Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day: Wages of Bush Derangement Syndrome

An NRO Corner reader points out that President Obama’s denunciations of the liberation of Iraq have deprived him of an important message that he could otherwise send to the Iranian people at this moment of crisis:

Imagine how powerful it would be for Obama (or, more likely, a surrogate) to be able to stand up and say to the Iranian protesters, “Under the USA, your neighbor Iraq held free and fair elections. The government of Iran went out of its way to demonize the US and undermine those elections. We are now seeing the results of that mindset come home to Iran as you are denied a voice by your government in your own elections. The US government stands behind all who seek free and fair elections.”

Of course, he can’t say that with any legitimacy because he has spent years putting down Bush and Iraq.

Obviously, the President can’t pick up an Iraqi talking point now, after having trampled it into the dust for the past seven years. Strangely, he also has omitted from his public statements any allusion to America’s role in supporting Moslems in Bosnia and Kosovo (against Christian adversaries, yet). It’s almost as if he wants to avoid hinting that any American military effort, save for those that He Himself engages in, possesses any virtue.

Quote of the Day

James S. Robbins:

The number of daily attacks in Iraq has fallen almost 95% from levels a year ago. Also of note, the murder rate in Iraq in November was 0.9 per 100,000 people. That is lower than the rate from before Saddam was overthrown. For those keeping score, the 2007 murder rate in the US was 5.9 per 100,000. Can we declare victory yet?

Yes, we can – so long as we give all credit to The One and denounce George W. Bush’s failed, incompetent policies.

Orphaned Victory

For once, it isn’t true that “Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan”. Oh, in the dexterosphere, for which today is V-I Day, praise will be ladled out to General Petraeus and even to the President who made the decision to put him in command, but the consensus of bien-pensants is that (a) the Iraqi campaign wasn’t an American victory and (b) it wasn’t won by anything America did.

The Obama Version falls into the mainstream of conventional wisdom: The Sunnis in Anbar province spontaneously rose up against al-Qa’eda, motivated by revulsion against its harsh treatment of their tribes. American and allied forces were bystanders, and the “surge” that began shortly after the first stirring in Anbar was a coincidence rather than a cause. According to this “narrative” (hereafter, NINNY, the “New Iraq Nattering Nabobs Yarn”), the Anbar Awakening would have taken place even had there been no U.S. Marines at hand to lend it firepower and expertise.

The vision of the “people’s revolution” against oppression is dear to the Left, for two reasons: First, it casts a warm glow over left-wing revolutions, such as the French and the Russian and the Cuban, that ushered in regimes far more vicious than what they replaced. Second, it provides a handy excuse for passivity in foreign affairs. Hostile tyrants will be overthrown without our having to act – and it they aren’t, their continuance in power demonstrates that they are not really tyrants.

Hence, resolute leftists opposed doing anything about Saddam Hussein. The irresolute were swept along with the post-9/11 tide, then, when the fighting continued, regressed to their mean and called for acquiescence in defeat. The principal motive for the NINNY is to justify their position by stripping victory of its paternity and blurring the distinction between success and failure.

How closely the NINNY corresponds to reality isn’t of interest to historians only. History, in the hands of polemicists, is a form of propaganda. That’s why, for instance, pro-communist A. J. P. Taylor and anti-American Pat Buchanan, two advocates of a wholly passive U.S. foreign policy, have zealously promoted the canard that Adolf Hitler had only moderate, realistic ambitions for Nazi Germany. The canard at the heart of the NINNY likewise leads to passivity.

The NINNY’s fundamental flaw lies in its axiom that Islamofascist terrorism will inevitably inspire revolt. That is not what history shows. The tactics of al-Qa’eda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan are, in fact, based not on a mere taste for brutality but on what has worked for similar movements in the past.

The first great success of Moslem arms against a Western nation was the Algerian revolt against France. There the rebels’ treatment of the local population featured “the systematic and gruesome slaughter of large numbers of Muslims to show everybody, French and Muslims, who was boss”. Terrorization “was a permanent and systematic modus operandi”. [Laurent Murawiec, The Mind of Jihad (2008), pp. 297–8]. The effect was not, as the NINNY would have predicted, an “Algerian Awakening”. Perhaps (indeed, probably) something of the sort could have been incited by a French counterpart to General Petraeus. Malhereusement pour la belle France, its commanders relied on counter-terror, which “worked” in the narrow sense of keeping the Moslem majority in a state of perpetual fear but didn’t gain allies and eventually, fatally lost support in the mother country.

In Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere), the mufsidun have emulated the tactics that triumphed in Algeria. There is no strong reason to think that the NINNY strategy of leaving it to the victims to help themselves will be, or would have been, an effective countermeasure.

Before the NINNY becomes immovably entrenched, the real history of the Iraqi campaign needs to be told. Like the history of any other war, it contains a fair share of folly and blunder. Those are what the media’s “zeroth draft of history” highlights, reflecting the preposterous notion that making a plan in advance and adhering to it faithfully are the benchmarks of military competence, but they proved unimportant. What’s remarkable – nay, astonishing – about the American performance in Iraq is the speed and skill with which our civilian and military leaders adapted to the unexpected and overcame the friction of war. Consider this short list of feats that were declared impossible until they were accomplished (after which they were instantly taken for granted):

• The thorough defeat, in scarcely three weeks and with trivial American and allied casualties, of an Iraqi army larger than the invading force and supposedly (the MSM told us repeatedly) “battle-hardened”;

• the capture of Baghdad by a coup de main, without the Stalingrad-like siege that the “experts” had predicted;

• the organization of successful elections, notwithstanding a determined terrorist campaign to disrupt them (recall that John Kerry promised, if elected, to cancel the one scheduled for January 2005, declaring that it was bound to be a fiasco);

• and, finally, the eradication of a powerful terrorist apparatus in a period of less than a year and a half, counting from the beginning of the “surge” (comparable achievements elsewhere have taken years or decades).

The Second Gulf War has the highest ratio of controversy to casualties of any in our country’s history. Once contemporary passions subside, however, there can be little doubt that Iraq will be the case study of how to win an anti-insurgent campaign. Names like Rumsfeld and Petraeus will sit comfortably beside Grant and Lee, while George W. Bush will gain the reputation of a wartime President on a par with Roosevelt, if not Lincoln. In a century or so, the fathers of victory will be acknowledged. I hope, though, that their just due doesn’t have to wait quite that long.

Not Yet a First Draft of History

Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush Administration, boldly subtitled A Secret White House History 2006-2008, has attracted conservative attention, because, between the lines of the author’s BDS-inspired diatribe, one can find evidence of George W. Bush’s good judgment, courage, imagination and ability to overcome formidable obstacles in the pursuit of America’s national interest. In the words of the Wall Street Journal,

The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed – something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

Peter Wehner offers a similar perspective, while Rich Lowry excoriates the obstinate resistance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (as reported by Woodward) to the President’s strategy.

The idea of turning a Woodward screed into a source of pro-Bush commentary is delightful, but I must demur. The War Within, like its predecessors, employs a modus operandi that renders it inherently unreliable. As history, it doesn’t qualify as even a zeroth draft.

By his own account, Mr. Woodward’s narrative is based on 150 interviews and an unspecified number of internal Administration documents. I’ve no reason to doubt that he talked to that many people, read a great many memoranda and gathered excellent raw material for a work of history. Unfortunately, those materials are inaccessible to everyone else. There is no way to check the tale that has been extracted from them. Participants in events undoubtedly disagreed about what happened. How did the author weigh their relative credibility? Did he examine their statements for inconsistencies? Has he allowed adequately for their self-interest and bias? Did he make sure to place testimony in its proper context? Did he omit crucial facts or elevate trivia to central importance? There is no way that the reader can know.

It’s commonplace for historians using the same body of evidence to reach strikingly different conclusions, even where they are dealing with a past that no longer excites fervent passions. The addition of ideological animus naturally widens the gulf. It is all but certain that Mr. Woodward’s timbers could be used to construct numerous widely varying buildings. His particular structure could be close to the truth. It could also be a fun house distortion. It certainly cannot be used uncritically – yet critical use requires being able to look at the evidence that the soi disant historian has kept out of sight.

