Say again, why did we start that war?

With all today's crises that we have to unwind, it's probably just as well that we let yesterday's controversies fade into distant memory.  Why continue to begrudge the people who dragged America into a deadly, debilitating, and disastrous war?  They now realize it was wrong, don't they?  Why keep flogging the dead horse of accountability for the invasion of Iraq if the proponents and propellants for war have now wised up?

But have they?  Thomas Friedman tells us otherwise.

This week the New York Times columnist who did more than anyone else in the Washington commentariat to legitimize the invasion and stampede Democrats into the war conspirators' quicksand offered his reflections, eight years on:

Unlike Afghanistan, the war in Iraq was, at its core, always driven more by idealism than realism. It was sold as being about W.M.D. But, in truth, it was really a rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of U.S. power. The immediate target was to topple Saddam’s genocidal dictatorship. But the bigger objective was to help Iraqis midwife a democratic model that could inspire reform across the Arab-Muslim world and give the youth there a chance at a better future. Again, the Iraq story is far from over, but one does have to take heart at the recent elections there and the degree to which Iraqi voters favored multiethnic, modernizing parties.

Friedman acknowledges that the war advocates' line about those weapons of mass destruction--which United Nations inspectors had discredited before the invasion even began--was pretextual from the start.  A deceptive sales job conned the Congress into passing a war authorization dutifully citing W.M.D.  proscribed by the U.N. Security Council, but the real purpose was "a rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of U.S. power."

This, of course, would be more benevolent than that rare exercise in the revolutionary deployment of Soviet power in Afghanistan a quarter century before.  It would set a precedent for far more pro-active American military intervention anywhere U.S. leaders deemed such idealism to be useful.  The grand objective was to inspire the Arab-Muslim world to democracy.

Friedman is suitably modest in not trumpeting the successes of this trillion-dollar experiment in nurturing democracy.  He leaves it to others to catalog the successes of Arab democracy supporters who invoke the Iraqi model as their inspiration. 

He seems determinedly oblivious to the Muslim world's revulsion at the invasion, which cross-national surveys have consistently documented.  With the invasion, "the bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim world," even in non-Arab democracies, the Pew global attitudes project reported in 2003. "Since last summer, favorable ratings for the U.S. have fallen from 61% to 15% in Indonesia and from 71% to 38% among Muslims in Nigeria."

Though war advocates like Friedman see themselves as liberal idealists, they are strikingly indifferent to the havoc the invasion wreaked on the cornerstone of liberal internationalists' practical idealism--the restraints on war-making enacted in the United Nations Charter.  The infatuation with revolutionary deployment of U.S. power and assumptions of its benevolence--unshaken by Abu Ghraib or Nisour Square--seem to cloud their judgment.

Most Americans now realize the war was a colossally costly mistake, which is why the advocates have largely fallen silent about it.  Certainly, we can be grateful that, in modest compensation for all the deaths and destruction this war has visited upon Iraq, Iraqis have established a wobbly democratic political system. 

But Iraqis have no illusion, as Friedman still does, that a bellicose U.S. administration invaded Iraq to create an inspirational model of democracy.  They remember, if he does not, the other grander strategies that war advocates who were closely connected to the administration were trumpeting at the time:  Re-draw the map of the Middle East.  Show Palestinians the hopelessness of resistance.  Drive on to Tehran.

This was not idealism.  It was certainly not realism.  It can only be called fantasy--and lethally expensive fantasy at that.

We all wish for the success of liberal democracy in Iraq, and hope that Iraqis will unite in striving to keep it.  But Friedman reminds us that war-makers' illusions die hard.      

Comments

[Nabil Shoeb]

For the sake of democratizing Iraq,was it worth killing and displacing a million Iraqi men,women,and children.
Even if the U.S.says Iraq is democratized,this will not affect any change in other countries in the middle east.
The government and the system in Iraq now is looked upon as a puppet for the U.S.and not really free democracy.