Burnt Orange Report

How We Got There (an opinion greatly aided by 20/20 hindsight)

By Jim Dallas

Over the last few weeks, through the use of 20-20 hindsight, I've made a few conclusions about US foreign policy towards Iraq. Arguably, you can't argue with somebody unless you undertand how it is that they interpret history and what lessons they draw from it. For the sake of public debate, here is how I understand the backstory to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

We need to flash back to December 1998, during Operation Desert Fox, which was launched by President Clinton in concert with our British allies. This marks the real beginning of US policy of "pre-emptive" war against Iraq, and showed the weakness of the policy of dual-containment which had been undertaken by the first Bush administration and continued by President Clinton.

The policy relied essentially on two pillars. The first was weapons inspections, the second was sanctions. (A strong case could be made that by 1998 regime change was already official US policy).

During the 1990s, Saddam systematically misled the United States and UN weapons inspectors (though arguably both the US and UN share some of the blame for the failure of inspections). The result was that our government and our allies simply did not know what was going on in Iraq in regards to weapons of mass destruction. And considering the fact that Saddam certainly had chemical and biological weapons before and possibly after 1992, there was a lot to worry about.

When President Clinton ordered air strikes in 1998, the situation was made worse, because inspectors were forced out (or withdrawn by the UN, depending on how you frame the events). Our limited knowledge about Iraqi NBC weapons became even more limited.

Moreover, the sanctions put in place after the first Gulf War were not accomplishing what they were intended to. Although Saddam never successfully rebuilt his army (which had been funded in no small part by the US, which after the first Gulf War was persona non grata, and by the USSR, which after 1992 simply did not exist anymore), the Iraqi people suffered by being cut off from the rest of the world. While Saddam deserves primary blame for that, the US and the UN were certainly complicit in letting the sanctions regime condemn the Iraqi people instead of the Iraqi dictator.

Moreover, in a separate-but-related arena, the Clinton administration tried (but failed) to exert pressure on Al-Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations in its last couple years. While the political will existed to use force to subdue Osama bin Laden, actual effort seems to have been sporadic and hard to explain to a GOP congress which was increasingly isolationist and averse to any serious foreign policy discussion in 1998 and 1999. Obviously, the country was already distracted by more serious issues like Monica Lewinsky, school vouchers, and "partial-birth abortion."

But in sum, the policy of Iraqi containnment was clearly failing by the end of the decade, and the inability of the Clinton administration to articulate an alternative framework for dealing with Saddam was extremely short-sighted, and created a policy vacuum (a lack of real ideas) that allowed a patently nutty idea like invading Iraq to advance unchecked two years later.

So by the time President Bush took office in 2001, something had to give. At first, it seemed that the Bush administration was considering what Secretary of State Powell called "smart sanctions", which to some suggested that US-Iraqi relations might be liberalized and perhaps eventually normalized. Provided, of course, that realists like Powell could suppress the protests of neoconservatives in the Pentagon (who by early 2001 were already planning for war).

The tragedy that occurred on September 11 of that year clearly forced the administration to re-evaluate the situation and finally get "serious" about terrorism, or at least try to continue the unfinished business of the Clinton administration in subduing Al Qaeda. The problem is that, aside from a stunningly successful war against terrorist-harboring Afghani Taliban, there were very few tangible things that the President could do to vanquish Osama bin Laden himself.

September 11 also forced Bush to revisit the attitude of the Clinton administration towards "rogue states." While there has never been any evidence to link the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to any rogue state whatsoever, many of the "what-ifs" that had been advanced during the 1990s involving rogue states, terrorists, and "weapons of mass destruction" suddenly became more palpable. Hence the "Axis of Evil" speech delivered in the months immediately after 9/11.

The desire to "do something, anything" after 9/11 manifested itself in truly awful policy-making. Hence the USA PATRIOT Act, which many lawmakers have since regretted. This attitude also influenced the Bush administration's rapidly shifting (and prior to 9/11, possibly non-existant) policy on Iraq.

In mid-2002, UN weapons inspectors had been absent from Iraq for nearly four years, and the lack of intelligence (evidenced by the failure by the US to find any "WMDs" in Iraq thusfar) was staggering. We simply did not know what was going on. After 9/11, this was unacceptable.

So the Bush administration began considering military action against Iraq - on the basis of what they did not know or could not know. And the US Congress approved a use-of-force resolution justified, essentially, by ignorance.

Eventually, Secretary of State Powell convinced the President to do the right thing and go to the UN. Eventually, the give-and-take of global politics led to the passage of UNSC Resolution 1441, which given the tensions and anxieties of the time, was a masterful compromise which might have laid the groundwork for a return to a "normal" state of affairs with Iraq. The United States, and the world, had a right to know what Saddam Hussein had been doing during the absence of UN weapons inspectors. The renewal of inspections uner Res. 1441 offered a chance for the US and the UN to figure out whether Iraq actually posed a threat to its neighbors (and the Coalition).

Had the drive to war ended in November 2002, when Iraq relented to UN pressure under the threat of war, the world might have had peace as well as piece-of-mind. And George W. Bush would have succeeded in making a broken process work again.

But it did not. The weapons inspectors came away with mixed evidence for and against the presence of illegal weapons, and despite the need for more time to come to a real conclusion, Bush's patience simply ran out. And the rest, as they say, is history.

In sum, there was a bi-partisan failure under both the Clinton and Bush administrations to develop a realistic, long-term strategy for dealing with Iraq that did not involve the use of force -- and when one seemed to emerge when the UNSC passed Resolution 1441 unanimously, the Bush administration simply rejected it out of hand.

There were some advantages to the eventual outcome -- US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. The most of important of which was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. But the disadvantages cannot be overlooked either, and I remain convinced that on balance it will not be viewed kindly by history (and given the since-aborted framework for regime change tentatively developed under the Iraqi Democracy Act, it cannot be said that war was the only option for removing the dictator).

The President's political team has tried to paint the occupation of Iraq as not merely a success (which is dubious in-and-of-itself), but as a bold new approach to the Middle East. But quite frankly, I do not believe that what has unfolded in Iraq can be understood without considering the policies adopted by the Clinton administration (after all, weren't anti-war people reminded over and over again that the left was "hypocritical" because Clinton bombed Iraq because of alleged NBC weapons?) and, more importantly, the weaknesses of those policies. Moreover, eventually historians are going to need to grapple with why Clinton's adventures abroad (to wit, Bosnia and Kosovo) were so successful and relatively-bloodless, compared to the quicksand-quagmire that Iraq is rapidly becoming.