Jackson Diehl has a message for those of us who were right about the Iraq War: You may have been right but you still wrong.
If that sounds like a bit of Alice-in-Wonderland logic, it is. Diehl’s argument is that the war turned out badly, but we remained the indispensible nation in the region. “U.S. influence in the Middle East remained strong,” he said, but only if you ignore the facts on the ground. The Arab Spring, in many ways, was a reaction to the U.S. approach to the region and there are now fewer governments who are friendly to U.S. interests than before we entered Iraq guns ablaze.
But it is the critics of the war — those of us who said months before the March 2003 invasion that we were courting disaster by even talking about war — who have failed to learn its lessons. Diehl wants a more assertive intervention in the Syrian civil war; failure to intervene on at least a Clintonian model (with U.S. air power backing others’ troops), he says, would be to cede leadership. Already, he says “every neighbor of Syria has been shocked and awed by the failure of U.S. leadership.”
Every neighbor? Look at the map. Iran borders Syria and we know where they stand. Then aside from Israel and Turkey, there are not a lot of neighbors who consider themselves steadfast U.S. allies. And Turkey has its own very specific interests to worry about (the Kurds). The other neighbors — Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan — are unlikely to seek out American intervention because it will only inflame core constituencies who remain angry at America’s meddling in the region. So who wants intervention?
The column is typical of the kind of approach used by former war supporters to rehabilitate themselves and paint the original critics as out of touch. It fails the test of logical argument because it cherry-picks evidence. The U.S. intervention was successful in rooting out al Qaeda from Iraq, he says, while ignoring the fact that al Qaeda was not a presence in the country until after the American invasion.
The U.S., he also writes, “triggered the transformation of Iraq, quickly disposing of the old regime and buffering the subsequent sectarian struggle.” What followed the fall of Saddam was a particularly nasty civil war that flared for several years and that continues to smolder and undermine stability in Iraq. It also did more than “prompt low-level meddling” by Iran; it led to an Iraqi government that tilts toward Iran.
Diehl and his colleagues were wrong about Iraq in 2003. They were wrong in the years that followed and they continue to be wrong today. We need to stop taking these guys seriously.
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Hank Kalet 