear ambitions is taking place right now in Iran. (It may already be too late to deter North Korea, which has millions of South Koreans under its guns and probably possesses at least two nuclear bombs.) If Iran, a charter member of the "axis of evil," continues its long-standing race to build nuclear weapons — if, for example, it defies the October 31 deadline set by the International Atomic Energy Agency for allowing full inspections of its nuclear sites — will Bush be able to scare Iran into backing off?

Or might the mullahs correctly calculate that, with the U.S. armed forces overstretched in Iraq and many Americans unwilling to support another pre-emptive war, the president could not launch a major attack anytime soon? And that the best way to deter any future U.S. attack would be to accelerate their nuclear program?

The worthy vow around which Bush has built his foreign policy is that the United States "will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons." Perhaps he can still make good on that vow. The IAEA’s newly tough posture on Iran may be a reflection of Bush’s own toughness. "It is precisely because we have shown we are willing to go to war that options short of war may now be available to us and to others," asserts one administration official.

And the Iranian tyrants might hesitate to call the bluff of a president who has deposed two terror-sponsoring tyrannical regimes in two years, killed or captured many Qaeda and Baathist leaders, forced the rest into hiding, and stationed the world’s most awesome military force on Iran’s doorstep.

But if Bush proves unable to stop Iran (and North Korea) from going nuclear, his pre-emption doctrine will be a spent force. This would give a green light to the nuclear ambitions of other rogue regimes (Libya, Syria) and of unstable states where militant Islamists may someday seize power (Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and more). As the number of nuclear-armed states increased, so would the risk that one of them — gambling that its anonymity would prevent retaliation — might hand off a bomb to terrorists.

If Bush cannot stop Iran, then the last, forlorn hope for stemming the tide of nuclear proliferation would be to bolster the very international institutions and agreements that this administration has so often scorned, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the IAEA. The best way to do that, and to repair the damage done to our security by Bush’s many affronts to world opinion, would be to offer concessions that this president has adamantly ruled out, such as pledging not to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons or to resume nuclear testing.

This does not mean that Bush was wrong to invade Iraq. Whatever else happens, the world is less dangerous than if he had backed down and allowed Saddam to resume his nuclear and biological weapons programs. And that’s exactly what Saddam would have done once the heat was off, with the help of France and Russia, which would soon have reverted to neutering the U.N.’s inspections regime and circumventing its economic sanctions. The notion that America had reverted to paper-tiger status would have emboldened all of our enemies.

Besides, for all the terrible bloodletting and lawlessness in Iraq over the past six months, the collateral benefits of this war for the Iraqi people have been far greater than has the collateral damage. Whatever mix of motives spurred Bush to risk his presidency by invading, the countless thousands of liberated Iraqis who would otherwise have been murdered by Saddam or starved by U.N. sanctions owe him their lives, and all Iraqis owe him their chance to create a decent government. Bush will deserve great credit for that even if he ends up a one-term president.

But Bush also deserves blame, for putting us all in greater danger by squandering both his own credibility at home and the goodwill abroad that we need to win the war against terrorism.

The justification for any pre-emptive war depends on the magnitude of the threat. And any president who proposes such a war has a duty, once any need for surprise has passed, to level with the American people as to what he knows — and does not know — about that threat.

Based on Saddam’s appalling record, I probably would have supported the Iraq invasion even if Bush had disclosed the CIA’s doubts about the British view that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," in the words of Bush’s January 28 State of the Union address. And even if Vice President Cheney had not waited six months to make it clear that he misspoke when he said on March 16 that "we believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." And even if the administration had not been so willing to foster the widespread, but probably incorrect, impression that Saddam had a role in 9/11, and so elusive about the costs of rebuilding Iraq. And even if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had not claimed on March 30, "We know where [Saddam’s weapons] are."

But many others who supported the invasion might have felt otherwise if given a more candid account of the threat. And if Bush announces at some future time that, for example, another massive military attack is necessary — this time to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold — many Americans will not take his word for it. He will have to prove it to us.

As for world opinion, we cannot afford a continuation of Bush’s gratuitous affronts to the United Nations and our one-time allies, or his obdurate refusal to make reasonable compromises to win their support. This pattern extends well beyond Iraq.

Bush was right to resist the unrealistic demands of the Kyoto global-warming treaty — but wrong to trash it so overtly while offering no serious alternative approach. He was right not to submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court as presently constituted — but wrong to so ostentatiously "unsign" the ICC treaty, thereby insulting those who see it as essential to protecting human rights. He was right to detain and interrogate captured Qaeda terrorists as unlawful combatants — but wrong to flout the 1949 Geneva Conventions by refusing to give the many detainees at Guantanamo who may be innocent civilians any chance to tell their stories to military tribunals. He is right to suspect the French government of incorrigible obstructionism — but wrong to alienate the many Europeans who want to help us fight terrorism.

