Quasi
an outlet for writers
April 1, 2003
Volume 2, Issue 2
Watchfulness, Strength, and Humility
Those are the themes which run through the articles in this month's edition. These are the virtues that we can use to respond to the topics explored in this issue. One major topic that is addressed is two-pronged: the war in Iraq is going to take longer than most expected, and so that gives the anti-war movement, much of which is anti-American and hates President Bush with a personal venom, time to develop their arguments and try to persuade the public that the war is a failure. Unfortunately, it is argued, the efforts of those who seek to undermine the war effort through biased media coverage or misinformation may end up costing more lives, both American and Iraqi.
Second, watchfulness is needed to examine the arguments and logic of the anti-American sentiment, which has its roots on college campuses. Andrew Sullivan has written a scathing rebuke to those who equate President Bush with a terrorist (anti-war protesters wear shirts asserting that very thing), and takes their argument to its logical end. I think this is probably the must-read piece of the three below.
Lastly, I have also included a piece from Sullivan that explains who is responsible for the war in Iraq, in both positive and negative ways. He is preempting both blame-shifting in the event of a debacle, and illegitimate praise-grabbing in the event of a successful campaign. If you can read two, read this one as well.
On the website, I've included two other articles, one by a fellow who went to Iraq to be a human shield and was dramatically impacted in his thinking by his experience there. The second article is by a Christian writer on how our own attitudes in this time are important, and should be characterized by humility.
Much of this issue's content is again derived from Andrew Sullivan, who is an amazing for both how much writing he is able to do and for how insightful and intelligent his thoughts are. Again, he posts daily at andrewsullivan.com.
As always, send me your thoughts, and if you run across anything helpful, informative or interesting, send it my way and I'll consider it for inclusion in the next issue.
-- Jon
--------
Digging In
The Anti-War Movement's Long-Term Effects
by Jon Ward
I have met the anti-war movement while interviewing protesters on the street, watching protests on TV, and reading editorials opposed to the war. While there are intelligent and informed and objective objectors to the war, they appear to be few and far between. The majority of those opposed to the war in Iraq seem to be either uninformed or malicious.
There is a sliding scale for those who are uninformed. They cover a broad range. There are high-schoolers who have got nothing better to do, like a D.C. student I met at a demonstration in front of the White House. When I asked him where the U.S. was basing its invasion of Iraq from, he said quizzically, "Bangleadad?" At the same protest, I met an 18-year-old Jordanian woman who had read up on things rather well.
However, certain organs of the mainstream press have come under fire as being anti-war as well, most notably the British Broadcasting Company, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. Of course, everyone says Fox News is pro-war and just as biased in the opposite direction, but Andrew Sullivan, who has been sounding the horn loudly about "the Beeb", as he calls it, says that the aims of the liberal media's anti-war bias underscore a deeper conflict within and without America. It is a conflict against all things American, and Sullivan argues that anti-war reporting will give the Iraqi army higher morale (unjustifiably so) and lower the morale of Iraqis who want to fight back against a repressive regime but will only run the risk if they think victory is at hand. The consequence of just these two effects would be prolonged fighting and therefore more casualties on both sides.
Sullivan recently posted this email he received. "I am an Emmy award-winning, documentary film producer with 30-plus years of experience on five continents," the e-mailer writes. "For the last two years I have been working in Europe and stuck in a hotel that has as its only English-language TV channel, BBC World. Fortunately, I have access via the Web to a far wider understanding of what's going on in the world. I am more than appalled over BBC's blatant and incessant propaganda; I am deeply concerned to the point of perhaps being, well, frightened. The BBC is clearly and unambiguously the most corrupt and dangerous English-language media force in the world today."
Strong words. Sullivan says it underscores a deeper and broader conflict. "It is important to remember, I think, that the war isn't just between the West and Saddam. There's also a political and ideological war within the West," Sullivan wrote. "The anti-war crowd have lost the argument about going to war; so they are determined to win the case during and after it. They want this war to be regarded as a disaster. And it's up to the rest of us to fight back, expose them, and keep people focused on reality, not pro-Saddam and anti-Western spin. I need your help in this, so keep those press clips coming. Blogs are another weapon. We should use them."
