Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War

Final words.

Gentlemen,

Thanks for agreeing to participate in this Slate dialogue. I've invited you because you're fellow members of what Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, once termed the "I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club." With the arguable exceptions of Fareed and Christopher, you're liberals by background and inclination. Yet you decided to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq despite a range of objections to the Bush's administration's foreign policy. Ten months on I thought that, like me, you might be having some second thoughts about that decision. The question I'd like to raise with all of you this week is a straightforward one: With the benefit of hindsight, do you still believe that the United States should have invaded Iraq in March 2003?

Let me kick things off by volunteering some of my own qualms. I had been in favor of deposing Saddam Hussein since the premature end of the first Gulf War in 1991 for two primary reasons, which I explained in an earlier Slate dialogue. The first was humanitarian: Saddam was (is) a genocidal butcher on an epic scale, and I wanted to see Iraq freed from his grip. The second was Saddam's seemingly incorrigible pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons. March 2003 was not the time of my choosing—I would have gone in back in 1993 (when Saddam tried to assassinate former President Bush), or in 1998 (when he slammed the door on the U.N. inspectors*), or waited for a genuine emergency and a more propitious moment to reassemble an international coalition. But when George W. Bush chose to finally act, I supported him despite serious reservations about timing and method because I wanted the job finished at last.

To me, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis remains sufficient justification, which is why I don't think the failure to find weapons of mass destruction by itself invalidates the case for war (though it certainly weakens it). What does affect my view is the huge and growing cost of the invasion and occupation: in American lives (we're about to hit 500 dead and several thousand more have been injured); in money (more than $160 billion in borrowed funds); and in terms of lost opportunity (we might have found Osama Bin Laden by now if we'd committed some of those resources to Afghanistan). Most significant are the least tangible costs: increased hatred for the United States, which both fosters future terrorism and undermines the international support we will need to fight terrorism effectively for many years to come. Of course, the fall of Saddam has made us safer and is likely to produce all sorts of positive side effects, such as Qaddafi's capitulation. But the diminution of America's ability to create consensus around actions necessary for collective security makes us less safe. So, while I still think the Iraq war was morally justified, I'm not at all sure it was worth the costs.

Many of those costs—human, financial, and diplomatic—could have been reduced substantially if President Bush hadn't gratuitously alienated so many potential allies, and sympathizers, and if arrogance and ideology hadn't prevented his Pentagon team from properly planning for the occupation. But as a supporter of the war, I can't get myself off the hook by saying Bush has screwed things up, because he has screwed things up in ways that were evident in advance of the invasion. This was elective surgery, and we had a pretty good idea what the surgeon's limitations were. The choice wasn't between an invasion led by George W. Bush and an invasion led by a president who would make an eloquent case to the world and build a credible global coalition. The alternatives were Bush's flawed war or no war. So, the question I'm asking myself now is whether the marvelous accomplishment of deposing and capturing Saddam justifies costs that I really ought to have expected.

Because I'm doubling as moderator (and because, frankly, I haven't completely made up my mind), I'm going to refrain from answering for the moment. My hope is that by the end of the week, the rest of you will have helped me reach a conclusion.

Let's start off with a question for Kenneth Pollack. Ken, in your excellent piece in the new issue of the Atlantic, you conclude that our discovery that Iraq did not in fact have active WMD capabilities makes the case for invading "considerably weaker" than you believed when you argued it in your book The Threatening Storm. I agree! But does it weaken it to the point that you now think, with the benefit of hindsight, we should not have gone to war?

I'd like Thomas Friedman to respond first to Ken. After that, it's open season.

Salutations,
Jacob

Correction, Jan. 16, 2004: This piece originally stated that Saddam "booted the U.N. inspectors out" in 1998. This is technically inaccurate, though his actions led to their withdrawal. Return to the corrected sentence.

I also don't find this to be an easy question to answer. And let me start with the necessary disclaimer that while I believed a war would be necessary to depose Saddam, I opposed both the timing and manner of the actual war as the Bush administration pursued it.

For me, there is no escaping the fact that the prewar intelligence estimates regarding Iraq's WMD programs—and particularly its nuclear program—were wrong. Iraq was not 4-5 years away from having a nuclear weapon, as I and the rest of the Clinton administration had been led to believe.

On the other hand, going back in time to 2002, but knowing that Iraq did not pose the same kind of strategic threat that we believed, I think there still would have been grounds to argue that a full-scale invasion to topple Saddam was a reasonable option.

Saddam Hussein's regime was still a source of considerable instability in one of the most important and fragile regions of the world. Setting aside the invasions of Kuwait and Iran, and the wars he threatened with Syria and Israel, his behavior throughout the 1990s (when he did not have nuclear weapons and after suffering the horrible defeat of the Gulf War) was still astonishingly aggressive, risk-tolerant, and determined to overturn the status quo. His 1993 attempt to assassinate George Bush, his 1994 threat to Kuwait, the 1996 attack on Irbil, provoking Desert Fox in 1998, and trying to move Iraqi ground forces to the Golan to provoke an Israeli military action in 2000 all speak to the problems his regime created as a matter of routine.

There was still a residual WMD threat. What we have learned since the fall of Baghdad is that Saddam remained determined to acquire these weapons at some point in the future and had preserved rudimentary elements of the programs, which he intended to use to rebuild them after the sanctions were lifted. With the exception of the missile area, these were not very active programs, and the threat from Iraqi WMD (and particularly nuclear weapons) was much, much further away than was believed, but it was not gone completely. I think this the weakest argument, but not entirely irrelevant.

There was also the human rights argument. For me, this was very compelling, although I recognized that it wasn't necessarily as important for every American. Even before the revelations of postwar Iraq, only the most obtuse failed to recognize that Saddam's regime was among the most odious of the last 50 years. As someone who supported previous U.S. humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and elsewhere—and who wished we had taken action in Rwanda—the argument was an important aspect of my own conviction. I felt guilty all throughout the 1990s that we were not doing more for the Iraqi people (especially after we betrayed them in 1991). Unfortunately, until Sept. 11, I saw no likelihood that the American people were going to support an invasion—which was the only policy that could actually relieve Iraq's misery. However, I had supported both revising the sanctions (years before the Bush administration would adopt them under the banner of "smart sanctions"), and I argued for a more aggressive covert action program in the vain hope that it might produce regime change.

Which brings me to my last point: the range of available options. In asking whether the United States should have gone to war with Iraq I think we also need to address what our alternatives would have been. We need to remember that our Iraq policy was in bad shape starting in the late 1990s. I still find the alternatives all pretty bad—although some are not necessarily as bad as I thought them before the war.

I think the war put to rest the fantasies of the neocons that we could simply arm Ahmad Chalabi and a few thousand followers (followers he still has not actually produced), give them air cover, and send them in to spark a rolling revolution. Richard Perle and others argued for that initially, but in the end they had to support a full-scale invasion as the only realistic course. The covert-action-based regime-change policies that I and others in the U.S. government had pushed for as an alternative never had a high likelihood of success, either—they were just slightly more likely to produce a coup and much less likely to create a catastrophic "Bay of Goats," as Gen. Anthony Zinni once put it. Ironically, I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.

The one alternative policy that looks better in retrospect is deterrence—which was the idea that we could allow containment to collapse because we could still deter Saddam from making mischief through our own military power. While I think Saddam's astonishingly reckless behavior before the war only confirms the prevailing view among Iraq experts that this was not someone we would have wanted to trust with nuclear weapons, the postwar revelations suggest that he was so much further away from having those nuclear weapons that we might have safely opted for deterrence in the expectation that we could have found an alternative way to deal with him in the years before he did get his hands on a nuke.

If I had to write The Threatening Storm over again I certainly would not have been so unequivocal that war was going to be a necessity. However, I still would have pointed out that there was a strong case for removing Saddam's regime (for the reasons mentioned above) and that realistically the only way to remove him from power was to mount a full-scale invasion. I might have decided that when you weighed all the pros and cons, deterrence and invasion might have been roughly equal, but I would have pointed out that a key difference between them was that if you opted for invasion you were removing a great evil from the world and creating the possibility that we could turn Iraq into a real positive, as Tom and Fareed argued when they made the case on the basis of democratization. It would not have been as compelling, but my guess is that many readers would still have come to the conclusion that war was the least-bad choice among a menu of imperfect options.