The ideal president for these terrifying times would understand when to give ground as well as when to stand firm. Bush does not appear to be that man. Whether his Democratic opponent next year will come closer to the mark remains to be seen.

The post Opening Argument – After Iraq: Is President Bush Making Us Safer? appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

This is not the approach that Bush has taken, however. Instead, he has accused his critics of "revisionist history" while retroactively revising his own pre-war claims. He and his aides have passed the buck with unseemly eagerness to CIA Director George J. Tenet for Bush’s now- inoperative uranium-from-Africa claim; in fact, the CIA, despite pressure from administration hawks to tailor its intelligence to their policy goals, had repeatedly warned the White House that the evidence was shaky. And Bush has uttered a succession of bald untruths and evasions reminiscent of Bill Clinton, except that Clinton would have been much more artful.

On July 14, for example, Bush said in an impromptu press conference that "subsequent to the [State of the Union] speech, the CIA had some doubts" about the uranium-from-Africa intelligence. But in fact, the CIA had expressed doubts months before that speech, as any casual news consumer knows now, whether or not Bush knew it on January 28.

Moments later, Bush added: "The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power." (Emphasis added.) This was outlandishly, transparently false. Saddam allowed Hans Blix and his team of United Nations inspectors into Iraq in November. It was Bush’s determination to invade — not Saddam’s actions — that cut the inspections short.

Then there was Bush’s pathetic assertion on May 29, in an interview with Polish television, that "we’ve found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories." But the trucks to which Bush was referring contained neither biological agents nor evidence that any such weapons had ever been there. And whether they were mobile laboratories for the manufacture of biological weapons is still a subject of dispute among intelligence experts.

What are we to make of such hokum? Had it come from Clinton, Republicans would have accused him of deliberately deceiving gullible voters, and so would I. In Bush’s case, another hypothesis seems plausible: a disturbing ignorance of and insouciance about critical facts, combined with a reflexive urge to duck accountability. "The characteristic Bush II form of dishonesty," Michael Kinsley wrote more than a year ago, with perhaps a pinch of hyperbole, "is to construct an alternative reality on some topic and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniveling dweeb obsessed with ‘nuance.’ "

Whatever Bush’s mental process (and I don’t think it is captured by the word "lying," now so fashionable among apologists for Clinton’s perjuries), the more the president works at creating his own Iraqi-WMD credibility gap, the harder it becomes to take his word for anything.

I say this with great regret, because I believe that in these terrifying times we desperately need this president — and the next one, and the one after that — to be effective in fighting terrorist enemies and rogue regimes. Otherwise, their quest for doomsday weapons is all too likely to end in the murders of millions of Americans. And I fear that the Democratic presidential contenders (with the possible exceptions of Gen. Wesley Clark, a noncandidate so far, and Sen. Bob Graham of Florida) and their party may not be up to the job of using military force as assertively as necessary to avert such catastrophes.

Bush is plenty assertive. But he also needs to be believable, especially in the supremely serious matter of pushing for preventive wars. Suppose, for example, that the president tells us next week that Iran is starting to make nuclear bombs for sale to Al Qaeda, or that North Korea’s nuclear program "poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities," as former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry warned in a recent Washington Post interview.

Will the world, or even the nation, believe a president who has so recently asserted that Saddam wouldn’t let inspectors in, that the CIA’s doubts about his uranium-from-Africa claim had arisen "subsequent to the speech," and that "we’ve found the weapons of mass destruction"? Republican hawks miss the point when they ask, as Newt Gingrich did last month, "Does even the most left-wing Democrat want to defend the proposition that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein in power?" The point is that the president of the United States should tell the truth, not least because our security depends upon his credibility.

Bush’s mangling of established facts has emboldened his critics and the media to overstate the importance of his pre-war overstatements of the WMD evidence, some of which postdated the lopsided House and Senate votes in October authorizing Bush to invade Iraq. This is the view not only of Republican partisans but of some Democrats, including Philip Bobbitt, who served President Clinton as a senior National Security Council strategist. Bobbitt warns that "you guys" — the media — dangerously distort the big picture by focusing obsessively upon presidential misstatements.

