Why Are We in Iraq?
Sun Sep 23, 2007 at 04:23:17 AM PDT
In the 1960s and early 1970s, one of the most pressing political questions was "Why Are We in Vietnam?," which famously became the title of a novel/meditation/rant by Norman Mailer. But today's equivalent question--"Why Are We in Iraq?"--is not only unanswered, it's often unasked, especially inside the Beltway.
In an interesting and important exchange with Bob Guldin in the September 27 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Powers focuses on the failure of Congress, even since January, to ask the hard questions about why the Bush Administration attacked Iraq.
It's worth reading the whole thing, but Powers's conclusion is particularly important:
American political leaders, Republicans as well as Democrats, did not ask hard questions before voting for war in 2002, they have not asked hard questions about the President's goals in the five years since, and they are not asking hard questions now about the true nature and prospects of the bold imperial adventure which the White House PR machine insists on calling a "war on terror." I have thought from the first day of war that it would destroy two presidents—suck up all their energy and attention, while every other matter of importance was allowed to drift. Two presidents, I thought, because the second in the early flush of triumph at winning the White House would look for a new strategy to put off or disguise the reality of failure, much as Nixon did in 1969. Of course the new strategy would fail, and the new president would find him- or herself insisting that the new strategy needed more time, or that someone else—Iran perhaps—was to blame. The lesson of Vietnam is that it doesn't take long to get stuck. Not knowing why we went in allowed us to go in; not knowing why we should get out will make it impossible to get out. None of the presidential candidates seems to know why we are failing, or to understand what is imperial about the way we deal with Iraq, or to sense that a bigger war is just another mistake away. I don't know what we can do about this.
Powers emphasizes the wishful thinking among those who want to get us out of Iraq that worrying about the causes of the war is unnecessarily dwelling on the past, rather than a necessary step in extracting ourselves from this disaster...and assuring that we don't repeat it in the future.
Powers suggests that the invasion of Iraq might have been an enormous, imperialist gamble by Bush and his cronies, perhaps the attempt to do what American policy makers feared the Soviet Union would do following the invasion of Afghanistan: "control the movement of oil" in order to "provide a mighty tool for coercion of the entire developed world." Powers clearly sees this conclusion as speculative, pending the kind of question-asking that he's calling for.
But, like Vietnam before it, Iraq is both a departure from, and a continuation of, U.S. policy. And one of the core building blocs of the case for war, beyond the lies and dissimulations of the Bush administration, beyond the nonsense about WMDs and 9/11, beyond even the Administration's mysterious real reasons for the invasion that Powers is searching for, was the core assumption of our foreign policy elite, shared by all who are considered "serious," Republican and Democrat alike: that the "projection of military force" in defense of (flexibly defined) "vital national interests" is the very foundation of American foreign policy. Any argument in favor of the use of American military force is necessarily "serious" and worthy of consideration; any argument against the use of military force is assumed to be "unserious." Glenn Greenwald has recently blogged brilliantly about this.
This basic, bipartisan assumption in favor of militarism is why the administration's lies sounded so plausible to so many, why so many Democrats voted to give Bush the power to start a war, why even in the summer of 2004 the national Democratic Platform could say that "people of goodwill may disagree about whether America should have gone to war in Iraq" (p.8).
Confronting the question of why we're in Iraq is thus a matter not only of getting to the bottom of the extraordinary and radical imperial ambitions of this administration, but also of questioning the much more ordinary and consensual imperial ambitions that have marked this country's foreign policies since at least 1898.
Powers has powerfully discussed why nobody in DC is interested in doing the former. I think it's obvious why they're also uninterested in doing the latter.
Permalink | 53 comments