The interesting thing about his attacks on the BBC is that the anti-war side makes the argument that it is the government which issues propaganda, and of course that accusation has some merit. Of course the government is going to emphasize that which reflects well on them. Yet the government has embedded journalists in every nook and cranny of this war to make sure that the real story gets out. Some have criticized that the Pentagon knew that reporters would bond with troops and censor themselves as a result, but the bottom line is that they're going to report what happens, for the most part. Sullivan is saying that it's not the government releasing propaganda, but rather the premier news service in the world.
Sullivan wrote on the 27th about the effect that the anti-war movement may have in a protracted war in Iraq. "If the war is more protracted, that makes the home front much more important. The propaganda organs against this war will fight hard to weaken American resolve. They are Saddam's only real hope - that Americans will tire of casualties, lose confidence, and make some sort of deal with the devil. With this president, that won't happen. But heaven knows, the anti-war right and left will do all they can to derail a war they so fiercely opposed. They will use even the slightest civilian casualties, however tiny in relative terms, into an hysterical campaign to foment regional unrest and sap morale at home. We have to counter and challenge their every argument. And the White House needs to be clearer now than ever that we intend to win no matter what, and that winning means unconditional surrender of the regime. We have to reiterate tirelessly that we are morally in the right; that a regime that is
sending its own troops into battle at the point of a gun deserves to die; that a gangster's mob cannot and will not be allowed to terrorize a country and a region for much longer. And at some point, if Saddam's terror mob doesn't crack, we have to live with the higher numbers of civilian and military casualties that a less squeamish battle to destroy it might require. We're not at that point yet - far from it. We're actually still within reach of an amazingly casualty-free victory. But if it comes, and I deeply hope it doesn't, we must simply aim at victory. If we have to live
without a perfect scenario - regime collapse, infrastructure intact, civilians spared to an historically unprecedented degree - we have to."
I've noticed Sullivan's rhetoric become more animated as the war has progressed. I think that's inevitable given the fact that he's come down clearly on side of a very passionate debate. He also wrote about how the Iraqis are trying to use our own press and our own psyches against us. This has been on my mind lately as well--the extreme left, or the politically correct movement, whatever title they bear, by virtue of their blood-curdling screams against any missteps by our military, have actually put our own troops in harm's way. Our pilots wait for eons to receive confirmation of targets as they fly over anti-aircraft fire, our troops must sit in the field as they are fired upon, unable to fire back because the Iraqis are shielding themselves with civilians, knowing that we must adhere to certain rules. I don't have an easy answer for that situation--I am not going to say I favor shooting civilians--but certainly the "peace" movement has not made things any easier in this regard.
Sullivan writes: "The setbacks the allies have suffered these last couple of days are all due to one thing: some Saddam units acting as terrorists. By pretending to surrender and then opening fire, by relocating in civilian neighborhoods, by shooting prisoners of war in the head, the soldiers apparently still loyal to Saddam are not reversing the allied advance. What they're doing is trying to inflict sufficient damage to improve their morale and increase the costs of the invasion. They want us to fire into civilian areas; they want us to panic at a few atrocities (as in
Somalia); they are counting on an American unwillingness to persevere through serious casualties. And they intend to use the Arab media and their Western sympathizers, i.e. the BBC, NYT, NPR etc., to get this message out. The lesson to learn is that we have cornered the equivalent of a rabid dog. It will fight nastily, brutally and with no compunction. Those units who will go down with this regime will not go down easily. After an initial hope that this thing could be over swiftly, I think it's obvious by now that we're in for a nasty fight - and the Saddamite remnants will ally with the anti-war media to fight dirty and spin shamelessly."
Sullivan delves deeper into anti-American sentiment in the piece following this, but I thought it was interesting to see how that sentiment is playing in some of our media outlets to have a real and often negative effect on the battlefield. However, I do think that many Americans are smart enough to see the irrationality of many of the far left's statements regarding war. "You are against violence in all situations? There are no conflicts that require the use of force for resolution?" Many are sharp enough to see the stupidity of positions like that, which are usually held by people who don't know any better. There are few people like Ghandi, who actually believed that.
When asked what should have been done to prevent the Holocaust, Ghandi said that a large segment of Jews should have committed suicide to draw the attention of the world to the injustices committed by the Nazis. That is pacifism taken to its logical end. Say what you want about whether you disagree or not, but at least Ghandi had thought through his beliefs and was willing to stand by them, unlike so many today who simply throw jingos and personal statements in the political and social arena to achieve a short-term end, believing that the ends justifies the means.