"The nuclear threat posed by Saddam was very real," says Bobbitt, even if the uranium-from-Africa claim and some other intelligence cited by the administration were wrong. "He was well known to have enormous riches from illegal oil sales, has long sought nuclear weapons, and steadfastly refused comprehensive U.N. surveillance that might give warning. One never knew when we might wake up to find he had bought or developed a nuclear device that would put these depredations completely beyond redemption."

Indeed, if one thing has become clear since the war, as Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland has stressed, it is that the intelligence community did not know enough "to predict with accuracy the intentions and capabilities of Saddam Hussein and his regime." Saddam gave Bush ample reason to assume the worst, and thus to move in before Saddam became too strong.

The media focus on Bush’s credibility "is bewildering," adds Bobbitt, who is more forgiving of presidential misstatements than I, perhaps because he has an insider’s view of the torrent of information and decisions every president must process every day. "President Bush’s pre-war statements about WMD were, in the main, merely stating the obvious: Every major leader, including (Jacques) Chirac and (Vladimir) Putin, and every major intelligence service was, and remains, convinced that Saddam Hussein acquired and did not wholly destroy large stocks of WMD. Whether the president’s rhetoric was as careful as one might wish or not, the big picture ought not to be very controversial, and he is basically a big-picture guy. Nobody ever thought George W. Bush was a detail man, and the press has long known that net assessments are seldom unanimous in intelligence community."

Bobbitt, who also predicts that former Iraqi officials and scientists will provide ample evidence of an active WMD program once they no longer live in fear of Saddam’s return, adds valuable perspective to the current uproar. But the media can hardly be expected to stop focusing on Bush’s credibility until Bush stops making demonstrably untrue statements.

This is not to join The New York Times in urging the president to make a public apology for his past misstatements. "Leading a war effort is not made easier by constant second-guessing by the president of his own actions and public retrospective reassessments of those actions," as Bobbitt says. "For one thing, it embarrasses allies, as it has Tony Blair. For another, it saps public confidence in the president’s leadership. Regret is a sentiment best left to a president’s memoirs." Besides, Bobbitt adds, Bush "did not seriously err."

But err he did. And leaders do themselves no credit when they pile misstatement upon misstatement or seek to shift all blame to subordinates for everything that goes wrong. If George Tenet can say, "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency," George W. Bush should be able to say, "I am responsible for the approval process in my administration."

The post Opening Argument – The President Should Stop Saying Things That Aren’t True appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

That suspicion is taking root in much of the world. I think it is wrong. But I also fear that the administration may have done grave damage to its own credibility abroad by overstating the quality of its intelligence and creating an expectation that it would find large arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq-an expectation that officials are no longer confident they can fulfill.

Unless we find such arsenals, or solid proof that Saddam had them until recently, people may be hard to convince that the administration is not crying wolf the next time it accuses a rogue nation of developing doomsday weapons.

To be sure, some suggest that Bush "doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue)," in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, because ending Saddam’s bloody tyranny was ample justification for the war.

This sort of logic may be good enough for the American electorate, at least for now. But it should not be. As Republicans used to stress, the president of the United States should tell the truth. Especially when he is beating war drums, and when the credibility of the nation is at stake.

Bush sold this war as pre-emptive self-defense against the threat posed by Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons (and quest for nuclear weapons), not as a precaution against future production of chemical and biological weapons. Before the invasion, he spoke of liberating the Iraqi people as a happy side effect of war, not as a necessary or sufficient reason for it. He assured the United Nations that if Saddam disarmed, the U.S. would not disturb his brutal tyranny.

At this writing, no chemical or biological weapons have turned up in Iraq, to the apparent surprise and chagrin of high-level administration officials. No mustard gas. No VX. No anthrax. Not one vial.

U.S. investigators have found what they believe to be one or more mobile biological weapons laboratories-a potential semi-smoking gun, in the view of one well-placed official. They have also found protective suits and atropine to ward off chemical weapons, and materials that could be used to make chemical weapons. But it remains to be seen whether the mobile labs could have had benign purposes and the protective equipment could have been intended for defensive use.

On May 13, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, told reporters: "There’s no question that there were chemical weapons years ago," but "I just don’t know whether it was all destroyed years ago," or "destroyed right before the war," or "whether they’re still hidden" (emphasis added).

This is not what one would have expected after pre-war statements such as Bush’s March 17 assertion to the nation that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Or such as portions of Colin Powell’s February 5 speech to the U.N.: "This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well documented…. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets…. Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons…. And we have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them."

