Bush's Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq

In a few hours, George W. Bush will walk out of the Oval Office for the last time as president. As he leaves, he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on.

AP

Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it's easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago -- and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn't he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- the man who will be sworn in as vice president today -- didn't limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president's people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to "keep it from totally collapsing" until they could "hand it off to the next guy."

For his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was "not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq "lost." These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.

For many of these critics, the template for understanding Iraq was Vietnam -- especially after things started to get tough. In terms of the wars themselves, of course, there is almost no parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: The enemies are different, the fighting on the ground is different, the involvement of other powers is different, and so on.

Still, the operating metaphor of Vietnam has never been military. For the most part, it is political. And in this realm, we saw history repeat itself: a failure of nerve among the same class that endorsed the original action.

As with Vietnam, with Iraq the failure of nerve was most clear in Congress. For example, of the five active Democratic senators who sought the nomination, four voted in favor of the Iraqi intervention before discovering their antiwar selves.

As in Vietnam too, rather than finding their judgment questioned, those who flip-flopped on the war were held up as voices of reason. In a memorable editorial advocating a pullout, the New York Times gave voice to the chilling possibilities that this new realism was willing to accept in the name of bringing our soldiers home.

"Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave," read the editorial. "There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide." Even genocide. With no hint of irony, the Times nevertheless went on to conclude that it would be even worse if we stayed.

This is Vietnam thinking. And the president never accepted it. That was why his critics went ape when, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he touched on the killing fields and exodus of boat people that followed America's humiliating exit off an embassy rooftop. As the Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti noted, Mr. Bush had appropriated one of their most cherished analogies -- only he drew very different lessons from it.

Mr. Bush's success in Iraq is equally infuriating, because it showed he was right and they wrong. Many in Washington have not yet admitted that, even to themselves. Mr. Obama has. We know he has because he has elected to keep Mr. Bush's secretary of defense -- not something you do with a failure.

Mr. Obama seems aware that, at the end of the day, he will not be judged by his predecessor's approval ratings. Instead, he will soon find himself under pressure to measure up to two Bush achievements: a strategic victory in Iraq, and the prevention of another attack on America's home soil. As he rises to this challenge, our new president will learn that when you make a mistake, the keepers of the Beltway's received orthodoxies will make you pay dearly.

But it will not even be close to the price you pay for ignoring their advice and succeeding.

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Liberals and the Surge

In early January 2007, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq war was going moderately badly to very badly. Indeed, the war had been unpopular for much of the previous years, at times deeply so. But by this past September, a nationwide Pew survey found “a striking rise in public optimism about the situation in Iraq.” According to the poll, 58 percent of Americans now believe the war in Iraq is going well or very well, and the same percentage now also say that the U.S. will definitely or probably succeed in Iraq.

This news is encouraging—and not terribly surprising. After all, most Americans have assessed the situation in Iraq based on a reasonable interpretation of events on the ground. And since the January 2007 announcement of the “surge”—President Bush’s decision to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Iraq, armed with a fundamentally new counterinsurgency strategy—the situation on the ground has, by every conceivable measure, improved. In some cases, the progress has been stunning.

And yet, no matter what most American believe or what reality tells us is so, leading liberal observers and politicians, long in the vanguard of opposition to the war, have denounced the surge at every point. Even as some, in the face of overwhelming evidence, have been forced to concede a modicum of American progress, they have done so reluctantly and have downplayed the role played by administration policy in achieving that progress. Others have denied that significant progress has been made at all.

Why they have responded in this way is a question worth exploring. But first it may be useful to establish the record.

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The formal inauguration of the surge in January 2007—in announcing it, the President said it would “change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror”—was met by liberal commentators with a skepticism bordering on derision.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post mocked Bush’s “fantasy-based escalation . . . which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles.” At Time, Joe Klein ridiculed “Bush’s futile pipe dream.” Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times, found “something genuinely bizarre” about those Americans who actually supported the new strategy. “It is not just that they are wrong. . . . It’s that they are completely detached from reality.” The New Republic’s Peter Beinart predicted that, by 2008, American soldiers would “still be dying, and the catastrophe will still be deepening.” In sending more troops to Baghdad, Beinart wrote, “Bush is showing his commitment to win—except that the United States has already lost.”

Liberal politicians were just as certain that the surge was a doomed and irresponsible policy. On the night of the announcement, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Later in the month, Senator Joseph Biden declared: “If he surges another 20, 30 [thousand], or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake.” Senator Hillary Clinton similarly insisted that “I cannot support [the] proposed escalation of the war in Iraq,” while Senator John Kerry said that sending in additional troops was not an “answer” but “a tragic mistake.”

Throughout the spring, even though the full complement of additional troops had yet to arrive in Iraq, the drumbeat of opposition continued, and so did intimations of American defeat. To Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, “the [American] lives lost in Iraq were wasted.” Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith, writing in the New York Review of Books, argued that Bush had embraced a plan that “has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference.” On Capitol Hill, Senator Christopher Dodd asserted that “there is no military solution in Iraq. To insist upon a surge is wrong.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared that “this surge is not accomplishing anything” and in April announced flatly that the Iraq war was “lost.”

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Two months later, liberal critics of the war remained of the same mind, and were now demanding that we quit the field altogether. According to a July 8 New York Times editorial, the time had come “for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.” (This, despite the paper’s acknowledgment in the same editorial that an American pullout was likely to yield “further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” not to mention regional chaos and more terrorism.) James Fallows of the Atlantic, a sharp critic of the surge from the outset, wrote that the expectations “being heaped” on it were “simply laughable.”

In August, Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal party, took to the pages of the New York Times Magazine with a mea culpa titled “Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment.” Ignatieff wrote:

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a President. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the [2003] invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

In fact, however, far from having turned into an “unfolding catastrophe,” the dream was already getting closer to realization. By the summer of 2007, although Iraq was still in many ways a broken nation, evidence was mounting that the surge was working. In almost no time, sectarian violence had been sharply decreased in Baghdad, and the provinces of Anbar and Diyala were being reclaimed. Coalition forces were making huge headway in human intelligence, and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the run.

In September, a full report on the situation was delivered by David Petraeus, the military architect of the surge and the new commanding general in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Both men had traveled to Washington to provide two days of congressional testimony.

Petraeus and Crocker reported that civilian Iraqi deaths in all categories had declined by more than 45 percent since the height of sectarian violence the previous December. During the same period, the number of overall ethno-sectarian deaths had decreased by more than half in the country as a whole, and by about 70 percent in Baghdad. In Anbar province, thanks in large part to the turn against AQI by local Anbaris, car bombings and suicide attacks had declined in each of the previous five months. Likewise, the number of areas in which AQI enjoyed sanctuary had been considerably reduced. Even the political front showed advances, with heartening early signs of a bottom-up reconciliation of hitherto warring Iraqi factions.

While both Petraeus and Crocker were careful not to overstate the degree of progress in Iraq, and reminded everyone who would listen that the country remained a fragile place, they left no doubt of their belief that, in the words of Crocker, “a secure, stable, democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors is attainable.”

But none of this mattered to the administration’s liberal critics, who to their earlier prognosis of failure were now adding charges of government cooking of the evidence. Even before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic majority whip, warned Americans that “by carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working.” After the hearing, Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the general’s testimony was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” To Representative Rahm Emanuel, the general’s written report deserved to win “the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction.”

Paul Krugman, an influential columnist for the New York Times, could not have agreed more. The administration, he flatly asserted, was intentionally misleading the public by “creating the perception that the ‘surge’ is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.” Others were even more reckless. A Democratic Senator complained to the website Politico that no one was willing to call Petraeus “a liar on national TV,” hoping instead that “outside groups will do this for us.” As if in response, MoveOn.org, the left-wing political-action committee, promptly took out a full-page ad in the New York Times proposing, in giant type, a new name for General Petraeus: “General Betray Us.”

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In November 2007, two months after Petraeus and Crocker testified, Barack Obama was still arguing that the surge was having the opposite effect from the one they had described: “not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.” Representative David Obey, asked if the surge strategy was working, offered the novel view that if violence was in fact decreasing, it might be because the insurgents were “running out of people to kill.”

True, such palterings were becoming a little harder to sustain. The Washington Post, for one, was ready to conclude in a mid-November editorial that “the ‘surge’ of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success.” And not only in military terms: “Markets in Baghdad are reopening, and the curfew is being eased; the huge refugee flow out of the country has begun to reverse itself.” By the end of 2007, there was no question that Iraq, which a year earlier had been on the brink of implosion, was now on the mend. Attacks against citizens in Baghdad had dropped by almost 80 percent since November 2006, murders in Baghdad province had decreased by 90 percent, and roadside bombings had declined by approximately 70 percent. In the Dura market in southern Baghdad, where fewer than a handful of shops had been open in January 2007 there were now 500 in operation. As Joseph Fil, commanding general of the multinational division in Baghdad, reported, “many Iraqis now can shop without fearing for their lives.”

Nevertheless, in a January 2008 debate, the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination—Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards—still refused to reassess their stance on the surge. Instead, they silently dropped the subject in favor of re-emphasizing their commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq and their unchanged opposition to the presence of any permanent bases there.

Others were not quite so ready to abandon their conviction that the surge itself had failed, even if that meant moving the goalposts on the definition of success. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, questioned on her unbending insistence that American troops must begin an immediate and massive withdrawal from Iraq, was asked by the CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer: “Are you not worried that all the gains that have been achieved over the past year might be lost?” Pelosi replied: “There haven’t been gains, Wolf. The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure.” In the Washington Post, the writer Michael Kinsley rang an inventive change on the same motif: the surge was a failure, he reasoned, because even though violence was down, and even though political progress was being made, the number of American troops was still roughly where it was when the surge was announced—as if the achievements produced by those troops were somehow disconnected from their presence.

In early April of this year, Petraeus and Crocker made a return appearance on Capitol Hill. By then, some liberal politicians were reluctantly conceding security gains, but insisted they were evanescent and therefore unimportant—“very nice to have,” in the words of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, “but essentially . . . meaningless.” To the columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., the problem now was that “the administration and its supporters talk incessantly about winning but offer no strategy for victory.” In doing so, he continued, they “resemble their own parody of liberal do-gooders insisting on continuing flawed and foolish programs no matter how obvious it becomes that their efforts are doing more harm than good.”

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More harm than good? In his April testimony, while stipulating that “the situation in certain areas is still unsatisfactory and innumerable challenges remain,” Petraeus presented an avalanche of statistics illustrating the degree to which “security in Iraq is better than it was when Ambassador Crocker and I reported to you last September, and . . . significantly better than it was 15 months ago when Iraq was on the brink of civil war and the decision was made to deploy additional U.S. forces to Iraq.” To which Crocker added:

Last September, I said that the cumulative trajectory of political, economic, and diplomatic developments in Iraq was upward, although the slope of that line was not steep. Developments over the last seven months have strengthened my sense of a positive trend.