One’s confidence in The War Within’s analysis is seriously undermined by its evident determination to place President Bush in the worst possible light: first, by asserting that the “process” by which he decided to commit more troops to Iraq and alter the way in which they were used was faulty (that is, insufficiently deferential to “expert” opinion that turned out to be wrong); second, by claiming that the “surge” played no important role in shaping the present state of affairs, that things would have worked out about the same if the President had followed the (alleged) advice of the Joint Chiefs and retreated from the Iraqi theater. As Peter Wehner summarizes,

On the matter of the surge, Woodward downplays its importance. He argues that the enormous drop in violence in Iraq is owed mainly to other factors (the Sunni uprising against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the ceasefire with Moktada al-Sadr), and even to luck (a top-secret operation targeting terrorist leaders came online, he claims, at the same time the surge was being executed).

It seems obvious to me, as it does to Mr. Wehner, “that the surge reinforced every good thing that has happened in Iraq. All the other actors – the Sunnis in Anbar, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sadr and his minions, the government in Baghdad, Iraq’s neighbors – had to factor the staying power and reinforcement of the U.S.-led coalition into their calculations. It enabled everything else to take place.”

There is, however, a more fundamental point to which Mr. Woodward’s anti-Bush passion blinds him. If the situation in Iraq in early 2007 was truly such that the Anbar Awakening was bound to succeed and al-Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” to stand down, then it was not at all desperate. By Mr. Woodward’s lights, the anti-mufsidun forces were in such a strong position that all they needed from the U.S. was a little help with tracking down and executing high-level terrorists. If that was so, doesn’t it vindicate the Administration’s pre-surge strategy, which the same Bob Woodward derided in his earlier volume, State of Denial?

It’s not hard to infer that this book was begun in confidence that the surge would fail. The plot was preordained: Stubborn, out-of-touch President ignores the wise advice of his generals. They struggle manfully to rescue him from himself but, sad to say, are outmaneuvered.

Reality, though, failed to conform to the narrative, sending Mr. Woodward into his own “state of denial”. He has obviously tried to adhere to his original thesis to the maximum possible extent. Perhaps he is personally satisfied with the resulting work product. There is no reason why anyone else should take it seriously as a guide to what really occurred.

Barry’s Words

Gregory S. McNeal:

In view of his non-existent record, Obama’s words must merit greater scrutiny because they are the only remaining measure voters have for what Obama believes. Those words have been woefully inconsistent over the totality of Obama’s short career, and are full of generalities like “hope” and “change.” In fact, the only consistent theme in his campaign is one policy change after another. All politicians modify their positions (including McCain), but usually those changes take place over a few years and as circumstances dictate. Obama’s changes on dozens of issues came about in just three and a half years and not for policy reasons, but for political gain.

But let’s be fair. At the core of Slick Barry’s shifting words about Iraq is an unchanging principle. A year ago, USA Today interviewed him and reported,

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday [July 19, 2007] the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

The danger of “a potential genocide in Iraq” has receded, but the candidate’s attitude toward America’s most important Arab ally remains unaltered. The Washington Post – sounding almost like a cog in the VRWC – summarizes:

The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome — that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves.

It is, nonetheless, a natural view for an isolationist left-winger, who knows little about the world outside Hyde Park and cares less. “Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

Legend Making in Progress

Last Friday Scott McClellan, fired press secretary turned left-wing avenger, gave a book report to the House Judiciary Committee. An inevitable topic was the kerfuffle over glamorous superspy Valerie Plame Wilson, whose career of saving the Free World was rudely interrupted when Bob Novak revealed that she worked for the CIA.

Mr. McClellan’s testimony was along the lines everyone expected: Without inside information or other evidence, he speculated that Vice President Cheney ordered his aides to leak Mrs. Wilson’s occupation to reporters as punishment for her husband’s criticism of the invasion of Iraq. The subvillains in this story were Scooter Libby and that ubiquitous man of evil Karl Rove.

It’s a familiar narrative, and, as is also familiar, the teller omitted a couple of plot-spoiling facts: first, that the source for Mr. Novak’s report was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, whose estrangement from the White House in general, and the Vice President in particular, was notorious; second, that the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Mr. Wilson’s famous anti-war op-ed rested on a lie: Contrary to what he told readers of the New York Times, his mission to Niger uncovered evidence that Saddam Hussein did want to buy uranium in Africa.

It would be interesting, I mused, to see whether press accounts of Mr. McClellan’s committee appearance mentioned this background, so I checked the Nexis database. I don’t think you’ll be surprised at the results.