Now, by contrast, the official line about weapons of mass destruction seems to be morphing from 1) unqualified assertions that "we will find them," as Bush told NBC’s Tom Brokaw on April 24; to 2) suggestions that Saddam may have quickly destroyed WMD or shipped them off to Syria in recent months to avoid detection by U.N. inspectors; to 3) speculations that perhaps Saddam had ended the deployment of large stocks of difficult-to-maintain WMD years ago, choosing instead to build mobile labs and the like to give himself the capability of making WMD whenever he chose.

The first theory may prove to be true, but it looks increasingly forlorn in the context of statements such as those by Gen. Petraeus.

The second theory improbably posits that after spending billions on WMD, Saddam decided, under threat of invasion and death, to get rid of them clandestinely rather than trying to save himself by either surrendering them publicly or using them to stop the invaders. This theory is also hard to square with the pre-war administration claims that WMD had been deployed to Iraqi units. (If so, why didn’t coalition troops find any of them after overrunning those units?) And it would tend to support the anti-war mantra that the U.N. inspections could contain any Iraqi threat. Besides, if indeed Saddam did send his WMD abroad, the Bush policy may have exacerbated the proliferation that it was supposed to prevent.

The third theory may be the most plausible. But if Saddam did get rid of his WMD years ago, it means that Hans Blix was right to accuse the administration of relying on "shaky" intelligence; that U.S. officials misled the world, negligently albeit not deliberately; and that Bush miscalculated Saddam’s intentions as badly as Saddam miscalculated Bush’s.

This does not mean that Saddam was not a threat. Three pillars of the administration’s WMD case are clearly true: U.N. inspectors found vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program in Iraq during the 1990s; lots of the weapons had not been destroyed before those inspectors were forced out of the country; and those weapons remain unaccounted for to this day, because Saddam contemptuously spurned many chances to show the U.N. any documentation of their destruction.

The administration assumed, logically enough, that Saddam had kept these weapons. After all, if he had destroyed them, wouldn’t he have proved it to the world rather than seeing his country suffer through years of devastating U.N. economic sanctions and exposing himself unnecessarily to invasion and death?

Perhaps not, theorizes David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and has close ties to the current administration. Perhaps Saddam got rid of his weapons (but not his development programs) to make sure that U.N. inspectors did not stumble across them, but hoped that-by bluffing that he still had them-he could continue to intimidate his neighbors and could deter Bush from marching into Baghdad. Perhaps he assumed that the surest way to invite an invasion would be to show Bush how defenseless he was.

And once the world’s attention had turned elsewhere, Rivkin’s theory suggests, Saddam could have used his blueprints to develop new chemical, biological, and, ultimately, nuclear weapons: "What mattered the most, and provided the most compelling strategic justification for the regime change, was Saddam’s unshakable commitment to retain, on a long-term basis, a viable WMD effort."

Rivkin may be right. But Seymour M. Hersh may also be right in contending (in the May 12 New Yorker) that the administration gave undue credence to ideology-driven intelligence analyses prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. That unit was set up in late 2001 by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz because Pentagon hawks were dissatisfied with the reluctance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to support their claims that Iraq was both awash in banned weapons and allied with Al Qaeda. These analysts, claims Hersh, persuaded the White House to trust Iraqi defectors of questionable veracity and to brush aside evidence inconsistent with their speculations and hawkish assumptions.

In a speech last October, for example, Bush made much of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and weapons chief, whose defection to Jordan in 1995 forced Saddam’s regime "to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents." But Bush and other officials have ignored Kamel’s statements to U.N. interviewers that all of these weapons had been produced before the 1991 Gulf War and destroyed during the early 1990s. (Kamel was killed after being lured back to Iraq with his family in 1996.)

If the world ends up concluding that Saddam did destroy most or all of his WMD years ago, both the president’s credibility and America’s security will have suffered a serious self-inflicted wound.

The post America’s Credibility Is Taking a Hit in Iraq appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

But in an important sense, the current second-guessing of the Bush-Rumsfeld war plan, and of President Bush’s fateful decision to invade without more international support, is beside the point. The United States today is like a big ship navigating a treacherous sea of icebergs in a dense fog. Bush and his people are at the controls. And for at least the next 21 months, all Americans-including those who consider Bush unfit to lead-must depend on whatever skill and luck he can muster. If he fails, we will all be in even direr peril.

There is good reason to debate what Bush should do next, and in particular to warn against the grandiose visions of empire entertained by some neoconservatives in and around the administration. But carping over whether Bush or Donald Rumsfeld should have steered this way instead of that way yesterday will not help them or us steer around icebergs today or tomorrow. Nor will reveling in the hatred that seems to spur some Bush media critics to attack a war plan that they would defend were this a Democratic administration, just as Clinton-hating conservatives trashed our last president’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo.

