And now some truth:
Success has many fathers; the failure in Iraq has a lot more
Jeffrey Simpson
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
Five years later, it is easy to forget how many people supported the invasion of Iraq, including many people in Canada.
In the United States, support was overwhelming. Americans believed (because their president and government told them so) that war was urgently required because of Saddam Hussein’s link to al-Qaeda and his possession of weapons of “mass destruction.”
Their country’s security depended upon his removal. The task of taking him out would be limited in cost and time.
The clangorous conservative commentariat in U.S. think tanks and newspapers, the entire Republican Party, veterans associations and the majority of Middle Americans saluted the war. Some gullible liberals fell into line, supporting torture as a necessary evil and the invasion as justified. The Democratic Party, or at least large elements of it, rolled over.
In Canada, it is convenient to hail Jean Chrétien’s decision to keep this country from the march of madness, and to believe his decision reflected an overwhelming Canadian consensus of virtue and good judgment. It did not.
The decision flew in the face of relentless pro-war fusillades from our very own conservative commentariat, including leading editorial writers and columnists, most of whom have subsequently recanted, sort of. The Canadian Alliance, then the official opposition, wanted Canada in what George W. Bush called the “coalition of the willing.” Opposition leader Stephen Harper said Canada should stand with the Americans.
Quebeckers were largely hostile to participation; opinion in the rest of Canada was divided. Had Mr. Chrétien decided the other way, he would have been hailed by many Canadians who bought into the Bush agenda or who thought Canada should be a good ally.
A solid majority of Americans now understands the war was a mistake. Yet Republican presidential nominee John McCain, stoutly defends the invasion, although he believes the Bush administration erred in not sending enough troops to end it quicker. He suggests that some kind of U.S. military presence might be required in Iraq for “a hundred years.”
How does anyone calculate the cost of folly? A recent book by economist Joseph Stiglitz says the direct and indirect costs total about $3-trillion. Taking direct costs alone, we are talking about many hundreds of billions of dollars.
More than 4,000 U.S. lives have been lost; thousands more have been wounded. As for Iraqis, the number of dead is guesswork. Estimates range from 80,000 to one million. Hundreds of thousands have fled the country; hundreds of thousands more uprooted themselves within Iraq to flee sectarian violence. Neighbourhoods and regions are much more sharply defined, now, by ethnicity and religion.
The invasion was part of a grand scheme worked out by neo-conservatives to remake the Middle East - to render Israel more secure, isolate Iran, democratize Arab states, support Iraq’s Kurds, crush radicals and, of course, drive a stake through al-Qaeda. The costs would be paid for by Iraqi oil exports.
None of this has happened; most developments in the region have run in the opposite direction. The invasion’s biggest winner has been Iran, hands down.
When historians of U.S. foreign policy look back on this adventure, it’ll be hard to find a comparable litany of deceptions, errors and lies. The only tragedy that compares is Vietnam, another war based on a misunderstanding of the country in conflict, a failure to match military power with counterinsurgency requirements, and a delusional policy-making world in Washington.
As the Iraq affair drags on, to what extent have Americans begun to digest the lessons of this disaster?
They have already formed their judgment about the George Bush/Dick Cheney administration. But what about their press that, like so much of Canada’s, did not do an adequate job of scrutinizing what was being said? What about their Congress that failed in its constitutionally entrenched responsibility for oversight of the executive?
An election system allowed the candidate with fewer votes to become president with help from a compliant supreme court. A political system designed for checks and balances failed to use either. Five years later, with no end in sight, the folly of invading Iraq grows more evident with each passing day.
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