Why do most of the liberals view Iraq as a failure?

I don't really know why others - liberal or not - may believe the Iraqi War was a failure. I'm not even certain that history will judge it as a failure, though that is a real, perhaps likely, possibility.

I don't think any of us truly knows what were the motivations that led us into the war. History strongly suggests the government rhetoric was (as always) only partly an accurate reflection of their motives. My own estimate is that the motives involved a combination of the following;
1 The then likely prospect of the lifting of the UN trade sanctions and the resultant financial bonanza for Saddam, coupled with the intelligence estimate of what he could do by way of restoring WMD programs that we knew he at least once had, and may well have kept partly intact after the Gulf War --- this coupled with concerns about how he might use this capability against the West, U.S. interests, and Israel, in conjunction with a largely Suni fundamentalist terrorist movement, with which his interests were becoming increasingly aligned.

2. The (perhaps naive) hope or expectation that a modern secular government could more readily be established in Iraq than any other Mideast Moslem state, and that it could become a model towards which Iran (with a restive, young population, eager for modernity) and Saudi Arabia (corrupt and a candidate for revolution) could gravitate.

3. The belief that such a successful transformation could favorably alter the future historical trajectory for an Islamic world, stuck in failed political & economic models (authoritarian & theocratic), and increasingly confrontational with respect to the West.

This is incomplete, and it represents only my own conception of what might be the most rational (in my view) motive for the intervention.

It is clear that our plan & execution of the post invasion transformation of Iraq has failed badly in achieving any transformation of Iraq that could be beneficial to our other interests in the region. While a more or less stable and partly representative government may endure, the country that was once a source of hope for the potential of the development of a modern secular state is now in the grip of religious sectarian, tribal, and political strife and armed conflict.

What is worse, a force that once preoccupied and limited the action of the Islamist government in Iran has been removed, and, instead of a hopeful model for the future evolution of that country, we now have on their western border a resurgence of sectarian strife that is grist for the mill of the worst (from our perspective) ambitions of the revolutionary Shia theocracy in Iran.

Finally the U.S. is emeshed in an expensive, extended conflict that reduces our freedom of action in a world that is rapidly becoming more complex and filled with competing national ambitions in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Moreover this exacerbates the historically predictable disenchantment with the Western winner of the Cold War that inexorably grows as memories of the Soviet empire fade and new ambitions divide a world formerly united by a common threat.

So I conclude that, in this strategic sense, the war has likely been a failure, and one that will continue to harm us as we try to extricate ourselves while preserving as much of the modest benefits of the new situation as possible.

As a matter of historical comparison, I don't think our mostly European critics of the intervention offered a better solution - or any solution - for the underlying challenge behind the Islamist challenge confronting us. Indeed many of the most vocal among them were among the principal violators of the pre-invasion sanctions and the principal recent suppliers of the military hardwate we found in Iraq. However those who sit on the sidelines and criticize generally do have a more permissive situation than one who is stuck by circumstances with the responsibility for leadership and action.

You might be right, George.

But that doesn't change the fact that the USA choose their position .... namely not to stay on the sidelines but to act how they acted.

I agree with that. My comment was only by way of comparison - not an excuse.

However, it is a comparison worth keeping in mind as we attempt to draw beneficial lessons from the experience. It would be a great misfortune if potentially worse attitudes and behaviors were wrongfully vindicated by our failure.

How is it moral for someone to self-righteously decide to take it upon themselves to "save" these little girls from the cultures and societies in which they are born in a way that will readily and willingly slaughter these selfsame little girls?


Of course not. And the plight of little girls in Iraq before our invasion, and that of the ones in Iran is not comparable to the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda and Darfur. You're comparing apples with death cap mushrooms.


It is the peoples' who happen to have been born on the wrong side of some arbitrary line in the sand right to decide whether their "salvation" includes the prospect of their own slaughter, not anyone else's.

I disagree with your basic premise in the first place (matter of degrees), but more importantly I hope you're right about Iraq not becoming a genocide like that of Rwanda or Darfur... but fear you are underestimating the consequences of an immediate pullout. I would very much like to be wrong about that.