Ken Pollack

I appreciated Ken Pollack's honest reassessment of the question of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq. The Bush team could learn a lot from it.

Since my liberal hawkishness regarding the Iraq war was never rooted in the WMD issue, I look at the postwar a little differently. The debate about the Iraq war for me was always a struggle between hope and experience: hope that we could partner with Iraqis to remove the genocidal tyranny of Saddam Hussein and replace it with some kind of decent, pluralistic, representative government in the heart of the Arab world, and my experience—particularly living in Lebanon during its civil war—which left me skeptical about ever producing a self-sustaining, multiethnic democracy in that region. It was a real struggle in my head. In the end, I let hope win. I have no regrets.

Indeed, having visited Iraq three times since April, I feel even more strongly today than I did the day the war started that, while the Bush team has made an utter mess of the diplomacy and postwar planning, it was still the right war and still has a decent chance to produce a decent outcome.

Why? I think there were four reasons for this war, and I identified with three of them: There was the stated reason, the moral reason, the right reason, and the real reason.

The stated reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction that posed a long-term threat to America. I never bought this argument. I didn't have any inside information. I simply assumed that whatever WMD Saddam possessed had to be, after a decade of sanctions, so limited that it was easily deterrable. There was absolutely nothing in Saddam's history to suggest that he was suicidal—that he had the capability or will to attack the United States directly and pay the price.

He was always deterrable and containable. This was always a war of choice.

The WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity. They will have to answer for that.

Personally, I believed the right reason and the moral reason for the war were more than sufficient to justify it. To be sure, they would have been a hard sell as a war of choice, but not impossible—had Messrs. Bush and Blair really thrown themselves into it.

The moral reason for the war was that this was a genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of some 1 million Iraqis, Kurds, Iranians, and Kuwaitis as a result of Saddam's internal suppression and external wars with Iran and Kuwait. Saddam was 10 times worse than Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, whom NATO took on without U.N. cover.

The right reason for the war, and this was the core of my own argument, was that the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten our open society were not the hidden WMD of Saddam. Those, as I said, were always deterrable because Saddam and his sons loved life more than they hated us. No, the real WMD that threatened us, and still do, are the young people being churned out, year after year, by failed and repressive Arab states, who hate us more than they love life and therefore are undeterrable. I am talking here about the boys of 9/11. I am talking here about all the youth identified in the two U.N. Development Programme Arab Human Development reports—youth who want to run away from the Arab countries they were raised in because they are so frustrated, angry, and humiliated by how their governments and society have left them unprepared for modernity. Sept. 11, I have always believed, was produced by the poverty dignity, not the poverty money. It was the product, as Egyptian playwright Ali Salem once remarked, of young men who felt so humiliated by the world, they felt like dwarfs, and dwarfs search out tall towers to bring down in order to feel tall. Humiliated youth, ready to commit suicide using instruments from our daily life—cars, planes, tennis shoes—and inspired by religious totalitarians are the real threat to open societies today.

Therefore, the right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam's regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report's prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Unless we successfully partner with Iraqis, though, to build a new and more decent context, that terrorism bubble will eventually come back tenfold. We must get this right. Yes, I know, it may all turn out to be a fool's errand. A decent Iraq may be impossible. But I would rather go down swinging as an optimist than resign as a pessimist. Because if there is no way to produce governments that can deliver for their young people in the Arab world, get ready for a future full of Code Orange and Code Red.

I can't wish the fall of Saddam's regime undone. Before going to Iraq I knew abstractly that it was one of the worst in modern history—and there's been plenty of stiff competition. After five weeks there, my appreciation of its terribleness is more concrete and emotional. I know that's hardly the best or only basis for foreign policy decisions, but in this case it's decisive for me: The slaughter and misery of Iraqis (and their neighbors) justified the war; it would have justified it going back to 1991, or 1988, and I never understood why there's a statute of limitations on genocide. I admired Jacob Weisberg's lucid reckoning of costs and benefits—I've been thinking very much along the same lines, with the same question mark at the end—but I honestly don't know how to weigh such things: Bush's manipulations versus no more torture, the damage to international institutions versus the end of a regional threat. What is the point system?

Rationally, Jacob has posed a very hard question—maybe impossible. But every time I try to calculate the tally, I can't make myself want another outcome.

Ken Pollack should be congratulated: How many leading voices on this issue have subjected themselves to such honest criticism? What he got wrong he got wrong because the intelligence was mistaken. What the administration got wrong it got wrong because it didn't care about the intelligence. Like certain French intellectuals, it knew the truth apart from the facts and found its own facts to fit the truth. Anyone who doubts this should read the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's new report on weapons and the Iraq War. The United Nations comes off as a fairly effective institution; the administration version loses on every count, and it would be good to know why the president didn't know what he claimed to know. It's amazing to me that there's no national debate, no commission of inquiry, no serious congressional hearings about the way the country was systematically manipulated into war. Tonkin Gulf, by itself, was a minor deception by comparison (with major consequences, of course). Like Tom Friedman, I was always suspicious of the weapons arguments. The administration protested too much. But this doesn't mean that the weapons arguments can be bracketed or put aside—first, because the way they were made did some fairly serious damage to American democracy, and second, because they go to the heart of the debate over the Bush national security strategy, pre-emption, and international institutions. It turns out that the cobwebby world of inspectors, containment, and alliances isn't as disposable as some people thought.

I'm much less certain about the other half of Tom's argument—changing the political culture of the Arab world by breaking things—than I am about the human rights imperative. Changing the political culture of one Arab country is going to be hard enough. Before the war, no one could know what kind of political psychology we would find once the seal of Saddam's tyranny was broken. It turns out that Iraqis are a lot less grateful, a lot more suspicious and even conspiratorial, than the advocates of liberation predicted. The moral self-congratulation we saw in this country in early 2003 went a long way toward damaging the prospects of a decent postwar. Totalitarianism didn't make Iraqis better people or readier to govern themselves democratically—exactly the opposite. The margin for error was almost zero: The American occupation had about two weeks to get things right after the fall of Baghdad in order to set in motion a process that had any near-term chance of success, and it got everything wrong. The best efforts of the best Americans in Iraq are constantly undermined by the terrible decisions of policymakers in Washington. Now we're just flailing—people in both Washington and Baghdad admit privately that there is no workable plan and little faith in the competence of self-rule. I think we should stop talking about vast change in the Arab world and focus on doing what we can—even as our influence wanes by the day—to get Iraq right. Sept. 11 made us think about big ideas, global conflicts—inevitably, and rightly. But Iraq should make us think about practical knowledge and nuanced judgment. One problem with liberal hawks is that great moral dramas are always more attractive to us than difficult long-term tasks.

George Packer

My own two cents, on the topic of WMD: I never did think that Saddam's weapons were sufficient grounds for war. I even said so here, in Slate, before the war. If WMD were the problem, containment and deterrence were the solution. But I can understand, sort of, why Bush and Blair ended up harping on the weapons issue, and why the Bush administration kept hinting at conspiracies that probably never existed. I don't defend Bush and Blair for speaking in these ways, and I hope that future elections will show that Bush has been punished for his misdeeds, and Blair has not. But I can imagine what drove them to do this.

It was because something is missing from our modern way of discussing the world. We know how to describe certain things—and have forgotten how to describe certain others, which are sometimes larger. This has been true of the war's proponents, except for a few of us lonely liberals (and even we have been inconsistent), and true of the war's opponents. It is a vocabulary problem. The words are missing.

Foreign-policy-speak has been taken over by terms like these: WMD, rogue states, regime change, nation-building, humanitarianism, and individual Bad Guys with such names as Osama, Saddam, and Slobodan. These terms express a vision of the universe that might suit a big-city mayor—a universe in which every problem can be handled either by the police department or by the do-good agencies. WMD, rogue states, and Bad Guys are the foreign-policy equivalents of guns, gangs, and gangsters—matters for the police.

Regime change, nation-building, and humanitarianism are the equivalents of slum-clearance, housing development, schools, and soup kitchens—matters for the do-goods. In city politics, conservatives cheer on the police department, and liberals cheer on the do-goods. Thus, in foreign policy, conservatives cheer on the U.S. military, and liberals, the United Nations—the police and the do-goods.