Bush was not my choice for president. (I wrote in former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb.) In my opinion, Bush’s fiscal policies are recklessly irresponsible; his tax cuts are bad medicine for the economy and too skewed to the rich; his other policies are often disappointing; his bull-in-a-china-shop disdain for diplomacy is incalculably costly, and may well have cost us a northern front through Turkey; his impatient and cocksure responses to reasonable critics seem petty; and his unscripted public comments and demeanor are often an embarrassment, especially by comparison with Tony Blair.

But like the hedgehog, Bush understands one big thing: In this terrifying new world-where rogue nations are bent on developing nuclear weapons and motivated to slip them covertly to Islamist terrorists devoted to mass-murdering Americans-our best chance of avoiding catastrophe is to stop Iraq, Iran, Libya, and others from going nuclear by any means necessary, including military attack. If the threat to attack is sufficiently credible, we may not need to do it again. And it will be credible only if we make an example of Saddam Hussein that shows other rogue regimes that if they seek nuclear weapons, they will meet the same fate. (This may not be feasible in the case of North Korea because it effectively holds hostage the millions of South Koreans within range of 11,000 of its artillery pieces and because it probably already has nuclear weapons.)

The cautious, reactive approach to incipient threats practiced by Bill Clinton, Bush’s father, and most of their predecessors might prove to be slow-motion suicide in today’s world, with the odds of unimaginable carnage in America rising exponentially as more and more rogue regimes go nuclear. And a preventive-war policy that would have seemed recklessly aggressive a decade ago may now be our only hope.

As to the administration’s much-criticized Iraq invasion plan, it’s quite possible (but hardly established) that Rumsfeld should have sent a more massive force. And it’s possible that unless Saddam’s regime suddenly snaps-as did the Taliban, despite much early pessimism about the progress of that war in Afghanistan-an unexpectedly bloody victory may leave us in greater peril than Saddam has ever posed. That would occur if this war leaves the American people with no stomach for a repeat performance and thus belies Bush’s threat to attack any other rogue regimes that seek nuclear weapons.

Does this mean that Rumsfeld was an arrogant fool for rushing into Iraq with a force too small to finish the job? Arrogant, yes. Fool, no. Rumsfeld had plausible reasons for proceeding as he did. The stunning speed of the initial push may well have prevented Saddam’s forces from torching the southern oil fields and firing missiles at Israel. Perhaps more important, the shock-and-awe, limited-force, low-cost victory for which the administration hoped would have sent just the right message to Iran, Libya, and others: This was easy. You can count on us doing the same to you if you seek to go nuclear.

Now it appears that the Iraqi resistance will be stiffer, the costs of this invasion higher, and the war longer than Rumsfeld had expected. But that does not make the "rolling-start" plan a failure-not yet, at least. Our troops are closing in on Baghdad. Reinforcements are on the way. Eventual victory is assured. No battles have been lost. Coalition casualties have been light. And it is unclear whether this war will be less successful than if Rumsfeld had waited-as the summer heat descended-to assemble twice as many troops.

Nor is it clear that the official talk of an easy, low-cost victory was designed to lull the American people into false confidence. Such optimistic forecasts were designed in part to persuade Iraqis not to fight for a doomed regime. That did not work. But it may have been worth a try. And while Vice President Cheney’s March 16 prediction that our troops would be widely "greeted as liberators" looks shaky now, it may yet be vindicated.

The bottom line is that we should spend less time second-guessing the administration’s past military strategy and more time pushing for Bush to make the right decisions in the weeks and months ahead. Some suggestions:

•To close the "credibility gap" that some in the media seem so eager to enlarge, Bush, Rumsfeld, and their commanders should drop the annoying and self-discrediting pretense that they are never taken by surprise, never unsuccessful, never in doubt, and never wrong. They should also meet constructive criticisms from current and retired military leaders and others with respectful attention and thoughtful rebuttal, not withering contempt.

• To salve the wounds that we have inadvertently inflicted on Iraqi civilians, Bush and Congress should promise generous compensation to the injured and to survivors of the dead, and create a process for making such payments as soon as possible.

• To show good faith to suffering Palestinians, Bush should make it clear that he is as serious as Tony Blair is about moving ahead with the "road map" for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; perhaps he should start by demanding an immediate halt to new Israeli settlement activity in return for an unambiguous commitment by the Palestinian Authority to do everything in its power to end terrorist attacks.

• To counter suspicions that his real motive is to seize Iraq’s oil, Bush should say more loudly and clearly that we will hold those assets in trust for the Iraqi people until we turn them over to the new government, and will take nothing to defray the costs of the invasion.