That's an awkward and portentous phrase. I suppose since the USA has command of the most armed forces and munitions, (by a huge margin), in the western world it assumes the responsibility for action and what it sees as leadership. Would that it did not, or at the very least, if it wishes to lead then it should first ascertain whether others will willingly follow.

The answer to that should inform the process; and the forum for that discussion, for all its faults, is the United Nations.

Actually I thought the phrase was accurate and compact - just right. Examples are to be found on both sides of this issue. Certainly the irresponsible paralysis of the European powers in the face of the genocide developing during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, with each stuck in historical outlooks (German sympathy for the Croats, Russian for the Serbs, Italians for a quick escape for Slovenia, and the French appetite for brokering for advantage) doesn't speak well for European military preparedness or willingness to act in the face of the very kind of problem their vaunted EU was designed to prevent and contain. The unhappy fact is that it took (belated) American leadership to spur Europe into constructive action. So much for the powers of discussion and united action.

U,S, military power and relative (to GDP) investment are a good deal less now than during the Cold War. True we shrank ours at a less precipitous pace than did the European powers (but not China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia or many others). However, this is a result of choices made in both the US and in Europe. One could make a very serious case that Europe has underinvested in this area. Certainly the operations in Bosnia and Serbia demonstrated that in many areas, prominently including airlift, the combined European powers couldn't come up with even what was required for that relatively small operation.

Moreover, I believe that American strategic planners realized that, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unity of the Western Alliance would fade and rivalries would soon emerge - as they have. The world is what it is, and relying entirely on the fidelity of friends in a new and changing situation is not generally wise - as has been amply demonstrated.

That may be your opinion, but the facts strongly suggest that the UN will remain stuck with the least common basis for agreement on serious issues. Repeatedly we have seen that it doesn't amount to much. Britain may well be willing to make that bet, but I don't think that Americans would agree.

Motive
I since a quick and potent post: Why is this war a failure? I think it's because when the people asked: "Why did they do this to us?" No one gave us an answer. Maybe our government is so corrupt that they do things we don't notice or arn't allowed to? Either way, all I heard was "Why we should go to war!", but I'm personally interested in their side of it, what was their motive to attack us?

You know, O'George, your "analysis" suffers because you have failed entirely to take notice of the agenda of the Project for a New American Century. The PNAC, founded in 1997, addressed Clinton in a public letter in 1998 calling for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (This is a link to the text of the PNAC letter sent to President Clinton in January, 1998, found at the PNAC web site.) A key passage of this letter comes near the end, wherein the signatories state: "In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." The signatories are: Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis F u kuyama (it was necessary to "warp" the spelling of this name to get it past the idiot automatic censor program here), Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Robert B. Zoellick. The number of these who became members of the Bush admininstration is significant.

Writing at the time they did, these people could not have known to a certainty that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction or if he were involved in programs to develop them. As can be seen in the documents linked on this page from the PNAC web site, a concerted program was undertaken to prepare the ground for an invasion of Iraq before Bush had even been elected. Not listed among the signatories to the letter addressed to Clinton is a founding member who can be reasonably be described as the éminence grise both of the PNAC and of this administration--Richard Cheney.

While it may be true that these people acted from genuine conviction, it also cannot be denied, because the evidence is present at the PNAC web site, that these same people intended the establishment of military bases in Iraq (although they consistently refer to southwest Asia, as Iraq is the only nation which they advised invading, it is rather obvious what was meant). The nations with the two largest proven reserves of "light, sweet crude" are Saudi Arabia and Iraq, first and second in that order. Given current relations with Saudi Arabia, our access to that petroleum and influence with the government are assured. Invading Iraq, and establishing military bases there provides us (notionally) the same access and influence--although things have obviously not gone as the PNAC members intended, or told the American people would be the case.

