Charles Krauthammer has used his column in the Washington Post to be one of the biggest cheerleaders for invading Iraq. Krauthammer is also scathing towards all those who disagree with him. I found it very interesting to review Krauthammer's evolution on Iraq.
His first mention of invading Iraq was 4/19/02, when Krauthammer said the US shouldn't get involved in the Arab-Israeli dispute:
the detour into the morass of Arab-Israeli diplomacy risks diverting America's diplomatic, political and military energies from our supreme national objective: fighting anti-American terror. Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us. We cannot hold the self-defense of the United States hostage to the solving of a century-old regional conflict. This idea that we cannot fight Iraq without a consensus of Arab states behind us is absurd. We need two countries, Kuwait in the south and Turkey in the north. We're already moving our command-and-control out of Saudi Arabia into Qatar. What exactly was Egypt's contribution to victory in the Gulf War? Or perhaps we need those crack Syrian troops who watched us take Kuwait City.
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Above all, we must not be diverted from our supreme national objective: defeating and destroying those who did Sept. 11 and those planning the next Sept. 11.
August is when Kruathammer really gets on the Iraqi invasion band wagon. On 8/17, he mocked the
NY Times coverage of the opposition to invading Iraq and he did so again on
9/13. He has a couple of columns (
here and
here denouncing Democrats for wanting UN support before invading Iraq. On 10/7, Krauthammer summarized the
agruments for and against invading:
There are two logically coherent positions one can take on war with Iraq. Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is simply intolerable--and must be pre-empted.
Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare. It would likely increase the chances of weapons of mass destruction being loosed by a Saddam facing extinction and with nothing to lose. Moreover, Saddam has as yet never used these weapons against America and its allies because he is deterred by our overwhelming power. Why disturb the status quo? Deterrence served us well against such monsters as Stalin and Mao. It will serve us just as well in containing a much weaker Saddam.
But he then blasts the Democrats for taking a third position:
But, ah, there is a third way. It is the position of Democratic Party elders Al Gore, Ted Kennedy (both of whom delivered impassioned speeches attacking the president's policy) and, as far as can be determined, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. This Third Way accepts all the premises of the antiwar camp. It gives us all the reasons why war could be catastrophic: chemical or bioweapon attacks, door-to-door fighting in Baghdad, alienating allies, destroying the worldwide coalition of the war on terror, encouraging the recruitment of new terrorists, etc.
Moreover, they argue, deterrence works. ``I have seen no persuasive evidence,'' said Kennedy, ``that Saddam would not be deterred from attacking U.S. interests by America's overwhelming military superiority.'' So far, so good. But then these senior Democratic critics, having eviscerated the president's premises, proceed to enthusiastically endorse his conclusion--that Saddam's weapons facilities must be subjected to the most intrusive and far-reaching inspection, and that if he cheats and refuses to cooperate, we must go to war against him.
This is utterly incoherent. In principle, a search for genocidal weapons that can be hidden in a basement or even a closet cannot possibly succeed without the full cooperation of the host government. There is not a serious person on the planet who believes that Saddam will give it.
Actually, the position Krauthammer assigned to the Democrats was the official position at that time of Dubya and his administration, but Krauthammer apparently knew that Dubya's position was all propaganda and the decision had been made for invading. So far, Krauthammer has been relatively consistant with his logic for invading Iraq:
(1) Saddam has weapons of mass destruction
(2) Saddam is working on nuclear weapons
(3) Saddam "has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us"
Therefore, invading Iraq is a part of "our supreme national objective: fighting anti-American terror."
For a while, Krauthammer discussed UN weapons inspections. He is highly critical of the idea, but for a while seemed to take the position that if Saddam allowed "serious, coercive inspections" then we would not need to invade. On 10/18, Krauthammer savaged the French for blocking in the UN Security Council a draft resolution calling for invading Iraq if Saddam doesn't allow inspections. On 11/1, Krauthammer laid out what he thinks the UN Security council should pass:
For the American threat to disarm Saddam to retain any credibility, State will have to hang on to three elements of the current U.S. draft resolution:
(a) Citing Saddam as being in ``material breach'' of the resolutions he signed to end the Gulf War. Material breach is recognized as a casus belli.
