That’s Not What We Intended

By Josef Joffe

Translated By Ron Argentati

23 October 2008

Edited by Lauren Abuouf
Germany - Die Zeit - Original Article (German)

From Paul Wolfowitz to Richard Perle: How the American architects of the Iraq war explain their failure.

The memo is known as the “horror show” in Pentagon circles. America alienated the world and had to go it practically alone in Iraq. Sure, Saddam is history, but civil war, manipulated by Syria and Iran, goes on. Washington is helplessly tied down and is forced to ignore important subjects like the Middle-East peace process. Democratization and reconstruction drag endlessly on.

The litany is familiar but the author and time frame are interesting: Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush’s Secretary of Defense, had already written the memo for the President in October 2002 – albeit in the conditional tense. It gets better: “If we find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq we will lose our credibility.” And “The international reaction against this pre-emptive war will make it difficult for us to find allies in the future.”

Readers can find the list in Douglas Feith’s book “War and Decision.” Feith was Under Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon until 2005. Along with Richard Perle (then Director of the Defense Policy Board), and Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense), he belongs to the real “Axis of Evil,” at least in the view of critics who saw those three as the vanguard of an Israeli “Kosher Nostra.”

But Douglas Feith looks like the nation’s son-in-law; today, he sits at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank, and teaches at Georgetown University. Wasn’t the war a terrible mistake, just as the “horror show” predicted? Wasn’t Iran the far more dangerous enemy that actually manipulated terrorists and sought nuclear weapons, even today? “Yes, yes,” Feith answers, “the Israelis told us that, too, and considered Iran the number one enemy of both our nations.” But why, then, a war against Saddam? The bomb he never had is ticking now in North Korea, the third arm of the axis.

“We paid a terrible price, not because of the war as such, but because it went so badly. And today neither North Korea nor Iran believes that our diplomacy is backed up by a credible threat.” Why, then, the wrong war against the wrong enemy, considering that Feith believes today that the invasion “wasn’t inevitable?”

Over lunch at the Bombay Club, Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s number two man at the time, begins with a surprising admission: “Contrary to what you read everywhere, I wasn’t the mastermind, the string-puller.” Richard Perle, known as the “Prince of Darkness” to opponents of re-armament in the eighties and who works today at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says much the same thing: “We three had the least to say; Rummy (Rumsfeld) made all the decisions. We didn’t have any real influence, although I wanted it very much. He usually ignored our advice. Doug (Feith) had no operative power. I saw Rumsfeld perhaps only three or four times outside the Defense Policy Board.” The Defense Policy Board was an advisory forum where Rumsfeld appeared every six months.

Surprise number two: The original objective wasn’t regime change and democracy. Regime change was “the result, and not the object of the war,” – although Wolfowitz himself believed whole-heartedly in the benefits of democracy. “Just think of democratic Poland, with its totally changed, western-oriented policies.”

Then what was the object of the invasion? “Saddam was the right enemy,” answered Wolfowitz, “we had to all intents and purposes been at war with him ever since his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Even after he was driven out of Kuwait, he remained a dangerous strategic threat in the Gulf region. That’s been forgotten today. He wanted revenge for his humiliation in Kuwait. He gave sanctuary to terrorists and supported terrorism. He threatened to use biological weapons after the attacks of 9/11 precisely at the same time as panic was being caused by the anthrax letters.” Washington found itself in a state of siege, reported Donald Frum, the White House speech writer who coined the phrase “axis of evil.”

These ex-Bushites insist people need to understand the drama of September 11th from the standpoint of Washington’s obsession with the idea that the destruction of the twin towers was the opening round in a prolonged attack by international terrorism. Wolfowitz’s deputy, Feith, writes, “We had no indication that Saddam participated in the attacks.” But Feith went on to say that “the over-reaching problem was that the next 9/11 would be carried out using weapons of mass destruction. Terrorism not as a bloody theatrical play, but as mass murder. The result was the targeting of the axis of evil, countries able to supply terrorists with such weaponry.”

But why Iraq? Why not Iran with its old terrorist connections and it’s push to develop nuclear weapons? The answer to that, seven years on, offers another surprise: in his halting explanation, punctuated with many silent pauses, Wolfowitz says, “We lacked the means and the diplomatic prerequisites (for war against Iran). We didn’t have the 16 UN resolutions imposed against Baghdad.” Feith recalls the President feared the United States was running out of time because the sanctions on Saddam were collapsing and he might then be able to actually build a nuclear weapon. Besides, nothing could be undertaken against Iran until all options “this side of war” had been exhausted.