To ignore that so many former members of the Reagan administration, and the administration of the elder Bush, became, first members of the PNAC and advised the toppling of the Hussein regime by military means with the concomitant establishment of military bases in Iraq--and that those same people became members of the administration of the younger Bush, which has invaded Iraq, and begun the construction of large military bases--is at the least naive, if not actually willfully disingenuous.

It is difficult, for me at least, to avoid the conclusion that this invasion and occupation has been created and furthered a coterie of men who had held high governmental power under Reagan and Bush, but who were ignored by the elder Bush who refused to countenance military action to topple Hussein, and who were completely without influence and power during eight years of a Democratic executive administration. It is, in my never humble opinion, rather obvious that a handful of men have lead this nation down the garden path, and have done so because of resolutions which they took which had reference to the control of the most highly-valued petroleum in the world, and which was not supported by credible evidence that the Ba'athist regime of Iraq possessed womd, or would attempt to threaten the United States with womd.

In short, i see no reason that historians will in future vindicate this action. A few other points--O'George suggests that our critics are mostly European. This ignores that there are more Mulim nations in the world than there are members of the European Union--and that even if we got some lip-service support from those nations' governments, the invasion has proven almost universally unpopular in the Muslim world.

The other point is that O'George, either through ignorance or a willfully disingenuous intent, equates Iraq with an Islamist threat. Iraq was a secular nation, which is why at one time the fanatic Wahabbi, bin Laden, considered himself and publicly described himself as an enemy of Hussein and the Ba'athist regime. Iraq was never a component of any "Islamist" threat, until our invasion prepared the ground for that reaction among the people of Iraq.

You're conveniently leaving out that Saddam paid lip service and cold hard cash to Jihadists and their families. Surely that qualifies him as a component.

Setanta,

You are just looking for a fight where there appears to be no basis for it. Moreover, as you warm to the process your rhetoric degenerates to foolish accusations of deceit - as in your second post above. Why do you do this? It demeans you.

I don't dispute that there was a PNAC, or a letter such as you described. I know and have conversed with some of the people you cited. I believe the motivational outline I provided is generally consistent with what was in the letter. The interest in petroleum to which you referred is an obvious concern directly related to that for the failure of Moslem states to develop modern alternatives to the authoritarian secular and theocratic states that are preventing their evolutionary development and accommodation with the modern world.

The impasse in the political development of the Moslem world, as well as the serious mistrust and disaffection with the West was well-established by the end of WWI. We did not create it in Iraq, though it is clear we have done little to diminish it. The only fairly modern secular political movement in the Arab world, the Baath party traces its roots to admiration for Fascism and Nazi Germany as an alternative to the insults, deceptions, and exploitation they believed they suffered at the hands of the British and French.

I didn't claim any certainty that Saddam had effective WMD. On the contrary I said that he formerly had such programs; that he appeared to still have an interest in them; that we could not be sure he had not retained some capability through the Gulf War; and that, with the sanctions about to be lifted, he was likely to resume his investment. It is a well-established principle in intelligence circles to credit a potential enemy with the capabilities he seeks and might have, as opposed to only those we know he has. This point of yours does not bear at all on the outline I gave above -- you are beating dead air.

The notion that we need or believed we needed military bases in Iraq doesn't withstand scrutiny. We already had (and still have ) a major base infrastructure in the Persian Gulf - from Oman through the Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. I have been there, seen them, and operated from some.

There are two obvious reasons why the elder president Bush didn't wipe out Saddam's government during or after the Gulf War.
1. The much vaunted international coalition, including the French, the British, and the Saudis would have instantly collapsed had we done so. Indeed it was a precondition of the alliance to act only to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The French saw economic and perhaps political opportunity in deals with Iraq (they continued to provide Saddam with crew served weapons after the war, and they signed a massive deal for development of the Mosul oil fields.) The Saudis feared the creation of a radicalized Shia Iraqi state, aligned with Iran and so on.
2. We still ourselves wanted an effective counterweight to Iran, and Iraq, under Saddam, had done that. (One could well make the case that we should simply have let Saddam keep Kuwait - He was broke after the long war with Iran, and Kuwait had little historical basis for a distinct existence anyway. ) This, indeed was the central policy of the Reagan Administration.

