JEB the Vulcan; the 90’s Roots of the Iraq War
Was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a mistake based on false intelligence gathered post 9/11? Well for some that might be a reasonable excuse, say for the Senators who voted for the 2002 AUMF – the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Iraq. Even they would have some things to explain and ask forgiveness for, because after all a lot of that supposed intelligence was known to be bunk at that time, and probably some of them knew that and all of them SHOULD have known that. Still there were reasonable (if cowardly) political calculations that suggested that standing in the way of those who were bound and determined to go to war come what may was a bad idea for politicians with future ambitions. Say certain Senators whose names were Kerry and Clinton, but of course not only them.
So we should not give the Signatories of the AUMF a pass. On the other hand there is a clear difference in culpability between being an accomplice after the fact and a conspirator before the fact. And the ‘fact’ in question is when the decision to go to war on Iraq was decided and by whom. And on examination that decision had little to do with intelligence gathered between 2001 and 2003, it had little to nothing to do with aluminum tubes or yellowcake or Curveball, those were instead convenient trigger points for a decision made years before. By a group that came known as the Vulcans, which overlapped almost entirely with those who signed on to the Project for a New American Century – PNAC.
Who were the Vulcans? Well the easiest test is those who either signed the Statement of Principles of the Project for a New American Century in June 1997 or those who signed the follow-up Jan 1998 Letter to President Clinton on Iraq or as in many cases both. These names and explanations for who they are can be seen at this openly anti-PNAC site, so feel free to fact check: Sourcewatch: Project for a New American Century. An examination of those names and the express goals of the PNAC and how the inclusion of Jeb Bush among the former implicates him in the latter below the fold.
Lets start with the Signatories to the Statement (emphasis mine):
Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz
and then add the names of the Signatories to the Letter (note the overlaps, emphasis again mine)
Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, 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
Which leads to my first claim: I am going to take it as read that the joint origin of these as PNAC products and the cross-signings make these in effect a single production explicitly endorsed by the signatories of either or both. That is anything damning in the Letter reflects back on the Signatories to the Statement and vice versa. Anyone who would like to take a logical razor to this can lay out their case in Comments.
Now to the Statement and Letter. Both should be read in full but let me isolate some passages, first a sort of question asked and answered in the Statement:
As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?
Note the active sense of ‘shape’. Now the answer as to what will do the ‘shaping’:
We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration’s success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.
It is not I think any kind of rhetorical reach to describe the Project as one to establish a Pax Americana and one that is as self-consciously in support of the economic and political interests of the U.S. as the Pax Romana was to Rome. This is plainly and purely a proposal to use the U.S. military in a unilateral and continual effort to establish a New Century on American terms. And Jeb Bush signed on. In June 1997.
What then was the first step for the Project? Well that is outlined quite clearly in the subsequent Letter:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
What then is the threat? Well to be fair to the Vulcans they make it clear that the fundamental threat is the deployment of WMD. But they make it equally clear that the solution to that threat cannot be and should not be sustained attempts at disarmament of the regime through diplomatic means. No indeed, instead:
Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. 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.
We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.
I don’t think I need to belabor the point. It was the stated starting point for the Project for a New American Century to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein and his entire regime from power. The Signatories to the Statement and the Letter which jointly set out this starting point were signed by the key advocates for the Iraq War in the post 9/11 Bush Administration making it frankly absurd to claim that their motivations for starting that war were in any sense FORMED by the events of 9/11 or intelligence gathered after but at best were REINFORCED. As far as Dick Cheney and the other Vulcans were concerned the proper time to launch a war predicated on eliminating the Saddam Hussein regime was 1998. Or sooner. And Jeb Bush was firmly among the Vulcans.
(In passing it is worth noting that George W Bush was NOT a Signatory and his campaign pledges not to be the World’s Policeman might have been sincere. Before Cheney and Wolfowitz and others used 9/11 to drag him to support a PRE-EXISTING PROJECT. War on Iraq was a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’.)
Thanks for this, Bruce. You made your case.
I am reasonably sure it will not come up in the “debates.”
