And though Dean was depicted as an unserious, weak-willed pacifist who required a “permission slip” from the U.N. before he would even consider defending the United States, the opposite was true. Dean endorsed the right of America to act against imminent threats with or without U.N. approval. His point—almost never fairly presented or debated—was that there was no need to incur the always mammoth risk of war or unleash its inevitable horrors, given that the inspection process would reveal soon enough whether the intelligence touted by the president was really true, i.e., whether Saddam really did pose the threat which the president claimed compelled us to invade that country:
Now, I am not among those who say that America should never use its armed forces unilaterally. In some circumstances, we have no choice. In Iraq, I would be prepared to go ahead without further Security Council backing if it were clear the threat posed to us by Saddam Hussein was imminent, and could neither be contained nor deterred.
That a person speaking in such language was transformed into a fringe, crazed, soft-on-defense socialist-leftist, and that his posture was distorted by our national press into a radical symbol of anti-American weakness, oozing spineless and even subversive indifference toward U.S. security, is a testament to the effectiveness with which the administration imposed a Manichean worldview as the national political orthodoxy.
This demonization of Dean as an out-of-the-mainstream radical was fueled not even so much by the content of Dean’s opposition to the president as it was by his unapologetic tone. He became the leading war opponent at a time of the almost-unanimously and hastily passed Patriot Act, of anthrax attacks, a paramilitary presence in many of our nation’s cities, Homeland Security alerts, and sky-high popularity ratings for Bush. Most Democrats were cowed into submission, virtually endorsing every Bush desire and offering only the meekest and most apologetic resistance when they resisted at all.
The president was no longer a mere public servant nor even still a politician. He became far more epic and glorious than that. He was the Commander in Chief in a time of war. And though the United States Constitution makes clear that the president is vested with that role only with respect to members of the armed forces—most assuredly not vis-à-vis American civilians—his supporters frequently insisted that to undermine Bush was to weaken the United States and to aid America’s enemies. As Joe Lieberman once put it, “In matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” During the 2004 campaign, President Bush said that John Kerry’s criticisms of the war in Iraq “can embolden an enemy.” He thereafter warned, as he and his administration have emphasized many times, “In a time of war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail.”
Dean is but one prominent example of how rational debate in the United States over whether to invade Iraq was trampled on by the president’s emotion-inducing sermons that the U.S. had been called to fight Evil. Jim Webb, the former Reagan secretary of the Navy and decorated Marine combat hero, was equally as prescient as Dean, and just as tenacious in the lead-up to the war in trying to induce a reasoned examination of the serious risks entailed in an invasion. In September 2002, Webb authored an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing vehemently against invading Iraq. As with Dean’s speeches, it is striking just how right Webb was about virtually everything he warned of and it is tragic that his arguments were all but ignored by a war-hungry political and media elite, intoxicated by an exhilarating Manichean mission:
Meanwhile, American military leaders have been trying to bring a wider focus to the band of neoconservatives that began beating the war drums on Iraq before the dust had even settled on the World Trade Center. De spite the efforts of the neocons to shut them up or to dismiss them as unqualified to deal in policy issues, these leaders, both active-duty and retired, have been nearly unanimous in their concerns.
Is there an absolutely vital national interest that should lead us from containment to unilateral war and a long-term occupation of Iraq? And would such a war and its aftermath actually increase our ability to win the war against international terrorism?…
America’s best military leaders know that they are accountable to history not only for how they fight wars, but also for how they prevent them. The greatest military victory of our time—bringing an expansionist Soviet Union in from the cold while averting a nuclear holocaust—was accomplished not by an invasion but through decades of intense maneuvering and continuous operations. With respect to the situation in
Iraq, they are conscious of two realities that seem to have been lost in the narrow debate about Saddam Hussein himself.
The first reality is that wars often have unintended consequences—ask the Germans, who in World War I were convinced that they would defeat the French in exactly 42 days. The second is that a long-term occupation of Iraq would beyond doubt require an adjustment of force levels elsewhere, and could eventually diminish American influence in other parts of the world.
Other than the flippant criticisms of our “failure” to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of
Iraq, but it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam
Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay….
These concerns, and others like them, are the reasons that many with long experience in U.S. national security issues remain unconvinced by the arguments for a unilateral invasion of Iraq. Unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation’s existence is clearly at stake.
Every dangerous and costly consequence Webb warned of has come to fruition. Yet the tough-guy political and pundit classes arrogantly derided Webb’s thoughtful, sophisticated, rational, and—as it turns out—prescient analysis, notwithstanding his status as combat hero and military expert. Instead, those shrilly warning about Iraqi mushroom clouds detonating over our cities and offering rosy-eyed assurances about invading Iraq were deemed to be the serious, responsible, and strong national security leaders.