Sullivan takes the anti-war protesters argument to its logical end in the article following this. The question is, how much of the anti-war movement really believes it?
-----
A Million Mogadishus
The Far Left's Wish?
by Andrew Sullivan
The coming weeks are going to be critical for the left in this country for a very simple reason. Legitimate, important, valid or even extreme and hyperbolic arguments before a war are one thing. But they have a different salience when they are made during a war - especially one that has barely even begun. There are already polling suggestions that the anti-war movement is at this point bolstering public support for the war. But if the anti-war rhetoric among the extreme left continues in the same vein as it has this first week, the marginalization of the left in this country, already profound, might become irreversible. Let me take two comments this past week. In the Boston Globe, James Carroll explicitly denied any moral difference between the regime in Baghdad and the administration in Washington. He described the "shock and awe" air campaign as if it were the direct equivalent of 9/11:
"And what, exactly, would justify such destruction? What would make it an act of virtue? And is it possible to imagine that such violence could be wreaked in a spirit of cold detachment, by controllers sitting at screens dozens, hundreds, even thousands of miles distant? And in what way would such "decapitation" spark in the American people anything but a horror to make memories of 9/11 seem a pleasant dream? If our nation, in other words, were on its receiving end, illusions would lift and we would see "shock and awe" for exactly what it is - terrorism pure and simple."
This lazy form of moral equivalence is not rare among the radical left in this country. But it is based on a profound moral abdication: the refusal to see that a Stalinist dictatorship, that murders its own civilians, that sends its troops into battle with a gun pointed at their heads, that executes POWs, that stores and harbors chemical weapons, that defies twelve years of U.N. disarmament demands, that has twice declared war against its neighbors, and that provides a safe haven for terrorists of all stripes, is not the moral equivalent of the United States under president George W. Bush. There is, in fact, no comparison whatever. That is not jingoism or blind patriotism or propaganda. It is the simple undeniable truth. And once the left starts equating legitimate acts of war to defang and depose a deadly dictator with unprovoked terrorist attacks on civilians, it has lost its mind, not to speak of its soul.
9/11 and our current campaign against Saddam are, if anything, polar opposites. With overwhelming firepower and complete air command, the allies in Iraq could reduce Baghdad to rubble if they wanted to. Instead they are achieving what might be an historically unprecedented attempt to win a war while avoiding civilian casualties. Even if you take Iraqi numbers of dead at face value, even if you believe that every explosion in Baghdad has been the result of allied airpower, the number of civilian casualties is still minuscule, compared the force being used. On 9/11, in contrast, the entire aim of the exercise was to kill as many civilians as possible. For James Carroll to equate the two is a moral obscenity.
How big a leap is it from decrying allied warfare as terrorism to actually actively supporting the Baghdad regime against U.S. troops? In the past two years, we have indeed seen some misguided Americans fighting for the Taliban; we have seen human shields attempting to support Saddam's war crimes; we have seen an American soldier try to kill his own fellow service members; we have seen extremist Muslim Americans murder people in sniper fire and at airport counters. These people are very few in number, and should not be conflated with the "anti-war" movement as a whole. But observing "peace" rallies where Bush is decried far, far more passionately than Saddam -- where, in fact, Saddam is barely mentioned at all -- suggests that something not altogether different lurks beneath the surface among many others. Nick Kristof this week bemoaned the fact that "in some e-mail from fellow doves I detect hints of satisfaction that the U.S. is running into trouble in Iraq -- as if hawks should be taught a lesson about the real
world with the blood of young Americans." (When you read Eric Alterman's blog, and see him almost high-five every allied setback, you can see what Kristof is worrying about.)
Then last week, someone actually came out and said it. Columbia University professor, Nicholas De Genova, hoped at an "anti-war teach-in," hosted by left-wing writer and historian Eric Foner, that there would be "a million Mogadishus" in this war. To translate: this guy wants to see a million young American troops subjected to war crimes, shot and mutilated, and paraded through the streets. No one in the crowd objected. "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military," he elaborated. And to loud cheers from an Ivy League college audience, he thundered, "If we really [believe] that this war is criminal ... then we have to believe in the victory of the Iraqi people and the defeat of the U.S. war machine." Notice how de Genova parroted Saddam's propaganda that the dictator and the "Iraqi people" are indistinguishable. But notice something far more obvious.