Which did not stop Barack Obama from taking to the op-ed page of the New York Times two months later to insist that “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.” A week later, ABC’s Terry Moran asked Obama if, knowing what he knew now, would he support it? Obama’s answer was “No.” That is, he was still against the surge despite his own belated acknowledgment that it had, in fact, “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” In the effort to reconcile this blatant contradiction—akin to a diagnostician’s continuing to oppose the treatment that made the patient well—he twisted himself into an intellectual pretzel, asserting that the decrease in violence was the result not of any new American strategy but of “political factors inside Iraq that came right at the same time.” A similar counterfactual claim would later be made by Bob Woodward in his new book The War Within and by Peter Galbraith in the New York Review. In Galbraith’s summary judgment, “less violence . . . is not the same thing as success,” and in any case the surge “has not been the main reason for the decline in violence.”

And so it goes. By the time General Petraeus handed over the flag of his command to General Raymond Odierno in September, the situation in Iraq had been utterly transformed. Not only had overall violence in Iraq declined to almost “normal” levels,* and not only were Iraqi security forces growing in numbers and effectiveness as threats from al-Qaeda and Shiite militias decreased, but Iraq’s political leaders had also reached comprehensive domestic accommodations, passing key laws in the areas of provincial elections, the distribution of resources, amnesty, pensions, investment, and de-Baathification. Also in September, Iraq’s parliament passed a crucial election law that, according to a story in the New York Times, “represents a significant achievement for a country that has more often resorted to violence than political negotiation in resolving its differences.”

Petraeus once described Iraq as “hard but not hopeless.” Today, he says Iraq is “hard but hopeful.” That statement would seem beyond dispute.

Not, however, to the war’s liberal critics.

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Those critics, in the piercing phrase of Senator Joseph Lieberman, “hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq.” So hermetically sealed off from reality are they that even Charles Peters, the founder of the liberal Washington Monthly, was driven to write as long ago as last December:

I have been troubled by the reluctance of my fellow liberals to acknowledge the progress made in Iraq in the last six months, a reluctance I am embarrassed to admit that I have shared. . . . [T]he fact is that the situation in Iraq, though some violence persists, is much improved since the summer. Why do liberals not want to face this fact, let alone ponder its implications?

Why, indeed? And, if reluctant in December 2007, why are most still reluctant today?

A generous interpretation is that by the end of 2006, many liberals had made a definitive good-faith judgment that the Iraq war was irretrievably lost. This then became the filter through which they viewed all later developments. Once convinced of the impossibility of substantial progress, never mind a decent outcome or an actual victory, they could not help receiving good news as anomalous and/or inherently unsustainable.

But the generous interpretation may be too generous, and also condescending. Reasonable and responsible adults are expected to assess the solidity of their convictions against the available evidence and in light of changing circumstances. Even at the time of the surge’s announcement, when things were going quite badly, should responsible adults not have been able to entertain the possibility that, given the enormity of what was at stake in the war, a fundamentally new approach merited at least a degree of support, however hesitant or conditional?

Instead, many pronounced the new approach a failure even before it was tried. Still worse was that they continued to pronounce it a failure even as the evidence began to amass that it was succeeding. Even those few who (like Richard Cohen and Joe Klein) eventually admitted they were wrong about the surge itself continued to insist they were right about the war. Others stuck more and more zealously to their original position the more it became falsified by reality. They, and not the President, were the ones who were truly “doubling down” on their bet—as if a decent outcome in Iraq threatened their entire worldview.

Nor was their blindness limited to the good news occurring in the lives of Iraqis. They seemed no less blind to the huge drop in American combat deaths. Those deaths, after all, had been said to be among the core concerns of the anti-surge critics, who along with their allies in the media had been focusing relentless attention on the numbers of American casualties in Iraq. Yet little was now made of the fact that—to take just one example—there were but five U.S. combat deaths in Iraq in July 2008. (The previous monthly low had been eight in May 2003, after the invasion.)

Nor, finally, has much if anything been made of the fact that coalition forces have drawn down significantly. All five of the U.S. combat brigades committed to the surge, as well as two Marine battalions and the Marine Expeditionary Unit, have withdrawn. One could not ask for a clearer sign that the surge has been achieving one of the key declared objectives of the anti-war critics themselves—namely, a reduction of American combat troops in Iraq. It is a sign that remains, for the critics, all but unnoticed.

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Enter, ignominiously, politics. For some liberals, hatred of the President was clearly so all-encompassing that they had developed a deep investment in the failure of what they habitually dismissed not as America’s war but as “Bush’s war.” To an extent, this passion was driven by merely partisan considerations: Iraq had become a superbly effective instrument with which to bludgeon Republicans. It had helped the Democrats take control of both the House and the Senate in 2006; might not a thorough “Republican” defeat in Iraq lastingly reshape the political landscape in their favor?

This is, admittedly, an unpleasant line of speculation, and those foolhardy enough to venture upon it have been loudly condemned for questioning the patriotism of their political adversaries. But patriotism is not the issue—judgment is. When politicians acting in good faith misjudge a situation, nothing prevents them from acknowledging their error and explaining themselves. For the most part, we await such acknowledgments in vain.

In partial extenuation, it might be contended that politicians have an elementary obligation to be responsive to the opinions of their constituents; since Iraq had become a certifiably unpopular cause, stepping out of line on the issue was likely to be regarded as an offense punishable at the polls. But what, then, are we to say of the opinion shapers, the editorial writers of our great newspapers, the essayists and columnists and book authors who, unconstrained by petty interest, present themselves as stalwartly independent spirits willing to follow the truth wherever it may lead? What was at work in them when the evidence of American progress—which started as a trickle, and then became a river, and eventually became a flood—could no longer be denied? For not only did they continue to deny it, but they actively promoted an alternative policy of withdrawal and retreat that would have made an American defeat, and a jihadist and Iranian victory, inevitable. Is it not fair to say that what was at work in them was an ideological antipathy not just to an American President, but to America’s cause?

Fortunately, as I noted at the outset, Americans at large are not so ready to deny the evidence of their senses, and appear open to reasoned argument on the basis of that evidence. For a political leader in high office, this is a great blessing. Some eyes will refuse to open and some ears will refuse to hear and some voices will always be raised high in derision. To act rightly in such circumstances is difficult and often enormously costly; but it is the very essence of leadership. If a leader’s decision is wise, there are grounds for hoping that in time this wisdom will be vindicated and, perhaps, recognized—even in the case of a war once massively unpopular but now winnable.

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Footnotes

* According to the quarterly report submitted to Congress by the Department of Defense in September, “security incidents” in Iraq are at levels not seen since early 2004. Across Iraq, civilian deaths have declined by 77 percent since the same period in 2007, and ethno-sectarian-related deaths by 96 percent. Eleven of Iraq’s eighteen provinces are now under local Iraqi control.

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About the Author

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives.

Casualty of the Surge

But after early challenges, the positive results have become undeniable, as violence in Iraq has plummeted, normality has returned to markets, and neighbors and political accommodations have moved forward. McCain, it turns out, was tragically and gloriously right -- as right as Winston Churchill during his wilderness years. And McCain's come-from-behind nomination victory would have been inconceivable without this prophetic achievement.

This raises the question: If McCain benefited politically from being correct about the surge, why has Barack Obama not been punished for opposing it?

It was, after all, the single most important decision Obama has made as a public official. His judgment? "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." This initial reluctance is perhaps understandable; many shared it. But Obama persisted in his skepticism after the results became evident. Even in July of this year, he argued, "the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true."

...the main reason Obama has escaped the political consequences of his poor judgment on the surge has been the success of the surge itself, which has taken the issue almost entirely off the table. In early December 2006, 44 percent of Americans said that Iraq was the most important problem faced by the president and Congress. This week, 7 percent said Iraq was the most important issue in their choice for president. A relatively peaceful Iraq is not an issue -- even for a candidate who might have thrust it into genocide.

So Obama is left with a pleasing paradox: The successes of a strategy he opposed may have paved his way to the presidency.

And McCain is left with a poignant comfort. He once said he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He may lose an election, in part, because he helped win a war.

Victory Is an Orphan in Iraq

When it comes to Iraq, a majority of Americans simply won't take yes for an answer.

The surge is succeeding. Security in Iraq's three major cities has vastly improved. The Iraqi army is finally asserting control. American casualties are at their lowest since 2003. Civilian deaths, kidnappings and car bombings have plummeted. Al Qaeda is now virtually friendless in Iraq. Most important, the Shiite and Sunni mainstream are beginning to participate in their own liberation.

Yet instead of rejoicing and a ticker-tape parade, our political leaders and opinion makers speak of immediate timetables for the contraction and withdrawal of our troops, the counting of our losses and the atonement for our sins. Few speak of the war with any sense of pride or patriotism. Never before has a nation so distanced itself from a military triumph. There is an overarching taboo associated with any acknowledgment that it may have benefited Iraqis and Americans. Buried beneath the mosh pit of President Bush's declining approval ratings, Iraq remains a continuing source of shame.

Many say that Saddam Hussein never posed a threat to our security. That by expending military resources in Iraq we squandered the chance to capture Osama bin Laden, and allowed the Taliban to rise from the dead in Afghanistan. That Iran pressed forward with its nuclear ambitions, knowing that we were so alienated in the region and had so stretched our military capacity that we couldn't stop them.

Surely it would have been best had the U.S. been able to mobilize an appropriate and forceful response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. But no one seriously believes bin Laden fell off the radar of our priorities simply because this part of the world is so rich in terror and instability.

Given the state of the world after 9/11, it was a judgment call as to where our interests would best be served, and where military force would do the most good. Saddam's Iraq had been one of terrorism's most reliable and dangerous state sponsors. Iraq was not merely an oil-rich sideshow, ultimately irrelevant to our justifiable war against terror.

It is true that the full case for going to war in Iraq was not adequately presented -- although humanitarian reasons for deposing Saddam were certainly present, and we should not have depended alone on the presence of weapons of mass destruction. It is also true that we were pathetically ill-prepared for what we would find in Iraq, and how we would be perceived once we arrived. And the disgraceful practices at Abu Ghraib were undeniably unworthy of the sacrifices our soldiers otherwise made.

Yes, there are many truths about the war in Iraq. But to say America fought an ill-advised war that was both a lost cause and a total loss is surely not one of them.

Unfortunately, the American mainstream hasn't sufficiently found itself on this war yet. There has been no coalescence around a coherent set of facts. Public opinion may be free in America, but sometimes it is shaped by subtle intimidation. Given all the loud rhetoric of defeat and despair, most Americans haven't felt secure enough to look at the war as it is rather than what they have been told to believe.

There is nothing wrong with establishing timetables for our departure -- as long as we are equally prepared to accept the accolades of our hard-won struggle. Leaving Iraq, whenever that date may be, should be done not from a position of defeat and disgust, but rather with the pride and gratitude that our troops deserve for a job well done.

Iraq's Budget Surplus Scandal

Largely attributable to the bonanza in oil prices, to new discoveries of oil since the eviction of Saddam Hussein, and to the increasing success of Iraqi exports via the pipelines to Turkey, this surplus could amount to as much as $79 billion by the end of this year. A good chunk of that money is sitting safely in a bank in New York. I would call this good news by any standard, though of course I understand the annoyance of Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and others involved in the auditing of Iraq, who complain that all the unspent wealth is a bit much, given the heavy outlay from the U.S. treasury for the rebuilding of Mesopotamia.

