![]() Some in the Bush Administration had convinced themselves that Saddam was the source of all of the ills of the Middle East and that, therefore, any progress on any issue in the region first required Saddam’s removal. ![]() However, there were also a great deal of unreasonable ideas, and unfortunately these unreasonable ideas were not only part of the justification for the war, but also became critical elements of the Administration’s prewar thinking about postwar reconstruction. Some of their rationales for war were quite reasonable: the international consensus that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs–which turned out to be entirely mistaken but was considered “incontrovertible” at the time the fact that Saddam was one of the most brutal tyrants of the previous sixty years the fact that his ambitions ran directly counter to those of the United States–and his efforts to achieve them had destabilized the Persian Gulf for twenty-five years and the problem that the world was losing interest in keeping him bound by sanctions, as evinced by the postwar revelations of the Volcker commission concerning the corruption and manipulation of the Oil-for-Food program by the Iraqi government to secure the political support of France, Russia, and China, among other countries. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz noted in an interview with Vanity Fair, the threat of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was simply the one threat upon which all of the senior members of the Bush Administration agreed–and believed that it could be used to justify the war to the public. ![]() The invasion of Iraq was born of a great many different ideas. In its breathtaking hubris, the Administration engineered a Greek tragedy in Iraq, the outcome of which may plague us for decades. It refused to believe intelligence that contradicted its own views and doggedly insisted that reality conform to its wishes. It never learned from its mistakes and never committed adequate resources to accomplish either its original lofty aspirations or even its later, more modest goals. It staged both the invasion and the reconstruction on the cheap. It disregarded the advice of experts on Iraq, on nation-building, and on military operations. If Iraq does slide into all-out civil war, the Bush Administration will have only itself to blame. ![]() Indeed, perhaps the most tragic evidence of this unrealized potential is that even three-and-a-half years after Saddam’s fall, with Iraq mired in a deepening civil war and no sign of real progress on the horizon, over 40 percent of Iraqis still clung to the belief that Iraq was headed in the right direction–with only 35 percent saying it was headed in the wrong direction. Americans returning from Iraq–military and civilian alike–have proven unanimous in their view that the Iraqis desperately want reconstruction to succeed and that they have the basic tools to make it work, but that the United States has consistently failed to provide them with the opportunities and the framework to succeed. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion. Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s fall. Its disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States. ![]() The reconstruction of Iraq was never going to be quick or easy, but it was not doomed to failure. ![]()
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