Only this vision of life has the minor drawback of leaving out the single largest fact in the modern history of the world. That largest of facts is the rise of a certain kind of political movement—movements animated by paranoid hatreds, by apocalyptic fantasies, and by the fanatical desire to kill people en masse. These have been the big totalitarian movements, Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and a few others—movements whose greatest goal was to destroy liberal civilization.

The language of WMD, Bad Guys, humanitarianism, and all the rest cannot describe these movements and their doctrines and their fanaticism. We know how to speak about member states of the United Nations. But totalitarian movements have always been international, with and without state support. We have lost the ability to speak about mass international movements of that sort.

Why is that? It is because most people have convinced themselves that modern totalitarianism no longer exists. The Bush administration has said so itself. Everybody remembers the notorious National Security statement of 2002—the statement that became infamous for declaring somewhat idiotically (because some things are better left unsaid) a policy of pre-emptive war. But the really scandalous part of that statement said: "For most of the 20th century, the world was divided by a great struggle over ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus freedom and equality. That great struggle is over."

Wrong! The totalitarian visions live on. Only, instead of being called fascism or some other name from the past, the visions of the present are called radical Islamism and Baathism and suchlike, with doctrines duly descended from their European progenitors—the totalitarianism of the modern Muslim world. All the talk about WMD has been hugely misleading, in this respect. As the NRA likes to say, WMD don't kill people; mass totalitarian movements kill people (sometimes using WMD, but more often, not). But our mayor's language of foreign policy has prohibited us from saying so.

What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.

But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy—it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise—mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else's sake, Muslims' especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

But I haven't responded to what everyone else has said, or said anything about non-military ways to go about this. I promise to do so tomorrow.

Kenneth Pollack's revisiting of his own argument in The Threatening Storm, while admirable and scrupulous (even if it is written by someone who used to be a producer rather than a consumer of WMD information) affects the essential case no more than Paul O'Neill's supposed "disclosure" that the Bush administration was anti-Saddam from the start. It was long ago announced, by President Clinton in a major speech in 1999, that a future confrontation with Saddam on WMD had become inescapable. And it was long ago voted nem con by the Senate that, for other reasons having to do with genocide and tyranny, the Iraq Liberation Act ought to become law. It would have been an occasion for very severe criticism if the incoming Bush administration had sought to dilute either of these historic commitments.

Pollack may have been led to overstate the immediate danger from WMD, but he did so on persuasive evidence that was supported by a long history of exorbitant behavior by the Baathists, and on a long history of culpable underreaction by Washington. (There was no comparable inquisition, as I recall, when the intelligence "community" failed to predict, and very nearly failed to report, the invasion of Kuwait. And the antiwar forces cling to their taunt on WMD because every other part of their propaganda and prediction has been utterly exploded.) That's if WMD ever were much of an argument in that quarter. I myself had a different experience from Pollack, in the run-up to the war. I had to debate, every week and sometimes every day, with anti-interventionists who said that Saddam's possession of WMD was a reason NOT to attack or attempt to depose him. I said that the threat was latent not blatant, and that the main "immediate" danger was an off-the-shelf purchase by Iraq from North Korea, and by the way I think I was right. But I was not an elected officeholder in a democratic government in a post-9/11 atmosphere. If I had been, I would certainly have decided to make the worst assumption about any report on Saddam's capacity for lethality, and I would have been operating at all times on the presumption of guilt. As a civilian, I would have wanted to criticize any Western government that did not err deliberately on this side.

Another way of phrasing this is to remember the line taken by the late Dr. David Kelly, sad subject of the Hutton inquiry in Britain. In an article written just before his death, this experienced inspector stated that you could have genuine inspections only by way of regime change. This essentially commonsensical view, which has been seconded by other veteran inspectors such as Rolf Ekeus and David Kay, takes account of the notorious Iraqi deception and concealment programs; the failure to comply at any point with U.N. resolutions; the sequestration of Iraqi scientists; and the preservation of secret funds, documents, and resources in Baghdad against the day when sanctions might be lifted and another bid for superpowerdom be made. Taken together with the secret bargaining (now exposed) with North Korea, this entitles us to speak of a Permanent Threat if not precisely an Imminent One. "Imminence" might have come when Saddam gave way to the Odai/Qusai regime: a prospect that need no longer concern us but that did not concern the antiwar forces even when it was a possibility.

Thus, we now can account more or less for Iraq's lunatic mixture of missing and undeclared weapons, and that in itself is an achievement. Moreover, the Iraqi economy and military are no longer at the disposal of a crime family with well-attested links to piracy and gangsterism, and that too is a gain. Dr. Howard Dean now tells that al-Qaida is in Iraq after all, but only because of President Bush. He is entitled as a private citizen to his touching belief that the connection began only a few months ago: One would not want a president to have been so insouciant if he had had to take the actual decision at the time, and once again I applaud the presumption of guilt, which was equally well-merited.

I cannot see the point of the case about a "distraction" from the hunt for Bin Laden, and this is not only because I strongly suspect that dear Osama has already passed away. Nor is it because so many of those who stress the Iraq "distraction" were telling me, just a couple of years ago, that it was futile to intervene in Afghanistan lest such a move cause thousands of new Bin Ladens to spring up. … (How soon they forget, but I don't, and I am keeping score.) The tactics and resources that are required to fight a covert war against nihilistic theologues, and the tactics and resources that are required to remove a totalitarian dictatorship, are somewhat distinct. They may well overlap and they have in fact done so, but who can argue that we should not be ready and able to perform both such undertakings, possibly simultaneously? The two in fact reinforce one another, and coalition forces in Iraq are now rapidly acquiring deadly skills that will certainly be required in other places and at other times before the war against jihad and its patrons is over.

This point also applies to the question of cost. One cannot know the price of anything in advance, but one can be determined to pay it no matter what, as in a struggle for one's own life or for the life of loved ones. If it was foolish of the administration to argue that things like Iraq or Afghanistan could be done cheaply, it is flat-out irresponsible for the antiwar populists to argue that the money would be "better spent at home." Do they somehow still imagine that war is another word for "overseas"? For all I know they do. If we are really looking for cost cuts, then we could draw down the wastage and folly of the "war on drugs," or the fantasy of nuclearism. (The failure of the left to seize those chances, by the way, is yet another proof that it cares only for morbid dislike of anything undertaken by the president.)

As for casualties, there is only one apparent way of avoiding them for sure, and that way—abstention or pacifism—runs a risk of greater casualties later on, or as well. I detest utilitarianism, but I prefer it to idealism or neutralism, and I believe a decent case can be made that many, many Iraqis have been saved by the intervention, and that many inhabitants of other countries including our own are better-protected by the abolition of aggressive and unstable dictatorships. The case cannot be literally proved, of course, but we have a shrewd idea of what can happen when such regimes are left to choose the initiative. And this in turn makes one weep to think of what we and the Iraqis might have been spared if Saddam Hussein had been removed by Bush Senior. (Now that the in-between sanctions have been lifted, surely those who claimed that they were genocidal and child-murdering ought to have a good word to say. Or do they want one to suspect that they only wanted sanctions lifted when Saddam Hussein was still in power?)

Staying with the lachrymose for a moment, one weeps also at the missed chances and the blunders. Need I specify the appalling misjudgment of Washington's Turcophiles, the stupefying lack of economic and technological follow-through—the voracious Halliburton lobby seems really to have dropped the ball there—and the ditherings over the Governing Council? However, these seem to me to be second-order objections, since we had well before the turn of 2000 become in effect co-responsible for the future and the care of Iraq. Its future was unavoidably in our future. The chief blemish of that de facto policy, in which every main faction in American politics was already complicit, was that it involved a shame-faced and unstated power-sharing with Saddam Hussein. That was intolerable and could not long endure. So, I think that the president and his advisers deserve credit for acknowledging and shouldering what was in fact an "actually existing" responsibility. While those who tried to disown or disclaim the responsibility are in a very poor position to snipe at the way it is being discharged. Much of the criticism I read expresses one or another form of denial of this basic consideration. Those who say, for example, that they would approve the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq if only there were more French or Russian soldiers there are conceding more than perhaps they intend. (I personally can't say that I yearn to see there the veterans of Rwanda and Cote d'Ivoire and New Caledonia, or the heroes of Grozny.)

