BONUS POST: Iraq War Historical Document
A letter sent on October 23, 2002
I’ve never done a post like this, but I thought it might be interesting for some subscribers. Today is the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Five months before the invasion, I wrote an email to a couple dozen friends and colleagues across the conservative world (I was then on the right and worked at First Things magazine) making what I thought was a conservative-realist argument against the invasion. (Not a single recipient outside the FT offices responded to or even acknowledged what I wrote.) Below is the text of that email. (Do I agree with every argument and formulation below? No, I do not. This is a snapshot of my thinking at a moment in the past, nothing more.)
Dear Friends,
After much thinking (and discussion with a good friend, XXXXX XXXXX), I have concluded that I cannot support the Bush administration's plans to go to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. If we do go to war, I will support the campaign and the administration in the hopes of making the best of the decision. But I will consider that decision to be a mistake, just as I currently consider it a mistake for the administration to have chosen to focus so much of our nation's attention, resources, and energies on Iraq. I have come to this conclusion based on the following considerations, which I include in the hopes that you may find them interesting and useful.
The administration's case has several elements to it, including:
1. Saddam Hussein already possesses some weapons of mass destruction (WMD), namely chemical biological weapons, and actively seeks others, namely nuclear weapons. Because he has used the WMD that he already possesses, we can assume that he would use those he possesses in the future no matter what we do to deter him.
2. Even if Saddam does not possess the military means to threaten the mainland of the United States directly, he would gladly provide a terrorist organization with a WMD that could be detonated, perhaps by a suicide bomber, in the U.S. Invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam can thus be considered part of the War on Terror, and may even be required by it.
3. Saddam has refused to abide by a series of UN resolutions calling for, among other things, his disarmament.
4. For the sake of American interests (1 - 2) and the viability of the UN as an institution (3), Saddam must be disarmed under the threat of force or, preferably, his government overthrown militarily by the U.S.
In my view, 1 and 2 are unconvincing. The fact that Saddam has used chemical and biological weapons against Iran and the Kurds tells us nothing about the likelihood that he would use them against the United States. On the contrary, the fact that he did not use them against our troops in the Gulf War—or against Israel in his inept Scud-missile attacks—seems to indicate a degree of restraint inspired by self-interest. That is, Saddam was deterred by Dick Cheney and Jim Baker, who threatened, before the start of the Gulf War, that we would respond to any use of WMD with a nuclear strike. The same holds for Israel, whose Defense Minister, Moshe Arens, made similar threats. In other words, Saddam has shown himself to be a "rational actor" who can be deterred. "Smart" sanctions, coupled with a tough new inspection regime (not the toothless one agreed to by Kofi Annan in 1998) and explicit threats should be more than enough to contain Saddam for as long as need be. The threats could be made through diplomatic channels as well as publicly. The president, for example, could announce something like the following: "If Iraq ever uses its WMD against the United States or its allies, the United States would respond with overwhelming force using every weapon at its disposal. The same holds for the transfer of WMD-related material to any terrorist organization." That, to my mind, would be sufficient to deter him.
The administration's belief that Saddam cannot be deterred is understandable, but it has, I'm afraid, little to do with Saddam himself. It is inspired by shock at the extraordinary brutality and randomness of the attacks on 9/11/01. In a word, we don't want to be caught with our pants down again. This is a healthy response, and I endorse it wholeheartedly. In fact, I support the War on Terror unconditionally, provided it remains focused on the followers of Islamofascist ideology. I believe that this war must be prosecuted with vigor—and continued until the enemy has been utterly destroyed. Note that I do not say "defeated." This is crucial, because it points to a fundamental difference between our militant Islamist enemies and traditional military opponents (including Saddam). That is, al-Qaeda does not care about life; its members constitute the only true "culture of death" in the sense that they seek to inflict the maximum possible number of indiscriminate deaths and they demonstrate no concern even about their own lives. It is thus pointless to seek to "defeat" them, since a party to a conflict accepts defeat only when he chooses life over continued struggle. But al-Qaeda is indifferent to life. It is therefore undeterrable and must be destroyed.
