Retreads
Arthur Herman ("Why Iraq Was Inevitable", Commentary, July/August 2008) brings us back to Fall 2002/Winter 2003 to show us, with the"long view" of history, that the threat Saddam Hussein posed had been ever present in the minds of the American public and leadership.
I would agree, in part, with Mr. Herman: historians will contend with the image of Iraq in popular consciousness, particularly as an expression of the fear posed by Islam and the Arab world. The case for war was a soft sell. However, Mr. Herman is not interested in the public consciousness. He is interested in the opinions of politicians in order to show that the threat Hussein posed was not something invented by Bush and Neo-Conservatives, but which had its roots in the Clinton administration and that Democrats and Republicans believed in with firm conviction. But that's shooting fish in a barrel.
Why, though, does Mr. Herman stop at January 2003? It was at that point that the quality of intelligence about Iraq was coming into question, and that key evidence in the case for war was, at best, impressionistic (if not completely abstract). Nations who were allies and supporters of the US in Afghanistan expressed their misgivings about the quality of the intelligence even though they agreed that Hussein probably pursued WMD. Those nations that supported us (with the exception of the United Kingdom and Australia) have little more than their blessing. To most governments, the intelligence was not compelling solid enough that they felt immediate war was the only way to neutralize Hussein. (A reminder: France, Germany and"Old Europe" were not the only critics of the US in the UN, only the most articulate. Nor were they alone in profiting from the Oil-for-Food program.)
Unfortunately, what made war inevitable was not the intelligence, but politics:
Should we have backed off after the Blix report on January 27, 2003, even as the American troop buildup in Kuwait was in full swing? That would have devastated Bush’s reputation as a war leader after his resounding success in Afghanistan, and guaranteed that he would never be more than a one-term President (which may have been the real objective of his critics anyway).
Mr. Herman sacrifices Pres. Bush's image as a morally courageous man: doing what was right was less important that doing what was politically advantageous. Were six weeks not enough time to divert from the path of war? Ah! another question for historians.