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a berlin blog |
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Monday, March 24, 2003 Whose War?Andrew Sullivan has his latest column up from the Sunday Times, called "Whose War? A roll-call of the architects." It makes the provocative case that this war is not George Bush Jr.'s fault. That's true, up to a point — but then Sullivan goes on to blame Clinton and the U.N., skating neatly past the notion that the war is George Bush Sr.'s. To wit:Back in 1991, U.S. and U.K. forces were only a few hundred miles behind the positions they advanced to in the middle of last week. Saddam was reeling, after a coalition invasion to repel his aggression against Kuwait. Both the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shi'a in the South, emboldened by the war in Kuwait and encouraged by Washington, launched an uprising against the same tyrant we are still battling today. With American air-cover, they could have succeeded. But the Americans, in the greatest military miscalculation of the last few decades, hung back. Then-president George H.W. Bush insisted that his war aims did not include the removal of Saddam Hussein, but were limited to the liberation of a small oil company known as Kuwait. Why, after sending hundreds of thousands of troops halfway around the globe, did Bush suddenly turn modest? Because the United Nations was the rubric under which he fought the war; the terms of his enormous coalition were dictated by the U.N.; and those terms were strictly limited to the reversal of Iraq's invasion, and nothing more. Sorry, Andrew, but it's more complicated than that. Remember the ’91 war was not a humanitarian enterprise. We didn't send hundreds of thousands of troops halfway around the globe to liberate a little kingdom called Kuwait. We did it because Saddam was threatening Saudi oil fields. It was a bald-faced war for oil; even Norman Schwartzkopf has said so (on Frontline). The prospect of having so much oil under a brutal tyrant's control was enough to mobilize the U.S. military and even motivate the French. On the surface, not a bad idea. I wouldn't want Saddam in charge of that oil, either. But there's a catch. When you move so baldly in your economic interests, one thing you don't do — for the sake of world peace — is knock off a head of state. We couldn't have justified changing regimes in Baghdad for "American security" or any of the usual bromides. We were just protecting the world economy. Bush Sr. knew that as well as his cabinet, his generals, and most of the civilized world. Matt Welch has excerpted a few of the passages from then-Secretary of State James Baker's 1995 memoir on why we didn't take Baghdad. We should have done it, in retrospect, but there was no will to knock off Saddam even in the highest, most hawkish military circles. So the Gulf War itself — its oily nature — led to the current mess. In that sense George Sr. is the supreme architect of Gulf War II. And if you listen to Laurie Mylroie (which no one seems to do anymore; she no longer fits into either camp's design), Gulf War I led to a covert war of revenge by Saddam and his terrorist agents throughout the 1990s, involving the first World Trade Center explosion in 1993, a plot to use 12 airliners as missiles in ’95 (by Khalid Sheikh Mohmmed and others), and, just possibly, September 11. This was the theory advanced by Mylroie and the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute in 2000, when Clinton was still in the White House. The men on the board of the American Enterprise Institute — Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, just to name a few — are also the draughtsmen of the current war. They know all about Mylroie's theory; they published her book, for God's sake, and if Clinton or Gore were still in power the theory would have been kicked around in public as a radioactive example of how Clintonism is no match for terrorism. (That was the whole purpose of Mylroie's book.) Unfortunately, Mylroie did good work: Her case is not airtight, but it's alarming enough to be worth a public debate. So the neo-con silence on the Saddam theory, at least around Radio Free Mike, has been deafening, I mean nothing short of dazzling. But Sullivan makes a pretty good point that begins to explain the mystery. He says the neo-conservatives ...weren't natural Bush [Sr.] allies. Men like the Pentagon's Richard Perle or Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz or the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer and Bob Kagan, or the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan or the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol: all these had been bitter foes of Bush's father, brutal critics of his foreign policy ... The reason they rallied behind Bush in the wake of 9/11 was simply because he was the president. So any theory pointing a finger of blame back to the President's father (such as, Saddam has been working with al-Qaeda since Gulf War I, precisely because of Gulf War I) can be discussed in back rooms, but soft-pedaled in public until another time, in order to keep from embarrassing the royal family. I think when the history of this ugly era is written there will be surprises on both the right and left. Saddam will be seen as a real and festering threat, with real weapons of mass destruction, and George Herbert Walker Bush will be seen as the man who encouraged him to hoard them, and truck with terrorists like Bin Laden. He'll be known as the American leader who wasn't great enough to solve the international problem of Saddam Hussein without involving his nation in a Machiavellian war for its "economic interest" -- at the expense of so many others. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:14 PM | |
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