Doing the math on Bush’s war
by Edward Cone
7-18-04
Are you better off now than you were before the United States invaded Iraq?
Voters will be trying to answer that question until Election Day, with the keys to the White House riding on the result.
The old math asked if you were better off now than you were four years ago. The essence of that equation was economic, and it remains highly relevant to the Bush-Kerry contest. But this year there is a new math, too, which applies to security and the defining strategy of the Bush administration, the war in Iraq.
Iraq was a battle of choice in the larger war on terror that was thrust upon us. Even if it was a good idea, it was not the only thing we could have done at that point. Was it worth the cost, regardless of the flawed case Bush made for war, such as the weapons of mass destruction we have not found and the exaggerated links between Saddam and al-Qaida?
I approach the problem with the assumption that the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 was pretty much inevitable. Gore would have done it, Kerry would have done it. Bush deserves credit for his early success there, but he will be judged on what happened next.
The war has had two unqualified successes: the removal of Saddam, a longtime enemy and potential threat; and the demonstration of our extreme military prowess and willingness to use it. Together, these positive results must register a strong message with other governments that might sponsor terrorism.
Other outcomes are less certain. The idea that we can export democracy to the Muslim heartland remains unproved, with the stability of Iraq itself an open question. Establishing an Iraqi base of operations to replace our presence in Saudi Arabia may not be feasible in the long run, and the larger strategy of remaking the region country by country may never pan out. The extermination of foreign fighters in Iraq may be outweighed by the recruitment of new ones sparked by the U.S. occupation.
Among the clear, negative impacts on U.S. security of the war is our reduced capacity to work with other nations in a global fight against terror. And as pro-war writer Andrew Sullivan put it at his weblog, the discredited case for invasion made by Bush “has made future pre-emption based on intelligence close to impossible.” That ties our hands in the face of potential threats to come.
Another crucial measure of the war’s value is the opportunity cost: What else might we have been doing for the past two years if we had not been focused on Iraq? It was never a question of invading or Iraq or doing nothing at all, and much remains undone. Afghanistan is a mess, Osama is at large, nukes are proliferating, and our military is overextended, none of which makes us safer.
Less safe for sure were the hundreds of Americans who have died in the 14 months since major combat operations supposedly ended. Was their sacrifice worth it? Even if the war itself proves worthwhile, did they die in vain because of the way the occupation has been managed by the Bush administration? That’s another core issue raised by the experience in Iraq: the competence of the Bush team to fight this long, strange war, which will continue far beyond combat and reconstruction in Mesopotamia.
Such competence is a critical arbiter of U.S. security, and the “post-war” experience in Iraq has not been encouraging. The litany of mistakes made there is depressingly familiar (disbanding the army, underestimating Iraqi antipathy toward invaders, betting on the scoundrel Chalabi), as is the administration’s susceptibility to ideological solutions over pragmatic ones.
There is not yet a clear answer to the question of Bush’s war. Events continue to unfold, with the outcome very much in the balance, and any tally has to be weighed against a guess at how well John Kerry would have handled the same situation and how well he might handle the next one.
Bush spoke out strongly last week about the success of his Iraq gamble, in response to harsh criticism of his case for war in the Senate. One indication that he lacks some confidence in his own argument may be his recent reinvocation of “values” as a campaign theme, even as his vice president was in the news for dropping an f-bomb on that same Senate floor.
With the dodgy economic recovery making it hard to ask the old campaign question about relative prosperity, and no easy answers on the new campaign question about relative security, issues like gay marriage offer Bush a way to fire up his base. But for the rest of the country, the big equations are yet to be solved.
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