Thursday, 19 August 2004

The case for war, revisited. Back before the Iraq war began, I read a blog post — I've forgotten where — by someone who said "I support a war to depose Saddam Hussein, but only with a Democrat in the White House. The Democrats would rebuild Iraq after the war; the Republicans would screw it up."

At the time, I thought he was joking.

John Kerry has talken a lot of flack for his position on the Iraq war: He voted to give President Bush the authority to wage war (a decision that left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall mercilessly skewers here), but he's been sharply critical of Bush's post-war performance. Many of Kerry's supporters opposed the war (or, more to the point, anyone who opposed the war is fervently opposing Bush this election), and many who told the pollsters they supported the war in mid-2003 are now swinging into the "bad idea" camp.

My own position is not far removed from Kerry's: I supported the war, but criticized the Bush administration repeatedly — both before the war and after it. Here's what I said over a year ago, when we were still coming down from the post-war euphoria:

A bold leader would have declared that Saddam must go whether he has WMDs or not, instead of trying to manufacture the proof we didn't have and strong-arm other nations into accepting it. Saddam had plenty of sins that justified armed intervention to remove him, and opening up a real live debate on how well the Peace of Westphalia is holding up after 400 years just might do wonders for America's reputation and security and silence the critics who fear a world where America alone determines the limits of national sovereignty.

So I have to confess some sympathy for where Kerry is right now: If I'd been in his shoes, I might have been a bit clearer about my reasons for voting as I did — but I'd have voted to depose Saddam. (Then again, my reasons can't be reduced to a single sound bite either… so if I were Kerry I'd probably be accused of flip-flopping and straddling too. On the national stage you can only have one of two positions; nuance is not an option.)

If I could go back to the Democratic primaries, and contrast the candidates' positions on Iraq in short, pithy sentences:

• Lieberman: I trusted President Bush, and still do. The war in Iraq was a good idea. I'm Serious About Terrorism. Neocons love me. Dean is a nut.
• Kerry: I made the mistake of trusting President Bush with powers I'll want to have myself very shortly. Everyone is lukewarm about me. I'm a combat veteran.
• Dean: I never trusted the President — and I was right. He fudged the case for war. Invading Iraq didn't make us safer. Liberals love me. Lieberman is Bush Lite.
• Clark: I'm a general. I don't know the first thing about campaigning for public office. What was the question again?
• Edwards: I'm running for Vice-President!
• Kucinich: I'll pull our troops out within 90 days. I'm really from the liberal wing of the Green Party, but I'm cleverly disguised as a Democrat.
• Sharpton: I'm just here for the free publicity.
• Gephardt: Bush's Iraq strategy was a miserable failure. Free trade is bad. Labor unions like me. Dean is a nut.

Looking back, it's no wonder that Kerry won the nomination… and that he has trouble expressing his views on Iraq without it sounding like a straddle. Of all the primary candidates, Dean and Lieberman were the only ones who managed to map out clear, concise, memorable positions on Iraq — and Lieberman's position was out of step with a party that wanted to oppose Bush in 2004. Gephardt's "no daylight between us and the President" strategy was the one Democrats took to the polls in 2002; Karl Rove and the voters punished them for it, and the rank-and-file members weren't going do that again.

Howard Dean, meanwhile, staked out the position that appealed most strongly to the anti-Bush forces — and, arguably, Dean was right about the Bush administration overstating the case for war. As I've said, I think there was a good argument for deposing Saddam by force… and the Bush administration botched that argument. Badly. Bush's case for war included too many red herrings: Cherry-picked intelligence reports, inaccurate claims about Saddam's ties to 9/11, and patently false statements about Iraq's nuclear program. If I had relied on George W. Bush to argue the case for war in Iraq, I'd have a lot of egg on my face right now.

And we do have a lot of egg on our face. Bush's bungled diplomacy has left us holding the bag in Iraq — we don't have, and never had, the legitimacy required to face down the likes of Al-Sadr. If we'd had a stronger mandate going in, then there'd be much stronger public support (in Iraq, in America, and around the world) for going into Najaf and putting down Al-Sadr's militia; as it stands, our hand-picked interim government is too weak to impose itself on him. This isn't a military problem: It's a political problem, and we've dug ourselves a political hole.

I'm supporting Kerry for a number of reasons, but one of them is to stop digging.

In terms of election-year gotcha politics, Kerry's position on Iraq is weakened by the fact that he voted to authorize the war — but, as conservative pundit Fareed Zakaria writes in this week's Washington Post, Kerry's position is the most defensible on the subject. Knowing what I know now, I still would have supported in principle a decision to depose Saddam Hussein by military force; in practice, the Bush administration's incompetence at nation-building has erased the gains I expected to realize.

We're rid of Saddam, but we've replaced his tyranny with a failed state — one where the central government does not have a monopoly on force — and we're no closer to solving the terrorism problem than we were in 2002. It's too late to reverse the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi army, or to re-open the window of opportunity that we squandered when capturing Saddam… but Kerry's election will at least give us the opportunity to start moving in the right direction again.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:12 am. comments.