Five star article on what went wrong in Iraq from the New York Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720Iraq: The War of the Imagination
By Mark Danner
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., $30.00
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
by Ron Suskind
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
by James Risen
Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00
Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end. —George F. Kennan,September 26, 2002<1>
I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years. —President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
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Out of this maelstrom, how does one fix now on "how we began" in Iraq? One might do worse than the National Security Presidential Directive entitled "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy," the top-secret statement of American purpose intended to guide all the departments and agencies of the government, signed by President George W. Bush on August 29, 2002:
US goal: Free Iraq in order to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and associated programs, to prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond.
End Iraqi threats to its neighbors, to stop the Iraqi government's tyrannizing of its own population, to cut Iraqi links to and sponsorship of international terrorism, to maintain Iraq's unity and territorial integrity. And liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy....
Objectives: To conduct policy in a fashion that minimizes the chance of a WMD attack against the United States, US field forces, our allies and friends. To minimize the danger of regional instabilities. To deter Iran and Syria from helping Iraq. And to minimize disruption in international oil markets.
This secret document, disclosed by Bob Woodward, is presumably the plainest, least ideological statement of what American officials thought the country they led would be trying to achieve in the coming war.<9> The words have now a sad and antique air, as if scrawled on yellowed parchment and decipherable only by a historian skilled in the customs and peculiarities of a far-off time and place. What can we say now, as we look at the Iraq of November 2006, about these official goals and objectives of the Iraq war?
The famous weapons of mass destruction are gone, most of them probably fifteen years gone, and their absence has likely damaged the United States and its power—the power, deployed daily, that depends on the authority of words and pronouncements and not directly or solely on force of arms— more severely than their presence ever could have. While no doubt convinced that Iraq had at least some chemical and biological weapons, Bush administration officials, like the cop framing a guilty man, vastly exaggerated the evidence and in so doing—and even as they refused to allow UN inspectors to examine and weigh that evidence— they severely undermined the credibility of the United States, the credibility of its intelligence agencies, and the support for the war and US policy among Americans, among Muslims, and around the world.
The containment of Iraq, threatened only in the realm of policymakers' imaginations before the war, has been breached. The country's "threat to the region," with jihadis flowing from neighboring Sunni powers into Anbar and Baghdad and Iranian intelligence agents flowing into the Shia south, is growing daily, with the ultimate worst-case future, the confused and blackened landscape of a regional sectarian war, already standing clearly visible on the horizon as a possible consequence of an escalating conflict.
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