"You never know where you are going to end"

We have long known, Dear Readers, that our foremost Single A Minor League political thinkers were espousing nuanced, carefully crafted ideas such as this golden oldie from the unesteemed Jonah Goldberg:

WHY IRAQ?
So how does all this, or the humble attempt at a history lesson of my last column, justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

No doubt Ladeen is extremely entertaining, though perhaps not in ways the cherubic Jonah had in mind.

That said, though, I was really quite amazed to find the nation's patron saint of realpolitik -- a man who has been known to advise presidents -- sharing a similiar sentiment during the run-up to Iraq.

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world. In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush's chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:

"Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, "in order to make a point that we're not going to live in this world that they want for us."

In other words, throw a crappy country with a population of Muslims against a wall to show the wogs who's boss.

How's that working out, Henry?

The above quote comes from a remarkable article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," by Mark Danner (and I've forgotten who pointed me in its direction. so apologies). In it, Danner tries to capture how we came to find ourselves in one of the most fucked up and un-endable conflicts since Vietnam despite the obvious and predictable problems many both in and outside of the government saw and remarked on well in advance of that first night of Shock and Awe. And the article comes at an important time, when the same punditocracy who cheer-led the imminent invasion now try to convey a different motivation for their support than they were peddling at the time. Which isn't hard for them to now do, since the rationale for their war support was as ideologically impure then as it is now. As Danner writes,

Gerson, of course, was author of what would come to be called the Bush Doctrine, a neoconservative paean to democracy that maintains that "the realistic interests of America would now be served by fidelity to American ideals, especially democracy." Others in the administration, however, plainly did "connect" with Kissinger's stark realism: Donald Rumsfeld, for example, who Ron Suskind depicts, in The One Percent Doctrine, struggling with other officials in spring 2002 to cope with various terrifying warnings of impending attacks on the United States:

All these reports helped fuel Rumsfeld's sense of futility as to America's ability to stop the spread of destructive weapons and keep them from terrorists. That futility was the fuel that drove the plans to invade Iraq... as soon as possible.

Cheney's ideas about how "our reaction" would shape behavior— whatever the evidence showed—were expressed in an off-the-record meeting Rumsfeld had with NATO defense chiefs in Brussels on June 6. According to an outline for his speech, the secretary told those assembled that "absolute proof cannot be a precondition for action."

The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to make an example of Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.

In the great, multicolored braid of reasons and justifications leading to the Iraq war one might call this "the realist strand," and though the shape of the reasoning might seem to Gerson to stand as far from "democracy building" and "ending tyranny" as "power politics" does from "idealism," the distance is wholly illusory, dependent on an ideological clarity that was never present. In fact, the two chains of reasoning looped and intersected, leading inexorably to a common desire for a particular action—confronting Saddam Hussein and Iraq—that had been the subject of the administration's first National Security Council meeting, in January 2001, and that had been pushed to the fore again by Defense Department officials in the first "war cabinet" meeting after the September 11 attacks.

[...]

It bears noticing that Kennan himself, having predicted that we will never know where we are going to end in Iraq, lived to see disproved, before his death at the age of 101 last March, what even he, no innocent, had taken as a given: that "you know where you begin." For as the war's presumed ending—constructed from carefully crafted images of triumph, of dictators' statues cast down and presidents striding forcefully across aircraft carrier decks—has flickered and vanished, receding into the just-out-of-grasp future ("a decision for the next president," the pre-election President Bush had said), the war's beginning has likewise melted away, the original rationale obscured in a darkening welter of shifting intelligence, ideological controversy, and conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all sides by the mounting dead.

Danner also provides us with a telling document -- one of the most ideologically-stripped down rationales for the war ever developed by a White House engorged on its own sense of power and righteousness,

...the National Security Presidential Directive entitled "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy," the top-secret statement of American purpose intended to guide all the departments and agencies of the government, signed by President George W. Bush on August 29, 2002:

US goal: Free Iraq in order to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and associated programs, to prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond.

End Iraqi threats to its neighbors, to stop the Iraqi government's tyrannizing of its own population, to cut Iraqi links to and sponsorship of international terrorism, to maintain Iraq's unity and territorial integrity. And liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy....

Objectives: To conduct policy in a fashion that minimizes the chance of a WMD attack against the United States, US field forces, our allies and friends. To minimize the danger of regional instabilities. To deter Iran and Syria from helping Iraq. And to minimize disruption in international oil markets.

Hmm. Let's see how we've done on those three clear objectives. No WMD found. Violence spiralling out of countrol, threatening the rest of the region while leaving Iraq's citizens afraid to leave their homes. And a newly strengthened Syria and Iran encouraged to play their hand in Iraq.

Mission accomplished.

Anyway, read the entire article. It's a riveting story of an intentionally dysfunctional White House, an incurious yet rigid president, a maniacal VP, a self-absorbed Def. Sec., and the assorted bunglars they put in positions of semi-authority, while all the while an "interagency" looking on in horror.

Irresistible as Rumsfeld is, however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing. Woodward, much more interested in character and personal rivalry than government bureaus and hierarchies, refers to this process broadly as "the interagency," as in "Rice said the interagency was broken." He means the governing apparatus set up by the National Security Act of 1947, which gathered the government's major security officials— secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, attorney general, director of national intelligence, among others— into the National Security Council, and gave to the president a special assistant for national security affairs (commonly known as the national security adviser) and a staff to manage, coordinate, and control it. Through the national security council and the "deputies committee" and other subsidiary bodies linking the various government departments at lower levels, information and policy guidance are supposed to work their way up from bureaucracy to president, and his decisions to work their way down. Ron Suskind, who has been closely studying the inner workings of the Bush administration since his revealing piece about Karl Rove and John Dilulio in 2003 and his book on Paul O'Neill the following year,^[15] observes that "the interagency" not only serves to convey information and decisions but also is intended to perform a more basic function:

Sober due diligence, with an eye for the way previous administrations have thought through a standard array of challenges facing the United States, creates, in fact, a kind of check on executive power and prerogative.

This is precisely what the President didn't want, particularly after September 11; deeply distrustful of the bureaucracy, desirous of quick, decisive action, impatient with bureaucrats and policy intellectuals, the President wanted to act. Suskind writes:

For George W. Bush, there had been an evolution on such matters —from the early, pre-9/11 President, who had little grasp of foreign affairs and made few major decisions in that realm; to the post-9/11 President, who met America's foreign challenges with decisiveness born of a brand of preternatural, faith-based, self-generated certainty. The policy process, in fact, never changed much. Issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the President's desk; and, if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his "instinct" or "gut."

Oh yeah, there's that "gut" thing, again.

Anyway, I could quote with endless fascination the summary of those surreal days in the run-up to the war and the Keystone Kops approach to occupation that has been the hallmark of this utter catastrophe, but that would be cheating you out of all the neck muscle exercise that constant shaking of the head affords as you read the review. But I will leave you with these facts, culled from the article's notes, which best describe each new Friedman Unit:

Here are the number of daily attacks on US forces at each of the Iraq war's purported "turning points":

July 2003: Bremer Appoints Iraqi Governing Council; sixteen attacks per day.

December 2003: Saddam Hussein captured; nineteen attacks per day.

June 2004: Handover of sovereignty to Iraqis; forty-five attacks per day.

January 2005: Elections for Transitional Government; sixty-one attacks per day.

June 2006: Death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; ninety attacks per day.

See Anthony Cordesman, Iraqi Force Development: Summer 2006 Update(CSIS, 2006), p. 7.

Meanwhile, what "multinational force?"