Friedman is right to say that the macro-policy, so often and so stupidly attributed to "neocon" conspiracy, has provided an important vindication. Since the regime changes in Kabul and Baghdad, other regimes from Riyadh to Islamabad to Tehran have quietly but decidedly changed their tune, while some others have gone so far as to drop their weapons. There is no serious state-sponsored hiding place for al-Qaida, whereas a quiverful of measures and tactics now exists, well field-tested, to tackle any new challenger in this field. Myself, I still have a fondness for the micro-policies, too. The Marsh Arabs are returning to their habitat, my profession can be practiced again in one of the places where writing was invented, the Shiites can follow their own religion, the Kurds are nearer to self-determination, there is politics again in a serious country, and we have seen the tree of liberty being watered in the traditional manner, which is an event that not every member of every generation can take pride in.

I seem to be the only one in the club who's changed his mind. In fact, a case could be made I shouldn't be here at all because I changed my mind before the war began. My membership in the "I can't believe I'm a hawk" club dated from Feb. 5, 2003, with Colin Powell's (now utterly discredited) pitch to the U.N. Security Council and expired a month later when I realized that, whatever the merits for war (and I'm still ambivalent on that question), the Bush administration was incapable of pulling it off. Here is what I wrote on March 5:

If the administration lacks the acumen or persuasive power to deal with such familiar institutions as the U.N. Security Council or the established governments of France, Germany, Turkey, Russia, China—even Canada—then how is it going to handle Iraq's feuding opposition groups, Kurdish separatists, and myriad ethno-religious factions, to say nothing of the turbulence throughout the region?

My case for multilateralism was, and still is, strictly pragmatic: The United States does not have the budgetary resources, the military manpower, the international legitimacy (especially in the region), or, I suspect, ultimately the political wherewithal to go this all the way to the finish line alone. (And, please, don't talk to me about the crack Polish division.)

Saddam Hussein was clearly a nasty, evil dictator. So were Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. So, today, is Kim Jong-il. Does that mean we should have declared war on the U.S.S.R., China, and Cambodia? Does it mean we should declare war on North Korea now? I ask those who support the Iraq war on humanitarian grounds: Why not? Tom Friedman makes an admirably honest point: We went to war with Iraq because we could. But to extend this argument further, I want to ask Tom: Because we could what? Yes, we could invade the country, topple the regime, and occupy the capital. But winning wars is about accomplishing strategic objectives. If the strategic objective was to oust Saddam Hussein, we won, and maybe we should go home. Regardless of my views on the war, I do not believe we should go home (having wrecked the nation's structure, we are obligated to ensure a new one is put in place); I assume no one else on this panel thinks we should either. So the strategic objective was something else, and the panel has cited several goals: democratization, regional stability, human rights, and so forth. If these were the strategic objectives, if this is what the war was about, then we haven't yet won, and, in Tom's terms, it is not yet clear that we could achieve them. I hope I'm wrong on this, by the way.

I am surprised how blithely many of you have waved off the growing—and by now all but incontrovertible—evidence that Saddam Hussein hasn't had weapons of mass destruction for many years and wasn't anywhere near the verge of building new ones. To you, WMD were never the real reason for war anyway. But to Congress and probably to the vast majority of the American people, they were the only reason (well, along with Iraq's direct and explicit links to al-Qaida, another dubious proposition). Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld certainly knew this, which is why they were so hellbent on twisting intelligence to make the case. Even Wolfowitz said, in his famous Vanity Fair profile, that Saddam's human-rights violations would not by themselves justify the sacrifice of American lives.

At the risk of sounding like a goo-goo, I invite someone to take up the question of going to war in a democracy. How frankly should an elected leader feel obligated to outline the true reasons for war? If the reasons fail to persuade, should he go to war anyway if he feels the cause is right?

If we are talking about creating something like a new world order, where tyrants and terrorists will not be tolerated, how important is it to persuade, cajole, and manipulate other countries to go along with us? If we cannot find very many others to join us—let alone, as was the case with Bush, if the president makes it clear he doesn't care whether others join us—should we continue with this campaign anyway?

I guess my wording of the question hints at where I stand on the issue. Where do you stand? If we're talking about the spread of democracy—or at least of a cooperative international community—is waging a preventive war, unilaterally, the best way to get the ball rolling?

Tom notes that NATO did not need the United Nations to go to war against Slobodan Milosevic on behalf of Kosovo. True, but the United States did need NATO. Clinton realized he needed to do this with some established international organization, and given that the Serbs were wilding in the heart of Europe, NATO was ideally suited. That war, as many neocons subsequently complained, was waged rather sloppily; a committee is not the most efficient vehicle for picking targets in a bombing campaign. Yet as Wesley Clark argues in his account of that war, it was the best—really, the only—way of conducting the war from the vantage point of achieving its strategic objectives. One of those strategic objectives was to demonstrate that the international community will not tolerate tyrannical enslavement in Europe. And today, U.N. peacekeepers are still in the country. The war would have been seen in a very different light—and it could have gone in a different direction—if it had been waged entirely by the United States Air Force and if American soldiers and Marines were still occupying the land.

There are other issues, but let me hurl these into the fray as a starter.

A word about Fred Kaplan's post. Fred explains that he supported the war, for a little while, because of Colin Powell's U.N. speech—which is to say, Fred never accepted the deeper reasons for the war, given that Powell never did explain them. But here is a problem. Someone who doesn't see the deeper reasons (at least, as I understand them) is not going to be able to identify the strategic goals.

The war was brought on, in my view, by the mass totalitarian movement of the Muslim world—the totalitarian movement that, in its radical Islamist and Baathist wings, had fostered a cult of indiscriminate killing and suicide. The true strategic goal of such a war can only be to discourage and defeat that movement. The goal is to cause people all over the Muslim world to abandon the cult of mass death and suicide. What would be a complete victory? The rise of liberal societies and liberal ideas. That is because the opposite of totalitarianism is liberalism. And so, our goal has had to be: to damage and discourage the Muslim totalitarians and to hearten and aid the Muslim liberals.

Are these strategic goals so impossible to see? On Sept. 10, 2001, the totalitarian wave in the Muslim world appeared to be at high tide. Many millions of people did think so, at least, and therefore felt inclined to give the various tendencies of the larger movement their support. In quite a few countries, the most gruesome tyrannies were in power, in the name of sundry versions of the totalitarian ideology. There seemed to be no prospect, none whatsoever, of seeing those tyrannies overthrown.

And today? The larger totalitarian movement in the Muslim world has been dealt two very powerful blows. The Taliban no longer rules Afghanistan and has been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. The Baath in Iraq has likewise been reduced to a guerrilla insurgency. Some 45 million Afghanis and Iraqis, who had previously been confined to the lowest ranks of hell, are now engaged in a very tough fight—a fight in which there is at least a plausible hope of achieving a better society, animated by liberal values in a suitably Muslim version.

On Sept. 10, 2001, liberal-minded people in those two countries had no reason to think that life would ever be better. Today the liberal-minded Afghanis and Iraqis have been given a somewhat shaky boost, but a boost, nonetheless, which can only encourage their fellow-thinkers in other parts of the Muslim world. Strategic goals? These are the strategic goals.

Why don't people understand these goals and accomplishments? (And, therefore, why don't they lend their support, which is desperately needed, if only to undo the American blunders that Fred correctly identifies?) The blame, a lot of it, does fall on Bush, who, in addition to his other errors, has given a very muddy picture of the reasons for war and its goals, sometimes making one argument, sometimes a contradictory argument. Really, the man has a lot to answer for. I don't see how Powell has helped (though it's good to have someone with personal charm speak for the country and not leave it to Rumsfeld to give the world the willies).

But some of the blame falls as well on the anti-Bush naifs who pretend not to hear when anyone speaks about the larger reasons and goals—the people who pretend that WMD and non-existent conspiracies were the only reasons for war and pretend that the only serious goals were the arrests of a couple of men, or the achieving of a magical utopia tomorrow, and pretend that if war has still not ended, we have gotten nowhere at all. It's all too true that better leaders could have made better plans, and the French and the Germans and the United Nations could help even now, if only they would. But it ought not to be so hard to see that, even so, the prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy today than they did on Sept. 10, 2001 and the prospects of Muslim liberalism are looking up, somewhat.