When the Bush administration claims that Saddam cannot be deterred, it is treating Saddam as if he were a member of al-Qaeda. But this is a profound mistake. Not only is there no evidence of a concrete connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda (which, if it existed, would certainly be sufficient to justify an attack on Iraq). It is also the case that Saddam's every move since he rose to power has been motivated by his desire to maintain his hold on power. However evil he may be—and he surely is among the most despicable men alive today—he is most emphatically not someone devoted to the amorphous religious goals of militant Islam and willing and eager to die in a conflagration for their sake. He wants to live—and he wants to thrive in this life. Unlike the Osama bin Ladens of the world, such a man clearly can be deterred. The same, of course, is true of the leaders of North Korea and most other "rogue" states that possess or may some day possess WMD. Now, a state run by Osama or someone similar would be a different story, and that prospect—the unification of death-obsessed Islamofascist ideology with state power—would be truly horrifying, especially if the state already possessed WMD. Indeed, we should be devoting considerable energy and resources toward ensuring that this never occurs—and preparing ourselves to deal instantly with such a catastrophic event if it were to occur. Pakistan would seem to be the most likely candidate for such an unfortunate event.
And this brings me to my next point. As we learned earlier this month with Pakistan's election, democracy in the Islamic world often benefits Islamofascists, who frequently enjoy distressingly high levels of popular support. This is something very hard for Americans to understand, raised as we are from our earliest days to believe that democracy is an unambiguous good. But the fact is that democracy is not unambiguously good; only in its "liberal" form is it desirable. And in order to be "liberal," democracy requires numerous cultural preconditions, many or most of which are absent in the Muslim nations of the world today. Pushing for more democracy in the Islamic world is thus unlikely to be helpful, and may actually unleash the very forces that we need to destroy.
In the face of these facts, the Bush administration has floated an additional reason for launching a war on Iraq—one that, more than any other, would tie it to the War on Terror. We are told that overthrowing Saddam will give us the opportunity to install a democracy in Iraq which will give hope to the whole Muslim world, thereby making the path of martyrdom less appealing—and then inspiring democratic reforms throughout the Middle East, from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iran.
As impressive as this plan is in its ambition, it is also, I think, foolhardy. It demonstrates several things: an ignorance of (or, more likely, indifference toward) the competing ethnic and religious forces that prevail in different regions of Iraq (Shiite in the south; Sunni in the central regions; Kurdish in the north), making the country a place in which parliamentary institutions are extremely unlikely to function effectively; a typically American optimism about the spontaneous capacity of all human beings for self-government; and an overemphasis on the capacity of political institutions to mold human behavior. Here I think the influence of Straussian political thinkers (Wolfowitz and Kristol) on the administration has been unfortunate. Straussians are disposed to believe, along with Aristotle, that politics is THE primary causal variable in human life: change the "regime," and all else follows. If this were true, then although occupying Iraq would be difficult, we would at least have reason to think that the end result would be a liberal Iraq (we would "force them to be free," as it were). But this is an erroneous assumption. Sub-political norms, practices, and beliefs are more fundamental than politics itself. And the most fundamental of pre-political beliefs is, of course, religion. I see no evidence that the Islamic world in general or Iraq in particular is ready for self-government. Just because Christian and post-Christian societies -- as well as Hindu India and (after lengthy military occupation) Shinto Japan -- have shown themselves to be compatible with free institutions does not mean that all cultures inevitably are.
Two final points.
