As with Iraq, so with Russia
The hawks and neocons have returned, demanding war and silencing dissent
February 15, 2022
Leon Hadar
Against
the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, we have been bombarded with many
historical analogies. Leading the list are the 1961 Berlin standoff and
the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis. And then there is that all-time favorite,
the 1938 Munich Agreement.
Those
crises should certainly not be regarded as ancient history. But then
why go back 60 or 80 years when you can walk down memory lane?
Like,
say, when an American president was trying to rally the public and
mobilize international support in the name of using military force
against an alleged bloodthirsty dictator who was supposedly threatening
Western geostrategic interests and challenging its liberal democratic
values?
I
am referring, of course, to the debate that took place in Washington
during the first year of this century over whether the United States
should go to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. According to the
then-consensus, Saddam was in possession of weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs) and in his spare time was supporting terrorism and trying to
destabilize the Middle East.
The
debate concluded, as you may recall, with the passage of the historic
2002 congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force
against Iraq, by a vote of 296-133 in the House of Representatives and
by a vote of 77-23 in the Senate. That gave President George W. Bush the
green light to launch a military campaign in Mesopotamia and get hold
of those WMDs hidden somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Since
no WMDs were discovered and the results of the Iraq war are still
haunting us, the following narrative has evolved to explain what
happened.
Almost
“everyone,” with the exception of a few lefty peaceniks and
conservative isolationists, and including the intelligence agencies of
the United States and Great Britain, believed that Saddam had WMDs and
that only the use of military force against Iraq would remove that
threat to world peace.
That
consensus that officials in the Bush administration and their
neoconservative cheerleaders constructed was eventually embraced by most
members of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, including the
mainstream media. They then promoted what we learned in retrospect were,
well, lies that helped persuade the American public and its
representatives on Capitol Hill to support going to war.
Then
came the moral of that tragic story: never again will we be drawn into a
costly military intervention in response to a war-marketing campaign
that is based on judgments made by the intelligence agencies and
promoted by a conned and conning MSM.
As
part of that narrative, we were also led to believe that those who
choreographed the Iraq war and backed it were “punished.” Hence
journalist Judith Miller lost her job in the New York Times for her
misleading coverage of Iraq’s WMDs based on leaks she received from Bush
administration officials. And then-senator Hillary Clinton lost the
Democratic presidential primary race against Senator Barack Obama in
part because she had voted for the congressional resolution authorizing
the president to attack Iraq.
But
in fact, President Bush was not punished. He was re-elected to a second
term, while his comrade-in-arms, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has
since been transformed into a global sage. Certainly most of the
government officials and generals who planned and carried out the war in
Iraq and the journalists and pundits who echoed their views did not
lose their jobs.
Those
who were responsible directly and indirectly for what was perhaps the
worst strategic mistake in American history were rewarded with new
positions of power and influence. And now, in an ironic twist of
history, they are helping another president mobilize the nation for
another war against another autocrat that is supposedly threatening core
US national interests.
It’s
true that, unlike the Bush-Blair duo, President Joe Biden and his
British buddy Boris Johnson are not proposing to go to war against
Russia. They are responding to provocations made by Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
But
then Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was also provoking the West in the early
twenty-first century with his bellicose statements and aggressive steps,
threatening to destroy Israel, massacring his Kurdish population, and
insisting that, yes, he had WMDs. And he did start a war with Iran and
had a nuclear reactor at one time. He was a Bad Man in the context of
the Middle East, just like Putin is in Russian terms.
But
just as in the months leading to the Iraq war, another American
administration and its intelligence agencies are now trying to convince
us that Putin is posing a direct threat to US national security by
demanding that his neighbor Ukraine not join a military alliance that is
directed against him.
And
a gullible MSM is buying this storyline hook, sink and liner, turning
Putin into America’s archenemy du jour, with no serious consideration of
the complexity of the historical, cultural, and geographical issues
involved.
In
a way, there was more serious debate in Washington about the idea of
going to war against Iraq than there is about the threat Russia
supposedly poses.
The
former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham,
refused to take the Bush administration at its word and voted against
the war resolution. Just a month before the vote, his committee had
uncovered that the administration hadn’t produced a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a comprehensive report from the entire
intelligence community, to rationalize pre-emptive war. He then invoked
rarely used senatorial authority and directed the completion of an NIE,
which exposed dissent to the administration’s key arguments.
No Bob Graham-like figure has emerged during the current debate over the Ukraine crisis.
After
Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri dared to suggest that the
United States would be worse off if Ukraine was admitted to NATO, he was
accused of “parroting Russian talking points” and blasted by some of
his Democratic and Republican colleagues.
Senators
from both parties are now working on legislation to aid Ukraine and to
impose sanctions on Russia. The only debate is to whether the sanctions
should be imposed even if Russia does not invade Ukraine.
In
reality, Hawley’s dissent should not be seen as the wild musings of a
political enfant terrible but as in line with the views of two of
Washington’s Wise Men, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and the
late national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who were opposed to
the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. Both suggested that the ideal
solution would be to have a Ukraine like Finland or Austria, a bridge
between Russia and the West. (The two were also opposed to the military
adventure in Iraq.)
Why is it that such views are not being heard in Washington today?
Perhaps
because, as during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, there are those in
Washington who want to make sure that no word of dissent is heard.
Thus,
while in 2003 the leading neoconservative pundit David “Axis of Evil”
Frum bashed those conservatives opposed to the war in Iraq as
“unpatriotic,” these days the Never Trumper Frum insists those opposed
to inviting Ukraine to join NATO are echoing “Putin’s talking points
justifying aggression against Ukraine.”
“They
had learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” Talleyrand (apparently)
said about the Bourbons, which could apply to the likes of Frum. But
unlike the Bourbons, they have yet to be punished for their mistakes.