...tenth anniversary of the U. S. invasion of Iraq, and every columnist and blogger is saying "I was right," or "I was wrong," or "I'm sorry," or "I'm not sorry," or blah, blah, blah, blah.
(I'm not exactly sure what Tom Friedman is saying in his column this morning, but I remember what he said in the lead-up to the war ten years ago. And it was, in effect, I'm all for it -- as long as it works. What a profile in courage!)
But one columnist whom I remember -- very clearly -- as not taken in by the baloney sausage being peddled by the Bush administration at the time was Georgie Anne Geyer, above. I've gone back and read some of her pieces in the months before the conflict.
On September 27, 2001, just two weeks after the events of 9/11, Ms. Geyer wrote (all emphasis mine):
Certainly, difficult, even dark, days are to come. The internal debate
over taking the fight against terrorism and Osama bin Laden to Baghdad
and Saddam Hussein is fraught with the danger of overreaching, and it is
being fed by the proponents within the administration of the official
Israeli line in place of prudent American interests.
On October 25, 2001:
Parallel to the international war against terrorism, a smaller "war" of
interests, beliefs and realities is going on beneath the surface, which
could endanger the final outcome of everything that has been
accomplished since Sept. 11. So far, this parallel conflict is being
contained by cool heads in the administration, but that could change at
any time.
Essentially, the discussion is over Baghdad: whether Iraq
and its "state sponsorship" is really to blame for the terrorism that
has struck America and whether we should not then go "straight to
Baghdad." That simple exhortation is deeply misleading.
The "Get
Iraq" campaign, which to some people means finishing the Gulf War,
started within days of the September bombings, long before the anthrax
attacks and the new questions they raised. It emerged first and
particularly from pro-Israeli hard-liners in the Pentagon such as Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and adviser Richard Perle, but also
from hard-line neoconservatives, and some journalists and congressmen.
Soon
it became clear that many, although not all, were in the group that is
commonly called in diplomatic and political circles the
"Israeli-firsters," meaning that they would always put Israeli policy,
or even their perception of it, above anything else.
On November 29, 2001, Geyer warned against a second war:
With its careless talk about "getting Iraq next," the administration
is incongruously looking for big -- and totally unnecessary -- trouble.
From
the beginning of the anti-terrorist campaign nearly three months ago,
some groups have been push-push-pushing to also attack Baghdad,
including itchy neo-conservatives from the Reagan administration (who
seem to want the U.S. to attack everywhere), spokesmen for the Israeli
government position (whose genuine intention is to drive a wedge between
America and the Arab world) and various journalists and thinkers (who
need "the story" to change at least every week for their own purposes).
But
last week, the administration joined the "Get Iraq!" fray as well in
voices that were so strident and repetitive that one had to suspect
something was "up." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice chimed
into the discussion: "There is plenty of reason to make very clear to
the Iraqis that the United States does not intend to let the Iraqis
threaten their own people ... or threaten our interests by acquiring
weapons of mass destruction." President Bush said pugnaciously of Saddam
Hussein that "he'll see" what America would do next.
On February 28, 2002:
The White House is talking as if an attack on Iraq is an obvious
outcome of the Afghan operation. Officials say, however, that they are
being cautious -- they plan to have Saddam eliminated by the year 2005,
not next week. In the same breath, the Pentagon announces that arms
producers are working three shifts, 24 hours a day, to replenish all the
Air Force and Navy inventories that have run dangerously low during the
Afghan war. In a kind of offhand afterthought, they all acknowledge
that the United States would have no allies, no coalition and no bases
in such a war. The fierce looks of ideologically impassioned men and
women who don't have to fight elite-group wars seem to be saying: "So
what?"
In the last few weeks, I have spoken to several prominent
and public conservatives pushing for a war against Baghdad -- yesterday,
if possible! One smiled with an air of strange excitement when he
talked of the eventuality of "marching 100,000 American troops across
Iraq." For another one, that wasn't enough: He wanted us to take on
Somalia at the same time and "wipe out every man, woman and child who
had anything to do with the killing of our American troops in 1983." And
polls show Americans support the general idea of attacking Iraq.
Did I miss a beat somewhere? Have we somehow gone overnight from the
"common wisdom" of the 1990s, when supposedly Americans would not risk
the life of one single American boy, to an era when we're looking around
for, shall we say, "challenges"?
On March 19, 2002:
The obsession with "getting Iraq" or "going to Baghdad" seems to have
begun with some of President Bush's own personal impulses. Observers in
and around the White House have noted repeatedly, for instance, that the
president feels that it has fallen to him to complete his father's
unfinished Gulf War. At the same time, he is surrounded by both
perfervid and pugnacious neoconservatives and Israel-supporters who
enjoy the prospect of battle -- and who have become virtually the only
voices he hears.