(b) Threatening ``serious consequences'' if Saddam does not comply with the new inspection regime.
(c) Devising a tough inspection regime that not only includes Saddam's presidential ``palaces'' but allows the safe and free interrogation of Iraqi scientists who know where the weapons are--which means taking them out of the country and giving their families asylum if they so request.
However, by 11/15, Krauthammer rejected inspections as doomed to failure and wrote that the US needs to avoid the
"inspections trap". On
1/10/03, he wrote:
It is impossible to find weapons of mass destruction in an uncooperative country. Even strong, determined inspectors will fail. Look: The United States was attacked with anthrax--and over a year later we still can't find the stuff even with the cooperation of the entire national government and every law enforcement agency in sight. How do you expect to find anthrax in a country in which the
authorities are hiding it?
Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix is neither strong nor determined. He was handpicked by France and Russia in 2000 for precisely that reason. (When it was suggested to an administration official that Blix was Inspector Clouseau, he protested that this was unfair: ``Clouseau was trying to find stuff.'') Everyone knows that the only way to find weapons is to question Iraqi scientists under conditions of protective asylum outside Iraq. Yet Blix has contemptuously dismissed this option as running ``an abduction agency.''
Instead, he is running a farce.
On 1/24, Krauthammer
restates his case for war:
The president cannot logically turn back. He says repeatedly, and rightly, that inspectors can only verify a voluntary disarmament. They are utterly powerless to force disarmament on a regime that lies, cheats and hides. And having said, again correctly, that the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam is an intolerable threat to the security of the United States, there is no logical way to rationalize walking away from Iraq--even if the president wanted to.
Nor can the president turn back politically. He began the march on Iraq with his State of the Union address a year ago. He identified the axis of evil as the single greatest threat to America and the world. To now admit that he can and will do nothing to meet that very threat would not just leave him without a foreign policy, it would destroy his credibility as a leader.
Most importantly, there is no turning back geopolitically. After the liberation of Afghanistan, the United States made disarming Iraq the paramount American security objective in the post-9/11 world. To now pass off Iraq to hapless Hans for ``containment'' 1990s-style would shatter the credibility of post-9/11 American resolve that was achieved by the demonstration of American power and will in Afghanistan.
After a column denouncing Clinton's lack of action on
Iraq, North Korea and terrorism, Krauthammer writes three columns (
here,
here and
here) telling the President to ignore the UN Security Council (and France is evil). The President follows Krauthammer's advice and Krauthammer gets the war he has been agitating for. Once the fighting started, Krauthammer wrote several columns on how great the war was going. In his
3/28 column, he mocked the press for panicing when military progress slowed down. Krauthammer made his first mention of his ideas for post-war Iraq - that the US should "use the authority of the victor to build a decent and open society." On 4/4, Krauthammer gleefully wrote about how the troops were already at
the gates of Baghdad. In his
4/10 column, Krauthammer wrote:
Gulf War II--the Three Week War (or possibly, Four)--is a monumental event: the first war ever aimed at destroying a totalitarian regime--and sparing the invaded country.
:
Which is what makes the Three Week War a revolution in world affairs. It is one thing to depose tin-pot dictators. Anyone can do that. It is another thing to destroy a Stalinist demigod and his elaborate apparatus of repression--and leave the country standing. From Damascus to Pyongyang, totalitarians everywhere are watching this war with shock and awe.
The fact that his entire justification for the war - Saddam's WMD's - hadn't be found yet didn't bother him. In fact, on 4/21 Krauthammer then mocked the Russian foreign minister for
wanting to know where the WMD's are before agreeing to end sanctions against Iraq.
On 5/2, Krauthammer said that the critics are wrong when they suggest "that Iraq's Shiite majority will turn it into another intolerant Islamic republic"
There is no reason to believe that Iranian-inspired Shiite fundamentalists will be any more successful in Iraq. Iraqi society is highly fractured along lines of ethnicity, religion, tribe, region and class. It is in the interest of all of them, most particularly the Kurdish and Sunni minorities who together make up about 40 percent of the country, to ensure that no one group wields absolute, dictatorial power over the rest. And, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld correctly pointed out, America is there to make sure that doesn't happen. One man, one vote, one time is not democracy.