From that, one concludes that Iraq became the main target because it was easiest to hit. Time was of the essence, the diplomatic attempts had already been made and Iraq was a third-string opponent, as later evidenced by the fact the actual military offensive against Iraq lasted only three weeks. America recalled the costly war of 1950 – 1953 against North Korea. Iran had double North Korea’s population and four times its land mass. Not a pushover opponent.

Was it still worth it, considering no weapons of mass destruction nor connections to terrorism were ever found? Wolfowitz: “The answer may be more clear two years from now than it is today. But the fact remains that the war has been a massive defeat for al-Qaeda who always maintained that Iraq was the main battlefield against the West.

The fact is the United States appears to be winning the war statistically: 106 soldiers were killed in October 2006 vs. 38 in October 2007 and only 10 in October 2008. Iraqi civilians? In the first three weeks of October this year, the count stood at 137 dead. That’s a lot, but in October 2007 it was 565 and in September 2006, the worst month on record, the total was 3,389. Al-Qaeda has been isolated (and probably has retreated into Afghanistan): Baghdad is taking over one province after another, most recently Anbar, the center of the 2004 Sunni revolt.

“If everything had gone well,” Wolfowitz ponders, “nobody would be questioning our position in the world today.” The public wants to know “what went wrong,” echoing the title of Bernard Lewis’ book on the subject. The book was the inspiration for much of Bush’s Middle East policy that contends that democratization failed in the Arab world because of the unhealthy political climate there.

Why did it go so badly? Wolfowitz: “We didn’t know our enemy. Saddam had already been planning a revolt for two years. We had no idea of the internal infighting that would be stirred up.” Perle recounts another fiasco: “We wanted to be liberators but within five or six months we became occupiers and targets.”

Was it a war to bring democracy to Iraq in the sense recounted by the eminent scholar Bernard Lewis? In truth, no. A distressed Feith writes in his book “War and Decision” that democracy “required Iraqi leadership, and there weren’t enough Iraqis with experience in democratic practice.” And so? It would be “naïve to think that democracy would have taken hold if we had just left Iraq alone.”

And, as misfortune would have it, the country really wasn’t left alone. Enter L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer in the role of Viceroy after Donald Rumsfeld called him out of retirement in Vermont. Bremer is no Lawrence of Arabia and proceeded with Plan F, which was to solve all the problems by dissolving the military and all the political parties. With that decision, the United States was transformed from liberator to conqueror. “We had the best intentions,” Richard Perle recalls, but under Bremer, the United States treated the Iraqis with “condescension and contempt.” The United States “was suddenly responsible for everything,” but without the expertise it needed. “All at once, 8,000 Americans had occupied one of Saddam’s former palaces in the Green Zone and half of them had never been in a foreign country before.”

Why did the plundering begin so early? The mind-boggling answer: “Tommy Franks (the top military commander) claimed he wasn’t responsible for internal security.” Perle’s conclusion: “I never thought we would botch it so badly.” And on the subject of democratization he added: “That wasn’t our main objective. If Saddam had brought out every bit of information he had on his WMD on the evening of the invasion, the whole war would have been called off. We were one hundred percent certain that Saddam had hidden all the stuff.”

So does the Iraq war shrink down to a saga of incompetence and ignorance? No other result than blood, tears and a big bill? $600 billion spent and 4,500 dead Americans so far? David Frum, coiner of the label “axis of evil” and member of the American Enterprise Institute, takes a protective stance with his colleagues: “Bush and Cheney really believed Saddam had WMD.” When asked why nobody bothered questioning this belief, Frum rages, “Do you know what would have happened if anyone had opposed him in February 2003 by saying ‘Mr. President, we’re not prepared to act. Please consider what will happen if anything goes wrong?’ He would have gone crazy and screamed, “I already told you we’re going in March!” That’s the way it was.

But the irony, Frum adds, is that “Iraq will become a stable, pro-Western country, it will return to the oil markets and it will play a positive role in the Middle East.” On the other hand, the war in Afghanistan, the one everyone called the one worth fighting, isn’t going well at all. Even if Frum wants to maintain he was right, it was an extravagant project that, despite all the talk in Washington, still has no clear meaning.

But why? An old Bush insider who absolutely refuses to be identified answers with the biggest surprise of all: “It was an act of imperial ego-boosting. We had to do something because we had been humiliated on September 11th and made into a laughing stock. We had to show our determination and power.” Would you do it all over again? The answer: “You would have to be crazy to do it again.”