If de Genova's comments aren't an expression of a fifth columnist, someone actively supporting the victory of a vicious dictator over the troops of his own countrymen, then what, please tell me, is? And please, don't give me the old McCarthyite "J'accuse." De Genova has every right in the world to say what he believes; and I would defend his right to say it anywhere, free from any governmental interference. By the same token, I am allowed to say that his views are morally repugnant. But then again, he has a point, doesn't he? The rhetoric of the "anti-war" movement has consistently argued that this is indeed a criminal war: that it is being conducted by an illegal president for nefarious ends - oil contracts, the Jews, world domination, etc etc. When you have used rhetoric of that sort, when you have described your own country as indistinguishable in legitimacy from a Stalinist dictatorship, when you have described the president as the equivalent of the Nazi SS, when you have carried posters with the words Bush = Terrorist and "We Support Our Troops When they Shoot Their Officers," then why shouldn't you support the enemy?
Before the war, such hyperbole could perhaps be dismissed as rhetorical excess. During a war, when American and allied soldiers are risking their lives, it is something far worse. Before the war, it was inexcusable but not that damning for the mainstream left merely to ignore the rabid, immoral anti-American rhetoric of some of their allies. But during a war, ignoring it is no longer an option. In fact, the mainstream left has a current obligation to declare its renunciation of what amounts to a grotesque moral inversion, to disavow the sentiments that were cheered at Columbia University.
You can see why they might be reluctant. De Genova's rhetoric - and that of the rest of the far left - describes president Bush as an unelected, maniacal tyrant, a caricature that is useful to Bush's political enemies. But indeed, if the president is what de Genova says he is, if he is, as the posters have it, the same as Hitler, then why indeed isn't Saddam indistinguishable? Why should we back one unelected dictator against another? Those are questions the rest of the anti-war left never answered categorically before the war, because they didn't have to. Now they do.
March 31, 2003, Salon.
copyright © 2000, 2003 Andrew Sullivan
-----
Whose War?
A Roll-Call of Architects
by Andrew Sullivan
Whose war is this? If it succeeds, it will have many authors, as victories always do. If it fails in any measurable way, its architects will be strikingly few, restricted to the handful of leaders who are required to take responsibility regardless of merit or cause. So perhaps now is the best moment for proposing the true orchestrators of this, the first full-scale invasion of the twenty-first century - while wet fingers are still thrust nervously upwards in the air. And, for all the easy judgments about this being "Bush's war," it seems to me that the picture is immensely more complicated than that. History is rarely so free of irony that the actual initiator of hostilities is the real force behind them. Others lie behind him, and others still behind them. And this war, perhaps more than many others, is laden with irony.
It is, first and foremost, the United Nations' war. Without the U.N., it would never have happened. Indeed, without the U.N., it wouldn't have even been necessary. Back in 1991, U.S. and U.K. forces were only a few hundred miles behind the positions they advanced to in the middle of last week. Saddam was reeling, after a coalition invasion to repel his aggression against Kuwait. Both the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shi'a in the South, emboldened by the war in Kuwait and encouraged by Washington, launched an uprising against the same tyrant we are still battling today. With American air-cover, they could have succeeded. But the Americans, in the greatest military miscalculation of the last few decades, hung back. Then-president George H.W. Bush insisted that his war aims did not include the removal of Saddam Hussein, but were limited to the liberation of a small oil company known as Kuwait.
Why, after sending hundreds of thousands of troops halfway around the globe, did Bush suddenly turn modest? Because the United Nations was the rubric under which he fought the war; the terms of his enormous coalition were dictated by the U.N.; and those terms were strictly limited to the reversal of Iraq's invasion, and nothing more. In one of the loveliest paradoxes of this battle, the U.N. therefore laid the groundwork for its subsequent self-destruction twelve years later. Without the U.N.'s restrictions on American force twelve years ago, Saddam would not be around today. Any non-U.N., American-led coalition with any sense of military opportunity, would have finished off the old Stalinist more than a decade ago. 1991 was therefore, in one sense, the U.N.'s post-Cold War high-point. Too bad it guaranteed its future nadir.
