Ramblings from the Fringe
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Months after President Bush declared "victory" in Iraq, he has yet to provide the American people with a coherent argument for U.S. involvement. As Americans are "shocked and awed" over the price tag of the occupation, they are rapidly forgetting this administration's rationale for why we went there in the first place. Time has not been kind to President Bush's justifications for sending thousands of American soldiers onto one of the most dangerous battlefields in the world. Indeed with the passage of each day the reasons are even flimsier than when he first presented them to the nation months ago. The WOMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) theory, for example, has dissolved so quickly from weapons of mass destruction to programs of mass destruction to practically -"issues" of mass destruction, that this administration's defense of this sounds more and more like OJ's claim that now that trial is over he will find the real killer. The stated reasons for the war don't hold up to close inspection either. And, further proof of their falsity can be seen in the slew of post bellum rationalizations for the war. One of my favorites is the flypaper excuse. The thinking behind this argument is that terrorists will attack Americans in Iraq rather than Americans in the US and hence Iraq is now serving as "flypaper" for terrorists. Even if true, this strikes me as a terribly haphazard reason, at best, for going to war. I – like everyone else – have been left to examine not the stated reasons, but the far murkier, sub rosa possible motives, that might make the war against Iraq – and its huge physical and fiscal costs – make sense. It is essential we look at the war not in terms of why we said we would fight, but in terms of what it actually accomplished and whether that was worth the cost. In the absence of all evidence that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States (this is a nation whose WOMD – all sides agreed – would have been hard pressed to reach Israel, let alone any real or presumed US territory), one wonders why President Bush was in such a hurry. The administration had a lot of what I think of as "Wink Wink Nudge Nudge" arguments for the war (c.f.: Python, Monty http://www.jumpstation.ca/recroom/comedy/python/nudge.html), implied reasons that could not be stated because they would not have been palatable to either the US public or those few allies we actually managed to line up for this. One such argument: In the wake of 9/11, the US needed to hit somebody and that somebody had to be both a larger and more credible foe than the Taliban. The government needed to be able to show not just that it could destroy anyone even remotely linked to the attack on the US (this knowledge was around before 9/11 and did not deter the attacks), but that it would. If you accept this then this was, oddly, a war of deterrence; not to deter Saddam – a negligible threat – but to deter everyone else. If the invasion of Iraq accomplished nothing else it proved that the nation would happily use terrorism as a pretext to strike at anyone. In this argument, the dubious nature of any connection between Saddam and al Qaida makes the show of force even stronger, as it is now clear that no actual link need exist between the target of our affliction and terrorism – we only need to say it does. Even with the inchoate rage floating around the US after 9/11, just needing to hit somebody was not enough to get the US public to send its children/siblings/spouses into battle. But the administration's linking of Saddam and al Qaida – despite ample evidence to the contrary – made it clear that the administration knew it had a powerful motivator and wasnt going to relinquish it. The latest proof of this was on Tuesday, September 17th, the same day that the media was trumpeting the fact that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said "he had no reason to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States,"Condoleezza Rice went on ABC's "Nightline" and said one of the reasons President Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in "a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged." This just two days after the AP reported, "Vice President Dick Cheney said success in stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would strike a major blow at the 'the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9-11.' " (It shouldn't be assumed that all "Wink Wink Nudge Nudge" cassus belli are for policies that dare not speak their name. Indeed the Iraq War of Bush the Elder was, if anything, a rational action in defense of a coherent policy which really wouldn't sell as a reason to take the nation to war. By invading Kuwait in 1991, Saddam had put a huge proportion of the worlds oil supplies in the hands of two nations neither of whom were terribly fond of the US. But to get the US to commit a huge percentage of its military to action – what was once known as "going to war"– back when the executive needed to get legislative approval for such things – requires a stronger emotional justification than "Protect Our Strategic National Resources." So that If you subscribe to the idea that our latest incursion into Iraq had anything to do with actually stopping terrorism, then the current President Bush and company had one Wink/Nudge reason that could be seen as at least coherent: We invaded Iraq because it was as close as we could get to 9/11's prime funders. But no one was going to go into battle under a banner of "Because We Can't Invade Saudi Arabia Directly!" Indeed, attacking the Saudis directly without first securing other, equally substantial oil reserves would have been an act of economic suicide. Also, any attack on Saudi Arabia could easily be portrayed as an assault on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Whatever substantial problems the US currently has with the Muslim world would have been as nothing compared to what would happen had we done that. Considered as a show of force designed to cow the Saudis, the Iraq war is a masterpiece. In PR terms, Saddam was a better foe than the