Here is the sum total of what was said about Mr. Armitage’s role, in each case well after the lede:

Cox News Service: “Libby, former White House political counselor Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage all discussed Plame’s identity with reporters after her husband, former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson, publicly criticized the White House case for war against Iraq.

Associated Press: “State Department official Richard Armitage first revealed Plame’s CIA identity to columnist Robert Novak, who used Rove as a confirming source for a 2003 article. Around that time Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson was criticizing Bush's march to war in Iraq.”

Among the remainder of the press, silence reigned. Regarding the embarrassing Senate Intelligence Committee report, it was total.

“When legend becomes fact, print the legend” used to be just a line in a movie.

Truman in a Hurry

Cowards, I know, would quit the fighting now
but the man who wants to make his mark in war
must stand his ground and brace for all he’s worth –
suffer his wounds or wound his man to death.

The Iliad, Book XI (Robert Fagels trans.)

Admirers of George W. Bush – not a numerous company but a stubborn one – like to anticipate that he eventually will take a place in history like Harry S Truman’s, a President who left office as a “failure” but is now widely praised for taking the first steps toward victory in the Cold War. It was not at all certain in the immediate aftermath of World War II that the United States would offer serious resistance to the advance of communism in Europe and Asia. We could have pulled back to our own hemisphere and let foreign nations take care of themselves. Similarly, the pro-Bush prediction is that his decision to treat terrorism as an act of war rather than a law enforcement concern, his espousal of the doctrine of defensive preemption, and his successes in Iraq and Afghanistan will set the West on course to suppress Islamofascism, however many detours may lengthen the way.

One element of the Truman-Bush parallel that no one has emphasized strongly is that President Truman started a process with meager short-term results. During his time in office, the Soviet Union swallowed Eastern Europe, Mao Tse-tung took control of mainland China, Stalin’s spies scored their most spectacular espionage feats, deterrence failed in Korea, and the accession of pro-communist governments in Western Europe remained a real possibility. Against those setbacks could be set the salvation of Greece and not much more. It would have been realistic to say in January 1953 that the “War on Communism” was a dismal failure. If either political party then had been like the Democrats now, it would have been said, and loudly, too.

A year ago, it wouldn’t have been excessively gloomy to foresee that President Bush would leave office with his Administration’s defining struggle in a similar state: Iraq would flounder into civil war and be abandoned by a President Clinton or Obama; Afghanistan would fall to resurgent Taliban; Pakistan would become a de facto terrorist ally; the mufsidun ideology, its prestige boosted by such victories, would come to define Islam; an emboldened Iran would emerge as a regional superpower. For every commentator who called the President steadfast in adversity, ten sneered that he was merely obstinate. The War on Terror was certainly not lost, but it looked to be as long as the Cold War.

Today, by startling contrast, it wouldn’t be utterly Pollyannish to say that George W. Bush will walk away a winner, leaving a devastated terrorist movement as his legacy.

About Iraq, the Washington Post’s editorial board (that’s Washington Post, not New York) says,

While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. . . .

Gen. Petraeus pointed out that attacks in Iraq hit a four-year low in mid-May and that Iraqi forces were finally taking the lead in combat and on multiple fronts at once – something that was inconceivable a year ago. As a result the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki now has “unparalleled” public support, as Gen. Petraeus put it, and U.S. casualties are dropping sharply. Eighteen American soldiers died in May, the lowest total of the war and an 86 percent drop from the 126 who died in May 2007.

The situation is looking good enough that Team Obama is pretending that Slick Barry never said, “We can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops: I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.”

“Win the War? Yes, We Can!”

And in Afghanistan,

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have “decapitated” the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a “tipping point”, the commander of British forces has said.

The new “precise, surgical” tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the “very effective targeted decapitation operations” that have removed “several echelons of commanders”. . . .

“We have seen increasing fissures of stress through the whole organisation that has led to internecine and fratricidal strife between competing groups.”

Taliban fighters are apparently becoming increasingly unpopular in Helmand, where they are reliant on the local population for food and water.

They have also been subjected to strikes by the RAF’s American-made Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the guided Royal Artillery missile system, which have both proved a major battlefield success.