In the second place, this is Bill Clinton's war. Next to Saddam, Clinton was the biggest and most surprising beneficiary of the 1991 defeat-from-victory. Then-president Bush never acquired the full-bore victory Saddam's fall would have guaranteed; and as the economy worsened, the prudent president got blamed for excessive concern with foreign affairs. Clinton popped up as a natural foil in American politics, dedicated to the economy before foreign policy, a passionate but nervous multilateralist, a believer in soft rather than hard power, a man the Europhiles could suddenly warm to, if only because he could be relied upon to do as little in foreign policy as Europe's elites were comfortable with. But Saddam, menacingly, endured. And Clinton, like many domestically-oriented Democrats, couldn't afford the appearance of military weakness.
So we had the sanctions regime and the inspections regime. We had abrupt clashes, long somewhat successful police work under U.N. inspections, but no real breakthrough with regard to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Worse, precisely because Saddam remained in power - thanks to the United Nations - American troops were required to stay in the region in large numbers to maintain some sort of deterrence. Where did they stay? Saudi Arabia. Who noticed this? One religious fanatic, Osama bin Laden. What was the result? The forces of Islamist fundamentalism shifted their focus from the corrupt regimes in their own region to the super-power thousands of miles away. If you want a direct, irrefutable link between Saddam and 9/11, you have to look no further than the consequences of the first Gulf War. If there had been no U.N.-mandated half-victory, Osama would never have had his direct provocation. And in one of those perfect circles of historical irony, Osama's revenge has led just as directly to Saddam's final come-uppance.
That twist, however, didn't come as a consequence of September 11, 2001. It came as a result of the final Iraqi-U.N. impasse in 1998, when the inspections regime collapsed in the face of Saddamite deception and intransigence. In response, president Clinton formally shifted U.S. policy from containment to regime change. Yes, this was Clinton's policy. It is still Clinton's policy. Which is why, at some level, this is also Clinton's war. The subsequent U.S. and U.K. bombing helped reduce the immediate threat of Saddam's weapons, but deferred once again the real day of reckoning, as the Americans and British cast about for ways to be rid of Saddam short of full-scale invasion.
And at the same time, the Clinton administration also created the clear precedent for the war we are witnessing today: Kosovo. In retrospect, the Kosovo campaign was the first and last test of a bizarre new world coalition, the coalition that collapsed in the first two months of 2003. A military hyper-power agreed to fight a war under terms in part dictated by European allies whose military capacity was negligible. Unequals had to pretend to be partners. The goal was not just to prevent genocide in Europe, but to save an alliance strained by sheer military imbalance to the point of absurdity. The result, as Robert Kagan has memorably argued, was the American and European realization that this imbalance was bound to strain the alliance almost to breaking point. General Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO forces in Kosovo, ruefully recalled later that the need to maintain a constant consensus between Europeans and Americans hampered the ability to send a direct message to Milosevic, prolonged the war and protected the enemy. This didn't matter in a case where America's own security interests were irrelevant. But it was a dark omen for future conflicts when real interests might collide.
In Kosovo, the U.N.'s failure to get consensus - Russian threatened to veto the military operation in the Security Council - showed that universal agreement could not be achieved even in the face of European genocide. And even within NATO, Europe's obsession with means collided brusquely with America's practical attempt to achieve clear military ends. "It was always the Americans who pushed for the escalation to new, more sensitive targets... and always the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations," Clark later wrote. At a meeting of allied military officials a few months after the war, one NATO minister summed up the consensus by saying simply "we never want to do this again." "No one laughed," Clark recalls. It was a prophetic moment, the essential Clintonian precedent for the breach that France and Germany turned into a chasm in the winter of 2002 and 2003.