• To repair the damage to America’s international image and relations, Bush should invite the United Nations and the world community to share responsibility for reconstructing Iraq and reconstituting its government, while ruling out any use by France of its veto power.

• To show that his pre-emption doctrine is indeed about self-defense, not empire-building, Bush should vow that we will initiate military force against another nation only when necessary to prevent development of nuclear weapons that could threaten us or our allies, and only if the Security Council refuses to act. He should also offer nonaggression pacts to any and all nations that verifiably renounce nuclear arms, including North Korea.

Bush should, in short, reject the empire-building ambitions of some of his neoconservative subordinates and endorse the stirringly modest description of America’s goals that Colin L. Powell offered during a global youth forum on February 14.

Citing America’s treatment of the nations defeated in World War II, Powell said this: "What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems, which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No. The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are."

The post Iraq and Beyond: Navigating the Fog of War appeared first on Stuart Taylor, Jr..

Which side has the better argument? And does it matter?

The answer to the second question is that it matters a great deal. Cynical leaders such as Putin and Jacques Chirac may not care about legal principles. But many people in their nations and around the world do care. The alarming, worldwide surge of anti-Americanism over the past few months owes much to the Bush administration’s image as a dangerous bully that has scorned international norms and institutions. Fed by statements such as Ari Fleischer’s February 28 suggestion that the president would insist on "regime change" even if Iraq voluntarily disarmed-which seemed to decouple Bush’s determination to invade from any plausible self-defense rationale-this fear and hatred of the United States can hurt us in many ways. Its most direct harm is in degrading the international cooperation that is vital to winning the war against terrorism.

In fact, a very respectable legal case can be made that since Saddam has shown no intention of disarming, the United States is justified in using military force as a last resort. This case is stronger, as a matter of international law, than was the case for President Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo and Serbia for 77 days, with neither U.N. Security Council authorization nor any plausible self-defense rationale. It is stronger than the case for President Clinton’s 1994 plan to invade Haiti-the event turned out to be a bloodless occupation-without obtaining authorization even from Congress, let alone from the Security Council. And it is arguably stronger than the case for President Kennedy’s threats and use of force during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Not to mention the numerous interventions by France in its former African colonies.

The legal arguments against invading Iraq rest mainly on the U.N. Charter. Article 2 bans "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state" without an affirmative Security Council vote, including the approval (or at least abstention) of all five permanent members. Article 51 recognizes only one exception: "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs." The last five words appear designed to outlaw the "pre-emptive" use of armed force until after an enemy has actually attacked.

The United States has two rebuttals. One is that the Security Council has authorized member states to disarm Iraq by force, both in 1991, in Resolution 687, which demanded destruction of all Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, and last fall, in Resolution 1441, which warned of "serious consequences" unless Iraq fully complied with its "disarmament obligations." But these interpretations seem legalistic at best, are disputed by most of the world, and are undermined by the abject failure of the U.S. and Britain to win a more explicit Security Council authorization.

The stronger argument is that in today’s world-with rogue regimes busily developing weapons of mass destruction, with undeterrable terrorist groups bent on using them, and with trend lines pointing toward the probable massacres of hundreds of thousands of Americans unless something changes-the U.N. Charter cannot be and has not been construed literally. And the long-standing right, under international law, to use military force to prevent threatened or anticipated attacks must be construed broadly.

Bush critics stress that even apart from the U.N. Charter, this right of pre-emptive self-defense has been limited to using the minimum amount of military force necessary to stop an imminent attack, and has never justified a "preventive" act of war based on speculative fears that perceived enemies might attack at some future time.

True enough-as of 1945 or so. But "we no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril," as President Kennedy said in his October 22, 1962, speech announcing the naval "quarantine" of Cuba to force removal of the Soviet missiles. "Nuclear weapons are so destructive, and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace." JFK’s logic foreshadows that of the Bush administration’s September 2002 "National Security Strategy of the United States," which stresses that the nation "must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries," who have or seek weapons of mass destruction that-even more than missiles-"can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and others have sought to distinguish today’s situation from the Cuban missile crisis by saying that the threat was more grave and imminent then; that JFK won the approval of the Organization of American States (although not of the Security Council) for his "quarantine"; and that he rejected pressure from military advisers to bomb the missile sites.

None of these distinctions is persuasive. The threat of a missile attack from Cuba in or after 1962-which would have been suicidal for both the Cuban and the Soviet regimes-was, if anything, less imminent than the current threat of a biological or chemical attack on the U.S. by terrorist proxies secretly armed by Saddam. And even the danger of a Saddam-sponsored nuclear attack may well be greater, albeit less imminent, than the threat that JFK acted to avert in 1962.

