Very few honest people dispute that the Iraq war has become an utter catastrophe. On Aug. 17, The New York Times quoted a “military affairs expert” who’d recently attended a White House briefing on Iraq, and who told the Times reporter: “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy.” The last rickety plank in George W. Bush’s jury-rigged justification for the war is falling apart, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to calm the chaos that America has sown.
Yet if the failure of the war is no longer really debatable, the reasons for the failure are. Many erstwhile war supporters—especially liberals who were more concerned with human rights than W.M.D.’s—have tried to excuse their bad judgment by saying they couldn’t have foreseen how badly the occupation would be run. The war’s opponents, in turn, have angrily dismissed that argument as a pathetic way for hawks to avoid responsibility for the real-world results of their positions. “The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge—a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place,” Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias wrote last year in The American Prospect.
There’s some truth there. The war was built on deception and demagoguery, and no matter how it was run, it wouldn’t have protected America from mythical W.M.D. or severed the nonexistent nexus between Saddam and Al Qaeda. But it’s hard to read many of the new books about the Iraq war without being awed by the administration’s ineptitude, and convinced that things didn’t have to be this bad. Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and James Fallows’ Blind into Baghdad offer a baroque kaleidoscope of ignorance and arrogance in, respectively, the Department of Defense, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Bush administration. There’s evidence of a striking degree of self-sabotage in these narratives, and of a nearly Stalinist ideological conformity and contempt for empirical truth. If the incompetence dodge lets hawks like Thomas Friedman or Hillary Clinton evade their full measure of blame, the notion that the inferno in Iraq became inevitable the moment the war was launched lets far guiltier people off the hook.
“Here is the hardest question,” writes Mr. Fallows: “How could the administration have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience in modern military occupations?”
http://www.observer.com/20060828/20060828_Michelle_Goldberg_culture_books.asp
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