Moreover, Shiism is not a hierarchical religion like Roman Catholicism. It is extremely decentralized. Among the Shiite majority itself, there are myriad ideological and political factions. Islamic scholar Hillel Fradkin points out that Khomeiniism--the seizure of political power by clerics--is contrary to centuries of Shiite tradition and thus alien and anathema to many Iraqi Shiites.
Does this mean that Jeffersonian democracy is guaranteed in Baghdad? Of course not. But the United States is in a position to bring about a unique and potentially revolutionary development in the Arab world: a genuinely pluralistic, open and free society.
That invasion plan that Krauthammer wrote so glowingly about? Well, Krauthammer suddenly notices a big problem with it:
The administration erred, however, by going initially for an occupation ``light.'' It did so understandably at first, victory having come so swiftly and crushingly that there were no existing institutions such as police or army to fill the vacuum, and simply not enough American soldiers for adequate seizure of full power.
:
Our problem in postwar Iraq has been a paucity of force, rather than an excess. The way to succeed is with an occupation ``heavy.'' The administration is hurriedly sending in about 4,000 more soldiers, heavy with MPs, and not a moment too soon.
On 5/16, Krauthammer writes
how evil Saddam was:
Torturer, murderer, plunderer, despoiler. ``We've gotten rid of him,'' said presidential candidate Howard Dean, prewar darling of the Democratic left. ``I suppose that's a good thing.'' It was a very good thing. A noble thing. And rebuilding the place that Saddam destroyed is an even nobler thing.
Could this be because the US still has found any of the WMD's that Krauthammer knew Saddam had? On 6/13, Krauthammer mentions the
missing WMD's:
The inability to find the weapons is indeed troubling, but only because it means that the weapons remain unaccounted for and might be in the wrong hands. The idea that our inability to thus far find the WMDs proves that the threat was phony and hyped is simply false.
:
If Saddam had no chemical weapons, why did coalition forces find thousands of gas masks and atropine syringes in Iraqi army bunkers? And does anybody believe that President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and General Franks ordered U.S. soldiers outside Baghdad to don heavy, bulky, chemical-weapons suits in scorching heat--an encumbrance that increased their risks in conventional combat and could have jeopardized their lives--to maintain a charade?
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Everyone thought Saddam had weapons because we knew for sure he had them five years ago and there was no evidence that he disposed of them. The WMD- hyping charge is nothing more than the Iraqi museum story Part II: A way for opponents of the war--deeply embarrassed by the mass graves, torture chambers and grotesque palaces discovered after the war--to change the subject and relieve themselves of the shame of having opposed the liberation of 25 million people.
Opponents of the war are trying to change the subject by bring up what Krauthammer said is
the reason we should invade Iraq? On
7/18, Krauthammer writes that we didn't invade Iraq because Saddam
had WMD's, but because he was
eventually going to have them. On
7/25, Krauthammer says it is okay that there are no WMD's because
everyone thought Saddam had them. As France and Russia didn't invade Iraq, it doesn't matter what they suspected. If you are going to invade a country, you shouldn't suspect, you shouldn't believe, you should
know. In his 7/25 column, Krauthammer also introduced that idea that success in the War on Terror hings on Iraq:
If we win the peace and leave behind a decent democratic society, enjoying, as it does today, the freest press and speech in the entire Arab world, it will revolutionize the region. And if we leave in failure, the whole region will fall back into chaos, and worse.
Krauthammer then stopped writing about Iraq for nearly two months, then he start denouncing Democrats for criticizing the President on the war. On 9/19, he denounced the Democrats who criticized the administration for spending $20 billion rebuilding Iraq. On 9/26, he denounced Democrats for saying that the invasion was politically motivated. On 10/3, Krauthammer returned to Iraq itself, saying that though some mistakes had been made, Bremer "has done remarkably well". Remember this quote, "Losing the peace? No matter what anyone says now, that question will only be answered at the endpoint. If in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated."