What is most interesting relative to your thesis is how those Reagan Administration figures came to came to reverse this, the central element of the Reagan policy which presumably they had a hand in shaping. I believe the most likely answer to that is the very argument I offered in the original post.

No, it was an either/or situation, O'George. If you are willing to stipulate that you were ignorant of the PNAC agenda, and the number of its members who became officials of the Bush administration, i'm fine with that. I don't insist upon deceit.

What exactly does that statement mean? How do you account for the fact that - according to your story line - these people ended up recommending the complete reversal of one of the pillars of the Gulf policy of the Reagan adminiastration in which they served? Are you suggesting they did not or could not reasonably have altered their assessments? Your meaning here is far from clear.

The PNAC agenda is hardly news, nor is the appointment of several to posts in the Bush administration - all common knowledge. Moreover nothin in it or the identities of its signatories in any way contradicts anything in my estimate of the situation.

I see your thesis suffering from quite a few flaws, O'George. First to digress to the minor point raised by O'Bill. He asserts that the alleged financial support of Hussein for Palestinian suicide-bombers constitutes support of terrorism. This is an inferential contention, i realize. However, this was just propaganda for Hussein--he could look good on the "Arab street" with such a gesture. I know of no solid evidence that Hussein spent any substantial sum of money on this, and in fact no evidence that Hussein ever sent anyone a single penny. But were someone to provide plausible evidence that this were so, it would still not provide evidence that Hussein caused any such bombings by the promise of a check for the family of these Palestinian kamikazes. The bombings took place before he made any such promise, and continued after he was toppled for power.

However, let us stipulate, for the sake of discussion, that he were responsible for any such bombings. How does the encouragement of suicide bombers in Israel constitute a threat to American security sufficient to justify the deaths of more than 3000 GIs and Marines, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis (more than 100,000 to date, by the plausible estimates of many reliable observers)? And even if it were alleged that those suicide bombers constituted some remote threat to American security, how would that claim justify invasion and occupation?

Which brings me back to Reagan. Libya and it's idiot colonel, GotDaffy, were directly responsible for the nightclub bombing in Germany and the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland. Reagan did not respond to that with the invasion and occupation of Libya. Reagan's policy decision was to send a carrier task force to challenge the blowhard's claim to control waters seen as international by the United States, and followed that in 1986, in the wake of the nightclub bombing, with a significant air strikes against Tripoli and Benghazi. But Reagan did not attempt to occupy Libya, and shove a counterfeit democracy down Libyan throats. The method pursued thereafter, and persisted in by the elder Bush, by Clinton, and finally by the younger Bush, of isolating and boycotting Gadhafi. In the 1990s, there were riots and attempts on Gadhafi's life. Like any despot in that situation, he had to keep the army and in particular its officers, happy--and the boycott and the international isolation were not accomplishing that end (keeping the officers happy, that is). The taste for the comforts of a western life style among his military props was such that Gadhafi eventually saw the handwriting on the wall, and caved in. In 1999, he allowed the extradition of Libyan officers accused in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. In 2002, he publicly apologized, and paid compensation to the families of victims. In 2003, he acknowledged having had programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, agreed to terminate them, and to allow international inspection to verify his compliance with the agreements he made.

From the nightclub bombing in 1986 and the bombing of flight 103 in 1998, to the final "rehabilitation" of Libya in 2003 represents 15 years of patience and concerted policy enacted with international cooperation, and an international consensus. It is flashy, it isn't dramatic, and it isn't pumping testosterone, but it worked. With Hussein, we don't even have the certainty that he was ever responsible for a single suicide bombing in Israel, and unlike the German nightclub and flight 103, we cannot point to Americans who were surely killed as a direct result of actions ordered by him. This is very likely why the administration never made a feeble claim such as O'Bill does here. It is not a justifiable basis for bloody red war.