While JFK’s blockade of Cuba was both bloodless and far more prudent than a military attack would have been, it was clearly, under international law, an act of war-one that the OAS had no legal standing to authorize. And JFK threatened to launch a military attack. He apparently meant it, which is why Nikita Khrushchev backed down and withdrew the missiles. Saddam has proved impervious to threats. He has also persisted in pursuing weapons of mass destruction despite his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, and despite Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s French-supplied nuclear plant, a preventive attack that has been vindicated by history.

Perhaps the most cogent critic of Bush’s self-defense rationale, Thomas Graham, Jr., a career arms control lawyer who was President Clinton’s special ambassador for nonproliferation and disarmament, has stressed that "it appears that Iraq has no air force, has virtually no ballistic missiles, is years away from a nuclear weapon, has a greatly weakened army," and has no means, other than terrorist agents, of delivering chemical or biological weapons. This, Graham argues, means that Iraq is not (unless attacked) "a short-term probable threat," especially as compared with North Korea and Al Qaeda.

All true. But chemical or biological weapons delivered by terrorist agents could kill a lot of Americans. In any event, the ultimate question is whether the unprecedented magnitude of the long-term threat that will loom over civilization itself if Iraq and other rogue regimes are allowed to develop nuclear weapons deliverable by terrorists justifies an unprecedented policy of using military force to prevent such proliferation whenever feasible. The answer, in my view, is yes. And I think that the great statesman Elihu Root, who in 1914 asserted "the right of every sovereign state to protect itself by preventing a condition of affairs in which it will be too late to protect itself," would agree.

None of this is to deny that attacking Iraq in the face of such broad international opposition carries grave risks, or that a more patient and diplomatic president might have won additional international support, or that the Bush administration had "developed a language and diplomatic style that seemed calculated to offend the world," in the words of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria. The point here is that the Bush administration’s problem is not lack of legal justification but perceived indifference both to the need for legal justification and to world opinion.

This image is badly in need of repair. A quick, successful invasion that looks more like a liberation than an attack on the Iraqi people would be a good start, especially if it validates the self-defense rationale by uncovering plenty of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program. And a humble vow by the victor to improve his flawed diplomacy, and to try much harder to show a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, might work wonders.

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The risks of invading include chemical and biological attacks on our troops; weeks of house-to-house carnage in Baghdad; an Iraqi-initiated smallpox epidemic; creation of new terrorists in the swamps of militant Islam; collapse of the governments of Egypt, Jordan, nuclear-armed Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; bloody civil wars in post-Saddam Iraq; and the need for years of occupation by a huge army under constant guerrilla attack amid escalating domestic dissent. (And, of course, there’s the risk of annoying the French.)

The risks of not invading include demonstrating American impotence and, thus, establishing that Saddam has regional hegemony; allowing Iraq to go nuclear; encouraging Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and other nations infested with Islamist terrorists to do the same-making it all but certain that, sooner or later, American and European cities would be obliterated by nuclear warheads anonymously delivered by boats or trucks. "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country," as President Bush said in his State of the Union address, "to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

Making the anti-war case on its merits requires some acknowledgment of these risks of inaction and even of the possibility that Bush might just be right. Many Bush critics prefer to focus on flyspecking perceived flaws in his advocacy. He has not "made the case" for war, they argue, ducking the question of whether the case for war exists. (I tried to make it in my October 5 column.) And some ordinarily astute Bush critics have lapsed into attacks on Bush’s "case" that seem neither astute nor logically tenable nor even clearly anti-war.

Consider the op-ed columns by Michael Kinsley and E.J. Dionne in the January 31Washington Post. These two are not left-wing crazies like Michael Moore, or America-haters like Susan Sontag, or "Euro-whining" denizens of the axis of weasels, steeped in "cynicism and insecurity, masquerading as moral superiority," to borrow from Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times. These are two of the nation’s best liberal minds. (They are also friends of mine.) But in this case, I respectfully submit, they have fallen into the sort of illogic for which Kinsley has long and lovingly skewered Republicans on issues ranging from abortion to the death penalty to Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility.

Bush "has a problem that goes beyond style," Dionne wrote. "We don’t know if this war is primarily about (1) taking weapons of mass destruction out of Saddam Hussein’s hands, or (2) removing Hussein from power, or (3) bringing democracy to Iraq and revolutionizing the politics of the Middle East." Doubters can argue "plausibly," he continued, that "if this war is only about weapons of mass destruction," then inspections will do the job, without war. But if "getting rid of Hussein" is the goal, "then all the arguments about weapons and inspectors are beside the point." And while "the best case for this war may be the humanitarian case" for deposing this child-torturing tyrant, it has a "problem," because "the United States is not prepared to launch a worldwide armed struggle against every dictator."

