Zakaria's Confusion

Fareed Zakaria writes today about the continuing debate about whether it was right to invade Iraq, and in so doing wanders into the confusion that the soft left encounters when analyzing the issue. At first, Zakaria asserts that Kerry is right and that Bush is being disingenuous in saying that his decision on Iraq would be the same even with the knowledge that WMDs would not be found.

Is Bush suggesting that despite this knowledge he would still have concluded that Iraq constituted a "grave and gathering threat" that required an immediate, preventive war? Please.

Yet, he then goes on to show that the sanctions regime had become a farce, and that undoubtedly when those would be removed, Saddam would have restarted (or reaccelerated) his WMD programs which we know existed. So then what is the issue? Should we have invaded or not? His argument is then that while it may have been the right thing to invade Iraq, the way that the Bush Administration did it was wrong.

Did the United States have to go to war before the weapons inspectors had finished their job? Did it have to junk the U.N. process? Did it have to invade with insufficient troops to provide order and stability in Iraq? Did it have to occupy a foreign country with no cover of legitimacy from the world community? Did it have to ignore the State Department's postwar planning? Did it have to pack the Iraqi Governing Council with unpopular exiles, disband the army and engage in radical de-Baathification? Did it have to spend a fraction of the money allocated for Iraqi reconstruction -- and have that be mired in charges of corruption and favoritism? Was all this an inevitable consequence of dealing with the problem of Saddam Hussein?

In response to the first two questions, is 12 years of inspections and UN "process" not enough time? How much longer should we have waited? And does he really believe that if we had just begged the UN a little more, France and Russia would have agreed to an invasion? For an astute political observer, Zakaria is either being naive or simply ignoring facts that don't fit his argument.

As to the other questions, it is easy to say now that something the Administration did didn't work. But to say that there was no plan, is simply wrong. A large part of the problem with the post-war occupation was the result of the military plan succeeding much better than anticipated. No one expected that Baghdad would fall so quickly - the expectation was that it would take at least a month to take the city. And in that time, the additional troops - the 4th Infantry Division which was supposed to come South through Turkey until the Turks refused, as well as various MP and civil affairs units - would have had time to arrive in Iraq to stabilize the situation on the ground. Not withstanding Zakaria's Monday-morning-quarterbacking, there was a plan but as so often happens it did not "survive first contact with the enemy". Arguing that we should have done it, but done it differently is a cop-out. The fact is that a President Kerry would have never invaded Iraq. And that is where the difference lies.