American Amnesia and the Unaddressed Legacy of the Iraq War
By Alex Mayyasi | July 30, 2009 at 2:44 pm“Having spent the better part of the Bush era arguing foreign policy with a fury not seen since Vietnam, Americans have settled on a remarkably durable consensus: It was a mistake. We’re winning. Let’s leave.” ~Ross Douthat
We can never be sure of the alchemy by which historical conflicts and experiences influence the decision making of national leaders in comparable situations. Were it not for the rapid escalation of World War I, would European leaders have proved as cautious in appeasing Hitler? But alternatively, Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the American humiliation in Vietnam did not deter the Bush Administration from trying to tame Afghanistan and Iraq.
As for the legacy of the current war in Iraq, one aspect of its legacy in foreign policy decision-making seems clear – that no one is considering it.
Since 2003, the Fertile Crescent has been the setting of a great test of Neoconservative American foreign policy. This grand Neoconservative vision, resurgent and emboldened in the 90’s by America’s triumph over the Soviets, calls for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” That is, a foreign policy of an American hegemon exerting global leadership and moral superiority, protecting fellow democracies while utilizing strong military intervention against hostile regimes to recast them in America’s own democratic image.
As President Clinton prepared for his 1998 State of the Union, he received a letter signed by a score of prominent Neoconservatives. Citing the inevitability of Saddam Hussein producing weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing the Middle East, threatening the safety of our troops and allies in the region, and cutting off the oil supply, they urged Clinton “to turn [his] Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” a strategy that “will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”
Three years later, the signers of this letter populated Washington with only a Texas cowboy between them and control of the American war machine: Dick Cheney was Vice-President, Donald Rumsfeld the Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz his Deputy, and Elliott Abrams Special Assistant to the President and a National Security Council member. When September 11 introduced the Middle East to the national consciousness as a land of sinister threats, it offered the opportunity to push their Neoconservative vision into action.
Not long ago, this vision appeared to have been torn asunder by IED’s and lying dead in the ethnically charged landscape of Iraq – de-legitimized by its failed implementation as Iraq descended into chaos and civil war. The Neoconservatives planning and running Operation Iraqi Freedom were criminally negligent, arrogant, unprepared and perhaps even corrupt in a plethora of ways so well discussed in the last several years they need not be repeated, although it can largely be summed up by an Army lieutenant colonel’s presentation to war planners days before the invasion, which described post-invasion re-construction plans as “To be provided.” They never were.
But the surge no longer reflects President Bush going down with the Neoconservative ship. Competent US military personnel, reconstruction experts and Iraqi citizens have wrought an amazing transformation, achieving modest successes in Iraq. I began this post with a quote by journalist Ross Douthat describing the collective American reaction to success in Iraq: relief and an attempt at amnesia. But lurking behind this collective silence on the meaning of Iraq remains the question of whether continued improvements will redeem Neoconservatism’s ideals and principles, and whether it will allow this strongly interventionist foreign policy, which simultaneously promotes American democracy, values and interests, to re-enter the decision making calculus of American leaders.
While our collective silence on Iraq leaves the fate of Neoconservativism unclear, the events unfolding there hold implications for other foreign policies. The Neocons have no monopoly on interventionism as a policy tool. American intervention has long been advocated, simply without the Neoconservative military focus and assumed moral clarity/superiority. The chaos of 2003-2006 Iraq has hurt prospects for more modest interventionists – realists advocating intervention to maintain international stability and idealists advocating intervention for democracy or human rights promotion. In addition, the forum in this past Boston Review contains a number of prominent political scientists who believe that interventions in one form or another could be the best hope for ending civil conflict and bringing development to the world’s “Bottom Billion.” Without dialogue, the differences between these approaches and the Neoconservativism that resulted in Iraq’s failures will be neither addressed nor discerned.
We are silent today, but the question remains: as history plays out in the keystone country of the Middle East, what will it mean for the foreign policy of the world’s superpower?
Bibliographical note: I drew extensively on Gilles Kepel’s excellent book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West in writing this post. For further reading on Neoconservative intentions in the Middle East, see Wolfowitz’s leaked “US Defense Planning Guidance” and this Neoconservative memo for Israeli leaders, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
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