Below are a number of recent items occasioned by the tenth
anniversary of the Iraq War.
Max Boot, Commentary. “The Future of Nation
Building.”
There are two essential lessons one can draw from the Iraq War:
either that we should never get mired in counterinsurgency or
“nation-building” operations in the future or that, if we do get
involved, we should do a better job of achieving our
objectives.
Editoral Board, New York Times. “Ten Years
After.”
[N]one of the Bush administration’s war architects have been
called to account for their mistakes, and even now, many are
invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible
for one of the worst strategic blunders in American foreign
policy.
Ezra Klein, Bloomberg. “Mistakes, Excuses, and
Painful Lessons from the Iraq War.”
[A]t the core of my support for the war was an analytical
failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that
was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to
support—an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different
people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little
resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration.
Andrew
Bavevich, Harper’s. “A Letter to Paul
Wolfowitz.”
With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed
America’s for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul,
saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to
seize, for its own good as well as for the world’s.
James Wolcott. Vanity Fair. “The Waning of the War
Whores.”
Kristol may still sport his Cheshire cat grin and Victor Davis
Hanson may still lay down the stentorian drumbeat at NRO, but the
neocon heyday is done and good riddance. Frank Gaffney, a familiar
face in the run up to war and after, is now reduced to running
around with the likes of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, waving
his hands up in the air about the menace of jihadism, and the
perfect new face of War Party militance—Allen West—lost his House
seat and has signed on to do a National Review cruise, which is
equivalent to a has-been actor getting a guest spot on Love
Boat.
David Frum. The Daily Beast. “The
Speechwriter.”
I was less impressed by [Ahmed] Chalabi than were some others in
the Bush administration. However, since one of those “others” was
Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought.
Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian. “David Frum, the Iraq
War, and oil.”
Talk about self-serving revisionism: to distance himself from
neocon designs on Iraq, Frum claims that he “was less impressed by
Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration”. But, as
Ruben Bolling just reminded me, Frum wrote a long and angry defense
of Chalabi in 2004 at National Review, hailing him as “one of the
very few genuine liberal democrats to be found at the head of any
substantial political organization anywhere in the Arab world”, and
ended with this proclamation: “Compared to anybody [sic] other
possible leader of Iraq – compared to just about every other
political leader in the Arab world – the imperfect Ahmed Chalabi is
nonetheless a James bleeping Madison.”
Daniel McCarthy, The American Conservative. “The
GOP’s Vietnam.”
Republicans split over Bush’s wars as deeply as Democrats once
split over Vietnam. The raw numbers aren’t similar—the antiwar
right is not as numerous as the antiwar left once was—but the
philosophical depth of the divide is as great. And it’s a
generation gap. Boomer Republicans are still refighting old
wars—Benghazi is the new Khe Sanh, and they’ve adopted Israel not
only as avatar of the lost South Vietnam but as symbol of the
Providential favor and military virtue our nation lost in the
1960s. Yet even the younger evangelicals—let alone Ron Paul’s
youthful supporters and the neo-traditionalist “crunchy cons”—don’t
buy it.
Pat Buchanan, Townhall (syndicated). “Was Iraq Worth
It?”
We are not known as a reflective people. But a question has to
weigh upon us. If Saddam had no WMD, had no role in 9/11, did not
attack us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us, was
our unprovoked attack on that country a truly just and moral
war?
What makes the question more than academic is that the
tub-thumpers for war on Iraq a decade ago are now clamoring for war
on Iran. Goal: Strip Iran of weapons of mass destruction all 16
U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran does not have and has no
program to build.
Despite my efforts to provide a balanced selection, most of
these pieces are strongly anti-Iraq, a perspective that (I must
admit) I share.