Fred Kaplan writes, "Please, don't talk to me about the crack Polish division." I can't help myself—I've got to talk about it. To see Polish troops taking part in the overthrow of Baathist tyranny is, in my eyes, hugely inspiring. No country on Earth has fought harder over the decades against totalitarianism than Poland, and the Poles are fighting now. Poland is not a rich country, and every society contributes what it can (if it chooses to contribute at all). But the Poles are contributing. You have only to read some of the comments by the Polish commander in Iraq to see why the Poles are there. They are the enemies of totalitarianism. They, or at least their commander, seem to understand what so many people find difficult to understand: In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a liberal war is going on—liberal in the philosophical sense, meaning liberty.

There are several topics that run through the letters you've published, so I'll try to sort them out that way instead of just answering individual posts.

1. Totalitarianism.

I'm a great admirer of Paul Berman and Terror and Liberalism (my thoughts about it can be found on the back jacket). Paul understood and explained the ideological nature of the 9/11 attacks before anyone else, and in my view his essential argument still holds up. But Paul's argument is grand theory, rooted in history, literature, and philosophy, and one thing it does not do is provide a readily apparent strategy. In the case of Iraq, its altitude is too high to explain the war and its aftermath. Because we are fighting Muslim totalitarianism, Paul says, and because Saddam was a totalitarian who was also a Muslim, the war in Iraq was the first, or second, step to take in the fight. But why does that necessarily follow? Baathism was not a rising totalitarian mania. It was a decaying totalitarian ideology that had long since lost its ability to inspire millions across borders to engage in mass acts of murder and suicide (to use Paul's terms). According to Kanan Makiya, the original expert on Baathism (see Republic of Fear), Iraq after the Gulf War lost its totalitarian nerve and became a criminal state: This explains the condition of its bureaucracy and, to an extent, the mind-set of its people after liberation. Conflating Saddam's regime with the worldwide Islamist movement leads to serious intellectual confusion and makes it harder to keep the latter in our sights. It also, in the short run, has unquestionably made it harder to fight the latter—the U.S. military had to pull special forces troops out of eastern Afghanistan to be used in counterinsurgency in Iraq. I wasn't surprised to read yesterday that Saddam warned Iraqi insurgents against cooperating with Islamists coming across the borders to fight jihad.

The Iraq war was unfinished business from the 1990s, an extension of arguments about the assertion of American power (see back issues of Commentary and Weekly Standard) and humanitarian war (see back issues of Dissent and the New Republic). Now that Saddam is gone and we're in Iraq, of course we should do everything possible to create conditions for liberalism to take root; and there's a chance that in the very long run those conditions could spread to other Muslim countries now controlled by dictatorships. In this sense, Paul and Tom Friedman are saying much the same thing, in different language. Before the war, I was ready to accept these possibilities as one argument for war, but about this my view has changed: The time I spent in Iraq was an education in the limits of war as an instrument of political transformation and the limits of America as its standard-bearer. Liberal democracy requires participation and consent, and as long as American military power is the prime tool for building it, Muslims around the world are unlikely to change their ideas. We need to decouple America and the promotion of democracy; the Iraq war did the opposite. The fact that tens of millions of Muslims around the world harbor increasingly hateful feelings toward America might not be rational, but it is a serious problem if this is a war for liberalism (as I think it is), though it isn't a reason not to fight worldwide Islamism.

2. Democracy abroad.

This might well be the only long-term answer to Islamism and its terrors. The Bush administration sometimes says so, but its actions often undermine its speechwriters' best efforts. As far as I can tell, the top policymakers see the war on terrorism as a matter of killings terrorists, as many as possible, which fits with the hard-edged "realism" most of them brought to the administration. The problem is that we don't know how to change other societies. Iraq so far is a sharp lesson in humility. Supporters of the war are fond of analogizing to Germany and Japan, but those countries had experienced total defeat after prolonged war, and the occupying powers enjoyed a legitimacy that the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq can only look back on with envy. In Eastern Europe, long-term support for dissidents helped end Communism and pave the way for democracy. But those forces were internal. There are very few comparable trends in the Muslim world today, outside of Iran. War is a very blunt instrument for such delicate work—going into Iraq with tanks and then trying to nurture democrats is like doing the finish on cabinetry with a sledgehammer. The war set powerful forces in motion that at the moment are hardly moving in a democratic direction.

The alternative model is something more like the Cold War than World War II—a long, difficult campaign, on many fronts, economic, political, cultural, as well as military, to nurture liberal forces in Muslim dictatorships without strengthening the hand of their enemies, until large parts of those societies begin to embrace liberal ideas. This is unglamorous, frustrating work. It doesn't provide a quick moral frisson. And it requires a longer attention span than most Americans, including liberals, hawks, or combinations of the two, have generally been able to muster.

3. Democracy at home.

Fred Kaplan is right: How we went to war matters a lot (which is why I wrote in my first post that the weapons question remains a scandal waiting for a dramatizer—perhaps a journalist as polemically gifted as Christopher Hitchens was when it came to the deceptions of Nixon, Kissinger, and Clinton). Bush damaged alliances and institutions abroad because, as his national security strategy makes plain, he thinks they're disposable. (The damage done by the French was about equal—this was a case of codependency.) As for democratic process at home, the president has never shown a great deal of regard for that, either. By March, when Fred wrote his renunciation, the wreckage was already considerable, the war inevitable—and as far as being able to pull it off, that depends on what "it" is. For me, it was getting rid of Saddam and his regime. But the things Bush broke on the way to war badly need repair—not just as ends in themselves, but because without alliances and institutions, and without the informed consent of the American public, we're a lot less likely to win the larger war that started on Sept. 11.

George Packer

George Packer's dispatch relieves me of the need to deal with Paul Berman's salvo. He makes the same point I would have, plus three or four others, all of them more elegantly. Let me follow up on a point George made with a question, aimed specifically at Paul and Christopher, but that anyone should feel free to pick up: What do you make of Jim Risen's front-page story in today's New York Times, reporting that, before he was captured (but after he went into hiding), Saddam Hussein wrote a directive to his insurgent-followers, urging them to stay away from the foreign jihadists who were coming in to battle the Americans and who, S.H. apparently emphasized, had incompatibly different goals and motives?

I have always believed that Bush's principal public justifications for the war in Iraq were mendacious, and I've said so all along. The mendacities have caused a huge number of problems, too, and one of those problems has been to get everyone to play "gotcha" with Bush instead of looking at what seems to be happening in the present. An example: today's story today about Saddam and his directive not to collaborate with jihadists.

The claim that Saddam and Osama were in cahoots was one of Bush's principal mendacities—an unlikely claim, which, if it had any truth at all, was likely to be a very tiny truth. And yet, because of that claim, the discovery in Iraq of Saddam's directive is seen as news. The news is: "See! Bush was wrong yet again! Saddam did not, in fact, want to conspire with the partisans of radical Islamism." But there is no news here. Saddam wants his Arab Baath Socialist Party to get back into power. Saddam does not want to see a victory for radical Islamism. He does not want to see his own movement get taken over by foreign Islamists. And why is that?

It is because these two movements, Baathism and radical Islamism, have many differences. Baathism is a species of radical Arab nationalism. It is semi-secular, sometimes even with a touch of leftism. Radical Islamism is ultra-theocratic. Different styles, different rhetorics, different ultimate goals. A lot of mutual hatred.

In the past, the United States and many another hapless government around the world adopted the policy of playing those two movements against each another in the hope of reducing terrorist dangers to ourselves. That is why, during the Reagan years, the United States supported Saddam and his Baath—in the hope of damaging the radical Islamists of Iran. Other countries, following the same logic, supported some of the wings of radical Islamism—in the hope of constraining the more violent or terrorist-inclined radical Arab nationalists. Anwar Sadat in Egypt supported the Islamists on this basis (though a radical Islamist group ended up assassinating him), and so did the French (for a while, which they came to regret), and so did the Israelis (in the forlorn hope that Islamist piety would quiet down the radical nationalist champions of violence).

Those were Machiavellian maneuvers, which sometimes may have made sense, in the short run. But the longer run has turned out to be a disaster for everyone—for the Arab and Muslim worlds, for the Israelis, the French, and even for us. And why did these efforts to play the two movements against each other prove to be disastrous? It was because radical Islamism and Baathism (to restrict the discussion to that one branch of radical Arab nationalism) do have their differences. But they also have a lot in common, beginning with their respective doctrines, at a fundamental level. They share, to wit:

1) A Paranoid Conspiracy Theory, according to which the Arab world (for the Baath) or the world of Islam (for the Islamists) is under a massive assault by a sinister and cosmic conspiracy of Zionists (and/or Jews, and/or Masons) and Crusaders (and/or Western imperialists).