Yes indeed, Iraq should pay for its own reconstruction. But, just before we all join hands on this obvious proposition, may we take a moment to apologize to Paul Wolfowitz? Of all the many slanders hurled at this advocate for Iraq's liberation, probably none was more gleefully bandied about than his congressional testimony that Iraq's recovery from decades of war and fascism could be self-financing. Now the opponents of the intervention are yelling that Iraq ought to be opening its bulging wallet right away.

What If Iraq Works?

Iraq in Review: Is there anything left of the antiwar Left’s criticisms of the Iraq war?

Many commentators on Iraq had no strong ideas about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, but often predicated their evolving views on the basis of whether we were perceived as winning or losing — and later made the necessary and often fluid adjustments. So in light of the changing pulse of the battlefield, it is time once again to examine carefully a few of the now commonplace critiques of the Iraq war.

1. We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan by going into Iraq, thereby allowing the Taliban to regain the advantage.

Any two-theater war can result in less resources allotted to one of the two fronts. But such multiple-front wars, whether in World War II or the Cold War, have never stymied the United States military. More importantly, if we are truly in a global war against Islamic extremists — as al Qaeda itself reminded us when it announced that Iraq was the key front in their jihad against infidel crusaders — then the problem is not necessarily fighting the insurgents in Iraq, but whether it is a theater conducive to our aims and resources — and can be won.

In other words, Iraq simply upped the ante of a larger war, promising disaster if we lost, and enormous advantages if we won. Progress in Iraq is already having positive effects in Afghanistan, where an experienced American counterinsurgency force is fighting extremists who know that their kindred are on the verge of losing militarily and politically in Iraq, and are afraid that the same bitter calculus now applies to them.

In the first years, the odds were with the terrorists — given indigenous Muslim local populations, the hostile neighborhood of a Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and anti-war fervor at home and abroad. But once the U.S. military defeated al Qaeda in Anbar, the population turned on Islamic terrorists, and the elected Iraqi government gained stature, then Islamists in and out of Iraq suffered a terrible defeat.

We learned to fight a war of counterinsurgency and win hearts and minds far from home; they lost an insurgency — and with it the support of the local and once naturally sympathetic Muslim population. Note that suddenly journalists, intelligence analysts, and politicians are struck by al Qaeda’s implosion, as the Muslim street turns on radical Islamists, who themselves are torn apart by internal ideological schisms.

While many critics remain too heavily invested in antiwar positions staked out between 2003–7 to cite the war as a contributory cause, the obvious catalyst for al Qaeda’s fiasco is its terrible performance in Iraq. Remember, if Americans adjusted their own support for the war on their perceptions of the success or failure of the U.S. military, why wouldn’t millions in the Middle East do the same with radical Islamists like al Qaeda, whose fortunes on the battlefield have only gone from bad to worse?

2. Bush lied about the war and entered it under the false circumstances of fears of WMD and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda.

Bush erred in focusing on WMDs when the Senate and House approved over 20 writs for war, all of them as valid now as they were in October 2002. That said, it is hard to find a single prominent congressional critic of the war who has made the case that the administration itself altered intelligence information, doctored reports, or had substantially different assessments than those provided to Congress or offered up by foreign governments. The reason recent critics of the war such as Sen. Rockefeller are utterly unconvincing in their allegations of administration malfeasance is that the record shows that they themselves had access to the same information, and often outdid the President in their prewar rhetoric and saber-rattling about Saddam.

But again, the battlefield, rightly or wrongly, colors these controversies. In a world in which there is no longer a Saddam Hussein (who would now have had his hands on trillions of dollars in oil revenue), a Libyan WMD program, and Dr. Khan’s nuclear export business, the proliferation issue is becoming less contentious. (If one were to believe the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran ceased its weapons-grade nuclear track opportunely right after Saddam’s capture). Since 2003, thousands of Islamic extremists and al Qaeda’s notables have been killed, and the organization routed and discredited; it is hard to see how Iraq has not had positive effects in curbing proliferation and damaging the organization that was responsible for 9/11. Moreover, disputes about Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s post-Afghanistan odyssey, assorted terrorists in Saddam’s Baghdad in 2003, or al Qaeda in Kurdistan during Saddam’s rule become less contentious with the knowledge that al Qaeda, between 2003–7, tried to win, and then lost, Iraq.

3. Mistakes in Iraq were legion and irreversible.

It is better to see such controversies in terms of long- and short-term consequences. Examine the two most discussed — the Iraqi army and troop levels. Disbanding the Iraqi army without providing temporary financial support for young males with military skills was disastrous. Yet in the long-term, building a new army without tens of thousands of hard-core Baathists — as was true of the de-Nazification program with German army in 1946–7 — offered a greater chance for eventual success.

Did we send too few troops? Apparently we had enough manpower to take out Saddam, which we did brilliantly in three weeks — a force determined partly in reaction to the first Gulf War, when current critics then alleged that we had needlessly sent over far too many troops, both our own and those of the unwieldy coalition.

Evaluating the surge is more complex, since in a vast theater the size of Iraq, an increase of a little more than 20 percent in troop strength probably does not per se win wars. We forget now that many supporters of the surge were calling for 80,000-100,000 more troops in 2004–7. The 30,000 troops was a compromise figure, given our commitments elsewhere.

As important as the 30,000 reinforcements were, just as critical were three other factors associated with it: a signal to both Iraqi friends and enemies that we were staying on and fighting to win; a radical change in tactics from counterterrorism based in compounds to counterinsurgency intended to protect the local populations from terrorist reprisals; and the appointment of Gen. Petraeus as senior commander in Iraq who won the confidence of the Iraqis; silenced critics at home; and energized his officers on the ground with a new commitment to victory.

Again, there were tragic mistakes — focusing on WMDs as a sole casus belli, the pullback from the first siege of Fallujah, and bellicose Presidential rhetoric coupled with operational tentativeness — all of them regrettable, none of them fatal or comparable to the disastrous foul-ups of World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.

4. Democratization was naïve and bound to fail, given the realities of the tribal Middle East.

In fact, the promotion of constitutional government, however clumsy our efforts in 2003–4, was the only chance the U.S. had after the fall of Saddam Hussein to stabilize the country and hurt our terrorist enemies. No development infuriated al Qaeda more than U.S. support for elections and a constitutional Iraq that undercut the slander of a 21st-century crusade to annex the ancient caliphate, and invested the Iraqi people themselves in the fight against terrorism for their own future. Iraq is not comparable to the Hamas plebiscite, in that its elections were in concert with a ratified constitution and a result of an American-led effort to depose Saddam Hussein.

One of the most surreal developments of the war has been the Left’s caricature of American idealism and our support for a democratic Iraqi government — a brave group of reformers who have been more tarred and demonized by American politicians than have been their al Qaeda enemies.

Should we see a President Obama, and he realizes that Iraq is working, expect the Left to cease its criticisms of neocon democracy fantasies, and instead adopt Iraq’s democracy as yet more proof of Obama’s hope-and-change idealism in foreign policy.

5. The real winner of the war was Iran.

In the short-term, yes — Iran benefited from the removal of its traditional enemy, Baathist Iraq, and from the initial pan-Islamist rallying against the U.S. presence in Iraq. But in the long-term, should Iraq succeed, nothing will be more destabilizing to Iran than to have a free society next door, where Shiites say, write, and read what they wish, and do so in pluralistic fashion. Again, the ante has been raised. Should Iranian-backed militias lose in Iraq, the theocracy will have suffered a terrible defeat, at a time it diverts precious oil dollars to failed military adventures while its silenced population rations gas. Iran’s theocratic government must either incite a U.S. preemptive strike, or destroy Iraqi democracy — or it is doomed.

6. President Bush’s presidency was ruined in Iraq.

If we were to lose the war, then yes. But should we win, should a constitutional government stabilize, should al Qaeda keep unraveling, and should the hiatus of terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad continue, then historians will rank Bush in Trumanesque terms: a similarly orphaned presidency that ended disliked — even as it crafted a strategy to defeat global Islamic terror by taking the fight to the heart of the Middle East, while establishing proof of America’s good intentions by fostering constitutional government that offered Iraqis an alternative other than the usual Middle East non-choice of theocracy or autocracy.

Bush was terribly damaged by a series of poor spokesmen, his own bellicose soundbites of 2002–3, a series of tell-all defections of former intimates and officials, and an inability to cut U.S. consumption of imported petroleum. But that said, years from now, historians will look at the record and the results, not the present rhetoric, and his legacy could well be — “He kept us safe.”

7. Our military is nearly ruined and the war was never worth the cost.

We have paid a high price for our efforts with thousands of dead and wounded, and billions spent. But if the deterioration of al Qaeda continues, America is kept safe, and the Middle East at last has some alternative to the dismal autocratic norm — one that curbs future oil-fed extremism — then Iraq will be the most important American achievement since the end of the Cold War. If we lose or quit, and Iraq devolves along the lines of the badlands of Pakistan, then, yes, the losses were not worth it.

For all the wear and tear on our military, recruitments are up, we have developed the most sophisticated and experienced anti-insurgent force in the world, and we are just beginning to shake-up the entire military by promoting a new generation of brilliant officers who came of age in the cauldron of Iraq.

In the end, the U.S. military has achieved the near impossible by removing the worst government in the Middle East and fostering what has a real chance to become by far the best. In some sense, whether Iraq was worth the high cost depends on whether one thinks the present-day liberal and humane democracies in Europe, Japan, and Korea were likewise worth the past, and far more terrible, price that America paid in blood and treasure to secure their enduring freedom.

Why We Went to War in Iraq, by Douglas Feith

Why Iraq Was Inevitable

According to an April 2008 poll in U.S. News & World Report, fully 61 percent of American historians agree that George W. Bush is the worst President in our history. Some of these scholars cite the President’s position on the environment, or on taxes, or on the economy. For most, though, the chief qualification for obloquy lies in Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

In this, of course, the historians are hardly alone: five years after the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the mainstream media and America’s political elites treat the Iraq war as a disaster virtually without precedent in our national experience. But while politicians and journalists are not necessarily expected to be adepts of the long view, for professional historians the long view is a defining necessity. As the English historian F.W. Maitland wrote more than a century ago, “It is very hard to remember that events that are long in the past were once in the future.” Hard it may be, but the job of historians is not only to remember it but to judge events accordingly.

In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.

Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.

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It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate:

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.