On April 9, 2002:
Most of the people now influencing Bush strongly on the road to a
seemingly perpetual warfare -- men like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, military adviser Richard Perle and Irving and Bill Kristol --
are either combative neoconservatives, fervent Israeli supporters or
Christian conservatives. The majority of them, including their most
aggressive spokesmen, have never served in the military.
Yet they
don't hesitate to express their views; indeed, their influence has led
the president from fighting the immediate war against palpable
anti-American terrorism in Afghanistan and al-Qaida cells, to helping
Ariel Sharon dissolve Palestinian institutions and structures so he can
keep hold of Palestinian lands, to (in the works -- really!)
overthrowing governments from Iraq to Syria to Iran to North Korea. (And
I know I've missed a few.)
On April 25, 2002:
But larger messages are accompanying the "war fever" (invade Iraq,
change governments across the Middle East) being pressed upon the
president by the neo-conservatives, the Israeli lobby and his Christian
fundamentalist supporters. Surely the president's current posture has
stunned most analysts, who never expected these kinds of actions from
George W.
On June 18, 2002:
Such an attack is not a game over here, where you have real and dangerous neighbors and not only distant obsessions.
The talk in Washington about invading Iraq, after having dropped off a
while because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is crescendoing again
-- without a Middle East solution, without a coalition, without even
our old allies, like the Turks.
The administration's increasingly arrogant sense that America can do
anything in the world bumps rudely up against reality here.
Jump to January 7, 2003:
But the strangest factor about all of this news, to me at least, is how
silent the country is. Where is everybody? I'd say, "Cat got your
tongue?" but my cat wouldn't like it at all. Is anybody in the country
thinking about what is going on? And exactly what IS going on?
Current events indicate to me a discordant pattern of leadership in the
country, a leadership ruled by obsession over Iraq, despite the fact
that Afghanistan is still a dangerous and, at best, only half-finished
mission. They indicate to me a country in which the public is
disconnected from the acts of its elected officials; the real cost of
these wars is disconnected from the desire to wage them; and most
serious of all, the military is ever more disconnected from the public
as power flows to less traditionally controlled groups, such as the
Special Forces.
And at the top of the political pyramid, especially from the White House
to the Pentagon (the State Department still has some good sense left),
one hears repeatedly the siren call of "empire," like the lotus-eaters
on the Isle of Djerba in ancient times crying out to Ulysses' sailors
with their delicious narcotic treats and then holding them enchanted in
the prisons of their desires.
Behind Iraq and all the war talk, beyond the strange and excited looks
in the eyes of so many in the administration, they are really thinking
-- yes, really! -- that they are incubating a New American Empire.
Did Americans really vote for empire when they elected this president in
2000? Did they foresee a group of officials who would boast about
American-led wars stretching gloriously across the globe and essentially
subsuming our diplomacy, our humanitarian work, our
conflict-resolution, our political negotiating ability and our
principles into only The Military?
I know the answers. What is strange to me is that so few Americans are asking the questions.
On February 6, 2003:
The real questions, the ones lying somewhere in the shadows outside the
war fever that has seized this administration, are whether the Iraqi
dictator was behind 9/11 and whether he and al-Qaida are banded together
in terrorism. (You do remember back that far, don't you, when those
were the supposed reasons for going to war?) Those questions remain
unanswered.
On March 4, 2003:
With Iraq, the administration has all the fevered rhetoric, but not even
estimates for cost or casualties and no idea whatsoever about how the
military invasion of a country by a hostile power will lead to the
systematic transformation of an eternally embittered and brutalized
tribal people. Lucky country, Iraq: It must endure only the wild and
unquantifiable dream of Transformation and Empire.
Finally, on March 18, 2003:
So on what is the very brink of an American war against Iraq, all the
reasons for that war are dissolving, one after one, like drops of water
in the Iraqi sands.
First we saw the administration's "great truth" that al-Qaida was
actually sponsored by Iraq turn out to be totally false. No matter: They
moved on.
Now it would be weapons of mass destruction. When none were found (but
surely are there), the Bush zealots reverted to what has always been
their primary goal: to "reconfigure" first Iraq and then the entire
Middle East, with Israel as America's pro-consul in the region.
But if the State Department report, produced by its prestigious Bureau
of Intelligence and Research and provocatively named "Iraq, the Middle
East and Change: No Dominoes," is correct, this war is truly being
fought for a series of dangerous and deliberately orchestrated
delusions.
Go back and read some of these columns. Ms. Geyer was one of the only people I can remember who was spot-on in the lead up to this disastrous war.
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1 comment:
Scott Ritter and Hans Blix were right.
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