House of Fahd because in many ways he was as horrible as we said he was. Certainly none of his neighbors were in any danger of rushing to his aid. Then there were, after all, all those pre-bellum rationales that the US was able to trot out, none of which existed for the Saudis. The idea that the invasion of Iraq was a bank shot also provides a consistent rationale in a "facts on the ground" sense. The US now has a large military force just across the border from the Saudis. It also showed the US military's ability to dispatch an army that – though poorly equipped and terribly led – was both larger and more experienced than anything the Saudis might field. On strictly this basis, you could argue the war has already paid off. There are many reports of the Saudi government having "urged the Saudi citizens to fulfill their religious and national duty by informing authorities about members of militant groups or those who support and sympathize with them." The authorities have even gone so far as to "re-educate" (my word, not theirs) the more extremist mullahs as to what may or may not be preached in the mosques. In purely physical terms, the cost of our Iraqi adventure is incalculable. The butcher's bill for any war is nearly always impossible to give good reason for. The cost in terms of people killed and maimed, of lives shattered, always falls disproportionately on those who – even if you grant the justness of a war's cause – had little if anything to do with its being fought. Any leader or nation embarking on war should do so with the knowledge that no matter how good their intentions or accurate their weapons they will destroy much more than they ever intended. This has been true ever since those first organized wars were fought thousands of years ago in what is now modern day Iraq. But, as the administration's myriad budget requests have shown, this is a war that is being fought with some concern for the physical costs (at least in terms of minimizing civilian casualties) and none whatsoever for the financial ones. So we are left to try and read the tea leaves when assessing whether or not the war has been worth its price. The real problem with finding sub rosa reasons for this war is that so many different ones can be found to meet so many different needs of the administration. Looking for explanations quickly becomes like wandering in a "Wilderness of Mirrors" – a phrase famously applied by former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to the dangers inherent in mole hunting at the CIA: Once you start subscribing to conspiracy theories it is hard to know where to stop. On the other hand, while you are crazy if you believe in every conspiracy, you are equally ill if you don't believe in any. Undoubtedly, the war has served as something of a diversion from the economic situation in the US. There is no argument but that the war certainly has allowed the administration to cloak actions sometimes hypocritical to their own stated beliefs and sometimes purely ideological in the mantle of patriotism. The massive amount of defense spending did spur at least one quarter's worth of economic growth while giving the administration cover to claim that it didn't believe in direct government spending to spur growth. This spending, after all, was done for national security not like those Democrats whose only solution to a problem was to throw money at it. But were those corollary or primary reasons for going to war? An uglier and scarier theory that fits the facts is that the war is also being used to aid in bankrupting the United States government. An absurd idea on its face, it has to be said that this gives a rationale to the Bush administration's otherwise inexplicable determination to increase spending while cutting income. A bankrupt government (or one with a crippling amount of debt) will have to take the drastic action of ending most of the social programs enacted by FDR – long a central tenet of NeoCon thought. If this sounds crazy, just remember I didn't come up with this idea first, conservative activist Grover Nordquist did. This hypothesis also goes a way towards explaining why the administration did such a purposefully bad job in anticipating the post-invasion problems in Iraq. Not only did it not want to know what the actual dollar figures might be, but they didn't care. If they had done substantial planning for the post-war situation then they would have had to say how much they expected to spend. That number certainly would have been made public – whether intentionally or not. Actually having to admit those costs would have dampened what was already fairly tepid support for the war (which is why the president rather famously fired economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey for making public his now low estimate of $100 to $200 billion). Add to this the idea that the Bush administration is actually embracing overspending as a way to get rid government programs it doesn't care for and it all makes a horrible kind of sense. If they're approaching the war with a blank check anyway then why bother putting a fixed figure on it when that will just cost you support anyway? What makes this scenario even more believable is that if ever there was an administration that has proven time and time again that it believes that an ideological end ALWAYS justify the means, it is this one. It is also an administration that has proven itself blithely uninterested in the collateral damage it causes. Most of its actions seem predicated by the idea that nothing matters but the next presidential election. Did this in anyway factor into the decision to go to war? The only people who might know wouldn't confirm if it was true and wouldn't want to give it any credence by denying it if it wasn't. Barring the emergence of a smoking email it remains nothing more than a theory. What is scary is that it is far from the least plausible theory about secondary motives for the war. Regardless of whether it is true or not, the government's current fiscal behavior makes it far too easy to imagine some subsequent president paraphrasing Caesar Augustus' lament to General Varus: "Bush, give me back my billions." |