How "intellectuals" influenced Bush Amin. on Iraq War

[The Crazy Canadian]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/05/judis_excerpt/print.html

Why are we in Iraq?
In "The Folly of Empire," John Judis argues that Bush is repeating the imperialist mistakes committed by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

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By John Judis



Sept. 28, 2004 | As recent memoirs from White House counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke and from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill make clear, key members of the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein well before September 11, 2001. Nationalists like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hoped to avert the threat of a hostile and oil-rich Iraq armed with nuclear weapons tipping the balance of power in the Mideast. Neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz hoped that by replacing Saddam with an elected pro-American government, the U.S. could transform the entire region, overthrowing sheiks and dictators and marginalizing radical Islamic movements that threatened the U.S. and Israel.

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One thing that helped convince Bush and Rumsfeld that an invasion was viable was the apparent ease of the American victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan. The victory inspired what British journalist Patrick Brogan had once called America's "illusions of omnipotence." But the other factor was the influence exercised in the critical months after September 11 by two groups linked closely to the neoconservatives in the administration: the first was the Iraqi exiles, led by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress; the second was the advice of historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Fouad Ajami. The exiles and the scholars argued that the United States could create a democracy in Iraq and the Mideast without a long and difficult occupation. It wouldn't be necessary to do the kind of "nation-building" the United States had backed in Somalia or the Balkans.

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But Lewis and Ajami were equally, if not more, important in convincing Bush that a military victory in Iraq wouldn't entail a long period of nation building. Both men were very well-known and esteemed experts on the Mideast who had close ties to the neoconservatives. Lewis was a professor emeritus at Princeton, and expert on the history of Islam; Ajami, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, had written several influential books on Arab politics. Lewis had been a mentor to Wolfowitz and Perle and also knew Chalabi well. Talking to Lewis, Perle said, was "like going to Delphi to see the oracle." After September 11, Lewis conferred at length with Perle's Defense Policy Board, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Bush read Lewis's articles. Ajami also met with administrative officials, but would have a particularly strong influence on Cheney.

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If the United States were to get tough, Ajami and Lewis promised success. By ousting Saddam, the United States would unleash pent up feelings of friendship rather than hostility toward the United States. Wrote Lewis, "In Iran and Iraq, with governments seen as anti-American, public opinion is pro-American. The joy displayed by the Afghan people at the ending of Taliban rule could be repeated, on a larger scale, in both these countries." Ajami wrote even more emphatically, "Were we to pick up where we left off a decade ago and head to Baghdad, the tormented people of Iraq would be sure to erupt in joy. If we liberate them, they may (if only for a while) forgive America the multitude of its sins. They may take our gift and do the easiest of things: construct a better Iraq than the one that the Tikriti killers have put in place." Ajami and Lewis predicted that Saddam's ouster would actually improve the conditions for peace in Israel by intimidating the radical Palestinians; and they discounted the reaction of the "Arab street."

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Of course, the critics of the invasion were proven right and Lewis, Ajami and the exiles wrong. The actual invasion was over almost before it began, but the occupation led to a nationalist revolt against American and British forces that continues to this day. Americans were not seen as liberators, except, perhaps, by the Kurds, but as latter-day Crusaders and imperialists. As former political scientist Larry Diamond, who worked with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), recounts in Foreign Affairs, "Too many Iraqis viewed the invasion not as an international effort but as an occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers, and this evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraq's former overlords." The invasion didn't lead to a democratic transformation of the region; instead, it strengthened the autocracies in Iran, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and provided a new recruiting tool for Al Qaeda throughout the region. And it didn't lead to peace in Israel, but to continued strife.

[Generic Other]

1. They should have known better than pin their intelligent designs

on the actions of idiots.

Imperialism: the cakewalk that became a quagmire...