Things we’ve learned from the Iraq War (III)
March 24th, 2008, 1:41 pm · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
There’s one thing Dick Cheney said about the Iraq War that I’d agree with: The ’smoking gun’ of another nation having nuclear weapons should never be a mushroom cloud over one of our cities.
In other words, if someone is about to make an imminent attack on the US, no question a pre-emptive action is justified.
In 2002-3, however, that wasn’t the principle we were operating under: Instead, we had Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine where if there was even a 1 percent chance of an enemy attack, we were justified in striking first.
The end result? A war where the American deaths alone have now topped 4,000, against an enemy who was never a threat to us: No ties to al-Qaida, no WMDs to give them if there’d been ties.
And we went in despite warnings that the Iraqi exiles were using us to advance their own agenda, despite more than one defector telling us there were no weapons, despite all the countless demurrals. At best, the Bush administration wilfully and foolishly believed all the facts that supported its case and nothing else; at worst, they lied through their teeth to justify sending in the troops (lied about the case for war, that is; accounts of one of Bush’s pre-war meetings with Blair show Bush had settled on regime change, then spent months assuring the American people he was trying to avoid war).
My point is, Cheney got it backwards: If we’re going to invade a country that hasn’t attacked us, we should be at least 99 percent sure we’re in imminent danger. That’s a 1 percent doctrine I can live with.
To paraphrase the blogger hilzoy, sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes it’s necessary to amputate all four limbs. Neither one should be done casually (would anyone accept “There’s a 3 percent chance you’ll die if we don’t turn you into a quadriplegic” as a rationale for an operation?).
But as we’ve seen, the past few years, it’s easy to come up with “conclusive” proof that there’s deadly danger; even before Bush, there were people in the intelligence community who knew they were better off finding the facts they’re told to find, not what was there.
Can we trust our intelligence services to evaluate the information honestly and accurately next time? Can we trust our elected officials to interpret it without imposing their own wishes on the facts? And when there are doubts and maybes and ambiguities, can we trust our government not to airbrush those out and announce the case for war is a “slam dunk?”
Unfortunately, the answer to all three is no—and that applies to any administration, not just this one. The Gulf of Tonkin incident happened under Johnson; Iraqis supposedly throwing Kuwaiti babies under incubators was the myth for Bush I; and (switching nations for a second), England went into World War One partly because of widly exaggerated stories about German brutality in Belgium.
So is there any way to reliably justify a pre-emptive strike? Or not?