These were the words of President Clinton on the night of December 16, 1998 as he announced a four-day bombing campaign over Iraq. Only six weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act authorizing Saddam’s overthrow—an initiative supported unanimously in the Senate and by a margin of 360 to 38 in the House. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom,” Clinton had declared. On the evening the bombs began to drop, Vice President Al Gore told CNN’s Larry King:

You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [emphasis added]

What these and other such statements remind us is that, by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s. (This was literally the case, the end of hostilities in 1991 being merely a cease-fire and not a formal surrender followed by a peace treaty.) Not only that, but the diplomatic and military framework Bush inherited for neutralizing the Middle East’s most fearsome dictator had been approved by the United Nations. It consisted of (a) regular UN inspections to track and dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) remaining in Saddam’s arsenal since the first Gulf war; (b) UN-monitored sanctions to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to make more WMD’s; and (c) the creation of so-called “no-fly zones” over large sections of southern and northern Iraq to deter Saddam from sending the remnants of his air force against resisting Kurds and Shiite Muslims.

The problem, as Bill Clinton discovered at the start of his second term, was that this “containment regime” was collapsing. By this point Saddam was not just the brutal dictator who had killed as many as two million of his own people and used chemical weapons in battle against Iran (and in 1988 against Iraqis themselves). Nor was he just the regional aggressor who had to be driven out of Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition of armed forces in Operation Desert Storm. As Clinton recognized, Saddam’s WMD programs, in combination with his ties to international terrorists, posed a direct challenge to the United States.

In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”

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But how to prevent it? An opportunity arose later the same year. In October 1998, Saddam threw out ten Americans who were part of a UN inspection team, and on the last day of the month announced that he would cease all cooperation with UNSCOM, the UN inspection body. On December 15, UNSCOM’s director, Richard Butler, reported that Iraq was engaged in systematic obstruction and deception of the internationally mandated inspection regime. Although the UN hesitated to invoke the technical term “material breach,” which would almost certainly have triggered a demand for a response with force by the world body, Clinton himself was determined to act. He had already received a letter from a formidable list of U.S. Senators, including fellow Democrats Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urging him to “respond effectively”—with air strikes if necessary—to the “threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its WMD programs.” After consulting with Great Britain and other allies, Clinton ordered Butler to pull out the remaining inspectors. On December 16, he launched Operation Desert Fox.

For four days, American and British planes and cruise missiles bombarded Iraqi sites in an effort to degrade Saddam’s programs. The key objective was to knock out communication-and-control networks—and in this, a Clinton official would assert, Desert Fox “exceeded expectations.” But the attacks did virtually nothing to destroy facilities suspected of housing weapons, most of which were in unknown locations. The only way to find out where they might be was by reintroducing UN inspectors, something Saddam now adamantly refused to permit.

Thus, in the end, Desert Fox proved a failure, not because of insufficient American firepower but because of Saddam’s defiance—and because of a lack of forceful follow-up. True, passage of the Iraq Liberation Act meant that the United States now had a regime-change resolution on the books and was providing a certain amount of money and aid for covert internal action against Saddam. True, too, Vice President Al Gore was a particularly strong supporter of these initiatives. But in the wake of Desert Fox, Saddam had conducted his own violent crackdown on potential opposition figures, which meant there was no hope for Iraqis to retake their country without massive outside help.

As 1999 dawned, the choices narrowed. Inspections had failed. So had air strikes and covert action. So had international trade sanctions, which imposed a new level of misery on the Iraqi people without putting any pressure on Saddam himself. The UN’s Oil-for-Food Program, created in 1996 in order to allow Iraq to sell some of its oil in exchange for food and other necessary supplies, appeared to be still another failure: Iraqis continued to starve, while Saddam seemed to grow only richer.

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And so, “starting in early 1999,” as Kenneth Pollack, an official in Clinton’s National Security Council, would later recount, “the Clinton administration began to develop options to overthrow Saddam’s regime.”

A plan for an actual land invasion of Iraq had been drawn up a few years earlier under the stewardship of Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was updated after Desert Fox. Although (Pollack writes) “no one thought the U.S. public would support such an invasion,” this was now beginning to seem the only option.

Concurring with this judgment was Scott Ritter, an American who had served on the UN’s weapons-inspection term and had become notorious for his aggressive approach to his job. In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late 1998, Ritter castigated the Clinton White House for failing to confront Saddam with the threat of invasion. This hardly endeared him to the President, but it did win him two warm allies in the Senate. One was the Republican John McCain. The other was the Democrat John Kerry, who outspokenly declared that since Saddam clearly intended “to build WMD’s no matter what the cost,” America “must be prepared to use force to achieve its goals.”

But nothing would happen in 1999. At the end of the year, the UN passed Resolution 1284—an effort to get Saddam to accept a new inspection regime, called UNMOVIC, in exchange for lifting sanctions on all goods for civilian use. Yet, weak as the resolution was, it led to a split in the Security Council, with four members—including France, Russia, and China—abstaining from the vote. That split would become permanent. By 2000, life at the Security Council would turn into a constant battle of wills, with the U.S. and Great Britain in one corner and Russia, France, Germany, and China in another. Although George W. Bush would later come to be blamed for wrecking the coalition that had fought the first Gulf war, the reality is otherwise: the wreck occurred three years before he became President.

All the same, as the military historian John Keegan has pointed out, Resolution 1284 did signal the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein. By refusing to re-admit inspectors, even under a relaxed sanctions regime, Saddam made it unmistakably clear that only a credible threat of military force would make him budge, and only the exercise of military force would ever get him out.

Unfortunately, by this time Clinton had lost whatever limited appetite for armed confrontation he might earlier have entertained. According to Pollack, the lengthy campaign to dislodge Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo had given the White House a taste of might go wrong in open-ended military operations, and Clinton’s advisers “were not looking to back into a war with Saddam the way they had backed into one with Milosevic.” Besides, the proposed invasion plan called for 400,000-500,000 troops and six months of laborious preparation, which would stretch to the breaking point an American military that, thanks to Clinton-era cuts, was now little more than half the size of the one that had fought Desert Storm.

In his final year in office, Clinton decided that his contribution to Middle East peace would lie not in the removal of Saddam Hussein but in a grand attempt to resolve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. With this, he missed his last chance to deal forcefully with the man he was publicly committed to overthrowing. Worse, by focusing his energies on a futile effort to placate Yasir Arafat, he diverted American attention not only from Saddam but from the mounting challenge represented by Osama bin Laden—not to mention the possibility that these two sinister figures might some day find common ground. As Clinton’s administration ended and George W. Bush’s began, Iraqi defectors were claiming that Saddam had set up camps in which terrorists connected with bin Laden were training to attack the United States.

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Confronting the same threat faced by the Clinton administration, and the same policy predicament, the incoming Bush team arrived at the same conclusion—namely, to do nothing. Bush’s advisers, like Clinton’s, were split. In the Defense Department, some, like Paul Wolfowitz, seemed (according to Pollack) “obsessed” with getting rid of Saddam—though in point of historical fact Wolfowitz’s position was not strikingly dissimilar to Al Gore’s. For others, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, Iraq “simply did not measure up” to China or Russia or Europe on the scale of international importance.

Most, like Vice President Cheney, were in the middle. They saw plainly enough that containment was not working, and they also saw the long-term benefits of regime change. But they recognized as well that (to quote Pollack again) “toppling Saddam was going to be difficult, potentially costly, and risky.” The net result was that by the summer of 2001, despite the almost complete collapse of the sanctions regime, “it had become clear that the administration was not going to pursue a radically new approach to Iraq.”

Then came September 11. A hitherto obscure terrorist threat emanating from the Arab-Muslim world had reached out to commit mass murder against Americans on their own soil, and in so doing had changed everyone’s priorities. Hillary Clinton, the new junior Senator from New York, put it this way in an interview with Dan Rather two days after 9/11, using starkly confrontational language of the sort for which President Bush would soon be pilloried: “Every nation has to be either for us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price.”

As for the administration, it had come to understand something else—namely, that its responsibility extended beyond the clear and present danger presented by nations, like Afghanistan, guilty of harboring terrorists. It had to prepare for future threats as well. In that regard, Iraq moved quickly to the head of the list.

As Douglas Feith explains in War and Decision, the recently published memoir of his days as Under Secretary for Policy in Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department, there were several reasons why a post-9/11 strategy had to focus on Saddam Hussein. First among them was Saddam’s ties to terrorist groups, of which the Clinton administration had been well aware and had repeatedly cited. Although no evidence existed that Saddam had been involved in al Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington—and no Bush official ever asserted otherwise—the White House learned after the liberation of Afghanistan that Abu Musab Zarqawi, one of al Qaeda’s key operatives, had found safe haven in Iraq. There was also some evidence (cited by General Tommy Franks in his own memoir, American Soldier), that Zarqawi “had been joined there by other al-Qaeda leaders.”

In March 2002, a New Yorker article described the presence in Afghanistan of a radical Islamic group, Ansar al-Islam, whose members were being trained in al-Qaeda camps but being paid through Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service—suggesting a connection “far closer than previously thought.” From other intelligence sources it appeared that Zarqawi was in fact heading Ansar al-Islam, and that its members were training for WMD use against Western countries. Finally, in September 2002, the CIA released a report, Iraqi Support for Terrorism, asserting that “Iraq continues to be a safe haven, transit point, or operational node for groups and individuals who direct violence against the United States.”¹

We now know, thanks to captured Iraqi documents, that American intelligence seriously underestimated the extent of Saddam’s ties with terrorist groups of all sorts. Throughout the 1990’s, it emerged, the Iraqi intelligence service had worked with Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front, and Yasir Arafat’s private army (Force 17), and had given training to members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Saddam also collaborated with jihadists fighting the American presence in Somalia, including some who were members of al Qaeda. It may be that al Qaeda had no formal presence in Iraq itself, but the captured documents show that it did not need such a presence. Saddam was willing to work with any terrorists who targeted the United States and its allies, and he reached out to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups (and vice-versa) whenever the occasion warranted.

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Second, as Feith relates, Saddam had the WMD know-how, as well as probable stockpiles, that terrorist groups like al Qaeda might want for future operations. Just weeks before 9/11, a privately sponsored exercise had simulated a smallpox attack on the United States. The results were chilling: more than three million people infected within two months, and one million dead. “Today,” declared the official report, “we are ill-equipped to prevent the dire consequences of a biological-weapon attack”—a conclusion that would cast a shadow of apprehension over the post-9/11 Defense Department, as dark as the shadow cast by the anthrax scare that gripped the country after five people received fatal doses in the mail and by the discovery during the invasion of Afghanistan that the Taliban had been experimenting with chemical weapons.

Where would terrorists look to acquire such inefficient but murderous weapons? As far as anyone knew, the place to start would be Saddam’s Iraq. UNSCOM had uncovered Saddam’s extensive biological-weapons (BW) program, dating back to before Desert Storm, only in 1995. Since then, Iraq claimed to have destroyed its BW stockpile—but there was no proof of this. Similar doubts surrounded Saddam’s chemical-weapons (CW) program, of which even bigger stockpiles remained unaccounted for. (In UNSCOM’s estimate, there were 1.5 undocumented tons of VX gas alone.) In addition, UNSCOM believed Saddam still possessed clandestine Scud missiles, useful as a delivery system for a chemical attack.

Third was Saddam’s declared antipathy toward the United States. In 1993 he had hatched a plot to assassinate his then-nemesis, former President Bush, during a visit by the latter to Kuwait. A “general suspicion” among Clinton-administration officials, in Pollack’s words, was that Saddam was also “working on a variety of terrorist contingencies” in the event that the United States ever tried to topple his regime. He was the only world leader who actually applauded the attacks of 9/11.