In a January 2007 hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the newly elected senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, reminded Robert Gates, President Bush’s new defense secretary, how individuals who had warned of the tragic results that have come to pass in postinvasion and occupied Iraq were treated:
I also want to say something about my longtime friend Senator McCain’s comments when he was talking about the consequences of pulling out of Iraq and in your statement, Secretary Gates, you list some of these as an emboldened and strengthened Iran, a base of operations for jihadist networks in the heart of the Middle East, an undermining of the credibility of the United States. In many ways, quite frankly, those have been the results of the invasion and occupation.
There’s really nothing that’s occurred since the invasion and occupation that was not predictable and in fact, most of it was predicted. It was predicted in many cases by people with long backgrounds in national security…and in many cases there were people who saw their military careers destroyed and who were personally demeaned by people who opposed them on the issues, including members of this administration. And they are people in my judgment, who will be remembered in history as having had a moral conscience [emphasis added].
Senator Webb’s description of the consequences befalling critics prior to the invasion captures the reason the president was able to lead a largely passive country to war with virtually no meaningful consideration of the consequences and costs. Those who have been proven almost entirely wrong in their starry-eyed prognostications clung tightly to the president’s Manichean sermonizing as a means for evading debate. The president was st
rong and Good and must be trusted. War opponents were demonized and dismissed as guilty, not only of poor judgment but also of poor character.
As the country struggles desperately to find a way to minimize the damage wrought by the catastrophe in Iraq, the same people who are responsible for convincing Americans of the wisdom of that invasion, through an endless series of monumental errors of judgment and debate-squelching campaigns against critics, continue to hold sway. That they were wrong about virtually everything prior to the invasion of Iraq has not diminished their status as wise foreign policy experts.
And the converse endures with equal strength. Those who were right about Iraq—specifically, war opponents and those who challenged and resisted the rhetoric and manipulative tactics of the president and his followers—are still treated by the political and journalistic establishment as unserious and “weak on defense” radicals who are unfit to be trusted with the national defense. The mere mention of the names Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi or Russ Feingold or Barack Obama or even Jack Murtha in the context of national security debate provokes knowing and condescending smirks among many of the most influential members of the pundit class. Astoundingly, even now, only those eager to send the nation to war—and who launched the country on its strategically disastrous course in Iraq—retain sufficient cachet to pontificate credibly on national security matters.
Few people were as consistently prescient—or as viciously demonized—as Scott Ritter was. Back in September 2002, Ritter was telling anyone who would listen that there was no convincing evidence showing Iraq had WMDs. He is a former U.S. Marine officer and was a top aide to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War against Iraq, when he had built a reputation as a tenacious weapons inspector working for the U.N. It is difficult to imagine someone with stronger credentials and credibility and thus whose views on Iraq’s WMD program—or lack thereof—ought to have been seriously considered.
At the time George Bush and his loyal supporters were assuring Americans that Saddam unquestionably had WMDs and that an invasion of Iraq was urgent, Ritter was desperately warning his fellow citizens of the dangers. In the fall of 2002, Ritter went to Iraq in an effort to forge an agreement that would save his country from making a horrendous mistake, and while there he addressed the Iraqi Parliament, warning:
My country seems on the verge of making an historic mistake…. My government is making a case for war against Iraq that is built upon fear and ignorance, as opposed to the reality of truth and fact.
As someone who counts himself as a fervent patriot and a good citizen of the United States of America, I feel I cannot stand by idly, while my country behaves in such a fashion….
We, the people of the United States, are told repeatedly that we face a grave and imminent risk to our national security from a combination of past irresponsible behavior on the part of Iraq and ongoing efforts by Iraq to reacquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic weapons…which have been banned since 1991 by a Security
Council resolution.
The truth of the matter is that Iraq is not a sponsor of the kind of terror perpetrated against the United States on 11 September, and in fact is active in suppressing the sort of fundamentalist extremism that characterizes those who attacked the United States on that horrible day.
This is the truth, and once the American people become familiar with and accept this truth, the politics of fear will be defeated and the prospect of war between our two countries greatly diminished….
The truth of the matter is that Iraq has not been shown to possess weapons of mass destruction, either in terms of having retained prohibited capability from the past, or by seeking to reacquire such capability today….
Iraq must loudly reject any intention of possessing these weapons and then work within the framework of international law to demonstrate this is a reality.
The only way that Iraq can achieve this is with the unconditional return of U.N. weapons inspectors, allowing such inspectors unfettered access to sites inside Iraq in order to complete the disarmament tasks as set forth in Security Council resolutions….
Except when television pundits were convened to smear Ritter’s character and attack his credibility, the mainstream American press all but ignored these warnings. On January 26, 2003, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer held a panel discussion about Ritter’s war opposition. Ritter was not present, but Peter Beinart, the prowar editor of The New Republic, and Jonah Goldberg, the prowar pundit from National Review, were invited to urge the invasion of Iraq, mock Ritter’s antiwar arguments, and hurl personal attacks at him. In stark contrast to Ritter, neither of these young, great “experts” who were urging the country to war had any experience with the military, the weapons inspection process, or Iraq. Joining them were Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and New York Post columnist Robert George, whose level of expertise on these matters was equal to Beinart’s and Goldberg’s.
