USA Today is the cultural equivalent of the back of the cereal box. But, importantly, it is the paper you get stuck reading when you're at the Comfort Inn, the same way you often get stuck watching Fox News. There it is, under your door or on your breakfast table, whether you like it or not. Some of the nuggets that appear there today in an
editorial are very tasty and very digestable. Finally, the popular wisdom, which includes "Raisin Bran's got two scoops" and so forth, now also includes statements like these:
[...] Bush made [pre-emption] central to his approach to the world. He trumpeted it, in September 2002, in a wide-ranging review called the National Security Strategy.
What happened next was a blunder of historic proportions that has made Americans less, not more, safe. The Bush Doctrine became the rationale for invading Iraq, a foe unrelated to al-Qaeda, three years ago this weekend. Better strike at Saddam Hussein, was the message, before he could strike at us with the weapons of mass destruction that, the intelligence showed, he was developing.
As the world now knows, the intelligence was wrong. Saddam had neither ties to bin Laden nor weapons of mass destruction. The cost of this misapplication of pre-emption -- in U.S. lives, money and credibility -- has been incalculable.
So what has Bush learned?
Officially, at least, not much. On Thursday, the White House published its first National Security Strategy since the one that enshrined the Bush Doctrine. Perhaps not surprisingly for an administration loath to admit error, the document casts Iraq as a pre-emption success. "With the elimination of Saddam's regime, this threat has been addressed once and for all," it declares. The pre-emption policy "remains the same."
Talk about learning the wrong lessons.
The Iraq invasion, far from being a success, provides a cautionary tale about just why strike-first needs to remain, as in the past, the final option. In Iraq, it vaulted to the top of the agenda. Key administration figures -- notably Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- had been itching for a war with Iraq long before 9/11. After the terror attacks, they asserted links between Saddam and al-Qaeda where there was none. Because the administration rushed into war without building alliances, few countries joined in.
After three years of turmoil, Iraq stands on the brink of civil war. Al-Qaeda operatives who weren't in Iraq before have gone there to fight U.S. forces. Neighboring Iran is increasingly influential with Iraqi Shiites, compounding the nuclear threat Iran presents.
Worse, because of Iraq, the U.S. ability to use pre-emption in the future, when it might really be needed, is weakened. Most of the world sees the USA as a global bully and its intelligence as suspect. U.S. forces are overstretched. And getting backing for a new pre-emptive attack from a public made wary by the Iraq experience would be difficult. [...]
(I love how USA Today still insists on calling us "the USA" every time the proper noun is needed.)
It was actually quite refreshing to read all the little truisms about the Iraq war that we've known for some time, but that the public up to now has been very reluctant to accept, now that these factoids have reached this sort of vernacular status. They're summarized here in simple snippets, in a form that would be right at home in a box called "Frosted Flakes Fun Facts". Your 6-year-old could understand them. Iraq War bad. Bushies bad.
And this morning, right along with those dry-edged danishes from the plastic rack and that coffee that could have been a little stronger and tasted a little less like Cracker Jack, the people of America digested these tasty, nutritious nuggets. Mmmmm, MMMM.