“I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment,” said Brig Carleton-Smith. “We have reached the tipping point.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is facing ruin from mismanagement and corruption. Nancy Pelosi’s notion that the mullarchy deserves the credit for the Iraqi government’s gains is a desperate anti-war fantasy, striving to put the worst face possible on victory, but suppose that it were true. Wouldn’t the President deserve kudos for either intimidating or charming the mullahs into a more cooperative frame of mind? As James Taranto says, “Who needs Barack Obama if the Bush administration is generating so much Iranian goodwill?”

And so it goes. Not that this good news amounts to an assured triumph. The enemy retains substantial resources and may be able to regroup. Worse, there is a danger that we will complacently relax the pressure too soon. Nonetheless, the President’s vindication may come much more rapidly than Truman’s, perhaps soon enough to embarrass the Bush haters mightily.

Feith vs. McClellan, Part II

Douglas Feith’s War and Decision was published on April 8, 2008. It is packed with first-hand information about decision making in the Bush Administration, with particular attention to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Included are internal documents that have never before been readily available to the public. Many of its facts are new and surprising.

Scott McClellan’s What Happened, published two days ago, is, by any standard, a far less significant work. Its author was a spokesman, not a policymaker. He played no part in the debates over America’s response to terrorism and has no experience or expertise that makes his commentary more valuable than anybody else’s. Judging by the excerpts that I’ve seen, his analysis is about as insightful as the average left-wing blog’s.

The Nexis database isn’t a perfect measure of media attention, but it’s pretty good. As of this morning, War and Decision had been mentioned in 140 stories over a period of two months. What Happened got 217 mentions – 50 percent more – in two days.

If you think that the mainstream media are engaged in a serious enterprise, the empirical data are against you.

Update (5/29/08): As of late this evening, the count stood at McClellan 355, Feith 143.

Among Scott McClellan’s defenders, side-by-side with Keith Olbermann, is vaguely conservative airhead Peggy Noonan. After a column praising What Happened with faint damns, she concludes, “What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s.”

Peggy Noonan has written eight weekly columns since War and Decision was published. These six words are all that she has said about Mr. Feith or his book. More data, sure, but she isn’t going to bother to read it.

Feith vs. McClellan

Having read Douglas Feith’s War and Decision over the long weekend (a better use of anyone’s time than blogging), I was interested to read about former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s unequal and opposite memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Just as Mr. Feith’s book is an exemplar of what a political insider’s account ought to be, Mr. McClellan’s, unless seriously misrepresented by press accounts and the excerpt reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, is a counter-exemplar, contributing nothing to historical knowledge but the author’s animus.

In fairness to Mr. McClellan, he does not deserve one criticism that has been widely bruited in the dexterosphere: He did not, during his tenure, knowingly retail what he believed to be falsehoods.

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured. [emphasis added]

In other words, Mr. McClellan did not perceive any “deception” while he served the Administration. It was only later, after it fired him, that he became “genuinely convinced” “that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it” is deserved. As press secretary, he was not in any event well-placed to detect deception. Unlike Doug Feith, he wasn’t a regular attendee at key policymaking sessions, didn’t debate the pros and cons of strategy with Cabinet secretaries, other top officials and the President himself, didn’t routinely peruse classified documents and didn’t have any significant background in foreign affairs. Where Mr. Feith’s view of the reasons for invading Iraq is founded on expert knowledge of the facts and careful consideration of their importance, Mr. McClellan’s is simply the “narrative” picked up from the media. He concludes with the confident, naïve, ignorant assertion, “Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.”

War and Decision reviews in detail why, after 9/11, leaving Saddam Hussein in power was a far graver risk than forcibly removing him. To summarize,

• Throughout the 1990’s, liberals decried the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, deplored the refusal of President George H. W. Bush to depose him in 1991, labeled him an “imminent threat” to the American interests and supported legislation that made “regime change” in Iraq official U.S. government policy. Whatever its source or validity, such alarmism cannot have been due to any deception practiced by George W. Bush, who did not become President until 2001.

• Also during the 1990’s, Iraq maintained stockpiles of chemical munitions and actively sought both to improve its chemical capabilities and to develop biological and atomic weapons. These facts, verified directly by the United Nations inspections that Saddam shut down in 1998, were largely admitted by Iraq, which claimed to have subsequently halted them but did not allow verification. The post-war Iraq Study Group reports found that covert development efforts had continued and that full resumption was planned as soon as U.N. economic sanctions came to an end.

