The “Golden Hour” that wasn’t; an old Iraqi hand pretends that we could have gotten it right

James Clad is an adjunct fellow at Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. According to NDU’s website, “Before joining the National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies James Clad was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia from 2007-09. He also served as Senior Counselor and Director for Middle Eastern affairs at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and as Senior Counselor for Policy and Donor Coordination at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Prior to 2002, he was Professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and, concurrently, Director for Asia-Pacific Energy at Cambridge Energy Research Associates.”*

So what about 2002-2007? Well, I haven’t gotten the whole thing filled in, but in the current issue of The National Interest, Jim himself tells us “In late April 2003, I rode in an open car down Baghdad’s wide-open airport highway. U.S. Army and Marine units had seized the city just two weeks before, at the end of a short invasion. I had come to Iraq for a few months, detailed to the White House from another agency, and I was heading that morning to Basra, the southern city occupied by the British Army.”

Okay, we’ve all done a few things we’d rather not talk about, and maybe Jim would have been better off if he hadn’t devoted a few thousand words to “what I saw in Iraq.” Here’s the frame Clad supplies for his article:

Really? “Sands from the Golden Hourglass?” Is that how you put it? A few sentences later, Clad tells us “few if any preconditions for a successful occupation of any duration existed in Iraq. Those that did we eliminated in rapid order.” Was it a good idea for the U.S., even from the most brutally “realpolitik” point of view, to invade a foreign country that had done nothing to harm us, a country that, with or without “weapons of mass destruction,” constituted no threat to us, when “few if any preconditions for a successful occupation of any duration existed”? Was there ever a “Golden Hourglass”? Was there ever anything but a guaranteed disaster from any point of view one could name—moral, strategic, or financial?

The more Clad runs through all the things the U.S. did wrong—and it’s a long list—the more he (unconsciously) demolishes the notion that there was ever any chance of making things right. Among the “missed chances,” he says, was that our “closest allies in Iraq—Australia, Britain and Japan—failed to present the Bush administration with a set of common views.” As if these three nations—or any other—should be expected to be gifted with the preternatural prescience needed to grasp exactly what was to be done! And as if the Bush Administration—the Bush Administration—could be expected to take advice from anyone, on anything, but most of all, on Iraq!

After acknowledging that the supposed justification for the invasion—the neo-cons’ beloved WMD—proved to be non-existent, Clad falls back on an ex post facto justification—proof that Saddam Hussein was a terrible guy! But we’ve known that for decades, back when the first Bush Administration, overlooking not merely the possession but the actual use of poison gas against both Iranian troops and Iraqi civilians,† sought a “deeper, broader” relationship with Saddam, until he got greedy and took all of Kuwait rather than just a piece, as the administration intended him to.

Dr. Clad is, I am sure, an intelligent, learned, and dedicated man. He pays his respects to the competent and dedicated people he met in Iraq, and cites the lessons of “history” and tosses around the names of Xenophon and Machiavelli and the rest, but he never comes to grips with what was really “wrong” with the invasion of Iraq—that it was a political con job invented by a Republican Party desperate for a reason for existence, desperate for an enemy, fearful that they could never beat the Democrats in elections based solely on domestic issues. The great drumbeaters for the war, of course, were the Likudists, like Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, who wanted U.S. dominance in the Middle East to protect Israel, as well as the “Oilists,” like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted the U.S. to control the world oil market. But it was not “the Jews” or the oilmen‡ who made the war happen, but rather the entire right wing of the Republican Party, lusting for some glorious victory, some great noise, to hide the fact that their party has nothing to say. And you don’t have to read Xenophon to know that.