Finally and most ominously, Saddam was emerging, like a great malignant moth, from the containment regime in place since the end of the first Gulf war. By the end of the 1990’s, sanctions had become a joke, proving less a liability to Saddam than an asset in rebuilding his power. In October 2000 a supposedly “contained” Iraq had boldly renewed its military cooperation with Syria, moving divisions to the Syrian border and even deploying troops into Syria itself to put pressure on Israel. Since then, Saddam’s attacks on American and British air patrols over Iraq had grown more intense. When General Tommy Franks met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the liberation of Afghanistan, these attacks headed his daily list of challenges. “It would only be a matter of time,” Feith writes, “before Iraq was once again engaged in a violent clash with the United States.”

With the fall of Afghanistan, moreover, Bush’s military planners had become more rather than less nervous about the Iraqi threat. Osama bin Laden’s escape from his Tora Bora hideout raised the possibility that he might find safe haven in Baghdad. (Saddam had offered the terrorist leader sanctuary at least once before, after his 1997 expulsion from Sudan.) And as for weapons of mass destruction, on this issue the CIA and its director, George Tenet, still had no doubts, and Tenet’s dogmatic certainty on the point was backed up by the UN inspectors themselves.

Since 1998, no inspector had visited Iraq. Huge quantities of chemical WMD’s were known to have existed before Desert Storm. Quantities had been destroyed since. How much more was left? Saddam had never made the accounting demanded by the UN. In its absence, the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, reasonably inferred that considerable quantities must still have existed.

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Today we know that this conviction—which had underlain Clinton’s air strikes in 1998 and the UN’s desperate efforts to reinsert its inspectors into Iraq, and which was shared by virtually every foreign intelligence service, from the French and Germans to the British and Japanese—was the weakest link in the case for going to war with Iraq. But who was responsible for the misimpression? Some have blamed it on the assurances of former Iraqi exiles, especially Ahmed Chalabi of the Iranian National Congress; their motive was presumably to convince the Bush administration to depose the dictator and put them in charge. A more likely culprit seems to have been another Iraqi exile, Rafid Ahmed Alwan, code-named “Curveball,” who arrived in Germany in 1999 telling horrific tales of Saddam’s BW arsenal.

Exiles and/or charlatans may indeed have played a part in misleading the CIA and other Western intelligence services. But by far the most important deceiver was Saddam himself. For more than a decade, he had consistently acted like a guilty man, evading inspections and moving trucks from palace to palace in the dead of night. Even his own army officers, Feith writes, believed he was hiding biological and chemical weapons. And as became clear from his post-capture interrogations, this was precisely the impression he intended to convey, assuming that it would be enough in itself to deter not only an American invasion but an insurrection by Iraqi Kurds or Shiites, or even—his most consistent worry—an attack by Iran.

It never seems to have occurred to Saddam that an American President would take him seriously enough to decide that his supposed WMD stockpiles and programs had to be destroyed by any means necessary. But there was nothing unreasonable about the President’s inference—which was the inference of most American politicians as well. No one knew for sure, just as no one knew what links Saddam might have with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. If WMD’s existed once, they might well still exist; nothing, and certainly not Saddam’s behavior, suggested otherwise.

Nor was there any way to know, at least until troops were on the ground. Thus, dealing forthrightly with the issue entailed, first, threatening Iraq with a full-scale land invasion and then, if Saddam refused to back down, launching an actual attack.

Convincing Congress that the United States enjoyed a right of “anticipatory self-defense” against Saddam was hardly a difficult task. On the contrary, in September 2002 the Senate virtually arm-twisted Bush into giving it time to pass a new and more specific resolution than the Clinton-era one authorizing regime change in Iraq. In ringing the tocsin, moreover, leading Democrats spoke at least as assertively as leading Republicans. One of them was Charles Schumer:

Hussein’s vigorous pursuit of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, and his present and potential future support for terrorist acts and organizations . . . make him a terrible danger to the people of the United States.

Another was Hillary Clinton:

My position is very clear. The time has come for decisive action to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s.

John Edwards was still another:

Every day [Saddam] gets closer to his long-term goal of nuclear capability.

Howard Dean, then the governor of Vermont, was of a similar mind:

There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the U.S. and our allies.

More than half of Senate Democrats, including John Kerry and Joseph Biden, joined with Republicans in authorizing the President “to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq,” and in so doing to enforce all the relevant but ineffectual resolutions passed by the UN Security Council. In the House, 81 Democrats (out of 209 in total) concurred. Later, many would claim that they had been tricked or misled or even lied to. In fact, the vote reflected nothing more than an affirmation of the old Clinton-era position, now urgently reinforced by the experience of 9/11.²

It was, after all, California’s Nancy Pelosi who had warned the nation on December 16, 1998, during Operation Desert Fox, that Saddam’s “development of WMD technology . . . is a threat to countries in the region.” During the House debate in October 2002, Pelosi sounded the same urgent theme, summing up a threat whose imminence the Democrats had been insisting upon for years. “Yes,” reiterated the tireless Pelosi, “[Saddam] has chemical weapons. He has biological weapons. He is trying to get nuclear weapons.”

That said it all.

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As the leaves turned in Washington in the fall of 2002, mainstream Democrats were on board with Bush, just as they had been on board with Clinton. The real reluctance for war came from Republican ranks—and from within the administration itself. The most serious dissenter was Secretary of State Colin Powell, together with his assistant Richard Armitage. Both men wanted to find a way to prop up the containment “box” around Saddam without having to resort to drastic military action.

Their hopes, however, were already more than three years out of date. The main feature of the containment regime had become the Oil-for-Food program, set up by the United Nations in 1996 with Clinton-administration approval. Within months, the program had become a spigot of cash for Saddam and his family and cronies. The full extent of the corruption, and the full roster of who paid in and who was paid out, may not be known for decades, if ever. But the overall picture is reasonably clear, thanks again in large part to documents seized in the 2003 invasion.

Saddam had shrewdly realized that vouchers for the sale of his oil might serve as a kind of international currency, distributed by him to favored customers who would be obliged to pay him kickbacks, all out of reach of the scrutiny of the UN. Eventually, UN administrators were brought into the conspiracy as well.³ Within a year the program had miraculously restored Saddam’s personal wealth and power, even as the Iraqi people continued to suffer. By the time of the U.S. invasion, he had skimmed at least $21 billion from the program, in addition to the billions made through smuggled oil sales to other Middle East countries, including his old enemy Iran.

The list of recipients of Oil-for-Food vouchers grew to more than 270 names, constituting a Who’s Who of slippery international politicians and diplomats—all of whom, needless to say, opposed any talk of military action against Iraq. On the Security Council, Russia, France, and China, key adversaries of U.S. policy toward Iraq going back to Clinton days, were among Saddam’s key beneficiaries. Not only was Oil-for-Food the biggest scandal in UN history, it had turned the UN’s mandate inside out. A program established to punish a rogue tyrant was systematically making him more powerful; nations that were supposed to be his custodians had become his accomplices; and the institution whose purpose was to protect international order was destroying it.

At the time, though, no one in the Bush administration knew this. That was why, in September 2002, President Bush was willing to yield to Colin Powell and British prime minister Tony Blair and ask the UN for one more resolution, this one explicitly threatening Saddam with military force if he did not finally comply with all the preceding resolutions against him.

What Powell found at the UN astonished even him. At a press conference, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, shrieked that “nothing! nothing!” justified war—making Powell so angry that, as he would later tell the reporter Bob Woodward, he could barely contain himself. “Any leverage with Saddam was linked directly to the threat of war,” Powell recalled, “and the French had just taken the threat off the table.” He could not believe the Europeans’ stupidity. Neither could the President. But it was not stupidity; it was self-interested duplicity.

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The UN’s refusal to hold Saddam accountable had the unintended effect of bringing even Powell into line with the White House. In conversations with Bush, he began to use terms like “mosh pit” and “quagmire” to describe the world body. Still, the decision had been made to go back for another, tougher resolution—something that Bill Clinton in his time had conspicuously not secured—either for Desert Fox or for Kosovo.

In going to the UN, Bush willy-nilly allowed the focus to shift from the threat posed by Saddam to the United States, which would justify anticipatory action in self-defense, to Saddam’s defiance of existing UN resolutions, which conferred on the Security Council the right to approve or disapprove of action. Suddenly the salient point at issue was Saddam’s actual stockpiles, determining the nature and extent of which had been the UN’s focus for more than a decade. This led to a crucial delay of more than six months, from September 2002 until March 2003, a period Saddam duly exploited both to build an international coalition aimed at blocking Security Council action and to prepare his own defensive plans.

The case against Saddam, even by the UN’s own rules, was rock solid, and in November 2002 the Security Council did unanimously issue Resolution 1441, ordering him to disarm his WMD’s or face “serious consequences.” Everyone understood that “serious consequences” meant the use of force, including on Iraqi territory. But the Europeans, determined to thwart the U.S., declined to take it that way. No military action was envisaged, they insisted; the passage of Resolution 1441 was action enough. Large crowds mobilized across Western Europe to denounce the very thought of war.

On November 25, 2002, under the terms of 1441, UN inspectors re-entered Iraq. They came back empty-handed. On December 7, Iraq dumped thousands of pages of documents on UNMOVIC. Even Hans Blix recognized that this mountain of materials, some of them over a decade old, contained nothing to clear up the question of what had happened to Saddam’s stockpiles. All the same, Blix asked for time to sift through the document dump, knowing the task would consume months.

As Bob Woodward notes in Plan of Attack, his account of the run-up to the war, Bush so far had been “a study in patience.” (It is also true that General Franks was not yet ready for offensive operations, and needed time for the buildup of American forces in Kuwait that was the leverage behind the implicit threat of force.) The President held back until Blix’s interim report on January 27, 2003, which even the New York Times labeled “grim.” There was nothing in it to suggest that Iraq had accepted the principle of complying with UN resolutions or intended to take any of the steps that, in Blix’s words, “it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”

_____________

Blix himself still held out the hope that, somehow, at some future time, Saddam would yet decide to comply. But his mission was doomed from the start. “UNMOVIC had the impossible task,” John Keegan notes, “of proving a negative, that Saddam no longer had forbidden weapons.” But the burden of proof belonged legally on Saddam himself, as stated in Resolution 1441, and it was his failure to comply with that demand, and not Bush’s supposed doctrine of “preemptive war,” that triggered the U.S. invasion. What finally forced the Americans’ hand was the UN’s failure or refusal to acknowledge the very existence of the demand that it itself had made.

The UN’s moment of truth came on February 5, 2003, when Powell gave a final presentation of the case against Saddam to the Security Council, with CIA director George Tenet sitting behind him. Powell’s 76-minute exercise in destructive analysis documented what everyone knew was the case: that Saddam was in “material breach” of the UN’s own stated requirements. That being so, the UN had lost any empirical grounds for declining to take military action. The only question left was whether the Security Council had the moral courage to stand behind its own resolution.