The same might have been done with Iraq. However, several problems arose. Libya and Gadhafi were economically hurt by the slump in oil prices in the 1990s, it is true, but that only assured that his international isolation worked to its ends more quickly. In the case of Iraq, the quality and quantity of petroleum produced are both far greater than the resources available to Gadhafi. The product was more highly valued, and produced in quantities greater by orders of magnitude. Great amounts of money were to be made from the exploitation of the "oil for food" program, and the recent evidence is that Americans were not behind hand in profiting from that program. Evidence since the invasion also shows that even with the profits accruing to a coterie surrounding Hussein, the situation in Iraq was deteriorating, even for the favored Sunni Arabs and members of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. The isolation of Iraq was never as severe as it was for Libya, and of course, in both cases, the practical effect of our energy-hungry economies and capitalist greed are such that either Libya or Iraq could find ways to sell their oil. The fact remains, however, that the policy of the isolation of Libya worked, and given sufficient time, may well have worked with Hussein, too. Gadhafi adopted a more practical and reasonable foreign policy as it became clear that he might not survive the unrest at home, never mind international attitudes. In fact, Hussein was never very bright. He had that gutter politician's touch, not unlike Adolf, but he might have required a good deal longer for the nickel to drop. Of course, if things in Iraq had gotten bad enough, he would have been obliged to bow to internal pressure, or he would have been violently replaced, as he did himself in 1978.

In Time Magazine, in 1998, the following passage was quoted as being the statement of George H. W. Bush, writing with Brent Scowcroft:

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

This delineates what you have said about the reasons the elder Bush gave for not driving on Iraq to depose Hussein, but it also says thing which you did not take notice of. The elder Bush takes not of the "incalculable human and political costs"--something which his son not only seems not to have considered, but continues not to acknowledge. Bush also points to the "post-cold war" doctrine of dealing with such problems with an international response. The younger Bush was willing to dispense with international consensus, it it didn't look like giving him what he wanted. Finally, Bush has this to say: Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.[/b] How very prophetic of Pappy Bush. And how very à propos of the topic of this thread.

Leaving aside the dubious and very quickly disproved casus belli for the Iraq invasion, this thread asks why anyone (contemptuously referred to by the author of this thread as "liberals") would declare the invasion of Iraq a failure. We were told that we would be greeted as liberators, with flowers strewn at the feet of our troops. This was disproved in the bitter fighting at An Nasiriyah where American forces suffered mightily just to keep a line of communications open over the Euphrates, not 100 miles from the Kuwaiti border--33 Americans dead, including 18 Marines in one day, and a week needed to secure the area. That hardly constitutes flowers being strewed at the feet of our troops. It does look very much like the elder Bush's vision of ". . . an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

We were further told that we would construct in Iraq a democracy which would be a template for the reform of the middle east--as you have suggested with your remarks about "modern alternatives to the authoritarian secular and theocratic states that are preventing their evolutionary development and accommodation with the modern world." We haven't seemed to have been so concerned with modern alternatives in Saudi Arabia, where 16 of the 19 September 11th terrorists originated. We haven't seemed that concerned with modern alternatives in our newest client state in Pakistan. We never seemed that interested in such modern alternatives in Pinochet's Chile, in Marcos' Philippines, or in a host of other nations in which we were wont to say: "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." Is there any such gleaming beacon of democracy and freedom in Iraq? Hardly. True democracy in Iraq means a Shi'te state, and that would assure years and years of warfare with the still powerful Sunni minority--the elder Bush's "barren outcome." Unemployment still runs high, petroleum facilities are still the constant targets of sabotage, gasoline is less plentiful and far more expensive than it was before the invasion, and electricity far less reliable. Nevertheless, Bechtel and Halliburton have made billions of dollars--Halliburton stock is worth three times what it sold for four years ago on the eve of the invasion. There is no reason to claim that the United States has succeeded in Iraq, even if one wants to say we need more time--if it is not yet a failure, how long do we have to wait, and how many more thousands have to die, before we can either admit failure, or make a genuine claim of success?

(I will address your remarks in your long post with which i disagree in another post.)

