The war in Iraq was a terrible mistake, and those who led us there are directly responsible for the rise of ISIS and our current quandary of how to respond. . . . [I]t is not the time to just repeat our old mistakes. Rather we should begin with repentance for those mistakes by listening better and humbly seeking better solutions. And that is where all the presidential candidates should begin. – Rev. Jim Wallis, Sojourners
There are many aspects of modern American politics with
which I am unhappy – the emphasis on fundraising and the seeming need for
unlimited cash, sound bites and clichéd talking points, the ensuing media
circus. But if during the upcoming presidential primary season the country
engages in a serious re-evaluation of America’s role in the world and the uses
and limits of military force, I will remain hopeful. No issue is more important
in judging one’s fitness and character to be president than a candidate’s judgment
on matters of war and peace, his or her gut-level instincts on how and when
American force should be exercised.
This is not to suggest that a candidate’s views on economic
and social issues, spending and taxing priorities, the environment, and the
Supreme Court are unimportant. These issues are indeed vital to the fabric of
our society and will determine how effectively we are governed in the years to
come. But economic and social policy is a collaborative effort between the
President and Congress, interest groups and citizen pressure; it is impossible
for one person to radically alter the social and economic landscape. Only as
commander-in-chief does the President have the power and authority to
single-handedly affect the lives and futures of millions of Americans and the
quality of our relationships to the nations of the world.
I was six years old when Lyndon Johnson made the ill-fated
decision to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Within a few years, as I
watched the evening news with my family and saw images of body bags on military
transport planes departing the jungles of Asia, I had enough sense to
understand that the Vietnam War was morally wrong and based on faulty premises.
Even at the age of nine, I knew it was time to bring our troops home. But then America
elected Nixon, we commenced secret bombing missions into Cambodia, and the war
dragged on for six more years. By the time U.S. forces withdrew and we brought
home the last American soldier, another 25,000 American lives had been lost.
Though I believe wars should be fought only as a last resort
and after all reasonable alternatives have been explored, I am not a pacifist. I
know we live in a dangerous world and must defend ourselves, our interests, and
our friends and allies when unjustly attacked. I supported the decision of
President George H.W. Bush to invade Iraq in defense of Kuwait in 1991, when an
American ally had been attacked and its sovereignty invaded by a neighboring aggressor.
The senior President Bush applied well established principles in coming to the
aid of an American friend and limiting U.S. involvement to accomplishing its
objective – defending our ally and securing a military retreat of Saddam
Hussein’s forces. I disagreed with many Democratic Senators, including Joe
Biden and John Kerry, for their knee-jerk opposition to that conflict, and I
said so at the time.
When America was attacked on September 11, 2001, I like most
Americans wanted a rapid and decisive U.S. military response against those
responsible. We knew almost immediately that Osama bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda were
to blame and, when it was discovered they were being sheltered by the Taliban
in Afghanistan, I affirmatively supported a quick and resolute attack on
Taliban forces there. The defense of a nation by necessity includes the right
of retaliation when unjustly attacked. While I did not expect us to be in
Afghanistan for 14 years, fundamentally I agreed with the U.S. military mission
in that country.
But when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 – and
well before then made clear its intentions of doing so – I was opposed from the
beginning, as were many of our most trusted allies and many American religious
leaders. Once again, some of my Democratic role models, people with whom I generally
agree on most issues – Hillary Clinton and John Kerry among them –
disappointed me. When on October 16,
2002, Clinton and Kerry voted to authorize U.S. military force against
Iraq, I believed then that they were wrong, and that their votes were nothing
but acts of political cowardice. Wanting someday to become president, both were scared of looking “soft” on national security and defense.
The vote in favor of the Iraq War Resolution of 2002 was far
from unanimous, and there were many other Democrats in the House and Senate who
possessed the same information as everyone else and rendered a different
verdict. Senators Carl Levin, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, the late Senators
Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy, all voted no with the same information that led
Clinton and Kerry to vote yes. And although he was not in the Senate at
the time, another prominent Democrat named Barack Obama also publicly opposed
the war in Iraq.
On the single most important question confronted by our political
leaders in the past half century – a question of war and peace, of life and
death – Hillary Clinton got it wrong and Barack Obama got it right. It was a
question of courage and judgment, of understanding the implications of American
military actions and learning the correct lessons from history. Obama made the right
call based on what he knew then, and he did not look to the polls for guidance.
Hillary Clinton and 28 Democratic Senators, 82 Democratic House members, and almost
all Republicans were dead wrong.