Later, Powell’s defenders would charge that he had been tricked or deceived into making the speech—and in retrospect he said he was humiliated by the thought that he had conveyed false or misleading information. In fact, as Feith shows, the speech came at Powell’s own suggestion, and before giving it he had ruthlessly winnowed out any evidence he considered shoddy or dubious. Even so, he offered over 100 examples of Saddam’s evasion and deceit, evidence based on eyewitness accounts, radio intercepts, and satellite photos. Nor did he hesitate to bring up the al-Qaeda connection as an indicator of possible future horrors along the lines of 9/11. “Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and al Qaeda together,” Powell asserted, and only military action could ensure that they forever remained apart.

His words were wasted. Russia, France, and Germany stood fast against war “under any circumstances.” Their intransigence, reinforced by their own secret links to Saddam, doomed any final Security Council vote for action. But Powell’s speech did at least confirm the near-unanimity of the official U.S. position. As the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote the next day, “I can only say he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” Indeed, even before Powell’s speech, Joseph Biden, reacting to Blix’s interim report, had summed up the feeling of many Democrats in these words:

Saddam is in material breach of the latest UN resolution. . . . The legitimacy of the Security Council is at stake, as well as the integrity of the UN. [If] Saddam does not give up those WMD’s and the Security Council does not call for the use of force, I think we have little option but to act with a larger group of willing nations, if possible, and alone if we must.

The die was cast.

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Operation Iraqi Freedom got under way on March 21, 2003. In October of that year, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) reported it was unable to find any of the WMD stockpiles that everyone believed were in Iraq. Still, what the group did find, in the words of its director David Kay, was “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment” that Saddam had concealed from Blix’s inspectors in 2002: proof, in other words, of Saddam’s clear material breach of Resolution 1441.

Of course, this was not the element of the ISG report that attracted the attention of the war’s critics. According to the New York Times, the ISG’s findings supported the view that Bush had “used dubious intelligence to justify his decision to go to war.” That was and is false.

While Kay and his ISG inspectors found no WMD’s, they did not say there had been none. To the contrary: “My view,” Kay stated, is that “Iraq indeed had WMD’s” and that smaller stocks still existed on Iraqi territory. Later he told Britain’s Daily Telegraph that he had found evidence of some WMD’s having been moved to Syria before the war. A question mark hangs over that possibility to this day.

In testifying to the Senate, moreover, Kay asserted unequivocally that “the world is far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein,” adding that the upper echelons of the Iraqi regime had become divided into two factions: those willing to sell to the highest bidder whatever they knew about manufacturing WMD’s and those, including Saddam himself, willing to buy someone else’s know-how at equally high prices. Saddam’s FBI interrogations would confirm Kay’s analysis. There Saddam admitted that he intended to rebuild his WMD programs once he rid himself of the international sanctions imposed after 1991. He knew that WMD’s were the key to his future power, just as they had been in the past. Had he been allowed to remain Iraq’s dictator, he would have emerged as an even greater international menace than before the Gulf war.

Those who condemn Bush’s decision to go to war, bemoan its cost in material and human terms, and deplore the damage it has allegedly done to the American image around the world should consider what would have happened if there had been no war. It is not just that millions of Iraqis would still be in the iron grip of Saddam and his police state. The fact is that, by 2002, no inspection regime and no amount of international pressure, no matter how plumped up by yet another UN resolution, would have kept him contained any longer. The Oil-for-Food corruption would have continued to grow unrestrained, finding reliable co-conspirators in Europe and the Middle East. Rising oil prices over the next half-decade would have kept Saddam awash in cash, allowing him to rebuild his military and cement his connections with powers like Syria and Russia. He had called our bluff before; but this time it was no bluff.

Given the logic of the situation, at what point could Bush have avoided war? To have taken the military option off the table before going to the UN would have undercut everything his analysts and policy advisers, including at the CIA, had been saying since 9/11—and brought howls of protests from leading Democrats in Congress. Doing so after the passage of Resolution 1441 would have made a mockery of the rationale for going to the UN in the first place, and, as Powell explicitly recognized, undermined the resolution itself.

Should we have backed off after the Blix report on January 27, 2003, even as the American troop buildup in Kuwait was in full swing? That would have devastated Bush’s reputation as a war leader after his resounding success in Afghanistan, and guaranteed that he would never be more than a one-term President (which may have been the real objective of his critics anyway).

Saddam Hussein had become a virus infecting the international body politic. The leading symptom of that infection was Oil-for-Food—emblematic of a moral anarchy let loose in the world that would prevail as long as Saddam remained in power. That anarchy had destroyed Iraq; eaten away the legitimacy of the United Nations; and almost wrecked NATO. Indeed, it is hard to see how NATO members already embittered by the diplomatic battle in the UN in 2002 could have continued to cooperate militarily in Kosovo or Afghanistan. Nor is it clear that Eastern European nations would want to join a NATO led by a power, the United States, that had displayed such bare-faced unwillingness to stand up to a dangerous dictator.

_____________

“My job is to secure America,” George Bush told Bob Woodward in 2004. “I also believe that freedom is something people long for.” Had he wished, he could also have referred back to the words uttered by President Clinton six years earlier, in February 1998:

Let’s imagine the future. What if [Saddam] refuses to comply, and we fail to act, or take some ambiguous third route? . . . Well, he 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 some day, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.

Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq war, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster. If, after 9/11, Bush had then blinked in his turn, he might indeed have found himself out of office by January 2005, and someone else would have had to tackle the job under much more disadvantageous conditions.

To judge by his unequivocal pronouncements pre-2003, and as improbable as it sounds now, that someone might well have been Al Gore, the erstwhile hawkish Vice President who had championed the Iraq Liberation Act, or indeed John Kerry, who back in 1998 told Scott Ritter that containment of Saddam was not working and that the time had come to use force. If Bush had failed to act, either one of these two men might have come to office in January 2005 publicly prepared to deal with the “gathering threat” that his predecessor had unaccountably allowed to grow larger and closer and ever more virulent.

Footnotes

¹ This document would become central to later claims that the administration “manipulated intelligence” for political purposes. But neither the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission nor the Senate Intelligence Committee found a single case of such manipulation or, for that matter, of political pressure being put on intelligence analysts. What the analysts reported was sometimes wrong, but not because policymakers made it so.

² For a full refutation of the charge that we were “misled” into war, see Norman Podhoretz, “Who Is Lying About Iraq?,” in the December 2005 COMMENTARY.

³ See Claudia Rosett, “The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It?,” COMMENTARY, May 2004.

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About the Author

Arthur Herman, who has taught history at George Mason University and Georgetown University, is the author most recently of "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age" (Bantam Books). His essay "Who Owns the Vietnam War?" appeared in the December 2007 COMMENTARY.

Are We Safer? Yes, George W. Bush has made America more secure since 9/11.

by Reuel Marc Gerecht
06/30/2008, Volume 013, Issue 40

Are we safer now than we were before 9/11? Safer than before we invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein? Barack Obama insists we are not. Seeing Iraq as the crucible of our growing weakness, the Democratic nominee for president asserts that "we have now spent over $600 billion, thousands of lives lost, and we have not been made more safe .  .  . [and] al Qaeda's leadership is stronger than ever." According to the senator, moreover, George Bush's policies have also "made Iran stronger"; under his administration Iran has been "able to fund Hezbollah and poses the greatest threat to America and Israel and the Middle East in a generation." Joining Senator John McCain to the president, Obama assails the "Bush-McCain record on protecting this country" and the Arizona Republican for his intention "to double-down on" the "fear-mongering," "saber-rattling," and "failed policies" which endanger the nation.

Now, it is certainly true that the Bush administration in its conduct of both war and diplomacy has too often been inept. Even if the provincial elections in Iraq this fall and the national elections next winter establish a long-lasting means for Sunni-Shiite reconciliation, fortify the country's nascent democracy, and decisively prove the wisdom of the surge last January, President Bush's allowing Iraq to descend into hell in 2004 will likely haunt his legacy. Whether it is Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition and the CIA's not-so-secret prisons, or the Patriot Act and the gargantuan Department of Homeland Security, there are many things that thoughtful critics could wish the United States had not done or had done better in the war on terrorism.

But Obama's charge isn't really about the arrogance, clumsiness, and lack of foresight that often characterize presidents and their administrations at war. For him, and many of his supporters, the Bush administration has uniquely and comprehensively degraded the nation's security, especially against the lethal threats emanating from the Middle East. America was much more secure under Hillary Clinton's husband--with the first attack on the World Trade Center, the truck bombing of Khobar Towers, the embassy bombings in Africa, the aborted attempt on the USS Sullivans in Aden, the other attempts at millennial bombings in the Middle East and the United States, and the near sinking of the USS Cole--on the road to 9/11.

Yet when we look at what George W. Bush has actually done, it's pretty hard not to credit him with massively improving America's security, both at home and abroad.

Before 9/11, America's counterterrorist capacities were, to put it politely, disorganized, unfocused, poorly staffed, and poorly run. (The exception was the ever-emotional and self-referential Richard Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, who should always get credit for being deadly serious about Islamic terrorism and Osama bin Laden.) The 9/11 Commission report is a chronicle of growing danger unmatched by bureaucratic seriousness or political will. And Bill Clinton, unlike George W. Bush, had nearly eight years to think about Islamic extremism. To President Clinton's credit and great shame, he intellectually understood the nature and horrific potential of bin Ladenism and al Qaeda--as he understood, and regularly tasked his senior officials to explain nationally, the dangers of an increasingly restless Saddam Hussein. Yet he could not summon the fortitude to strike devastatingly against al Qaeda and its Taliban protector or Iraq. Instead in 1998, we had "Operation Infinite Reach" in which cruise missiles were launched at a rock-and-mud Afghan village and a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that may have had an al Qaeda or Iraqi chemical-weapons connection. Only in the fall of 1999 did a CIA team, timorously, land in Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley to meet, but offer no military aid to, the anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Post 9/11, under President Bush, the situation changed drastically, as it certainly would have changed also under a President Gore. What is striking about Obama's Iraq-obsessed critique of the Bush presidency is his unwillingness to give any credit where credit is obviously due. Today in the mainstream press, with its pronounced anti-Bush reflexes, we are more likely to see articles and op-eds about America's unfair and labyrinthine visa system than about its effectiveness in our counterterrorism campaign. (And yes, the system is offensive, inflexible, and denies entry to many innocent, talented, and potentially pro-American Arabs, Pakistanis, and Iranians.) But if Obama wins in November, we can be assured that he will leave it in place. It is just too effective in complicating the operational planning of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

As president, Obama would also likely leave untouched the intelligence and security liaison relationships energetically developed by the Bush administration. Listening to the Illinois senator's speeches about America's current place in the world, one would think because of our many transgressions, we no longer have helpful friends. But if one talks directly to European security and domestic-intelligence services (and my colleague Gary Schmitt and I have spent the last two years visiting these organizations to get a realistic picture of how western Europeans are approaching counterterrorism after 9/11), one cannot avoid the conclusion that America's counterterrorist cooperation with them has blossomed under Bush. It is closer and more amicable today than it was in March 2003 when we invaded Iraq, and the relationships then--especially with the French, our most zealous Iraq war antagonists--were already good.

