How Did I Get it Right?

In honor of the trend of “How did I get it wrong” posts, this is a brief examination of how I managed to get it right on Iraq.  Revisiting correct decisions can often be just as productive as probing failures.  I’m also interested in working through it again because it’s kind of surprising that I got it right. Over the past years, more than a few people have guessed that I was an advocate of the Iraq War, in spite of the fact that I opposed it from the start.  To be fair, there are a couple of big reasons why people might think that I would get it wrong:

1. I like punching hippies. No excuse for this, although if you graduate from the University of Oregon there’s a high chance that you’ll be either a hippie or a hippie puncher, and there was really no way that I was ever going to end up a hippie. In thinking about what precisely this means, I suspect that it goes back to the cliche that all politics are local. Every social circle features people who make stupid arguments about something, and in social circles that trend heavily left, you get more stupid foreign policy arguments from the left than from the right. It’s not as if “No blood for oil in Kosovo, man!” or “People shouldn’t read Tolkien because he believes that violence can solve problems” are the best arguments that hippies made in my presence while I lived in Eugene or Seattle, but they’re among the most memorable. There are certainly much stupider foreign policy arguments on the right, but because I didn’t regularly have dinner (featuring stupid vegan hippie “food”) with right wingers, the intellectual fissures developed along hippie vs. non-hippie battle lines. This meant on a guttural, emotive first cut I often wanted to find myself standing opposite the hippies. Part of my general effort to move away from dispositional thinking has been to note that even if the stupid hippie believes that George H. W. Bush personally killed JFK, it doesn’t mean that the hippie is wrong about some other question of policy.
2. I am not “antiwar” in the sense that most use the term. I am against some wars, but not others. As long time readers will know, I think that the modern state inevitably kills people when it gets out of bed in the morning. War is simply another manifestation of state violence. I tend to think of war as existing on one end of the spectrum of state violence, different quantitatively than other state brutality (imprisonment, etc.) but not morally distinct. This doesn’t mean that I have to be in favor of every war, or of any particular war, but it does mean that I don’t find most constructions of antiwar pacifism very compelling. Prior to the 2003 Iraq War, I had supported most of the military interventions (Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan) that had occurred in my adult life. This belief leaves me in position to make dreadful errors on the question of particular wars; say what you will about the tenets of pacifism, but pacifists very rarely make the error of supporting stupid wars.

And so, there were some reasons to believe that I might make a serious error on the question of the Iraq War. In fact, however, I was barely tempted; for a very long time I could hardly even bring myself to believe that people were seriously proposing something so self-evidently stupid. Political science helped, I think, by providing some reasonably clear tools for thinking about military intervention and the state.  The reasons why I didn’t support the war:

1. I believe in deterrence theory. Like many others, I believed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. I just didn’t think that it mattered for US policy. As a general rule, states don’t undertake suicidal policies, making it deeply unlikely that Iraq would ever attack the United States or any United States client state with weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the chief American proxy in the region had the capability to destroy Iraq in the case of any attack. I also understood that “weapons of mass destruction” were not all created equal. Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons were of trivial effectiveness against any serious military foe. A nuclear weapon would be of greater concern, but possession of a small number of crude nuclear devices would not transform the military situation in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, I was reasonably confident that a sanction regime that would minimize the possibility of Iraq developing nuclear weapons could be maintained.I was also unimpressed by Iraq’s conventional capability. In 1991, Iraq had demonstrated in dramatic terms that it did not possess a world class conventional military. Since that time, Iraq had lost ground against Israel, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Indeed, “losing ground” doesn’t quite capture it; Iraqi military capabilities had substantially regressed, while those of every other state in the region had moved forward. Iraq simply did not pose a plausible military threat to any of its neighbors, and would not for the foreseeable future even if the sanctions regime had utterly collapsed.

In terms of threat, Saddam Hussein had demonstrated that he was risk acceptant but essentially rational. He had not used chemical or biological weapons against any foe that could have annihilated him. The wars he launched stood some chance of success. He had not launched any wars since 1991, when his military capability was effectively destroyed. He acted in ways that were basically predictable, not as some sort of “crazy man.”

I was equally uncompelled by the notion that Iraq would simply hand over weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist group. Such a move would leave Iraq vulnerable to attack from the enraged target, who would naturally assume that the weapons had come from Hussein. The idea that Iraq would give a nuclear weapon to terrorists is too absurd for words.

While I think that the construction “Bush lied, people died” is probably too strong regarding the existence of WMD, I think it’s quite appropriate to the discussion of the implications of WMD. I think that the administration and its proxies believed that Iraq had WMD, and simply exaggerated the available evidence. However, I believe that advocates for the war intentionally and explicit mislead the US public and the international community regarding the threat that such weapons might pose. People who understood all of the above, including Hussein’s rationality, the principles of deterrence theory, and the military ineffectiveness of Hussein’s WMD, simply lied about the threat in order to advocate invasion. Understanding that the advocates were either making a serious strategic error or straight out lying, even before the we failed to find WMDs, helped make it easy to oppose the war.

2. I understand how destructive war is. Any effort to conquer Iraq would involve a large-scale air campaign and destructive ground invasion that would kill tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Moreover, tenuous Iraqi infrastructure, already weakened by the 1991 war and the sanctions regime, would come under sustained attack. The reconstruction of Iraq was likely to be far, far more expensive and time consuming than the war advocates suggested, even absent an insurgency. I was extraordinarily skeptical of the interest and ability of the Bush administration to undertake seriously the reconstruction of a battered state. The experience in Afghanistan indicated how limited the Bush administration’s commitment to physical reconstruction was, and in a more modern economy requiring much more modern infrastructure, the failure of the administration was likely to be far more destructive.

3. I appreciate how awful disintegrated and failed states can be for human security, and understand the difficulty of building a state from scratch. I’m a bit of a Hobbesian, and while I didn’t expect Iraq to descend into a classic state of nature upon Hussein’s fall, I did believe that the collapse of the regime would be met with a substantial amount of chaos and destruction. Because of the aforementioned inability of the Bush administration to think seriously about the nature of the state, I suspected that the Iraqi state would be constructed heavy on neocon principles on low on any practical ability to do anything, including control its own borders and disarm violent substate actors. That the Bush administration did not understand the basic foundations of coercive state power made it clear that any political reconstructive efforts (as opposed to material reconstruction) would almost certainly be disastrous. Handing people hostile to the basic concept of responsible state policymaking the keys to a state was a recipe for disaster. If Franklin Roosevelt had explained to me personally that he and his policy team were personally going to supervise the reconstruction of Iraq, with a claim on unlimited funds and political authority, I might have been persuaded. That, and the Jedi.

Like I said, it wasn’t even close. The only thing that might have affected this calculus was clear, conclusive evidence that Hussein’s regime had been operationally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Such a revelation would have produced questions about Hussein’s rationality and ability to be deterred, and also would have furnished a clear jus ad bellum rationale for war. Nothing of the sort ever appeared, the pathetic fumblings of Stephen Hayes and Eli Lake* notwithstanding. And so, with the help of political science, I managed to get it right.

*While Lake has maintained that Hussein’s Iraq and Al Qaeda had connections, he has never argued that Iraq had a hand in 9/11.