Now if only our facile entertainment driven corporate media could ever do the slightest research and report or question jebbie this point. Oh i forgot, that might limit their access to the clown posse of gop candidates.
PNAC:
“preeminent [war profiteering militarists] power”
“opportunity [for some really good, permanent war profiteering] and a challenge” [from the 80% who think security is threats, and believe there should be investment in infrastructure and income equality].
“vision [we can con the people suing Fox to give up a civil society] to build upon the achievements [of our war profiteering business plan]”
“resolve [sheep lead] to shape a new century [of permanent war at the plundering the US’ middle class]”
“American principles and interests [in permanent war profiteering through siding with the thugs]
PNAC needs to rewrite Vietnam history as the ‘librul whimps reused to let the US kill enough Vietnamese to make Thieu a survivable leader’.
PK sums it up.
“Jeb Bush definitely did us a favor: in his attempts to avoid talking about the past, he ended up bringing back a discussion people have been trying to avoid. And they are, of course, still trying to avoid it — they want to make this just about the horserace, or about the hypothetical of “if you knew what we know now”.
For that formulation is itself an evasion, as Josh Marshall, Greg Sargent, and Duncan Black point out — each making a slightly different but crucial point.
First, as Josh says, Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option. They decided right at the beginning — literally before the dust of 9/11 had settled — to use a terrorist attack by religious extremists as an excuse to go after a secular regime that, evil as it was, had nothing to do with that attack. To make the case for the splendid little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about WMD — because chemical weapons, which many believed Saddam had, are nothing like the nukes they implied he was working on — and insinuating the false claim that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Second, as Greg says, even this isn’t hindsight. It was quite clear at the time that the case for war was fake — God knows I thought it was glaringly obvious, and tried to tell people — and fairly obvious as well that the attempt to create a pro-American Iraq after the invasion was likely to be an expensive failure. The question for war supporters shouldn’t be, would you have been a supporter knowing what you know now. It should be, why didn’t you see the obvious back then?
Finally, and this is where Atrios comes in, part of the answer is that a lot of Very Serious People were effectively in on the con. They, too, were looking forward to a splendid little war; or they were eager to burnish their non-hippie credentials by saying, hey, look, I’m a warmonger too; or they shied away from acknowledging the obvious lies because that would have been partisan, and they pride themselves on being centrists. And now, of course, they are very anxious not to revisit their actions back then.
Can we think about the economic debate the same way? Yes, although it’s arguably not quite as stark. Consider the long period when Paul Ryan was held up as the very model of a serious, honest, conservative. It was obvious from the beginning, if you were willing to do even a bit of homework, that he was a fraud, and that his alleged concern about the deficit was just a cover for the real goal of dismantling the welfare state. Even the inflation craziness may be best explained in terms of the political agenda: people on the right were furious with the Fed for, as they saw it, heading off the fiscal crisis they wanted to justify their anti-social-insurance crusade, so they put pressure on the Fed to stop doing its job.
And the Very Serious People enabled all this, much as they enabled the Iraq lies.
But back to Iraq: the crucial thing to understand is that the invasion wasn’t a mistake, it was a crime. We were lied into war. And we shouldn’t let that ugly truth be forgotten.”
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/blinkers-and-lies/
From the second Bush-Gore debate:
LEHRER: People watching here tonight are very interested in Middle East policy. And they’re so interested that they want to make a they want to base their vote on differences between the two of you as president, how you would handle Middle East policy. Is there any difference?
GORE: I haven’t heard a big difference right, in the last few exchanges.
BUSH: Well, I think, it’s hard to tell. I think that, you know, I would hope to be able to convince people I could handle the Iraqi situation better. I mean, we don’t…
LEHRER: Saddam Hussein, you mean?
BUSH: Yes.
LEHRER: You could get him out of there?
BUSH: I’d like to, of course. And I presume this administration would as well. But we don’t know. There’s no inspectors now in Iraq. The coalition that was in place isn’t as strong as it used to be.
He is a danger.
We don’t want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it’s going to be hard to it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.
LEHRER: Do you feel that is a failure of the Clinton administration?
BUSH: I do.