President Bush would certainly not win a popularity contest anywhere in western Europe (he does a little better the closer one gets to Russia), but the effect of this anti-Bush sentiment on our security and intelligence cooperation has been minimal. Most Europeans don't like the term "global war on terror," seeing counterterrorism primarily as a police exercise and are uncomfortable in their post-Kantian way with bellicose language. (But the Europeans know that without American assistance, they would have great difficulty striking terrorists abroad, as they don't possess the military means to do so.) As was the case before 9/11, the Europeans occasionally express some anxiety about transatlantic cooperation that could lead to death-penalty charges in U.S. courts or military tribunals, but this is usually expressed as a mournful afterthought.

European internal security officers certainly don't dwell on Iraq. They believe that the present generation of Muslim holy warriors--and both European and American security officials regard these European jihadists as the most dangerous of the would-be terrorists out there--are more products of homegrown causes than any American action. European security officials, especially in Great Britain with its large Pakistani immigrant community, put much more emphasis upon the conflict in Afghanistan--the "good war" for most Democrats--as fueling lethal jihadism.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, and France's internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, to our fight against al Qaeda and its allied groups. If European-passport holding jihadists get past the European services, the odds are not great that the FBI is going to catch them on this side of the Atlantic. Although the Bureau is certainly a better counterterrorist outfit than it was before 9/11, that difference, given the threat and the enormous amount of money spent on homeland security since 2001, isn't inspiring. (Obama could fairly criticize the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress for its post-9/11 handling of the FBI.)

Yet we can search in vain Obama's writings and speeches for serious commentary on Europe, let alone on Europe's essential role in America's defense against Islamic radicalism. Western Europe is arguably the most important arena for U.S. counterterrorist efforts against operationally active Islamic terrorist groups. (Intelligence sharing during the Cold War was nowhere near this intimate with the continental Europeans.) Obama is not alone in under-appreciating what the Europeans are doing for the United States. Focused on the failure of the continental Europeans to fight well--or often at all--in Afghanistan, the American Right tends to overlook their contribution to the larger battle against Islamic extremism. Given the accomplished Europeanists among Obama's advisers, however, it's hard not to suspect that the senator has assiduously been avoiding talking about the European-American counterterrorist partnership because it does not fit so easily into his Iraq-war-has-ruined-our-national-security, the-world-is-ashamed-of-us, al Qaeda-is-winning theme.

Obama insists that the Iraq war has seriously weakened us strategically. But how exactly is this so? According to the senator, the Iraq war caused us to take our eye off Afghanistan and our real enemy al Qaeda--the one in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not the branch in Iraq, which bin Laden constantly refers to, praises, and describes as fighting in the battle that will determine the fate of Islam. "These are the same guys [the Bush administration] who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11."

Yet, the Bush administration's mistakes in Afghanistan were not those of focus, but of battlefield tactics, will, and a longstanding, entirely bipartisan, confusion on how to deal with Pakistan. The same guiding lights who deployed too few troops to Iraq earlier sent too few troops unaggressively into Afghanistan. Who knows whether we could have caught or killed bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, at the beginning of the Afghan war if we'd parachuted troops en masse into the flatlands adjacent to the Taliban's capital of Kandahar, where bin Laden often resided? Who knows whether we could have killed bin Laden at Tora Bora if General Tommy Franks had committed large numbers of Special Forces to the fight and not allowed allied Afghan troops to be the primary ground forces in the area? We certainly should have done these things. We were fighting on bin Laden's terrain.

If Al Gore had been president, would he have overruled General Franks's casualty-averse, Special Forces-on-horseback, airpower heavy approach to the Afghan war? It seems unlikely. Would the more dovish and less experienced Barack Obama have questioned and countermanded a ranking general?

Obama has repeatedly said that he would now deploy two additional brigades (roughly 8,000 men) to Afghanistan--a commendable "surge" of troops that is surely needed in the country, and about double the reinforcements so far sent by the Pentagon. But is this really a big part of answering the senator's constant complaint that the Bush administration took its "eye off" al Qaeda? A few thousand more troops in Afghanistan's southern provinces would diminish al Qaeda in Pakistan how? Does he mean that instead of stacking up a couple of hundred CIA case officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, we should stack up these same men and women in Afghanistan, inside guarded compounds where their English-only abilities get further honed? (If Obama were to attack the Bush administration for its lack of zeal in the reformation of the CIA, especially the clandestine service, where the number of operatives who have any real knowledge of Afghanistan's languages and culture remains--according to case officers currently serving--scandalously small, he would be on firm ground.)

Increasing troop levels in Afghanistan will do little or nothing against al Qaeda in its primary training ground and headquarters: Pakistan. More troops will certainly help thwart the Taliban's ambitions to destabilize larger parts of Afghanistan. But to beat al Qaeda in Central Asia and the subcontinent, we must beat al Qaeda in Pakistan. And we are unlikely to do this anytime soon by opening up secular schools in the North-West Frontier Province (a commendable if unworkable idea of Obama's) or by launching occasional Special Forces strikes into al Qaeda-infested areas of Pakistan, another estimable if mild recommendation from the senator. Targeted assassinations and repeated military strikes against al Qaeda's camps and the affiliated Pakistani tribes can seriously damage the organization. The Bush administration has proven the possibilities of such tactics in Afghanistan and elsewhere by killing off or capturing probably upwards of 80 percent of al Qaeda's command structure and foot soldiers of 2001.

Which brings me to the question of whether Obama believes that with such losses al Qaeda is undiminished since 9/11, when bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri were living in the open and with ease dispatching emissaries. Many of the killed and captured holy warriors were skilled Westernized, globetrotting Arabs and Pakistanis. Al Qaeda is still recruiting and could do horrendous damage to the United States, but does Obama really think al Qaeda's recruitment efforts are "stronger" now after the world's principal security services have been focusing on the organization for seven years, and when well-known Islamists and the Arab media are seriously debating the ethics that allow young men and women to slaughter civilians in the name of Allah? Just read the increasingly whiny and apologetic speeches of bin Laden and Zawahiri since 2005. Note their current attempt to headline the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has solicited some derisory commentary from well-known fundamentalists. (In 2001 al Qaeda viewed Zionism as a subset of Western evil, generally not worthy of its loftiest polemics.) How in the world does Obama actually know that the incarceration and treatment of the 9/11 terrorists, which "destroyed our credibility when it comes to the rule of law .  .  . has given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, 'Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims' "? Are Muslim militants really turning into jihadists because the premier infidel power didn't give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed habeas corpus rights? Does the senator really think that faithful Muslims would embrace the slaughter of innocents if the United States waterboarded him--an interrogation technique that is quite polite compared to the standard interrogative methods of the Arab, Pakistani, and Central Asian security services? Like much of the American left, the senator is imagining his own disgust in the "hearts and minds" of foreign Muslims. Isn't it a big push to suggest that any of this means that al Qaeda and its allied extremist groups committed to jihad against America are in a stronger position now than in 2001 and 2003?

After launching military strikes against al Qaeda elements in Pakistan, what would the Obama camp do that is so different from what the Bush administration has done or a McCain one would do? Would President Obama really cut off aid to the Pakistani military, a highly imperfect ally in the war on terror? One reason al Qaeda-directed or -inspired suicide bombings skyrocketed in Pakistan in 2007-08 is that the Pakistani government had been challenging the group and its local allies. Another reason is surely that al Qaeda's holy warriors now have great difficulty in attacking the United States and other Western targets, in large part thanks to the Bush administration's counterterrorist efforts and to those of Britain and France.

General Pervez Musharraf may have been fitful and fickle in how he conducted his anti-al Qaeda campaign, but he did earn al Qaeda's wrath. And al Qaeda violence in Pakistan, as in Iraq, appears to be slowly but surely working against the popularity of the organization and its local support, as superbly described in a recent essay, "The Unraveling," by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic.

The increase in violence in Pakistan does not mean we are less safe; it means the Pakistanis are beginning to tackle the excruciatingly difficult problem of extirpating bin Ladenism from regions of the country where it put down deep roots. Jihadist sentiments are now widespread in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the North-West Frontier Province, and even the Punjab, the critical geographic and cultural bridge to India. Reversing this growth will likely be an erratic, ugly process as Pakistan's reborn democracy responds to the widespread anger about the American presence in Afghanistan. To local eyes, America is up to no good, the Pashtun Taliban were better Pakistani allies than the current Afghan government with its many pro-Indian Tajiks. With the Taliban in power, the Americans were getting bombed, and Pakistanis weren't deluged with suicide-bombers.

Democratic Pakistan is working hard to reach a modus vivendi with the Taliban militias. If it does, Afghanistan and the Coalition forces will face renewed attack as Pashtuns increase their support of the multiheaded Taliban movement. But if they don't reach an understanding, which seems more and more likely given the intensifying militancy and ambition among the Pakistani Taliban, then democratic Pakistan and its angry army will likely combat the militants who provide al Qaeda sanctuary. This brutal process may immiserate Pakistan and produce small waves of jihadists trying to gain access to the West and attack Americans and Europeans. But this is progress even if Barack Obama, who rightly supports the strengthening of democracy in Pakistan, doesn't quite understand what's going on.

But back to Iraq, the supposed epicenter of our newly developed national weakness: Does Obama hear our European and Middle Eastern allies calling for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq? (The definition of rapid is 16 months, the senator's stated timetable for a "gradual" withdrawal.) If so, he has acute hearing.

Once it became clear to Sunni Arabs that an American withdrawal would lead to the battlefield defeat of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority by Iraq's Shiite Arabs and Kurds, the desire to see the American troops leave Mesopotamia quieted down noticeably. Sunni Arabs are increasingly interested in the clout that might accrue to them through provincial elections in October 2008 and national elections before 2010. (It's amazing how military defeat focuses the mind on more peaceful paths to power.)

Are the emirates of the Persian Gulf or the Saudis asking the Americans to withdraw the Navy from the region? They could do so easily if so inclined. But they know that as long as the U.S. Navy stays, and the American will to use it remains steadfast, the Iranian regime's capacity to intimidate its neighbors remains a dream. Although the surge has so far had little effect on Obama and the Democratic party, its effect on the Middle East--on how Iraqis view us, on how all Arabs view us, and on how Iranians view Iraqis and Americans--has been enormous. We didn't run. We doubled-down. The Sunni Arab press and satellite TV channels are describing Iraq in more normal terms (it's hard for them as the country is full of Shiites, Kurds, and Americans) and is learning to deal, ever more calmly, with the hitherto bizarre situation of having Sunni Arab Iraqis say almost nice things about Americans.

