Liberals and the war in Iraq: still not getting it

Frank Rich has an article in New York that pivots off the publication of The Last Magazine, the posthumous novel of deceased journalist Michael Hastings that, as Rich tells it, chastises those liberals who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003:

It’s the default position of liberals to lay the blame for this apocalyptic legacy—a failing Iraq, unchecked international jihadism, a neo-isolationist America—on the Bushies, who deployed cooked evidence and outright lies to sell the country on the war and then executed their own strategy with breathtaking recklessness and incompetence. The Iraq War cheerleaders on the right, whether think-tank-funded neocon armchair generals or flag-pin-bearing bloviators at Fox News, are also easily identifiable culprits in this story. So are those reporters and editors in the mainstream press who at best failed to vet and at worst jingoistically inflated Bush-administration propaganda about Saddam’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

What tends to be swept under history’s rug is the leading role that the liberal Establishment played in this calamity. A majority of Senate Democrats voted to authorize the war, including the presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and John Edwards. Most of the liberal pundits and public intellectuals who might have challenged the rationale for the invasion enlisted in the stampede instead, giving the politicians cover. They are the target of Michael Hastings’s rude little book.

Well, let’s unpack a little bit of that righteous indignation, shall we? First of all, what about “unchecked international jihadism”? It the Middle East, sure, it’s terrible, but when was the last time some “international jihadist” blew something up in the U.S., which is, parochially enough, my major area of concern? Like in 2001, right? And what about a “neo-isolationist America”? Mightn’t that be, you know, sort of a good thing?

As for the staggering cost of the invasion of Iraq, as to the complete pointlessness of the whole endeavor, and as to the Bush Administration’s staggering record of shameless deceit and stunning incompetence, well, I’m totally on board with Frankie. He got that part right.

But he gets a lot of the rest of it wrong. For those of us, like Frank and myself, who viscerally opposed the war and the Bush Administration, it is a staggering* stroke of luck that not a single anthrax spore, not a single drop of nerve gas, was found in Saddam’s warehouses. Otherwise, the Republicans would be saying “Okay, things got out of control—way out of control. We didn’t do our job, damn it, and you’re right to hold us accountable. But there’s one thing you can’t forget: We saved your fucking ass! If we hadn’t taken Saddam out, he would have taken us out! All of us! The rest, well, it’s ugly—damned ugly—but it’s fucking collateral. The main thing is, we survived.”

That, more or less, would have been the Republican rap, because Rich’s denunciation of the Iraq War turns entirely on the fact that Saddam the Monster’s Weapons of Mass Destruction cupboard was bare. Rich swallows nine-tenths of the right-wing’s lies and only catches them out because Saddam, to everyone’s amazement, really had flushed everything down the drain.

Let’s begin, more or less, at the beginning. “Weapons of mass destruction” are not, in fact, weapons of mass destruction. The whole notion that poison gas and/or bacteriological agents are doomsday weapons is a crock invented by the right wing following the first Gulf War to justify continued involvement in the Middle East after we had thoroughly kicked Saddam’s ass. Rich, like most liberals, ignores the extensive historical record that shows the U.S., during both the Reagan and the first Bush Administrations, working hand in glove with Saddam “Worst since Hitler” Hussein when he was using these heinous weapons, first against Iranian soldiers and then against his own people. Just prior to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Bush’s ambassador, April Glaspie, personally told Saddam that the U.S. wanted a “deeper, broader” relationship with him. The point of Glaspie’s interview, as she later wrote to President Bush, was to assure Saddam that the U.S. would not object to his seizure of part of Kuwait, but that he shouldn’t take the whole thing.†

Poison gas and bacteriological agents are terrifying enough, but their actual impact is no greater than conventional explosives. No major terror attack has ever used them—in part because they’re extremely difficult to use, and in part, I suspect, because 99 percent of terrorists are smart enough to know that if they did use them, the resulting negative publicity would hurt their own cause. There was no way that Saddam was going to give these agents, if he had had them, to outside terrorists. There was no way that he would use them against the U.S. himself. Yet the Bush Administration sold, and liberals like Rich bought, the notion that if Saddam did have these agents he would be a threat to the U.S.

This was, in fact, the biggest lie. Saddam was not a fanatic bent on the destruction of the U.S. The “axis of evil” invented by the Bush Administration linked three nations—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—that had virtually nothing in common, were not allies of any sort, and, most of all, had had no involvement in 9/11—and they were never really called on it. This was the real lie—that these “evil” nations constituted an “existential threat” to the security of the United States—a lie that would retain much of its potency today if Saddam had just hung on to one canister of nerve gas. And Rich, with all his fervor, doesn’t even notice how much right-wing bullshit he’s already swallowed.

Afterwords
I explored these issues in more detail, and, perhaps, with more decorum, here.

*Yeah, I’m staggering a lot. Maybe I better sit down.

†Glaspie, who clearly fancied herself a Metternich in skirts, wasn’t quite the broad she believed herself to be.