2) An Apocalyptic Fantasy. The cosmic conspiracy will be defeated in order to reinstate the Golden Age of Islam in the seventh century, described as the Islamic Caliphate (by the Islamists) or as the Arab Empire based on Islam (by the Baath)—though both movements picture the reinstated seventh century as a high-tech extravaganza, a kind of modernity.

3) A Tyrannical Plan: The reinstated Golden Age will require an extreme police-state, described as the pious reign of Shariah or Quranic law (by the Islamists) or as the reign of brotherly Arab love (by the Baath).

4) A Cult of Death: the belief that masses of people should die, and death will strengthen the larger cause. The Iran-Iraq War was conducted on this basis, which is why it was one of the ghastliest things that has happened in modern times. And, as a consequence of that same Cult of Death, both movements, Baathism and radical Islamism alike, took to promoting random terror attacks.

The specific tactic of suicide terror is said to have been originally a specialty of the radical Islamists in Iran, who exported it to the Hezbollah in Lebanon—the people who truck-bombed the U.S. Marine barracks there (and French barracks, too). Since Lebanon was at that moment under the control of the Syrian Baath, it has always seemed likely that a bit of Baath-Islamist cooperation was already underway, in the cause of suicide terror—which is to say, collaboration between these movements is, in principle, not absolutely out of the question.

In any case, both movements, not just the Islamists, ended up promoting the larger vogue of suicide terror. Young men wearing shrouds—the costumes of suicide terrorists—marched in the Baathist military parade in Baghdad before the invasion, just to show that the Iraqi Baath was already planning for suicide terror. The Iraqi Baath is reported to have sent genuinely large sums of money to reimburse the families of Palestinian suicide terrorists. (Suicide terror has frequently been a matter of paying people.) Why did suicide terror become such a large fad in recent years? Because enormous institutions were promoting it, including some of the most enormous of all, the Baath and the Islamist movement.

So, then—Baathism and radical Islamism have their differences. But it ought to be obvious that, even so, these are branches of a larger single movement, and the nature of that movement ought to be recognizable to us. For what are these doctrines? The Paranoid Conspiracy Theory, the Apocalyptic Fantasy, the Tyrannical Plan, the Cult of Death—these things are old stand-bys of modern history. They are the central tenets of European fascism (and, in some respects, of Stalinism), which have been adapted into Muslim and Arab dialects by a variety of theoreticians. And this single movement, which I call Muslim totalitarianism, has, over the last quarter century, killed millions—exactly as European totalitarianism did, in its time.

George Packer worries that conflating the Baath and the Islamists into a single movement will sow an intellectual confusion. Yes, that can happen. But I think the principle confusion that has beset us in the last few decades has been the failure to see what these two movements have in common—the ways in which they are wings of a single movement.

George calls for a Cold War tactic of ideological pressure, which should last many years. I couldn't agree more. I salute him. He himself has done more than anyone to raise these points. A rifle and a cruise missile are surely the worst of all tools for helping some other society construct a liberal political culture. Still, terrorist attacks against Americans have been going on ever since 1983, and we may not want to wait another 21 years for the vogue of suicide terror to come to an end.

So, there is a logic for extremely crude responses, in spite of everything. (And let us not rule out at least a few crumbs of success, just because other methods would be a million times preferable. Things are terrible in Afghanistan today; and yet, a properly Muslim version of liberal democracy does seem at least thinkable there, lately. In Afghanistan!—one of the most rustic, far-away, un-middle-class societies on earth! And there is the exemplary model of Iraqi Kurdistan …)

But, yes, totalitarian movements can ultimately be defeated only in the realm of ideas. Millions of people have to be persuaded to change their ideas. Not forced—persuaded. Which is to say, someone has to go out there and try to persuade people.

On this point, which happens to be the most important point of all, Bush has failed us almost totally. It is pretty outrageous. His failure to take up these matters ought to be seen as a calamity. But then, who has been making up for this terrible failure of his? Who has taken up the burden to wage a really extensive war of ideas, a war of TV networks, radio programs, lectures, books, magazines, and everything else? I don't mean something small—I mean a massive campaign.

I think the political right is incapable of waging such a war, by virtue of its own militaristic and isolationist instincts. The neocons do sometimes talk about a war of ideas, but, on these matters, neoconservatism is all talk, no action. So, then, this should be the business of people on the left side of the spectrum. But where are the Democrats, on these matters? The left? This is truly a problem, and nobody seems to be doing very much about it, not on a grand scale, anyway.

Since this is my first post I want to address Jacob's central question, that Fred and George have pressed so effectively. Given the costs, was the war worth it? I think it was. Many of the costs (ruptured alliances, the postwar mess) can be alleviated (through better planning, diplomacy, etc.). I don't minimize these and have been vocal in pointing them out. But they do not invalidate the entire enterprise.

I've often been associated with the "democratization spillover" argument, so let me point out that the elimination of Saddam Hussein has been a big plus for American national security. The most anti-American and expansionist regime in the Middle East has disappeared. An actual and potential threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait has been eliminated. A violent, rejectionist state has faced consequences. This has had a sobering effect on the region: See Syria and Libya's recent behavior. Given our interest in a stable Middle East, this is good.

Given our growing interest in a more decent Middle East it is even better. For the last few decades we have defined deviancy down in that region. Behavior that would be utterly unacceptable from other countries gets a pass because it's the Middle East. If we learned tomorrow that, say, the Brazilian government was supporting various terror groups, trafficking in chemical and biological agents, and allowing its media to glorify anti-American violence, we would be appalled. When it's Syria we shrug our shoulders and say, "It's the Middle East."

This is the real connection to 9/11. After 9/11 we came to realize that we couldn't let the Middle East keep festering in its dysfunction and hatreds. It was breeding anti-Americanism and terror. With Iraq in particular, business as usual was becoming increasingly difficult. Throughout this discussion we have assumed that there was a simple, viable alternative to war with Iraq, the continuation of the status-quo, i.e., sanctions plus the almost weekly bombing of the no-fly zones. In fact, that isn't really true. America's Iraq policy was broken. You have to contrast the dangers of acting in Iraq with the dangers of not acting and ask what would things have looked like had we simply kicked this can down the road.

I had been comfortable with the "Saddam-is-in-a-box" argument during the 1990s. But by the latter part of the decade the policy was collapsing. In 1996 Saddam invaded the Kurdish safe haven of northern Iraq, re-establishing his power in the area. In the next few years he repeatedly defied U.N. inspectors and busted sanctions. His neighbors—Jordan, Turkey, Syria—began illicitly trading with him. The French and Russians were openly working to get the sanctions lifted. Saddam adopted an increasingly bold negotiating strategy, refusing or reneging on various compromises that were offered him. In 1998 he stooped cooperating with the inspectors. In November 1999 he stopped exporting oil (under the oil for food program) so that he could send oil prices to their highest levels in a decade. On coming into office, Colin Powell, realizing how ineffective sanctions had become, tried to create a "smart sanctions" program that would target the regime and not the Iraqi people. The French and Russians scuttled it.

So, what we had by 2001 was a policy that was leaving Saddam strong but killing thousands of Iraqi civilians—by one UNICEF estimate over 30,000 a year, of which the majority were children under 5. This was not the containment of the Soviet Union. Iraq had turned into a gangsterland, on its way to becoming a Middle Eastern Chechnya. Its humanitarian crisis was broadcast every day across the Arab world and had enormous popular appeal. That is why, having no love for Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden listed it as one of his three grievances against America in his famous declaration of jihad.

Was a continuation of these trends—collapsing sanctions, total impoverishment, no inspectors, Saddam emboldened, and Iraq as the humanitarian cause of the Arab world—good for American interest and ideals? Particularly after 9/11?