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| U.S. troops in Iraq |
I do not base any of this on 20/20 hindsight, but on what
was known at the time. It is why I believe that the question asked recently of
the 2016 presidential candidates – “Knowing what we know now, would you have
invaded Iraq?” – is precisely the wrong question. As James Fallows noted recently in The Atlantic, this question is too easy and tells us nothing about
a candidate’s foreign policy instincts, underlying values, or thought process.
It is sort of like asking, “Knowing what we know now, would you have bought a
ticket on Malaysia Air flight 370?”
I am more interested in understanding how the candidates
assessed the evidence then. How did they view the possible benefits and risks
of invading Iraq based on what we knew prior to March 19, 2003, when the first
bombs fell on Baghdad? Decisions are always made in real time, not in
hindsight. Understanding your thought process when it counted is the only way
voters can truly assess if your instincts and judgments are to be trusted in
the future.
Of course, mistakes are made and no one gets everything
right all the time. So, the next important question is one Fallows articulates
well: “Regardless of whether you feel you were right or wrong, prescient or
misled, how exactly will the experience of Iraq – yours in weighing the
evidence, the country’s in going to war – shape your decisions on the future,
unforeseeable choices about committing American force?” (James Fallows, “The Right and Wrong Questions about the Iraq War,” The Atlantic, May 19, 2015). In
other words, what are the lessons of our recent history? How will the lessons
learned help the United States more effectively engage with the international
community, properly assess American interests abroad, avoid costly and
unnecessary conflicts, and lessen the risks to future generations?
I would like to see the candidates struggle honestly with
these questions, with what they have learned from the recent past. I want to
know how they perceive the limits of force and America’s proper role in the world;
and the benefits, risks, and long-term consequences of military engagement. I cannot
trust any candidate who insists that the Iraq War is regrettable based only on
what we know now. It is not acceptable to state, as did Marco Rubio recently,
that invading Iraq “was not a mistake because the president was presented with
intelligence that said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” The decision
to invade Iraq in 2003 was not based on faulty intelligence. There were plenty
of people, including U.S. intelligence analysts and military strategists, who
thought better of invading Iraq, and who predicted precisely the consequences
of the resulting post-invasion occupation. There was no shortage of foreign
leaders, protestors, reporters, and intelligence experts who questioned the wisdom
of the American invasion, and who believed United Nations weapons inspectors should
be allowed more time to determine and certify that Iraq’s WMD program was
effectively non-existent.
On February 14, 2003, less than one month before U.S. forces
invaded Iraq, chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix publicly declared that Iraq
was cooperating with the inspections teams. And while there remained questions
concerning what had happened to a small portion of Iraq’s aged chemical weapons
stockpile, it was well known that nearly 95% of that inventory had been
verifiably destroyed in the 1990s. Whatever existing weapons program Iraq had
in 2003 – and as it turned out, it was non-existent – was certainly not a
threat to the United States to justify a military invasion lasting eight years
and costing over $2 trillion. Containment may be less dramatic, but it
generally comes with far less death and destruction.
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| London anti-war protest, February 15, 2003 |
President Bush did not make an objective judgment about the
use of military force based on the facts presented to him at the time. He was not
misled by his advisers and intelligence officials. The invasion of Iraq was a
foregone conclusion well before it happened. The WMD excuse was the public
justification for the war used to obtain a UN Security Council resolution and
congressional authorization. But it was not why we went to war. That decision
was pre-ordained even before 9/11, when as widely reported a close circle of Bush
advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, pressed
for a war with Iraq from the moment Bush became President. These men and others
wished not only to depose Saddam Hussein, a known menace and despot, but to install
a government more friendly to U.S. interests and to impose a democratic model
which they hoped would spread across the Middle East.
On the day of the 9/11 attacks and its immediate
aftermath, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, among others, made the case to the President
that Iraq should be part of any military response, even though there was no
evidence of Iraqi involvement for 9/11. Only when it was clear that a reason
for the invasion had to be based on something the American people could accept,
something that at least implied that Iraq posed an imminent threat and
justified the unprecedented action of pre-emptive war, did the WMD rationale
take priority. And the intelligence, as we now know, was selectively scoured
and used to justify the desired result.
While members of the administration claimed that the war
would be short and swift and U.S. armed forces treated as liberators, the
difficulties and costs of the post-invasion occupation were ignored. In
the run-up to the Iraq War, experts inside and outside of the Bush
Administration made clear that occupying Iraq would be extremely difficult and
costly. A November 2002 report by the National Defense University contended
that occupying Iraq “will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and
international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.”