And yes, this is also the neoconservatives' war. By this I don't mean the alleged cabal of Likudniks infiltrating American foreign policy and directing the might of the superpower to serve the interests of a tiny, oil-free strip of land at the east end of the Mediterranean. By this, I mean simply that this war represents the winning of a long argument among Washington's policy elites about the future of American interests in the Middle East. I witnessed much of this debate first-hand, editing the critical neoconservative-neoliberal Washington weekly, the New Republic, for five years in the early 1990s. When George H. W. Bush and James Baker pulled back from the brink of victory in 1991, I heard a long, loud and tenacious wail go up among a whole bevy of Washington neocon intellectuals. When then-president Bush leveraged his half-victory in Kuwait into the Madrid conference and followed the European script that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the real source of instability in the Middle East, that wail got even
louder. And it slowly morphed into arch-skepticism as the Rabin and Barak governments vested so much effort in the Oslo peace process. When Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, millions felt a sense of promise and hope, but in Washington, a hundred neocon eye-brows arched.
None of this will work, the neoconservatives harrumphed. Their argument went roughly as follows: Our hesitation in Iraq emboldened Israel's and the West's enemies, and made a real peace less, not more, available. Our abrupt retreat from Somalia under Clinton, our weak response to Islamist terrorism in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and our recourse to weak and porous sanctions against Saddam - all these moves simply galvanized those elements in the Arab world that didn't want peace with Israel, but desired Israel's destruction and the West's humiliation. My view at the time was sympathetic to the neoconservative analysis but still skeptical. Like anyone else, I wanted the Oslo process to work. Like most others, I wanted to believe that al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas were reasonable political entities, people you could at some point negotiate with, not murderous, implacable, anti-Semitic fanatics. Even though al Qaeda's attacks increased slowly in ambition and scale, I saw no reason to believe that they were quite the menace that many neocons insisted they were.
Two things shifted the balance to the neoconservatives in Washington more than anything else. The first was Yassir Arafat's refusal at Camp David and Taba to accept the sweeping deal Barak offered for West Bank autonomy. Or to be more accurate, it wasn't Arafat's refusal to accept it that turned the tide. It was his refusal to offer any alternative whatsoever, except a return to the Intifada, and this time with suicide bombing as his main negotiating tool. And the second event, of course, was September 11 itself. For anyone who had hoped to arrive at some kind of negotiated settlement with the forces of Arab and Islamist jihad, 9/11 was an epiphany. Everything those crazy old neocons had been saying suddenly had new-found credibility. Maybe they were right after all - and only force and power could deter the Islamist fanatics and bring about a Middle East peace.
When George W. Bush looked around him in the ashes of the World Trade Center for an analysis of what had gone wrong and a comprehensive strategy to put it right, the neoconservatives were the only credible advocates who had an actual plan. They weren't a cabal. And they weren't natural Bush allies. Men like the Pentagon's Richard Perle or Douglas Feith or Paul Wolfowitz or the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer and Bob Kagan, or the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan or the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol: all these had been bitter foes of Bush's father, brutal critics of his foreign policy. The Washington Post and New Republic had endorsed Al Gore for president. The Weekly Standard had backed John McCain in the primaries. The reason they rallied behind Bush in the wake of 9/11 was simply because he was the president. And the reason Bush reached out to these theorists was because history had proved them right and disaster had proved them prescient.
So it's not surprising that the first White House meetings after 9/11 brought up Iraq as a target for counter-attack almost immediately. This was not because Saddam was directly implicated. It was because war had broken out. In a war against Islamist terrorism, the neocons persuasively argued, you had to look at the bigger picture if you wanted victory rather than half-measures and semi-success. If this was war, going after the mere perpetrators of one calamity was not enough. That was the hallmark of mere police work, not warfare. It was Clintonism and Clintonism had catastrophically failed. What you had to do was survey the whole network of terror, its state sponsors, and, in particular, the relationship between all this and weapons of mass destruction. You had to think deep and you had to think big. Saddam was by no means the only link in this chain. But he was a brittle link. And there was already an international legal case that legitimized direct action. If you wanted to remake the entire region, Iraq was an obvious place to start.
Of course, the Taliban came first. But there was never any question that Saddam would have to be dealt with next. And the precedents laid down by Bill Clinton and the U.N. always made the universal, Security Council-backed route a deeply perilous and dubious one. Dick Cheney never bought the case. But Powell and Blair insisted on trying, and the president, much more pragmatic than his critics are prepared to concede, went for the U.N. route. Was he wrong to have had war in mind from the outset? After the experience of the 1990s, surely not. In his view, war had already been brought to the United States. And this humble, instinctually modest president in foreign affairs, demanded a comprehensive strategy to grapple with the gravest attack on American soil in American history. The neocons had such an analysis. Their rivals - the multilateral purists - had nothing but piece-meal initiatives and they also had recent history against them. Critically, Bush also remembered his father's experience. Again, Bush's critics get it half right and therefore completely wrong. Bush isn't out to avenge his father. He's out not to repeat his father's mistakes. This war
will therefore not end with Saddam's survival. Not this time. No premature withdrawals now.