• Saddam’s Iraq was a promiscuous provider of training, subsidies and material support to terrorist groups, with little regard for religious or ideological affiliation. This belief was widely held by the intelligence community before George W. Bush took office. Documents captured during and after the war amply confirm it.

• Among the world’s despots, Saddam Hussein stood out for recklessness (invasions of Iran and Kuwait, a threatened reinvasion of Kuwait in 1994), anti-Americanism (the attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993, daily attempts to shoot down American and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone, murals in honor of the 9/11 attackers) and ferocity (use of poison gas, wanton destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields, internal terrorism and torture). There was no reason to think that he could be reasoned with or deterred.

• International sanctions, which were the one hope of keeping the Ba’athists too weak to be a threat, were proving less and less enforceable. Three permanent members of the Security Council (Russia, France, China) favored weakening or abandoning them. After the war, we learned that corruption in the Oil-for-Food program had given Saddam a multi-billion dollar slush fund with which to bribe foreign politicians, making the demise of sanctions even more of a certainty than it had seemed to be.

American intelligence agencies also believed that Iraq had a large quantity of chemical and biological weapons on hand. That belief (which, Mr. Feith notes, was shared by Iraqi generals in communications intercepted by the U.S.) did no more than add another, redundant item to the long list of reasons to regard Ba’athist Iraq as an international menace. Weapons of mass destruction were, Mr. Feith shows, a relatively small, and never decisive, component of the case. If we had known with certainty that Iraq possessed not a single chemical, biological or nuclear weapon, its ability and willingness to aid terrorists in other ways would have been troubling enough. It could and did give a variety of mufsidun cash, equipment (hundreds of time bombs and suicide vests, for instance), training and safe havens.

All of these facts, none of them obscure in 2003 though the “narrative” has obscured them since then, apparently have slipped from, or never entered, the press secretary’s mind. Likewise less than perceptive is his harping on the “permanent campaign” that the Bush Administration supposedly waged to the detriment of “openness and forthrightness”. If the President has been trying to imitate Bill Clinton’s “war room” approach to governing the country, he has gone about it very strangely. The most conspicuous feature of his public relations strategy has been reticence about responding to his opponents’ allegations. A Clinton would have insisted (correctly) that the “sixteen words” about Ba’athist Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium in Africa were based on solid evidence, that reports of federal ineptitude in dealing with Hurricane Katrina were grossly exaggerated and that WMD stockpiles were only a small part of the rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. President Bush kept silent on all those counts and more. (Vide Douglas Feith, “How Bush Sold the War”.) It looks like Scott McClellan was blind not just to distant Iraq but also to the press operation that he supposedly headed. Whatever else his book may be, What Happened it is not.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “General McClellan’s War”
Peter Wehner, “Scott’s Truth vs. Reality”

A Unilateral War

When General Petraeus told Congress that Iran is furnishing weapons and training to our enemies in Iraq, and is responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians”, the anti-war Left yawned. To the extent that the pro-defeat crowd paid any attention, they dismissed such charges as more Bushitler lies, designed to stampede the public into war with the Mullarchy.

Yet just the other day, as Abe Greenwald points out, the Los Angeles Times, not often a conduit for Administration propaganda, quoted a Mahdi Army commander casually discussing his men’s receipt of arms shipments from Iran, including “bombs that can rip a hole in a U.S. tank and rockets that can pound Baghdad’s Green Zone”. He professes to “hate Iran”, and maybe he does, even as his pseudo-army’s nominal leader hides out in Tehran, but we ought to have learned by now that expectations that our enemies in the Middle East won’t cooperate with each other are delusory. Like Saddam Hussein before them, the mullahs are happy to arm and subsidize any species of anti-American mufsidun.

Does that matter at all to, say, Barack Obama? He insists that he’s not a pacifist; he’ll pour troops in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan, too, to find Osama bin-Laden. Why? Because bin-Laden’s organization murdered Americans. Yet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s organization has done the same, and the prospective Democratic President plans to invite him to a summit meeting – much as if President Roosevelt had proposed getting together with Hideki Tojo after Pearl Harbor.

Liberals scorn “unilateralism”, but only when America takes the offensive. Unilateral attacks against us, it seems, are not a cause for concern.