George raises a very important question as to whether war is the best agent for democratization. No, it isn't. But there are certain places where change is unlikely to come from within—anytime soon. In particular in oil-rich countries, there is always enough money to pay the army, the secret police, and the torturers. That's why, over the last three decades, while dictatorships all over the world have tottered and tumbled, not one has fallen in the Arab world. Democracy doesn't always come at the point of a gun, but it often does take outside pressure to topple a bad regime—Germany, Japan, Eastern Europe, South Africa. And while external help can be suspect, sometimes outside pressure can help as it did in East Asia and Latin America.

The eggs are broken. Now we need to make a decent omelet. Of course George is right when he says that to succeed in Iraq we need greater popular legitimacy—and we could have gotten it in various ways. And he's right that democracy-building is long, slow, hard work—I've written much about that myself. I've read his intelligent accounts of all the problems in Iraq today. But would it really be easier to make progress toward a decent society had there been no war? And while I'm as sensitive as anyone to public opinion, please don't take too seriously the howls of Arab intellectuals, people who only a year ago hailed Saddam Hussein as their hero. They are reflections of a broken culture. If the goal is to make them happy, we will never achieve any progress in the Middle East.

The war against Iraq was a tough call. For me there was no single reason that was dispositive. But I believe that political and economic change in the Middle East is vital to tackling the war on terror. That, coupled with the humanitarian crisis, coupled with the security problem that Saddam posed, made me sign on to the war.

Yes, we could have tried to promote reform without a war—and we are. We could have better funded legal exchange programs in Egypt, helped women's education in Jordan, provided economic advice to Qatar—but would it have been an adequate and urgent strategy to address the virus that has infected the Middle East? In Iraq we have the possibility of helping a society break through the barriers of the past and set an example for the future. Of course it may not succeed, and things may not change in that region. Many of the Bush administration postwar mistakes make that outcome more likely. But one thing's for certain: If we hadn't tried, we can be sure that it would not succeed and nothing would change.

Fareed Zakaria makes the most eloquent and persuasive case for war. If we all get together again in five years and his scenario has come to pass, I will arrive at the reunion with mea culpa in hand. I turned against the war last March not out of pacifism, faith in the United Nations, or solidarity with France, but rather out of sheer skepticism—not only about the Bush administration's dubious motives and mendacious ploys but also (and primarily) about its ability to pull the thing off, particularly in the "postwar" phase (which our officials, in fact, so thoroughly botched that it has devolved into a second, deadlier phase of the war itself). In their diplomacy leading up to the war, Bush & Co. proved themselves so maladroit at dealing with long-familiar allies and entities, I figured they'd be hopeless at untangling the internal ethnic tensions that would boil to the surface after Saddam's lid was blown off.

Fareed lays out an enticing plotline in which the emergence of a stable state and a civil society in Iraq inspires progress and moderation throughout the Middle East. He points to steps that have already been taken in this direction by Libya and Syria—and I agree that these steps are, in large measure, a direct result of the war. However, I would argue that we are still at a very early stage of this story. Iraq could evolve into a viable, Western-leaning nation; it could devolve into a bastion of Islamic fundamentalism, à la Khomeini or worse; it could deteriorate into fragmented anarchy, even civil war. I don't see any one of these possibilities as more or less likely than the others. If one of the latter two scenarios comes to pass, the impact on Iraq, the region, and the rest of the world—and the United States' standing in it—will be devastating, the exact opposite of the noblest intentions.

I'm not dogmatic about this point. Fareed, you may be proved right. I hope you are. I guess the difference between us, for now, is that you see the glass as one-quarter full; I see it as three-quarters empty.

The Bush officials have changed their tune somewhat in the past few months. They seem now to realize, to some degree, the need for a more multilateral approach. Baker's trip to Europe (which I think was about more than debt-forgiveness) is an intriguing sign in this regard. What they are doing, diplomatically, in the Middle East is less clear. The Libyan gambit is promising, but it would be nice to see some pressure on other powers, not least Israel, too.

The Bush people also appear more responsive to the desires and demands of Iraqi leaders. (You don't hear Wolfowitz waxing on de Tocqueville much anymore; when it comes to what we all see as an acceptable political outcome, the bar has been considerably lowered, to accommodate a shift from fantasy to realism.) And the military leadership—thanks, mainly, to the new Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who rose through the ranks as a special ops commander and therefore knows the nature of "low-intensity conflict"—is adapting as well, attempting to strike a more effective balance between banging down doors and capturing hearts-and-minds.

Maybe it will work out. Maybe it won't. If it doesn't, the war will have unleashed forces far more damaging than might have been brought on by a continuation of containment, smart sanctions, and other, subtler pressures. Certainly I agree with you (and Tom Friedman, who has been making this point repeatedly in the Times as well as here) that the next few months are decisive and that the administration has got to start playing this game much more shrewdly than it has until now.

I'd like to bring the conversation back to the subject of the war's costs and benefits and the issue of whether the latter justify the former. Christopher Hitchens, in his post, asserts that such considerations are irrelevant. "One cannot know the price of anything in advance, but one can be determined to pay it no matter what, as in a struggle for one's own life or for the life of loved ones," he writes.

That seems to me an appropriate sentiment for a battle of national and moral survival, such as the fight against Nazism. But if anything is clear in retrospect, it's that the Iraq war was not a fight for our survival. The best arguments advanced for the invasion in this dialogue have been either bank-shot strategic or non-strategic humanitarian. Absent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi sponsorship of al-Qaida, explicit self-defense doesn't come into it. And because choosing this war when we chose it was optional, a weighing of the costs and benefits is not merely appropriate, but the very heart of the decision.

Dare I make a comparison to Vietnam? I'm not sure where Christopher stands on that war today, but I would argue that there was a price worth paying to prevent Vietnam from falling into Communist hands. Unfortunately, the acceptable price—in American lives, Vietnamese lives, public funds, distraction from other problems, social division, and so on—was far less than what we paid short of achieving victory. If we could remake that decision with the benefit of hindsight, I hope we'd all agree Vietnam was a mistake—not on grounds of absolute principle, but because the costs were insupportable.

Of course, one does not simply stop fighting a war, even an elective one, because the profit-and-loss tally shifts from arguably favorable to marginally unfavorable—an implication of Christopher's I accept. Indeed, cost-benefit analysis can say we shouldn't have invaded in the first place, but that now that we're there, we should stick. We have already incurred most of the costs of going to war in Iraq and reversing course now would only serve to increase them—a point Mickey Kaus made the other day in his blog, in response to something Fareed wrote in Newsweek.

But that still leaves the question of whether our initial decision to support the war was wrong based on what we knew, or ought to have known, back in March. Most of you seem to believe we did not make a mistake. This afternoon, I'm leaning toward Fred's view that we did.

A short answer to Fred Kaplan's question of Wednesday: If the James Risen story in the New York Times is correct, which I have no reason to doubt, it is still written upside down, or at least would read just as well if printed that way. In other words, one might as well make a "disclosure" out of the fact that Saddam was in close touch with his own thugs concerning the movements of jihadist ones: movements of which he was very well aware.

On its own, that would now surprise nobody. Nor does it contradict anything we know already. My own analogy for the Baathist/al-Qaida collusion has always been that of a Hitler-Stalin pact: a cynical agreement on common interests and common enemies by ostensible and actual rivals. The analogy would break down a bit in point of relative scale: Saddam used to have a state machine, and the jihadists (at least after the fall of Kabul) did not. But that doesn't affect the argument very much. At all times—the case of Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan might be another example, or the less Islamist Abu Nidal network—Saddam wanted to be the one using, not the one used. And he wanted control. He was an absolutist dictator, before we forget.

The statements made by al-Qaida spokesmen come out the same way: They don't support Baathism, but they did strongly support Saddam against the coalition and they did and do want to make Iraq into a site for holy war.

The leaked document on this relationship from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which contains a great deal of information that has not been contradicted, shows the same pattern. Deniable Iraqi envoys were sent to seek accommodation and understanding, at arm's length, with the newest and most serious anti-American force in the region. How could it have been otherwise? It was the Mukhabarat's job to do such things. (And sometimes to undo them, as when they murdered Abu Nidal in the run-up to the invasion.) It's only a few weeks since the New York Times breathlessly informed us, in another upside-down disclosure, that Iraqi middlemen seeking to avert an invasion made an offer, among other things, to surrender a certain Mr. Yasin—wanted for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and ever since that date a resident of Baghdad. The main effect of that report was to tell the paper's readers, for the first time, of the existence of this very fascinating connection.