You have said that the interest in petroleum is an obvious concern directly related to that for the failure of Muslim states to develop modern alternatives to the authoritarian secular and theocratic states that are preventing their evolutionary development, etc. I suggest that you are putting the cart before the host, confusing cause and effect. We only have an interest in these states because of the petroleum. None of the members of the Reagan administration, or the administration of the elder Bush, nor of the PNAC have showed any such interest in the "un-evolved" authoritarian states of Africa, or of Asia where such states wield no economic power. We don't care that Pakistan or Uzbekistan are authoritarian states, so long as we get what we want in the way of military staging areas. Your long, tortured sentences seems to suggest some great altruistic motive on the part of the members of PNAC--and that i find not just suspect, but hilariously silly. If you go to the PNAC site, they have a plan for the entire globe--but they have only shown their single minded purpose with regard to the petroleum-rich middle east.

It was not until several years after the end of the Great War that Arabs began to mistrust the English and French, when the news of how Balfour and Churchill had carved up the middle east reached them. You claim that the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party was created on the model of the Nazis--but i say you are yammering about a topic upon which you are not well informed, and attempting to slur that party with a hateful association. Anyone familiar with middle east politics and history will know they need no help in gaining a blackened reputation. The party was founded in 1940 by Michel Aflaq, born in Syria in 1910, and educated in Paris in the early 1930s, where he developed a notion of combining the already existant Pan-Arabist movement with socialism. Pan-Arabism had already been conceived of by Hussein ibn-Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in 1915, and formed the basis of the agreement to aid the English in their war against the Turks. It was what was seen as the betrayal of the Hussein-McMahon agreement by the English and the French with lead to the disillusionment out of which many movements--the Young Officers, the Free Officers, and the Ba'ath Arab Socialists--were born. You may despise them as much as you do the Nazis, but you have no basis to claim that Pan-Arabism or the Ba'ath Party is modeled on the the Nazis. The Balfour-Churchill plan ignored ethnic and secular divisions, and planted the seeds of its own destrutions with acts such as placing a Hashemite King on an Iraqi throne.

The mistrust of the Americans as political heirs of the British and French is understandable. The recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 by Truman, and Eisenhower's unwise support for the 1953 overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran are rather obvious causes, and even though Eisenhower learned a lesson, and stood aloof from the French-English-Israeli plan in 1956, it was too late for the image of America in the middle east.

Whether or not Hussein wanted weapons of mass destruction, or programs to develop and build them is hardly at issue, and i have not claimed that he did not. I have consistently pointed out that international inspectors, prohibited by Hussein in 1998, had been resumed under American military threat, and the inspectors told us that the Iraqis were cooperating, and that there was no evidence that the Iraqis had the weapons or the programs. The evidence since the invasion is that they were right--but the younger Bush abandoned the principles which guided the elder Bush, and invaded without international consensus or support, and in that i consider him to have been the dupe of the PNAC members in his administration. In your subsequent post in which you refer to one of the "pillars of the Gulf policy of the Reagan administration" you say that i am unclear, and ask if i am suggesting that they could not have reasonably altered their assessments. No, of course i don't deny that--they obviously did. But having altered their assessment by 1997, they have not apparently reviewed or revised it since, and i suggest they were dazzled by the prospect of controlling such huge reserves of light, sweet crude with permanent military bases in southwest Asia--and therefore were unwilling to hear of any alteration of that assessment, and were willing if necessary to manufacture excuses to do what they had by then determined to do. Hardening of the policy arteries, if you will, by men already old, and aging the more as time passed and they kicked their heels outside the corridors of power.

You attempt to dismiss the notion that PNAC recommended building permanent bases in Iraq, by arguing that there is no necessity. I don't disagree with that, but you need to talk to the PNAC. In the policy paper issued in 2000 entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, the PNAC write: " . . . while the unresolved conflict in Iraq provides the immediate justification [for an American presence], the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." In the same paper, they write: "Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region". What is the pre-eminent long-standing American interest in the region? Petroleum.

