Disillusionment

Leon Wieseltier says that he is disillusioned by the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Like many on the Left, this disillusionments stems from the lack of stockpiles of the promised WMDs. Yet, his analysis for the reasons for going to war, and its strategic consequences are completely incorrect.

And so I was persuaded that the United States was facing a significant strategic threat and a significant humanitarian threat. Prudence and conscience brought me to the same conclusion.

But I was deceived. Strategic thinking must have an empirical foundation. You do not act against a threat for which there is little or no evidence. Yet that is precisely what the United States did.

Wieseltier's first mistake is to assume that the strategic reason for invading Iraq was the WMDs. I would say that if anything, the WMDs were the tactical reason within a much broader strategic reasoning. The strategic reasoning had to do with the threat posed to the United States by the economic and political stagnation of the entire Arab world. Iraq was simply a place to start the reconstruction of this mess. Additionally, the whole theory of pre-emption, which he says is now dead due to the lack of WMDs, relies on acting before a strategic threat emerges. This means oftentimes acting on incomplete intelligence. He continues:

It always seemed to me that the benefits to American security that would result from preventing a collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden (and I am under no illusion that the Baathism of the one or the Wahhabism of the other would stand in the way of their mutual anti-American convenience) would be substantially less than the costs to American security that would result from the introduction of an American army into the heart of the Arab world.

What Wieseltier sees as a by-product, "the introduction of an American army into the heart of the Arab world" was in fact one of the strategic reasons for going to war. 130,000 US troops sitting in this heart can do more to influence the actions of the surrounding regimes than all of the State Dept. diplomacy combined. One can argue whether the Army should actually be doing more vis-a-vis those regimes, but regardless, their presence in and of itself is causing a major readjustment of thinking there. Wieseltier then goes in to the familiar refrain of the Left that terrorism can not be fought militarily and that we need to take into account root causes.

We cannot fight Islamic radicalism, I mean militarily, without creating Islamic radicalism. The fight against Islamic radicalism must be political and cultural, which is why the fight against Islamic radicalism must not be conflated with the fight against Islamic terrorism.

As Israel has shown, it is possible and in fact necessary to fight Islamic terrorism and radicalism (a distinction without much of a difference) with military might. The key is to fight it correctly - as Victor Hanson, among others has pointed out.

Wieseltier then goes into the other justification for the war "the ennobling one". Here, he understands that the democratization of the Arab world is necessary for our security. His criticism here is that while this is a good goal it was poorly executed.

It is absolutely astonishing that the planners of this war expected only happiness in its wake. Their postwar planning seems to have consisted in a kind of reverse Augustinianism: goodness is the absence of evil, Saddam is evil, Saddam's absence is good. They failed to intuit all the other evils that would emerge in the absence of this evil. They did not recognize the multiplicity of Iraq's demons; which is to say, they did not recognize Iraq. Here, too, they operated unempirically, in a universe of definitions and congratulations.

It is fashionable to decry the poor post-war planning, and while it certainly could have been better, overall the reconstruction is going significantly better than could be expected from a thoroughly destroyed society, even if that good news is not being reported.