Blitzer began the segment by describing Ritter as “an outspoken critic of a possible war against Iraq [who] was arrested in 2001 for allegedly communicating over the Internet with an undercover police officer who was posing as a sixteen-year-old girl.” His question for the panel: “Is Scott Ritter’s credibility now destroyed?” Brazile’s answer: “Absolutely. It shows that he has poor judgment.” Blitzer was referring to Ritter’s arrest almost two years earlier, which ended with a dismissal of the charges against him, charges that Ritter has always denied.
George then accused Ritter of having been paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars from Saddam Hussein’s regime,” so everyone could safely ignore anything Ritter said because he was Saddam’s agent—“a pro-Saddam guy.” George referred to a documentary Ritter had produced that was financed by an American citizen of Iraqi descent and that contended, correctly as it turns out, that the U.N. inspection process had “defanged” Iraq’s weapons program. But war supporters deceitfully depicted Ritter’s film as being financed by the Iraqi government and claimed that Ritter himself had been paid by Saddam—complete falsehoods, disgustingly deployed to smear the former Marine and then–war critic as an enemy agent.
Thus, with attacks on Ritter’s loyalty and character carrying the day, his convincing arguments that the inspection process would demonstrate that Iraq possessed no WMDs could be and were easily ignored. Beinart followed George on the CNN panel and said about George’s smears of Ritter: “Yes, I agree.” He continued:
I think that he didn’t have any credibility to begin with. I mean, this is the guy who never really explained, as Jonah said, why he flipped a hundred and eighty degrees and became a Saddam mouthpiece. So for me it’s irrelevant. I never listened to what he had to say on Iraq to begin with.
After the Great Iraq expert Beinart was done eviscerating Ritter’s credibility, Goldberg announced, “[Y]es, I agree with everybody,” and then added:
He’s now just basically joined Pete Townsend on the Magic School Bus…. Pete Townsend of the Who has also been implicated in child porn and things of that nature. But as everybody said, Ritter’s credibility, just on the basics of Iraq, was completely shot and now there’s even less reason to listen to him.
The brilliant “analysis” of this expert panel thereby completed, Blitzer then decreed: “Let’s move on now.” Ritter’s arguments did not require engagement because these panelists—intoxicated by war rhetoric, Manichean imperatives, and the smug sense of their own rightness—had pronounced the ex-Marine and U.N. weapons inspector utterly lacking in credibility. Literally in a matter of minutes on CNN, Ritter—one of the nation’s preeminent experts on the subject of the Iraqi weapons program—was transformed by a television cast of know-nothing war cheerleaders into a grotesque cartoon, a pro-Saddam propagandist, a liar, a child molester, and an integrity-free subversive whose loyalty was very much in question.
That Ritter was right about everything he said, and Beinart, Goldberg, and company profoundly wrong means nothing. To this day, it is almost impossible to avoid he
aring from Peter Beinart and Jonah Goldberg in the nation’s most influential media outlets (Beinart was recently given a column in the Washington Post and Time, and Goldberg went on to become a twice-weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times). If, however, one wants to know what Ritter thinks about, say, whether the nation should wage war on Iran, one would have to search for small niche magazines, obscure websites, or alternative weekly newspapers.
Indeed, to discern what the U.S. should do about the Middle East or any other complex, grave national security matter, the national media hears from Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Kagan, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Tom Friedman, Rudy Giuliani, Rich Lowry, Newt Gingrich, and all the other “serious” tough guys who may have been wrong about nearly everything they predicted about Iraq but who are held out as foreign policy sages who possess credibility on these questions—still. But under no circumstances should one heed Howard Dean, Jack Murtha, Scott Ritter, Nancy Pelosi, various antiwar groups (including antiwar paleoconservatives), or anyone of that ilk, because they remain “unserious” about national defense.
When assessing the catastrophe that has been wrought from our invasion of Iraq, one can draw a straight line from the “debates” beforehand—and to those who were presented as credible experts—to the incalculable damage that has been done. And those experts are still thought of as such today, because even though they were profoundly wrong, they were on the side of Good. And in a Manichean world, that is far more important.
NORMALIZATION OF WAR
The Bush presidency has fundamentally transformed the way we speak about our country and its responsibilities, entitlements, and role in the world. In reviewing the pre–Iraq War “debate” this country had both on television and in print, one of the most striking aspects in retrospect is the casual and even breezy tone with which America collectively discusses and thinks about war as a foreign policy option, standing inconspicuously next to all of the other options. There is really no strong resistance to it, little anguish over it, no sense that it is a supremely horrible and tragic course to undertake—and particularly to start. Gone almost completely from our mainstream political discourse is horror over war. The most one hears is some cursory and transparently insincere—almost bored—lip service to its being a “last resort.”
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency Page 16