One still reads ignorant stuff about how "secular" the Baath Party once was. This ignores at least a decade's worth of ostentatiously jihadist propaganda, the building of mosques with militaristic names, and the writing of a special Quran allegedly in Saddam's own blood. To say nothing of open and boastful military and financial support for the jihadist suicide-murderers in Palestine, i.e., for the enemies of the more secular PLO. I dare say someone could now write an exclusive story for the New York Times saying that private letters showed that Saddam Hussein was never really sincere about his personal conversion to Islam. And I would believe that report, too.

Very occasionally, I feel sympathy for the anti-intervention forces. They can quite pardonably claim that they don't know quite which protean Bush/Cheney/Powell/Rumsfeld case they are debating, or which is today's prowar headline or justification. But the same applies in reverse. For example, once I finish arguing with someone who says that a thousand Osamas will spring up to replace the killed Osama, I turn to confront someone who angrily says that Bush hasn't killed Osama yet (which the first contestant can presumably not desire, unless he desires a thousand Osamas). And one can become dizzy, as between those who feel that there are too many American forces in Afghanistan or Iraq, and those who denounce Washington for sending too few.

I myself thought it was plain enough, when I spoke to Jacob's point about "cost," that I was alluding not merely to Iraq but to the whole front between ourselves and the jihad and its state allies. But perhaps I should have taken more care to bodyguard my remarks. (And I certainly didn't say that such a matter was "irrelevant.") I believe nonetheless that such a cost-accounting is impossible. At what point could it have been determined in advance that the fall of Saddam Hussein was worth X or Y? At what stage would cost have dictated discretion? Would halfway to Baghdad have been cheap at half the price? How was the "cost" of allowing continuing Baathist rule to be calculated? Have we really overspent in Afghanistan? Who would decide how the investment necessary for the demolition of the Taliban had hit diminishing returns? And when? And how would the money have been better spent "at home"? There is such a thing as knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. (Fred Kaplan comes closer to genuine bargain-basement reasoning by declaring boldly that he will endorse any policy that can be guaranteed as a painless victory in advance. Or that he might have done so until recently.)

Of some interest are the predictions made, by both Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, on precisely this point. In well-reported speeches and sermons, and in one instance in a tape-recorded exchange with a U.S. ambassador, both men predicted with boastful certainty that Americans would soon weary of the cost of combat and retire from the field, either because of "body bag" considerations or because of the general decadence produced by Judeo-capitalism, hedonism, corruption, impiety, etc. It seems to me to be of the very first importance, for reasons of morale and of strategy (as well as the imposed necessity of rehearsing and improving our tactics and soldiery by means of practice) that these predictions go into the dustbin of history as among the stupidest and vainest things anyone has ever said. I don't know how to quantify such a necessary attainment, but I do know that the contrary example would come in at a very high price indeed, and be very dearly bought for no comparative advantage.

Among the many thoughtful posts in this week's conversation—including Fareed's on Thursday—one of the best came from a reader. His or her point was that for Tom and Fareed especially, but to a lesser degree for others among us, the war's justification was practical and experimental: It might have certain good effects in the region and in the larger war on terrorism, or it might not—but avoiding action altogether was less tolerable than taking the risk of war. And, this reader went on, once the justification was put that way, on a practical and experimental basis, the ultimate verdict on whether or not the war was the right thing depends on how things go in Iraq and the region. In short, as Chou En-Lai said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, it's too early to tell. But just because the outcome is still to be determined, and the job will require enormous imagination, flexibility, local knowledge, and staying power on our part, success or failure will depend in large part on whether Americans manage to summon these mental qualities. As Christopher wrote in his book on Orwell, what you think matters less than how you think—and how this administration thinks isn't reassuring. For example, it's very difficult for me to imagine a symposium called "What Did We Get Wrong and Why?" being held at the American Enterprise Institute, where so much of the Bush foreign policy has been incubated, let alone at the White House. On the other hand, I'm encouraged by this conversation in Slate and by how the participants thought. I hope it continues in other guises. Thanks for the chance to join in.

George Packer

Christopher Hitchens' historical analogy—Saddam is to Osama as Stalin is to Hitler (or should it be "as Hitler is to Stalin"?)—is more than a bit strained. But if the comparison is valid, then it follows that invading Iraq in response to 9/11 was like invading the Soviet Union in response to Nazi Germany's aggression against Czechoslovakia. Christopher also knows better than to accuse me of endorsing, as he puts it, "any policy that can be guaranteed as a painless victory in advance." As he well knows from our conversations at the time, I was (and remain) an avid supporter of the war in Afghanistan, which—given the Soviet and British experiences in that country over the years—was by no means foreseen (by me, him, or anybody else) as a sure thing.

A final footnote on the arcane topic of Hitler and Stalin. I do think we have reason to keep these historical figures in mind. Saddam's Baath was founded in 1943 under a Nazi influence. (This ought to give the Germans a reason to ensure Baathism's final defeat in Iraq, even if Bush has treated Germany with arrogance.) Later on, Saddam added an influence of Stalin to the Baathist idea. Fred Halliday has pointed out that Saddam's birthplace in Tikrit is a mere 450 miles from Stalin's birthplace. (This might give the Russians a reason to help out, too.) Saddam has the unusual quality of being able to claim descent from Hitler and Stalin both. He is himself the Hitler-Stalin pact.

This arcane fact goes to the heart of our modern predicament—the reality that large political forces exist that have demonized entire countries and populations and have worked up a cult of mass killing. The war against these political forces has been bungled by the strategists in Washington. But, as George and other journalists have shown, many heroic people are doing everything they can do to undo those blunders on the ground in Iraq. What should liberals and Democrats do at home in the United States? Everything we can to help those people. Their success and our safety are one and the same.

Thanks to all seven of you all for contributing to what has been, at last for me, an illuminating and at times agonizing conversation. All week, I've found myself persuaded back and forth by your various arguments. And I very much second George Packer's commendation. The spirit of rigorous self-criticism is alive and well here, if nowhere else among supporters of the war.

For my part, I have indeed changed my mind this week. I no longer think I was correct to support Bush's invasion of Iraq last March. That's hard for me to say, since as I noted at the outset, I've itched to depose Saddam Hussein by violent means, since 1991. But Bush was the wrong president to do it, and last year was the wrong moment—based on problems I didn't perceive clearly enough because of my impatience to see our unfinished business in Iraq finally completed.

The first factor impelling me to change my mind is the emerging picture of the dishonesty involved in getting the public to support the war. Members of the Bush administration truly thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as did the vast majority of its critics. But the administration contributed to the general misapprehension by suborning intelligence, exaggerating evidence, and amplifying unreliable data in ways that, as Ken Pollack has depicted, amount to deception. They did this because, absent a powerful fear of Saddam's WMD, the American people would not have supported the invasion. A democracy must not be led to war on the basis of deceit, even if the unarticulated reasons for going war remain persuasive to many of us.

I don't fault myself much for being wrong about the weapons. Perhaps I should have been more suspicious, but if Ken and other experts couldn't see through the flaws in the Bush administration's evidence, I don't see how I could have. It was a very strong argument for war that turns out to have to be almost completely wrong.

The other reason I have changed my mind is that, as I indicated yesterday, I don't think it stands up well to cost-benefit analysis available at the outset. I think that the benefits could have outweighed the costs if the Bush administration had proceeded multilaterally and on the basis of prudent contingency planning. But it should have been possible to see a year ago that Bush was going to proceed in precisely the self-undermining way he did. Unilateralism was the president's policy. The liberation fantasy that caused so much additional damage to the already wrecked society of Iraq was the obvious underpinning of the Pentagon's postwar plan.

Here I do fault myself, for not better recognizing the evident character of this administration. Another president might have taken us to war in a basically prudent and honest way. This one was not competent to do so. Facing a continuing tragedy in Iraq, but no emergency, we should have waited for a leader capable of reasoning about our security priorities and working more effectively with countries we need as allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

Mistake or no, we must all live with the consequences of our decision. One point we all seem to agree on is that America must stay and finish what it started. A functional, democratic state in Iraq that exerted a positive influence on the region would go a long way toward vindicating the liberal hawks. I'm less optimistic about this outcome than Tom Friedman. But if such a nation emerges, no one will be more pleased about it than I.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2093620/

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