On 10/10, Krauthammer finally discusses Iraq's WMD's - his whole justification for invading but turned up missing. Krauthammer doesn't rule out that we will find WMD's some day. However, he jumps on Kay's "WMD-related program activities" to justify the invasion:
The fact that he was not stockpiling is relevant only to the question of why some prewar intelligence was wrong about Iraq's WMD program. But it is not relevant to the question of whether a war to pre-empt his development of WMDs was justified. The fact that Saddam may have decided to go from building up stocks to maintaining clandestine production facilities (may have: remember, Kay still has 120 depots to go through) does not mean that he got out of the WMD business. Otherwise, by that logic, one would have to say that until the very moment at which the plutonium from its 8,000 processed fuel rods are wedded to waiting nuclear devices, North Korea does not have a nuclear program. Saddam was simply making his WMD program more efficient and concealable. His intent and capacity were unchanged.
As things continue to go South in Iraq, Krauthammer on 10/31 reassured his readers:
What makes success for the saboteurs still dubious, however, is that they do not represent a true guerrilla force. They are nothing like the successful Vietnamese, Chinese or Cuban guerrillas who were, in Mao's famous phrase, ``fish swimming in the sea of the people.''
The Saddam loyalists swim in a small lake. They represent the deeply loathed Baathist regime with just a small constituency at home -- bolstered by foreign terrorists who may speak for a general kind of Islamism but are no more loved by Iraqis than they were by the Afghans, who despised them.
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The war in Iraq now consists of a race: the U.S. is racing to build up Iraqi police and armed forces capable of taking over the country's security -- before the Saddam loyalists and their jihadist allies can produce that single, Beirut-like car bomb that so discourages Americans (and Iraqis) that we withdraw in disarray. Who wins the race? If this president remains in power, the likelihood is that we do.
Again, Krauthammer ignore Iraq for nearly two months, then the capture of Saddam put Krauthammer into a gleeful mood in his 12/19 column. The good mood extended into the next week and the week after, when he wrote that "domino effects of the Iraq campaign" were bringing improvements all over the Middle East.
Then David Kay announced that there were definitely no WMD's. How did Krauthammer respond to the news that his justification for war was completely wrong. In his column, he again used the "everyone thought Saddam had WMD's" line. Let me give you analogy as to why that is a terrible excuse. Let's say there are two brothers, Bob and Bill. Bob and Bill like to talk stocks, and they both agree that XYZ corporation looks promising. Bob takes a small portion of his retirement money and buys some XYZ shares (the equivalent of France and Russia's continuing support for sanctions). Bill takes his life savings and his parents life savings and invest it all in highly leveraged purchases of XYZ shares (the equivalent of Dubya's stake his and the country's future on Iraq). It turns out that the CEO of XYZ was cooking the books and the price of the stock plummeted. Bill lost his house and so did Bob and Bill's parents. When Bob confronts Bill on why he stupidly put everything on XYZ corpoation, Bill says, "You thought the stock was a good buy, too!" The moral which Krauthammer misses - don't bet everything on hunch, even if others agree with your hunch. He also uses the "WMD-related activities" line and then offers up a false choice - "The U.S. could have either retreated and allowed Saddam free rein -- or gone to war and removed him." Choice number 3, particularly after the UN inspectors couldn't find any WMD's, was to offer to lift the sanctions in return for a continuous aggressive monitoring of Iraq. That is the last Krauthammer has written on WMD's.
Now, two and half months later, Krauthammer again writes about Iraq. Remember all that about how building a "genuinely pluralistic, open and free society" was the key to winning the War on Terror? Well, that is all gone now:
Our goal has been to build a united, pluralistic, democratic Iraq in which the factions negotiate their differences the way we do in the West. It is a noble goal. It would be a great achievement for the Middle East. But it may be a bridge too far. That may happen in the future, when Iraq has had time to develop the habits of democracy and rebuild civil society, razed to the ground by Saddam.
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This is no time for despair. We must put down the two rebellions -- Fallujah's and Sadr's -- to demonstrate our seriousness, then transfer power as quickly as we can to those who will inherit it anyway, the Shiite majority with its long history of religious quietism and wariness of Iran. And antagonism toward their former Sunni oppressors. If the Sunnis continue to resist and carry on a civil war, it will then be up to the Shiites to fight it, not for Americans to do it on their behalf.