Restoring the awe

Restoring the awe

by digby

Zach Beauchamp at Vox made a smart simple observation about Iraq which seems to elude just about everyone. But then he makes a mistake.
To understand why the Middle East is in chaos today, and why the Obama administration seems to lack a playbook for how to respond, you need to understand the failed US strategy behind Bush's "mission accomplished" speech. It was emblematic of a huge shift in US strategy in the Middle East — one that had disastrous results.

Bush wanted to remake the Middle East: replace the region's autocracies with democracies, and solve America's terrorism problem in the process. But the plan failed. Iraq became embroiled in a vicious civil war. Iran grew in strength, kicking off an increasingly sectarian fight with Saudi Arabia that has fueled conflict throughout the region.

When the Arab Spring protests toppled governments in the region, it added to the chaos, and provided new theaters of conflict. Neither Bush's new plan nor the Cold War-era strategy that preceded it had any good answers for these problems.

This collapse in American strategy didn't cause the Arab Spring, or all of the chaos that followed it. But it was a huge contributor to the problems the region faces today — and explains why the United States seems totally unable to do anything about it.

All of that seems right to me. But he goes on to say that Bush administration believed after 9/11 that the middle east needed to be remade in order to stop jihadism and Iraq was the most logical place to start. But that's not the way it was. The policymakers in the Bush administration had been lobbying to go into Iraq long before there was any fear of jihadism. In fact, they barely acknowledged jihadism existed. Now it's true that they wanted to remake the middle east but it was for a host of reasons that had to do with maintaining American hegemony, oil, Israel etc. Jihadism wasn't even on their radar, hence the August 6th memorandum to which Bush replied, "ok you've covered your ass..."

Beauchamp quotes a number of Bush officials from their various books and interviews saying they were motivated by 9/11. But if it was, it was only because it gave them the excuse to do what they had wanted to do for a decade. Here's the document that shows what the policymakers pushing for war with Iraq were really thinking.

There are many reasons why various players wanted that war. But it's fair to say that those who wanted it most fervently all agreed with this quote from PNAC fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht:
"We have no choice but to re-instill in our foes and friends the fear that attaches to any great power.... Only a war against Saddam Hussein will decisively restore the awe that protects American interests abroad and citizens at home".
Let's just say that didn't exactly work out the way they planned it.

Setting motivations aside Beauchamp certainly gets this part right:
Iraq's collapse created a civil war that sucked in the region's powers and sowed sectarian strife around the region. That situation presaged America's current problems in the Middle East after the Arab Spring — and, in some ways, helped create them. And neither America's traditional Middle East policy nor Bush's revisionist strategy offered a way to respond to the chaos.

American policymakers were caught totally flat-footed by the freedom agenda's collapse. Administration officials had no plan for dealing with an Iraq consumed by sectarian civil war. "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick Cheney famously said just before the invasion.

Iraq wasn't the only place Bush's strategy backfired. At the US's behest, the Palestinian Authority held elections in 2006. The militant group Hamas won, eventually resulting in a Palestinian civil war and schism, with Hamas in charge of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority limited to the West Bank.

Bush's freedom agenda held no answers to these problems. While the US could topple dictatorships and force elections, it had no real ability to get Sunni Iraqis to trust a Shia-dominated Iraqi state. Hence why the 2007 troop surge, heralded as a success at the time, managed only to temporarily reduce violence rather than solve the sectarian grievances that would eventually drive Iraqi Sunnis into ISIS's arms.

Likewise, the US couldn't reform the deeply corrupt Palestinian Authority practices that fueled Hamas's popularity. Bush's democracy agenda didn't come with a plan B.

Bush's freedom agenda held no answers to these problems because it wasn't a real agenda. It was a PR campaign designed to make Americans feel good about themselves for invading a country that hadn't attacked us. And, to be fair, there were neoconservatives who actually wanted to believe this drivel about the "birthing of democracy."  I'm fairly sure that Bush was one of them.  (I used to always refer to them as  "starry-eyed neocons.") But you can bet Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't believe a bit of it --- they were part of a hardocre, imperial clacque that went all the way back to the 70s. To the extent they signed on to the "lighter side" of neoconservatism it was purely for propaganda purposes. Their motives were about showcasing American power, period.

It's dreary having to talk about this again. But the results in Iraq are what they are. Many people predicted it would come to something like this and maybe it was inevitable at some point. But regardless of their "true motivations" Bush' neoconservative cronies had been pushing for this thing since the first gulf war and knew they'd never have a better opportunity.

9/11 was a gift not a motive.

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