Using His Words
Feith at WSJ dickers over rhetoric, says Bush should have stuck with the script on removing Saddam as a security threat, terrorism backer, not shifted to pegging it all on establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. One problem. It never was an either/or.
The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq’s future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam’s record, the administration’s record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration’s prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.
But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.
This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.
To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president’s shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president’s words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.
He’s right that the Bush administration should have never let its opponents make hay over the failure to find active WMD programs and significant, current stockpiles. Saddam Hussein and his regime were the WMD program. The regime’s support for anti-western terrorism and contacts with groups, including al-Qaeda, amid a crumbling sanctions regime, made his removal imperative. But preventing terrorism in the Middle East ultimately rests on the establishment of free, prosperous societies, and that was always part of the rhetoric. It is also, belatedly, happening in Iraq. Too bad they didn’t plan better for it. But then, they apparently thought removing the brutal, murderous WMD regime was all they needed to do. This article is about domestic politics, more specifically domestic PR, not foreign policy, and Feith at WSJ doesn’t get into what Bush should have left in Iraq once the Saddam-removal mission was accomplished, or examine where that might have gone. Maybe his book does.
Eli Lake at NY Sun in his review of “War and Decision” notes that Feith in making the case for Iraq as a logical target in the broader war against enablers of terrorism doesn’t get into Iran. More commentary/reviews of the book Feith is hawking here and here.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:09 am on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
3 Responses to “Using His Words”
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May 27th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Don’t they get it? We could have won the war, got rid of Saddam and his sons, and then bailed out, leaving Iraq at the mercy of yet another ambitious, brutal Arab strongman who maybe would have been a little more savvy about playing the West. Ensuring stability and a peaceful political process there is the only logical thing we could have done, for our own safety and interests. It’s too bad we didn’t know how to do it better, but nobody said life was easy.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Not making a greater effort to correct the over-emphasis on WMD was a miscalculation on the part of the President and his advisors, but an understandable one. They, and just about everybody else, were convinced that Saddam had them stored away. Saddam’s own actions pointed to that as extremely likely. When it turned out that the programs were dormant and the weapons did not exist in the quantity they were supposed to, (or were possibly spirited away to another country), it was too late to correct the impression that the only goal in Iraq was to remove WMD. The idea was set in people’s minds, even though the President had emphasized a multi-prong strategy in Iraq from the very beginning.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Even if the democratization of Iraq was the primary goal from the very start (it should have been if it wasn’t), the war could not, on that argument, have garnered the necessary Congressional and other domestic support. People would have yawned, and the effort would never have gotten off the ground. The WMD emphasis was a political necessity. Will the effects of political reform be worth it if that program succeeds? Absolutely. No other solution to the long-term problem has ever been offered, by war critics or anyone else.