Quite similarly, Kinsley accused Bush of being logically inconsistent, intellectually dishonest, and "morally unserious" because the president has stressed Saddam’s torturing of children and his other atrocities, even though Bush is not "prepared to enforce the no-torturing-children rule by force everywhere." If the real justification for war is that "the danger that Hussein will develop and use weapons of mass destruction against the United States justifies removing him in our own long-term defense," Kinsley added, then "that makes the talk about the torture of children merely decorative, not serious."

To the contrary, these elements of the Bush case for war are deadly serious, entirely consistent, and mutually reinforcing. If you have three good reasons for doing something, then it is logical and appropriate to take account of all three, regardless of whether each would be sufficient by itself. And when a president seeks to rally the nation for a supremely important national effort, he surely should court both hard-headed believers in realpolitik, by stressing the national security justification, and people more concerned with human rights, by stressing Saddam’s appalling history of atrocities.

It’s clear that neither Bush nor any other president would invade Iraq to depose Saddam if the child-torturing monster were no threat to us. Bush has never claimed otherwise. But it is not "merely decorative" to dramatize the human-rights benefits of deposing Saddam. It is good leadership. For those who, like me, are less certain than Bush that the national security benefits of invading justify the risks and costs, the humanitarian case might tip the scales. If it is legitimate for Bush’s critics to stress the killing and maiming of innocent Iraqis that would accompany a U.S. invasion, it is at least as legitimate for Bush to point out that the ongoing human suffering caused by Saddam’s continuance in power dwarfs the suffering attendant to removing him.

Conversely, if Bush’s main goal were to end Saddam’s atrocities, it would still make perfect sense to cite the national security benefits of deposing him as well. This might persuade people who oppose using military force, except in pursuit of our own clear national interest. President Clinton tried to broaden his case for the 1999 bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, which was motivated by humanitarian concerns, by arguing that it would bolster NATO and, thus, our security. Bush, unlike Clinton, has very strong national security as well as humanitarian grounds for going to war.

It was Clinton who said in 1998 that we must not tolerate Saddam’s defiance, because the Iraqi leader "threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region, and the security of all the rest of us." That’s three justifications for hitting Saddam. (For Clinton, hitting Saddam turned out to be mainly a rhetorical exercise.) Was Clinton morally unserious for citing more than one reason?

Indeed, in an August 2000 column, Kinsley defended Clinton’s humanitarian interventions against charges of inconsistency: "The Clinton Doctrine does not elevate logical consistency to a moral precept. Whether we act depends on the circumstances…. Critics make great hay over the inconsistencies. Why Bosnia and not Rwanda? Why Kosovo and not Sierra Leone?… But … it is a bizarre form of affirmative action to suggest that we must let white people be slaughtered in Kosovo because we let black people be slaughtered in Rwanda." It makes even less sense to attack Bush’s emphasis on the torturing of children in Iraq because he will not "enforce the no-torturing-children rule by force everywhere."

As to Dionne’s suggestion that the goals of disarming Saddam and of deposing him are somehow at odds, the answer is that deposing Saddam seems to be the only hope for disarming him. Iraqi obstruction of inspections is making that more and more clear. "And why would we not be satisfied with a coup that kicked Hussein out [and replaced him with] another dictator, but one willing to do our bidding where weapons are concerned?" Dionne asks. The answer is that we would be satisfied. No weapons of mass destruction, no war. The administration has made that rather clear.

This is not to dismiss all of Dionne’s and Kinsley’s Bush-bashing. Dionne was right to fault the administration for inviting distrust through its "relentless effort to insist on some link between Hussein and Al Qaeda" without more-persuasive public documentation. Dionne was on the mark in slamming Bush’s slips into "self-involved swagger," which unnecessarily undermine American credibility abroad. (The president should stick to prepared texts.) And Kinsley identified the heart of the problem with Bush’s "axis-of-evil" rhetoric and "Manichean notion of an absolute war against an absolute evil called terrorism": They have led him to feign (let’s hope he’s feigning) mindless unconcern about North Korea-a nuclear threat much more provocative and imminent than Iraq-because he apparently has no options in Korea better than dealing with the devil, which Republicans have long trashed Clinton for doing.

But the big question before the nation and the world is not whether Bush sometimes paints himself into rhetorical corners and says and does other things we don’t like. It is whether-assuming continued defiance by Saddam-we should invade Iraq.

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