You can find the PNAC document, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century on this page at the PNAC web site. I have not linked the document directly because it is in PDF format, and can cause problems for dial-up users.

I've already dealt with the reasons which the elder Bush himself gave for why he did not attempt to topple Hussein, and you seem to have missed some signal points which he made on that subject. Finally, as i've already noted, certainly these members of the Reagan administration came to take a different view than either Reagan or the elder Bush. The problem with that is, having come to a different assessment, they have since allowed nothing to dissuade them of excellence of their opinions. Small wonder--they don't personally go in harm's way, and as Thomas has pointed out, the price of crude on international markets certainly hasn't hurt them financially.

Just to make this clear--i'm not saying that PNAC wants military bases in Iraq because i suspect that is what they are up to. I say it because they said it in their policy paper in 2000, and have not "unsaid" it since then, at least not in any document available at the PNAC web site.

Setanta,

I can see nothing in your long post that relates even remotely to the outline I offered for what, in my opinion, was the most rational and likely motivation for the administration's decision to invade Iraq. It is a fundamental fact that many of the figures in the Bush II Administration had been associated, directly or peripherally with the previous Bush and Reagan Administrations and the strategy for the Persian Gulf Region that had been evolving during those years.

There is always a level of continuity in the evolution of such strategies, particularly as they are in part shaped by individuals and institutions below and beyond the political appointees of the various administrations. During the 1980s our immediate concern was the revolutionary government in Iran. You may recall that for several years we were actively escorting and protecting merchant ships transiting the Straits of Hormuz from attacks by Iranian revolutionary Guards, often in small boats armed with mortars and RPGs. The very bloody war with Iraq eventually consumed most of Iran's attention and military forces - much to our benefit and relief. Our strategy then was to do what we could to prevent either side from achieving a decisive victory in the War.

The war ended and Saddam, broke and exhausted, looked for some easy prey and money -- and found it in Kuwait. You have accurately recited the strategy and constraints that guided and governed the Gulf war. The intriguing question is how and for what reason this strategy so decisively changed after 9/11 and during the Bush II Administration - particularly considering that so many of the key figures in their strategic circles had also served in the Bush I and Reagan Administrations.

I outlined what I believe to be the most likely line of thought that precipitated this change. I don't know that it is actually what motivated them, but it is my considered opinion that what I outlined is the most likely and rational scenario.

There was indeed disagreement and debate over the issues involving some senior military leaders, including a couple of former CENTCOMs. At the military level much of the energy was consumed over the so called transformation program instituted by Cheney and Rumsfield. It was focused on speed, agility, situational awareness and precision weapons. It permitted significant economies of force, and that was successfully proven in the opening campaign. It is possible that, among some, a fixation on this issue clouded the more fundamental strategic issues. My impression is that some people were right & wrong on the strategy for the wrong reasons. Gen Shinseki is a good example.

Many of the points you argue are perhaps valid as well. However, I don't think they relate very much to the point I was making.

On the thread's original question, I saw this in the paper yesterday:

"The uncomfortable paradox facing London and Washington as they try to put the Iranian genie back in its bottle is that they have done more than anyone to uncork that bottle in the first place and set Iran on the way to regional hegemony.

First they removed the Taliban, Iran's enemy to the east, and then they eliminated Saddam Hussein. In little more than a year, the allies ensured Iran achieved its key strategic objective: to become the dominant power in the Gulf and the Middle East.

"Getting rid of the Taliban and then getting rid of Saddam, basically gave Iran a free ride in the region," said Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow for Gulf security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "With the collapse of the Iraqi state, the whole balance of power in the Gulf went out of control, and we moved away from a world of nation states to the world of sectarianism, with Saudi Arabia viewing itself as the centre of gravity of Sunni Islam and by default, Iran became the centre of gravity for Shia Islam.""

Many people here could see that coming, pre-invasion. Why couldn't Bushco?

Odd then that at the time they focused and spoke only about the WMD matter. Clarity is easy in retrospect: difficult in prospect - and many more claim it now than demonstrated it then.