Positive Liberty

Douglas Feith’s War and Decision was difficult to read. It was difficult because the author’s view of his own time in office diverges so fundamentally from the view found in nearly all other media that it’s hard to say whether the two even came from the same planet. Except, of course, that Feith is constantly pointing out these differences, and arguing that he is the only one who ever sees things as they really are. Everyone else is just plain mistaken. Some amount of this is expected in any memoir, but Feith piles it to new heights.

To be sure, as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, he had an unparalleled perch from which to watch events unfold during the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and through the early phases of our actions in Iraq. Unlike many of those with whom he disagrees, he also appears to have taken meticulous notes, and often he is convincing. At other times, although he does not convince, his view of the situation has been persuasive enough to change my own, even if I’m not entirely brought around to where he stands. And finally, on many more occasions he is so far into the minority that I can’t accept his version of events at all. That’s a lot to sort out; as I said, it was difficult to read.

To summarize Feith’s view of things from September 11 through the end of the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority….

This is a different history than the one even now being written. Against the hundreds of leaks of those years, leaks made all the more enticing by the comical reticence of the official spokespeople, and against the memoirs of Bremer and many others, Feith simply answers that they were all either deliberately misleading or dishonest. His view may stand alone, he seems to say, but at least it is the correct one.

Almost of necessity for someone taking these stances, his greatest target the American press, whom he blames almost as much as Bremer for various failures in Iraq. Although it’s true that there’s a great deal of ammunition here for the stab-in-the-back crowd — some of it live ammunition — it still surprises me how someone can simultaneously plan and execute the overthrow of one of the world’s most brutal dictators — and quail over the latest Maureen Dowd column.

Some aspects of his version of events do convince me, however: I had always found it remarkable, for example, how smoothly the handover of power progressed in Afghanistan compared to Iraq, and I had always wondered whether this was due to differences in the political culture of the two countries. Certainly Afghanistan is no paradise, but it’s been the more successful of the two reconstructions, even despite its poor infrastructure and decades of civil war. Feith considers one difference to have been key: In Afghanistan, we turned over power to an Afghan government at the soonest possible opportunity. Rather than planning post-Saddam Iraq more carefully, it might have been better for us to have planned it less carefully — and skipped the occupation phase entirely. Just give them their country back, already.

The 14-month U.S. occupation of Iraq humiliated ordinary Iraqis and alienated them from their own political process. No one wanted to participate in civic structures set up under occupation, and for this reason competing authorities emerged, all of them having our ouster as their top priority, whether through peaceful means or otherwise. This soured Iraqis on the political process and on democracy in particular, which appeared to them a sham. Even today, most Iraqis’ highest priority is to end the occupation, which may have ended as a legal arrangement but continues as a de facto deployment of overwhelming military force, and as a psychological stigma as well (this last, incidentally, is the real difference between Iraq and South Korea). Feith seems to be aware of this, even if he does insist that the occupation ended at the end of the nominal 14 months.

So, the occupation was damaging, and Feith blames Paul Bremer for much of the damage, because he above all was in a position to have shortened the duration of Iraq’s long national humiliation. I’m not entirely sure that Bremer deserves all of the blame he gets here — one would think that Donald Rumsfeld, to whom Bremer reported, and George W. Bush, whose status as the decider ought to count in good times and bad — would have something to do with it as well. And also simple human self-interest: Given the many uncertainties of the post-Saddam era, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Iraqis weren’t lining up to help us occupy their own country. These considerations would have been reversed if we had handed it over sooner, and Feith, to his credit, seems to realize this. Weighing these factors any more precisely would require more research than I care to do at the moment.

But to be perfectly clear, I still would not have chosen to invade Iraq, and I remain unconvinced that the “war on terrorism” is best understood as a war at all. The traditional difference between war and crime, one worth recalling, is neither the magnitude of the act, nor the degree of its evil, but rather its state sponsorship. And while Iraq was indeed a state sponsor of terrorism, it remains true that for both war and crime, traditionally defined, at least some causal relationship must exist between the target of retribution and the act in question. That is why, whether one supported the actions in Afghanistan, in Iraq, both, or neither, they must be justified separately and with different arguments.

This is a distinction Feith is quick to paste over. Yes, there are networks of terrorist organizations who are known to work with one another. Without state sponsorship, though, they are at most large-scale or particularly successful criminals. They are not reasons to wage war on populations, and let’s face it — all wars are ultimately waged against populations.

(It is grimly amusing to note that, while they would not have been a sufficient response to 9/11, locking cockpit doors alone would have been a sufficient preparation for it. This gives an idea of the true scale of the problem we face, no?)

The other interesting aspect of this mostly very contentious and irritating book was Feith’s treatment of “regime change” as a public policy. Prior to reading War and Decision, I hadn’t considered the articulated policy of regime change in itself as a problem. It was a convenient crutch, I’d thought, a throwaway from the Clinton years that Bush had made far too big a deal over.

Not so.

The problem with a policy of regime change is that it paints us into a corner: If we can’t have what we want by one means — say, diplomacy — we must have it by another, and we must one way or the other be rid of the potential dictator-WMD-terrorist nexus.

Of course, I’d like to be rid of this nexus, just as much as anyone else would be. But some subtlety would have helped I think. The problem is simply that with Iraq we’d already declared what we wanted, and we’d failed to articulate any trade-offs or compromises that might soften the bargain. We’re stuck with “regime change,” pure and simple, on our side of the fence. And on the other is a dictator whose own propaganda, and whose own tyrannical logic, declare that he both defeated us last time and must defeat us yet again. This was a recipe for war, if not under Clinton, then under one of his successors.

Again, Feith seems to have been aware of this. He just didn’t think that war was the worse alternative. Quite the contrary; he seems content to have been strapped in, and he faults Clinton surprisingly little for his conduct toward Iraq.

I find all of this strange for one simple reason. Feith makes it very clear that our rationale for war was not that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It was that he had the capacity to produce them on short notice — chemical and biological ones, at the very least. This meant that the potential existed for him to hand over these weapons to terrorists, and for this he had to be removed.

The trouble with all of this is that any dictator of a moderately industrialized state will have these exact same capacities. Nerve agents and organophosphate pesticides are closely related compounds, and the ability to create the one almost always implies the ability to create the other. Likewise with bacterial and viral culturing technology, which can be used for both beneficial and deadly products. Iraq had all of these, as do all post-industrial countries. And Saddam Hussein wasn’t about to step down of his own accord.

We’d locked ourselves in. Feith has no problem with this — we ran the risk, we won the war, and now we just have to see things through to a reasonably stable endgame. (This, incidentally, is in fact where we are, depending on your definitions of “win” and “stable.”)

I wonder, though, where his logic would take us with Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and many others. Is this the foreign policy we want, or is it one we’ve been forced into, or is it one we could have avoided? And in stomping out one dictator — good riddance to him — have we not created the potential for many more, in the resentment that we have created elsewhere? These are questions Feith doesn’t answer, and I worry that no one quite has.

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