Experts at the Army War College warned that the “possibility of the United
States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious.” And when
Lawrence Lindsey, the White House economic advisor, dared suggest that
rebuilding postwar Iraq would cost upwards of $200 billion – a laughably low
estimate as it turned out – he was publicly reprimanded and subsequently
dismissed.
As Fallows noted in the January 2004 issue of The Atlantic,
the problems confronted by American forces in Iraq immediately after the
invasion, the breakdown of public order, increased sectarian violence, the rise
of al-Qaeda in Iraq, were raised and willfully ignored in the planning stages
leading up to the war:
Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime was the subject of extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad: that occupying the country is much more difficult than conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out; that the Sunni center of the country is the main security problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.
Fallows also discussed the ill-fated decision to
dismantle the Iraqi army, a determination that directly contributed to the rise
of al-Qaeda in Iraq and indirectly facilitated the rise and success of ISIS,
which includes many of those dismissed Baathist security forces:
The case against wholesale dissolution of the army, rather than a selective purge at the top, was that it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day. Manpower that could have helped on security patrols became part of the security threat. Studies from the Army War College, the Future of Iraq project, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to name a few, had all considered exactly this problem and suggested ways of removing the noxious leadership while retaining the ordinary troops. They had all warned strongly against disbanding the Iraqi army. The Army War College, for example, said in its report, “To tear apart the Army in the war’s aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society.”
Moreover, even assuming the intelligence had been accurately
assessed concerning the WMD program, the notion of a pre-emptive attack against
a sovereign nation that posed no imminent threat to the United States or its
allies, and for which a policy of containment was in place and working, was
wrong, un-American, and morally unjustified. Hillary Clinton got this point wrong.
Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker – every Republican with the
exception of Rand Paul – continue to miss this point. It does not bode well for
the future. But at least Hillary has admitted that her past judgment was wrong.
That the Iraq War was a mistake in hindsight, however, is
now widely recognized even by many of its early proponents, Jeb Bush’s recent obfuscation
on the issue notwithstanding. It is a welcome, if somewhat surprising development
that many on the right, including most of the Republican presidential
candidates, have acknowledged that the decision to invade Iraq “based on what
we know now” was a mistake. According to the Costs of War Project by the Watson
Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the Iraq War has cost
the United States over $2.4 trillion in untaxed revenue, resulted in the deaths
of 4,500 Americans with another 40,000 seriously wounded. The war has led to heart-wrenching
tales of post-traumatic stress disorder, veteran suicides, and loss of morale. Iraq
has turned into a failed state as an estimated half-million of its people have
died. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, which everyone agrees is a good thing,
has nevertheless allowed Iran, which is four times as large and powerful, to
extend its influence in the region. Though President Obama’s precipitous
withdrawal from Iraq deserves some of the blame for Iraq’s current mess, none
of it happens if the United States refrains from committing its worst foreign
policy blunder in 50 years.
Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat
it. What was most egregious about the push for war in 2002-2003 was the Bush
Administration’s disdain for disagreement, its unabashed confidence in its own
judgment, its willingness to dismiss the opinions of many of our allies and
friends in Europe and the Middle East, a willingness to act unilaterally if
necessary, and the failure to critically examine and assess the evidence, risks
and benefits of war.
I would welcome in the upcoming presidential primary and
election season a lively debate and discussion about the lessons of the Iraq
War, the proper use of military force, where and when, if ever, America
should be engaged in nation building. I would like to see the candidates
discuss whether it was a good thing, and responsible leadership, for the United
States to have spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
without paying for those wars – without raising taxes to pay for them, or
asking for any sacrifices from the American people (other than those who
volunteered to serve in our armed forces). We need a true debate over America’s
priorities, the resources diverted for every bomber, every fighter jet, and how
that affects directly the lack of investment in our public infrastructure, our
schools, and our environment.
For several months before we invaded Iraq, many people
raised perceptive questions about the impending war, questions that remained
unanswered in the rush to war. While nobody lost any sleep over the end of
Saddam Hussein’s reign, the proper question was never, “Is Saddam good or bad?”
The more appropriate question, asked by many of us opposed to the invasion at
the time, but ignored by the majority of our leaders and much of the media was,
“What happens after we overthrow Saddam?” We cannot simply invade a country,
depose its leader, destroy its infrastructure, and leave its people in squalor.
If we do not wish to engage in nation building, we need to stop engaging in
nation demolition. How we respond to new threats is open for debate. But if we
fail to learn the proper lessons of history, we are destined to repeat our past
mistakes.
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