Iraqi Shiites are sending missions to Tehran to complain about Iranian meddling in Iraq's internal affairs. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's military headquarters in Basra, where he personally led the government's operations to secure the city, was shelled with Iranian-supplied weaponry, which, as U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker wryly remarked, no doubt focused the prime minister's attention on the Iranian problem. A tough, independent, sometimes irascible fellow, Maliki didn't look like he was enjoying his recent public audience in Tehran with Ali Khamenei, but he didn't buckle before the Iranian cleric, who wants to scuttle any basing agreement or defense pact between the United States and Iraq. After the meeting, Maliki reaffirmed his desire to see Washington and Baghdad sign a defense agreement. As the Washington Post put it, "This would seem to be an obvious U.S. gain in what, according to Senator Barack Obama .  .  . is the urgent task of countering Iran's attempt to dominate the Middle East." The Bush administration may have a difficult time getting a Status of Forces agreement passed through the Iraqi parliament, given how the issue rubs against Iraqi pride and the maximalist positions the Pentagon always initially takes in such negotiations. This is good. For the first time since the early 1950s, Iraqis are learning--and quickly--how to act as political adults. As Iraqi democracy gains strength, so will Iraqi pride and the ability of Iraqi leaders to make difficult compromises with the United States.

On the ground, the Shiite-led government in Baghdad is, slowly but surely, regaining control of regions of the country once dominated by lawless Shiite militias. The Shiite-led army is, slowly but surely, expanding its operations into Sunni regions of the country and encountering little opposition from armed Sunnis who once allied themselves to al Qaeda. Iraq's oldest Shiite nationalist party, the Dawa, to which the once belittled and now increasingly admired Maliki belongs, may well become the dominant Shiite political party after the national elections in 2009, further intensifying the "Iraqification" of the country's Shiite politics. The Dawa is hardly a bastion of pro-American sentiments, but it is increasingly a redoubt of Iraqi democrats who know that radical, armed Shiite youth are not a reliable political base. On both the Sunni and Shiite sides, older men are regaining the high ground.

The indefatigably anti-American Moktada al-Sadr, who has never shown much fondness for Iranians, is now "studying" in Iran. His political position is in flux and he is persona non grata at the religious schools in Najaf, Iraq's preeminent seat of Shiite education, where his father and his philosophically trailblazing father-in-law both gained their fame. Sadr is now employing the old Shiite belief in concealment or "occultation" as a political tactic. This may not work out as well for him as it did for the twelfth Imam, who is more revered today than when he vanished in the ninth century, or Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who became much more powerful exiled in Iraq and France than he had been preaching in Iran in the 1960s. The Iraqi provincial elections will let us know whether the Sadrists can hold their own, or whether the Dawa eats into Sadr's base of support. His personal charisma has certainly taken a hit as the surge has brought greater security to Baghdad's Shia community and eliminated the thuggery that came with Sadrist protection.

To the east in Iran, Mohammad Khatami, the former president, has publicly attacked his own government for "arming and training groups" for missions "in other countries where they wreak destruction and havoc." Hardcore members of the Iranian parliament have demanded that the intelligence ministry investigate Khatami for treason. Khatami, true to form, has quieted down, reaffirming this loyalty to the regime. But if he dared to voice this criticism publicly, we can be sure the senior mullahs of Qom are still saying it privately. (Qom is Iran's center of religious jurisprudence; its leaders have close ties to the divines in Najaf and often cool relations with the politicized clergy in Tehran.) In Sadr City and Basra, the Iranian regime has backed off its support of militant Shiite groups. It's a very good guess that Abd al Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (which was founded in Tehran in 1982), is livid about the cash, weaponry, and training Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps has given to Sadr's followers. Sadr and Hakim loathe each other. The Iranians surely know now they went too far in their attempt to radicalize the Iraqi Shia by encouraging internecine strife.

Obama would be correct in saying that the Iraq war offered clerical Iran an enormous opportunity to get itself into trouble, to unlearn a big lesson of the Iran-Iraq War: Arabism among the Iraqi Shia is real. The age-old Arab-Persian split in Mesopotamia can flair up suddenly, even among Iraqi Shia who have Iranian family members. In its history, the Iranian clerical regime has never had to deal with such a situation, where some of the most respected Shiite jurisprudents are in opposition and the Iranian ruling elite can neither shut these opponents down nor even criticize them too severely. Iraq's religious schools are recovering from the Hussein years and are again receiving students from Iran's most prestigious schools. Najaf will inevitably regain some of the centripetal eminence it had in the past. Najaf clerics were instrumental in both of Iran's 20th-century revolutions, and it wouldn't be surprising to see Najaf's disputatious clerics, both Iraqi and Iranian, rock the boat again in Iran (and in Lebanon). The Iraq war, with the gruesome al Qaeda campaign against both Shiites and Sunnis, has been the backdrop to a complex argument among devout Muslims about divinely sanctioned violence. The Iraqi Shiite religious establishment is not just waging an intellectual battle against the pretensions of Iran's theocracy, but also working with the elected Iraqi parliament and Sunni tribal leaders and anti-al Qaeda Sunni clerics to integrate religious ethics into law. Although most American liberals and conservatives now scoff at the idea, a religious, democratic Iraq could well be transformational for a region where virtually every government lacks legitimacy. In a Middle East that is always rough, corrupt, and illiberal, Iraq is potentially as revolutionary as American-liberated post-fascist Europe. Only now is the country really getting interesting. If democratic Iraq grows stronger--and we will have a pretty good idea of its strength with the coming provincial and national elections--and becomes a philosophical generator of anti-jihadist mores, the Iraqi people will have succeeded rather astonishingly.

When do we get to start asking whether the Iraq war, with its hard-won-however-imperfect democracy, might actually be a good thing, worth the American blood and treasure? If 85 percent of the Iraqis say it was worth the hellacious voyage, and the unelected Sunni Arab rulers of the region say it was not, might we not think with the former? If millions of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Iraqis vote in the provincial elections, will Obama really want to say, one month before the U.S. presidential elections, that America's sojourn in Iraq has failed? If Iraq contributes to the current intellectual debates in the Muslim Middle East that seem to be diminishing the ideological appeal of bin Ladenism in Arab lands, might that mean that the bloodshed in Mesopotamia hasn't been a waste?

And speaking of Iran, Obama constantly asserts that the Islamic Republic has been the great beneficiary of America's invasion of Iraq, that things in the region would be so much better if Saddam Hussein were still in power. Leaving aside the issues of intra-Shiite friction and competition and the Muslim soul-searching partly provoked by the Iraq war, is Obama suggesting that the Middle East would be a safer place if Saddam were still with us and he, too, were again developing nuclear and biochemical weapons and could thereby "check" Iranian adventurism?

Clerical Iran's relationship with Syria was ironclad when Saddam was in power--it would not at all be surprising to discover that Syria's North Korean-designed breeder reactor under construction at Dayr az-Zawr was critically aided and approved by the Iranians before Saddam's fall. Saddam's savage aggressiveness--remember it?--was certainly one reason the mullahs became serious about developing nuclear weapons (the regime's conception of the Iranian nation as the cutting edge of anti-American, militant Islamic power was another). Damascus was taking a page from Saddam's and the mullahs' playbook: Nuclear weapons are an excellent investment for regimes who see their legitimacy tied directly to their ability to project intimidating force. A nuclear-armed Syrian-Iranian axis could unleash an enormous amount of trouble without fearing military or even economic retaliation from Western or other Middle Eastern states.

Does Obama approve or disapprove of Israel's preemptive strike on Dayr az-Zawr? Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, a thoughtful dove, reluctantly praised the Israeli attack, which may well have retired Syria's nuclear-weapons program. Is this airstrike within the ballpark of the Illinois senator's idea of "tough diplomacy"? If so, would he then approve of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities? His speeches and interviews certainly suggest that he views clerical Iran as a much more dangerous threat to America and Israel than Baathist Syria, whose nuclear facility may well have been developed with Iranian aid as part of a covert effort to develop an anti-American, nuclear-armed front in the Middle East. Are preemptive bombing raids okay if done by threatened foreigners? Would Obama have approved of a U.S.-led raid on Dayr az-Zawr? Or would he have described such an attack as unwarranted bellicosity that endangers the United States and the "peace process"? On September 25, 2004, Obama told the Chicago Tribune that "Launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us to be in" given the ongoing war in Iraq. "On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse." Now that sounds a lot like John McCain's position on Iran, which Obama has described as counterproductive "saber-rattling."

It was the American invasion of Iraq that provoked the Europeans to get serious about their nuclear diplomacy with the mullahs in 2003. Has Obama noticed that as the threat of an American military strike against Tehran's bombmaking plants has faded so has the European resolve to punish the clerics with economy-crushing sanctions?

It just beggars the imagination to believe that Obama actually thinks that Ali Khamenei, Iran's prideful, virulently anti-American clerical overlord, would countenance a personal meeting with an American head of state. Obama has many advisers who served in the Clinton administration, and they have surely told him how unresponsive the clerical regime can be to earnest, friendly entreaties laced with the promise of big carrots. And the Clinton administration tried its hand at engagement when Mohammad Khatami was president, a cleric who will, at least furtively, shake a woman's hand. Over the last three years, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who was until his recent retirement the State Department's majordomo on Iran, was tireless in his efforts to build a united front against Tehran. If Obama really believes his team could do better, be "tougher" than Nick Burns, then he might perhaps explain how.

Whatever new strength Iran has in the region comes not from the American invasion of Iraq--or from Iran's relationship with its always troublesome 25-year-old Lebanese stepchild, Hezbollah--but from its nuclear-weapons program and the nefarious potential it bestows on a government that is willing, as Mohammad Khatami remarked, "to wreak destruction" beyond its borders. The Bush administration has failed to stop this program precisely because the vigorous diplomacy that Barack Obama advocates has not worked. Obama calls for "tough diplomacy," but most Europeans don't want biting sanctions. More eloquently than George Bush, Obama can ask the Europeans for cooperation, but does he really think he could rally the German industrial giant Siemens or the French oil company Total to abandon their Iranian projects because of his personal magnetism? How will he pressure Paris and Berlin to kill these investments? After his public statements, could he plausibly saber-rattle like President Bush, who before the recent National Intelligence Estimate cut his legs off had spooked certain quarters in Tehran with the possibility that he would do to the Iranians what the Israelis did to Saddam Hussein at Osirak and to the Syrians at Dayr az-Zawr? If Obama plans bigger carrots than the Bush administration and the European Union offered the Iranians to stop uranium enrichment, he might consider describing those carrots and to whom in Tehran they will be offered.

Perhaps Obama will just say that diplomacy isn't going to stop the clerical quest for a nuke, and he is unwilling to bomb the Iranian nuclear-weapons facilities because he really doesn't think a nuclear-armed clerical regime is that grave of a menace. It's an excellent bet this is what the senator really believes, although he appears determined not to say so. If he made such a statement now--or even just defined "tough diplomacy"--we could see a meaningful debate between the presidential nominees, assuming the Arizonan really thinks that the only thing worse than preemptive military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities is a clerical regime with a bomb. Perhaps we would have unexpected harmony between the two men, in favor of either preemption or containment. In any case, such a discussion would certainly be more profound than what the Democratic party's choice to be president of the United States has given us so far in his quest to become commander in chief.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.