Bush's Lost Year

On this weekend of mourning and rememberance, it's hard to believe how far we've come from the shock and disorientation of September 11, 2001. It's also hard to believe how clear our choices were in response to the attacks -- namely, the need for justice, to eliminate a threat that had been poking us for years, and to end a state sponsoring terrorism. In those weeks and months, Bush's response seemed measured, careful (too careful, in fact, we should have been in Afghanistan much, much sooner than we were). Our invasion of Afghanistan was supported by the international community and fully justified.

Then came 2002.

In the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows has written about that year, "Bush's Lost Year," (subscription required) a period of time that historians may look back and say, that was the year the U.S. lost their battle with Islamic terrorism.

Fallows begins by recalling a meeting he had with Paul Wolfowitz in January of 2002. At the time, Wolfowitz was clear-eyed on the immediate priorities with which the U.S. faced that winter.

As I listen to the tape of that interview now, something else stands out: how expansive and unhurried even Wolfowitz sounded. "Even" Wolfowitz because since then he has become the symbol of an unrelenting drive toward war with Iraq. We now know that within the Administration he was urging the case for "regime change" there immediately after 9/11. But when speaking for the record, more than a year before that war began, he stressed how broad a range of challenges the United States would have to address, and over how many years, if it wanted to contain the sources of terrorism. It would need to find ways to "lance the boil" of growing anti-Americanism, as it had done during the Reagan years by supporting democratic reform in South Korea and the Philippines. It would have to lead the Western world in celebrating and welcoming Turkey as the most successfully modernized Muslim country. It would need to understand that in the long run the most important part of America's policy was its moral example—that America stands for things "the rest of the world wants for itself."

I also remember the way 2002 ended. By late December some 200,000 members of the U.S. armed forces were en route to staging areas surrounding Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people had turned out on the streets of London, Rome, Madrid, and other cities to protest the impending war. That it was impending was obvious, despite ongoing negotiations at the United Nations. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld had asked to see plans for a possible invasion of Iraq. Congress voted to authorize the war in October. Immediately after the vote, planning bureaus inside the Pentagon were told to be ready for combat at any point between then and the following April. (Operation Iraqi Freedom actually began on March 19.) Declaring that it was impossible to make predictions about a war that might not occur, the Administration refused to discuss plans for the war's aftermath—or its potential cost. In December the President fired Lawrence Lindsey, his chief economic adviser, after Lindsey offered a guess that the total cost might be $100 billion to $200 billion. As it happened, Lindsey's controversial estimate held up very well. By this summer, fifteen months after fighting began in Iraq, appropriations for war and occupation there totaled about $150 billion. With more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers still based in Iraq, the outlays will continue indefinitely at a rate of about $5 billion a month—much of it for fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and other operational needs. All this is at striking variance with the pre-war insistence by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz that Iraq's oil money, plus contributions from allies, would minimize the financial burden on Americans.

[...]

On the last day of the year President Bush told reporters at his ranch in Texas, "I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully. One of my New Year's resolutions is to work to deal with these situations in a way so that they're resolved peacefully." As he spoke, every operating branch of the government was preparing for war.

[...]

As a political matter, whether the United States is now safer or more vulnerable is of course ferociously controversial. That the war was necessary—and beneficial—is the Bush Administration's central claim. That it was not is the central claim of its critics. But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the Administration's record, they tend to see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe. I have sat through arguments among soldiers and scholars about whether the invasion of Iraq should be considered the worst strategic error in American history—or only the worst since Vietnam. [emphasis added] Some of these people argue that the United States had no choice but to fight, given a pre-war consensus among its intelligence agencies that Iraq actually had WMD supplies. Many say that things in Iraq will eventually look much better than they do now. But about the conduct and effect of the war in Iraq one view prevails: it has increased the threats America faces, and has reduced the military, financial, and diplomatic tools with which we can respond.

"Let me tell you my gut feeling," a senior figure at one of America's military-sponsored think tanks told me recently, after we had talked for twenty minutes about details of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "If I can be blunt, the Administration is full of shit. In my view we are much, much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan position. I voted for these guys. But I think they are incompetent, and I have had a very close perspective on what is happening. Certainly in the long run we have harmed ourselves. We are playing to the enemy's political advantage. Whatever tactical victories we may gain along the way, this will prove to be a strategic blunder."

Fallows recounts, season by season, the terrible choices this administration made that year, and the results of those choices: The escape of Osama bin Laden, an Afghanistan that is reverting to a narcostate ruled by warlords, and a quagmire in Iraq that is probably going to be resolved only by the reemergence of a new strongman. Meanwhile, they have failed to effectively convince Europe and other Middle Eastern states of the threat of Iran's nuclear program, and they have allowed the situation in North Korea to fester (remember how Condi Rice said that we couldn't let Saddam's "smoking gun" to be a "mushroom cloud?" Well, what do you know?).

Oh, and then there's a failure to deal in any way with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict all the while that pictures are beamed throughout the Arab world showing children in Iraq, killed by U.S. rockets. And what about Turkey? The the citizens of that successful modern Muslim democracy hate the U.S. with a vehemence not seen in decades.

And then of course we also have a military stretched too thin to robustly respond to other threats, a military that is essentially drafting soldiers ready for retirement, and a National Guard that wasn't even available to help western states deal with forest fires this past summer.

And here is the startling part. There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.