"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out." -- General Sherman, 1863.
“So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the 'burning marl.' Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!” -- J.P. Sartre, 1944.
B.L.U.F. (bottom-line, up-front): two things I have learned from the catastrophes in Iraq and Indochina.
- VIÊT NAM: even seemingly limitless power can defer destiny, not divert it.
- IRAQ: every sweeping policy or proposed military intervention (i.e., war) is a best-case scenario of bundled assumptions and ought to be treated skeptically.
- BOTH: morality must assume a paramountcy in policy; the politics of nations must transcend the school-yard.
Why emphasizing 05feb03 is unfair Yet we insist upon focussing on Colin Powell's "great mistake", one that he readily admitted: that infamous speech to the United Nations Security Council during the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The exclusivity of this focus on a great leader's life strikes me as singularly unfair.
Frankly, SecState Powell merely made the same mistake many, many people did. Additionally, in a position of power, he had to make a momentous choice based upon incomplete information. And that information looked ominous.
Those who dance their bitter jigs on this man's biography forget just what things were like in 2003. There was ample cause for concern back then about Saddam's alleged nuclear weapons program.
While I can not locate the article in (I believe) The Wall Street Journal written in 1992, the last few pages of text in this paper provide evidence of Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons program being far more advanced in 1992 than had been anticipated, something like the capability of producing a weapon within five years.
What the SecState faced in 2003
Fast forward to 2003: the knowledge about manufacturing nuclear weapons available to Iraq had not gone away; that implicit five year window still applied. Yet no U.N.-sponsored weapons inspectors had set foot in Iraq since 1998, well over four years before SecState Powell's fateful speech.
lntelligence reports were ambiguous but leaned in favor of the proposition that Saddam was up to his old nuclear ambitions. Sadly, the V.P. and SecDef, together with their deputies, ring-fenced President Bush from the voices of dissent of which the SecState was one: "You break it, you own it." Being human, the SecState may also have been swayed by some or all of the feelings many of us had after 9-11: Middle Easterners had been killing Americans -- almost five thousand by 2003 -- for more than a generation, including a likely President, several Ambassadors, peace-keeping Marines, etc.
THEY started this war and WE had a right to finish it. And so a private agenda to "complete the job" in Iraq conflated with the war on terror (as a cover story for vengeance against a whole region and race). Now, back to the U.N. speech: after watching it, I was initially 'convinced' since I respected General Powell. That conviction lasted for thirty minutes, likely less.
All I saw were verbal assertions and pictures of trucks in the desert -- hardly damning evidence. My most recent viewing of that speech of a few months ago indicated to me that SecState Powell himself may not have been altogether convinced by the arguments based upon what we later found out to be manipulated intelligence.
¿Erring on the side of caution? So, yes, I can see why General Powell acted the way he did. He had to make a damnable decision in the face of ambiguous, if not radically conflicting, information. That took him from the sunshine of certainty, dubbed as the truth, to the shadows of uncertainty, relying instead upon ex-ante, imputed probabilities.
Obviously, I never had the privilege of meeting and speaking with Colin Powell, the patriot we admired, but I would not be surprised if he whittled down the competing claims to a maxi-min trade-off of comparative down-sides. DOWNSIDE #1: ¿what if the U.S., and the West, decided to do nothing and Saddam had these weapons? He had already shown a pre-disposition to use chemical weapons by doing so against the Kurds. He had tried to assassinate President G.H.W. Bush, then President G.W. Bush's father.
So . . . ¿why would Saddam necessarily feel inhibited from using a nuclear weapon, even if it were only a smuggled dirty bomb, against us or an ally? Wouldn't the devastation his country had endured from Desert Storm and the subsequent sanctions give that assumed mad-man ample reason to do it? PLAINLY AN AWFUL DOWNSIDE. versus DOWNSIDE #2: ¿what if the U.S.-dominated coalition invades Iraq and this time occupies the land of two rivers, only to find no nuclear weapons (i.e., what ultimately happened)? At least it would focus the fight in the region that had started it. AN EMBARRASSING BUT LESS HARMFUL -- at least to the U.S. and Western Europe -- DOWNSIDE.
Thinking through Powell's predicament But, hey, Saddam would never be re-admitted to the international community and the sanctions were devastating the Iraqi people. As Saddam would almost certainly never relinquish power voluntarily, it was time to get him out of there to end the protracted suffering of twenty million or more innocents In these terms, then (or others somewhat like them), I can see SecState Powell making a reluctant yet rational choice of downsides and, subsequently, being the 'ultimate' team player by justifying that invasion to the U.N. Throughout this version of mine, one sees a very broad-minded statesman agonizing over a deafening dilemma.
So, this man, far from being arrogant, erred on the side of caution as per a perceived maxi-min strategy. Tragically, that rational choice resulted in the deaths of 800,000 to 1.2 million Iraqis. Sadder still, Powell's mistake was one that I and many others would almost certainly have made sitting at his desk, likely with fewer reservations. So, I wonder how many of us would have had the integrity of character later to admit that mistake straight up as did our cherished Colin Powell. ¡My buns on the toaster! As l often say: I supported the invasion of Iraq and l may well burn in hell for doing so. The scorching climate is bad enough, but I can get used to that. It is the thought of spending eternity locked in the same room, furnished with musty nineteenth century furniture, with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld that makes me weak in the knees.
What I refuse to say is that I was deceived; there had been an exposé by a U.N. inspector that pointedly refuted the intelligence underlying the allegations against Saddam and I had read it.
