AV fave rave Daniel Larison has a post up1 quoting Peter Beinart from an interview Pete did with John Glaser of the Cato Institute as follows:
We also don’t have…we don’t really have a learning process that I think then shapes the public debate. So one of the things that’s really frustrating to me, and it’s probably frustrating to you…if you’re a hawk on Iran, okay, you’re a hawk on Iran, you think America needs to threaten military force, maybe even go to war against Iran, but if you take that…but if you were also very hawkish on Iraq, and very hawkish on Afghanistan, right? And also very hawkish, let’s say, on Libya, right? All of which didn’t turn out very well. It seems to me that when…I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a voice, a seat at the table…it seems to me that there should be a mechanism by which you have to explain why this is different…explain why those experiences should not lead us to the view that, actually, another war in the Middle East is probably not likely to turn out well.
Well, I’m glad that Pete, a one-time prominent liberal hawk pumping for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the auspices of the infamous Marty Peretz New Republic, has seen the light, but I have to say that, almost 20 years later, Pete’s vision is still less than 20/20. Pete’s interview with John is devoted to the “lessons” from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, also the subject of a recent post in Pete’s own substack blog, Lessons from Afghanistan a Year Later, noting that we spent several trillion dollars over a 20-year period to basically wreck a hapless, unoffending country, creating not a Potemkin village but a Potemkin country, whose government collapsed in utter confusion the minute we left, something I’ve bitched about quite frequently in the past. But, again as my headline suggests, Pete as a ways to go. Here’s how Pete summarizes the “thinking” of the Bush administration prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq:
Because Bush administration officials focused on Saddam Hussein’s brutality toward his own people, they couldn’t imagine that even Iraqis who loathed Saddam—for instance, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric whose father, father-in-law, and siblings Saddam had murdered—would still fight the American invaders who overthrew him because they did not want their country controlled by a foreign power.
Got that? We invaded Iraq because Saddam was a bad guy, and because we didn’t realize that a lot of Iraqis would prefer to be ruled a sadistic Iraqi dictator than a bunch of beneficent foreigners—namely, us. Well, I’m sorry to bust your bubble, Pete, but the Bush administration did not invade Iraq in a burst of naïve altruism: we invaded in an outburst of Machiavellian cunning. We would invade Iraq as the first step in establishing explicit military dominance of the Middle East, seizing control of the world’s oil supply while guaranteeing the safety of Israel, which is why people like Marty Peretz and William Kristol had been agitating for a second, and permanent, Iraqi invasion ever since the first one turned sour.
Iraq has a population of about 39 million. For that nation, triumphant U.S. forces immediately began construction of the world’s largest embassy (“larger than Vatican City” (121 acres) according to the well-informed Samantha Power) for a mere $700 million. Four fifths of the size of the “real” Pentagon (150 acres), this was, very clearly, intended to be “Pentagon East”, where, from now on, the U.S. would call the shots. We wouldn’t “steal” Iraqi oil, but we would make sure that world oil prices and supply would always be consistent with U.S. foreign policy objectives—and with U.S. oil companies’ balance sheets. The Bush administration was “sure” that none of the Iraqis would object to our presence because they didn’t give a damn what the Iraqis thought. The Bush administration—and a lot of other people, too—like, you know, Peter Beinart—were intoxicated by the prospect of unlimited American military power. We could, quite literally, tell the world what to do. Or so we thought.
By attributing humanitarian impulses to the 2003 invasion, Beinart is gilding a very impure lily. The Bush administration’s invasion was sheer, ruthless self-interest, with a hypocritical humanitarian mask. The decision to turn our retaliatory attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan into a long-term occupation à la Germany and Japan following World War II2 was similarly based on our unthinking hubris—the notion that since you can kill anyone you want, you can make anyone do anything you want leading us very far astray indeed.
Afterwords
Mr. Beinart must be described as a “slow learner”. In August 2010 an article on Beinart appeared in the Weekend Australian by Miriam Cosic, titled Unrepentant Liberal Hawk Still Has A Feather To Fly With, quoting Beinart with regard to the release of his book on American foreign policy, The Icarus Syndrome. In the course of the interview, Beinart does some pretty serious ass-covering. According to Cosic
His [Beinart’s] support of the war in Iraq had nothing to do with chemical or biological weapons. Beinart says he was more concerned with the very real chance that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, which seemed the case on the eve of the Gulf War, and that sanctions were not working but only hurting Iraqi civilians. He also believed that “it would be ridding the world of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century”.
“My rationale had little to do with 9/11,” he says. “It was that we had run out of options with Saddam. George Bush was playing fast and loose with his rhetoric. But I think my rationale would have been harder to sell.”
Beinart’s claim, presuming that Cosic’s account is accurate, that there was good reason to believe that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, is utter nonsense, Dick Cheney nonsense, and dangerously close to a lie. And the notion that we were “running out of options” with Saddam is nonsense as well. We could have simply left him alone, as we had prior to his invasion of Kuwait, which made him the whipping boy/poster child of the advocates of unilateral American interventionism in the Middle East, led by the “oilmen” like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the AIPAC men like Beinart and William Kristol.
Interestingly, Beinart, though still covering ass with regard to Iraq, has turned into fierce and penetrating critic of Israel, as anyone who examines his blog will discover. Beinart is Jewish (I am not) and thoroughly alive to the ins and outs of Israeli policy in ways that a non-Jew would find hard to match.
1. The post is for subscribers only. So subscribe already!
2. The Germany/Japan “template” is seriously flawed, as I explain here.
