A Neocon Finally Offers The First Geopolitical Justification For The Iraq War
By Mel Goodman on January 30, 2008 at 4:13 PM in Current Affairs
Nearly five years after the invasion of Iraq, we still have no official explanation or authoritative analysis on the reasons for the Bush administration’s decision to go to war, a decision many observers consider the most profligate in more than 200 years of American foreign policy. Last month, I agreed to debate one of the administration’s leading neoconservative policymakers, David Wurmser, to gain some insight on why George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld chose to go to war against Iraq instead of continuing the successful policy of containment. Wurmser’s comments were far more revealing than any information we have gained thus far from Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
Before he left the Bush administration in November 2007, Wurmser had held a series of high-level positions with three of the most enthusiastic supporters of the war: Cheney, Douglas Feith, and John Bolton. As a result, he attended a series of important policy meetings in the run-up to war in March 2003. In responding to my comments on the putative reasons for going to war (weapons of mass destruction and the links between Iraq and al Qaeda), Wurmser emphasized that there was never any discussion of WMD or terrorism as a reason for going to war.
Instead, Wurmser argued that the Bush administration believed there were significant geopolitical reasons for going to war and offered a fanciful explanation that broke totally new ground. Wurmser said that Cheney, Feith, and Bolton were convinced that U.S. containment of Saddam Hussein was failing and that the controls to keeping Saddam Hussein from expanding his regional influence were “dying.” As a result, the Iraqi leader was in position to exploit the rising anti-Americanism in the region and to “break out” from the sanctions strategy and the no-fly zones to lead a “rogue coalition of nations to expel the United States from the region” and even “to wage war against the United States.” The failure of the United Nations and multilateralism in general made a compelling case for U.S. intervention, according to Wurmser.
Wurmser added that there was a great deal of discussion of the so-called “freedom agenda” of such academics as Professors Bernard Lewis of Princeton University and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University that introduced the notion of “democratizing” Iraq and eventually the entire Middle East. Wurmser maintained that democratization was the only response to Saddam Hussein’s efforts to create a movement against the U.S. role in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. He added that Lewis and Ajami took part in policy discussions at the Department of Defense and the Department of State, where there was a consensus on the use of force to advance “American interests and American power.”
Although Wurmser offered no evidence for the presence of WMD in Iraq, he argued that the intelligence community made the case for Iraqi WMD and that the issue “demands more study” because such weapons were “still there or have left the country” and, in any event “were never fully accounted for.” He dismissed the efforts of thousands of U.S. analysts and technicians who found no evidence of WMD in Iraq. Instead, he disingenuously blamed Secretary of State Colin Powell and Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage for developing the case for WMD, thus absolving the White House and the National Security Council from any responsibility. Finally, he emphasized that “no one was saying there was no WMD” in Iraq and there was no intelligence collection that contended there was no WMD. He totally dismissed such agencies and departments as the Energy Department, the State Department, and even the U.S. Air Force, which dissented from the CIA’s arguments in favor of WMD in Iraq. He totally ignored the excellent intelligence collection from Iraqi and American sources that argued against the presence of WMD in Iraq.
Thus, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, there is still no evidence to determine why it was necessary to go to war and no reason to believe that history will treat the war kindly. Bush’s description of Iraq as the center of the war against terrorism is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy because the war itself and the U.S. occupation have created the motives and conditions for terrorist actions. The war in Iraq, moreover, meant the abandonment of the campaign in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda, which has worsened the security situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are training grounds and operational bases for jihadist terrorists. The creation of a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq has created the essential conditions for an eventual Iraq-Iran alliance, which will contribute to the overall instability in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration’s war in Iraq has led to great losses of American blood and treasure over the past five years and there is every reason to believe that these conditions will continue for the next five years. Bush’s war has squandered America’s moral authority, with the United States now identified the world over with torture and abuse, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, and ghost detainees.
Finally, Bush’s support for authoritarian governments throughout the region, particularly in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, has made a mockery of his promotion of democracy and human rights abroad. His failure in Iraq will dominate his presidency and, just as Vietnam determined the legacy of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, the Iraq War will determine the Bush legacy. Wurmser’s specious reasoning for the onset of war provides no genuine help in ameliorating this legacy or understanding what the Bush administration was trying to achieve in Iraq. And the stubborn persistence of the Bush administration and such neocons as Wurmser to continue the war only worsens all of the problems that it has created.
Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Failure of Intelligence: the Decline and Fall of the CIA.”
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