Dwight Stephens

In his column on 1/11/07, “The Fog Over Iraq,” David Brooks notes that the Democrats have criticized Bush’s proposal to send more troops to Iraq without offering any better alternative. Brooks notes that “[t]he centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly.” Good analogy.

And then there are those, like Senator Joe Biden, who might have the right idea, but are four years too late. According to David Brooks, “Joe Biden, who has the most intellectually serious framework for dealing with Iraq, was busy yesterday, at the crucial decision-making moment, conducting preliminary fact-finding hearings, complete with forays into Iraqi history.”

Where was this intellectually serious, preliminary fact-finding foray into Iraqi history before the invasion? The Senate dropped the ball. President Bush has recently turned for advice to some of the Old Guard from his dad’s Administration. Before charging into Iraq in search of WMDs and to topple Hussein, the Senate and President Bush might have been well-advised to heed the following sage advice from one of Bush the Elder’s principal advisors during the first Gulf War. Immediately after the first Gulf War, there was a significant amount of Monday morning quarterbacking and criticism of the U.S. decision not to pursue the Iraqi troops and finish them and Saddam Hussein off. The war was an overwhelming military success. Hussein’s unprovoked act of agression against a peaceful neighbor was a “last straw” that in the eyes of many, could have easily justified going all the way to Bagdad and toppling Hussein’s regime. What was the thinking inside the Bush White House? Emboldened, the Shiites began to revolt. It looked then like they might have welcomed us as liberators.
“Q: What was your advice to the President about those uprisings?

President’s Advisor: I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq. We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait but the idea of going into Baghdad for example or trying to topple the regime wasn’t anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict, that this was a dangerous difficult part of the world, if you recall we were all worried about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the Iranians restarting the conflict that they’d had in the eight year bloody war with the Iranians and the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had concerns about the Kurds in the north, the Turks get very nervous every time we start to talk about an independent Kurdistan.

Plus there was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim that we hadn’t talked to anybody about. That you hadn’t gotten Congress to approve, hadn’t talked to the American people about. You’re going to find yourself in a situation where you’ve redefined your war aims and now set up a new war aim that in effect would detract from the enormous success you just had. What we set out to do was to liberate Kuwait and to destroy his offensive capability, that’s what I said repeatedly in my public statements. That was the mission I was given by the President. That’s what we did. Now you can say well you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam, I don’t think so I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.

* * *

I think if Saddam wasn’t there that his successor probably wouldn’t be notably friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States for the next hundred years it’s going to be the world’s supply of oil. We’ve got a lot of friends in the region. We’re always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it’s part of our national character, you know we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war and the problem goes away and it doesn’t work that way in the Middle East it never has and isn’t likely to in my lifetime.

We are always going to have to be involved there and Saddam is just one more irritant but there’s a long list of irritants in that part of the world and for us to have done what would have been necessary to get rid of him–certainly a very large force for a long time into Iraq to run him to ground and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And you then have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go muck around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it. I think the, the decision the President made in effect to stop when we did was the right one.”

So, who was Bush the Elder’s prescient advisor? Richard Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, interviewed by Frontline after the War. (For more of the interview, see pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/cheney/2.html).

What happened to this “institutional knowledge” about Iraq, based on its history, that was at all times inside the institution at President Bush’s shoulder? Why hasn’t anybody asked Dick Cheney whether similar concerns were raised before the second Gulf War? And, as “Baghdad burns,” Joe Biden and the Senate conduct “preliminary fact-finding forays into Mideast history” to decide what should be done now. Maybe somebody should ask him why now and not before as a preliminary step in overseeing the President’s decisions to commit U.S. troops in Iraq and spend billions of dollars? $400 billion and counting.
While “better late than never” is true many times, sometimes late is the same thing as never. Unfortunately, when it comes to studying Iraqi history and culture, this may be one of those times. Instead, it may be time to face what appears to be the inevitable and pull the tooth–quickly–and get on with treating the pain. Maybe it won’t be as bad as predicted. But better to do so sooner rather than later.