First, note that I have ignored the adminstration's casus belli based on Iraq's violation of numerous UN resolutions (my #3 above). This is because I consider this to be little more than a ploy on the administration's part to convince UN-worshipping Europeans that they should support the United States in its desire to overthrow Saddam (and incidentally, judging from France's behavior on the Security Council over the past five weeks, the strategy has yielded mixed results at best). At least this is my hope. In my view, national interest should guide our foreign policy, not UN resolutions (and not the desire to "spread democracy," as the president's recently released statement of foreign policy principles declared, except as an indirect consequence of defending our interests). If we decide we must go to war to protect ourselves, we should do so regardless of what the UN thinks; likewise, the fact that the UN is apoplectic about a country's behavior (Israel's, for instance) should be irrelevant to our decision about how to behave toward that country.
Finally, some (Rich Lowry of National Review is one) have argued that the point of going after Saddam sooner rather than later is precisely to prevent Iraq from needing to be deterred in the first place (in the case of North Korea, by contrast, it may already be too late to avoid having to rely on deterrence). According to this view, our reliance on deterrence during the Cold War was a second-best choice made necessary by our passivity in the years immediately following WWII. Ideally, we would have done everything necessary to prevent the USSR from developing atomic weapons in the first place. This is supposedly what we should be trying to do in Iraq today.
Leaving aside the question of whether it makes sense to compare Iraq to the Soviet Union in terms of their relative threat capacities to the United States, I would simply respond to this view by pointing out that we should not cavalierly—that is, publicly—disregard the Westphalian logic of state sovereignty, as, once again, the president's foreign policy statement, with its endorsement of using military force to preempt the rise of rival powers, clearly does. A better approach would be to act with tact and discretion: defending the principle of state sovereignty in public while acting quickly and decisively to remove threats as they arise (the model here should be Israel's destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear power plant in 1981).
Still, the point raises a more general concern with which I will close these reflections. I am troubled by an increasingly unfocused belligerency on the right, of which Lowry's position is by no means the only, or the most extreme, example. There is a willingness, it seems, to use American military might anywhere and everywhere we deem it necessary to do so. Stated this way, the principle is not really objectionable; after all, I too think it appropriate to use our power to defend our interests where necessary. But how do we define "necessary"? Following Wolfowitz's lead, conservative intellectuals seem to be engaging in a continuous thought experiment, asking themselves, "what are the consequences of doing nothing?" And, still understandably shocked by the events of 9/11/01, we conclude, in nearly every case, that the consequences of doing nothing will be a worst-case scenario. But this is a prescription bound to produce reckless decisions, for it is based entirely on negative evidence—and it places the burden of (imagined) proof on those who would urge caution, who have no more "evidence" to offer about the future than their hawkish opponents.
Of course uncertainty plays a part in all political decisions, and none more so than those involving foreign affairs. But the Wolfowitz principle places such uncertainty at the center of deliberation, where it can serve as a black box containing all of the horrors of our worst post-September 11 nightmares. I have as many of those nightmares as any American—and as any person who works in New York City and saw the events of that September morning with his own eyes. But we ought not to allow these fears to convince us that every nation is our enemy—or that all of our enemies are equally threatening. Iraq is not, in my view, anywhere close to the greatest threat facing our country, and so I regret that the administration has chosen to focus our limited resources and energies on confronting it at this time.
Damon
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Damon Linker
Associate Editor
First Things
Truly excellent letter! It also illuminates the difference in the arguments for for US involvement in Iraq, as opposed to the current case for helping Ukraine. in 2002 the case was based mostly on conjecture and a shallow understanding of a religion, whereas now one nation invaded another soverign country; no need to read tea leaves.
Would that your argument had prevailed. The neocons’ advocacy of raw military force was arrogant in the extreme. One comment from
that period in particular sticks in my craw: “Every now and then we need to throw a crappy little country up against the wall to show them who’s running things.” This is the bravado of what some called the “chicken hawks” -- of men in the Bush administration, including Bush, who never saw combat, who indeed avoided combat (like General Bone-Spurs), and who saw war as simply another tool in their tool chest rather than a hideous hell that is the very last and regrettable resort of conflict resolution.