Lastly, this is Tony Blair's war. Watching his presence from the American side of the Atlantic is to be amazed by the way in which he has framed the terms of this conflict, its timing and its public meaning - in America as well as Britain. I know of no other recent precedent in which a British prime minister has had such an influence on American discourse, and therefore on the course of world events. Yes, Thatcher was and is revered among Americans, but primarily on the right and center. Blair commands respect on the American left and now something approaching shock and awe, to purloin a phrase, on the American right. This - along with a personal rapport with Bush and public loyalty and private consistency, two qualities deeply valued by the Bush family - has given the British premier unprecedented leverage over American power. Because of Blair, the world's sole hyper-power delayed its war for two months in a fruitless effort to paper over trans-Atlantic cracks that had been widening for a decade. Because of Blair, the realists in the Bush administration - Cheney and Rumsfeld - have seen their arguments complemented and sometimes superseded
by the rhetoric of liberal internationalism. Partly because of Blair, the Democrats, still controlled by the Blair-friendly Clinton mafia, have failed to resist this war as fiercely as its left wing would like. And because of Blair, president Bush laid out the "roadmap" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians before, and not after, the war to depose Saddam.
Poodle? You have to be kidding. But Blair's leverage was all the more serious because it wasn't wielded for transparent reasons of British world influence. It seemed to Americans to come from obvious conviction about the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and from a genuine and perhaps unique understanding of what Americans went through on September 11. Maybe it was coming to the United States immediately after the massacre that did it. Maybe it was attending the Congress for Bush's historic September 20 address. But Blair convinced Americans that his sympathy wasn't restricted to human sentiment in the wake of tragedy, but also included analysis and policy that could turn such a tragedy toward good. And his ability to articulate those reasons, in ways that Bush couldn't, reassured the American center and made 70 percent American public support for this war a
possibility.
And, yes, this is also, in the last resort, president Bush's war. To read the scathing accounts of his diplomacy in the European press, the caricature of his character that has become universal, the disparagement of his intellect, and the contempt for his strategy, is to experience a certain amount of cognitive dissonance these past few months. This simply isn't the president I've observed for the past two years or so, and I started as a skeptic of Bush and a supporter of John McCain. In fact, it's hard not to feel that the personal demonization of this man is less an accurate portrayal of his role at this moment of history than a way for others to vent their own feelings of impotence, or irrelevance, or frustration. But one thing I can relay from Washington. The closer you get to people who actually know him, who deal with him, who observe him, the greater the respect you hear. In a cabinet of heavy-weights, you'd expect in these tense circumstances a certain amount of grandstanding, of leaks to the press about who is really running the country, a buzz of rivalry and condescension and personal spin that is actually the norm in most administrations. But instead, you hear something rather different: that Bush really is in charge, that he has earned the deepest respect of those with far more experience than he has, that he is as steady as he is calm, as determined as he is pragmatic. It's far too early to make judgments about this president's place in history, but I suspect the future will hold him in far higher regard than the present. He enters this new phase of the war with majorities in both Houses of Congress, with more public support than his father had in the first Gulf War, and with a military more expert and relatively powerful than any in the annals of world conflict. From being barely elected just over two years ago, that's some transformation, as impressive as Blair's. There will undoubtedly be ups and downs in the days and weeks and months ahead. But no one should doubt either this president's resolve or his ambition. For him this war is not a few days old but already a year and a half in duration.
This campaign for Saddam is neither as dramatic as his critics charge nor as central as some of his supporters believe. It is just one part of an unfolding strategy to remake the world's security. That's why, at a deep level, this war is not one that Bush created or devised or laid the groundwork for. But it is a war whose course he has indelibly shaped and whose successful resolution he is determined to achieve. I wouldn't bet against him succeeding.
March 24, 2003, Sunday Times.
copyright © 2000, 2003 Andrew Sullivan
