We can't fix anything without discarding our broken tools. In this case, the broken tool that got us into the mess and is continuing the mess is the Bush administration and those who supported and continue to support them. Without some way of working without them or making them obey some other decision maker, it doesn't matter what plan we have because any plan will be subject to their plan on how to implement it.

Step One is to figure out how to work around the Bush administration. Only then can we get to Step Two which would be a plan to stay in or get out that is implemented without the incompetents who screwed us so thoroughly in the first place.

Huckabee's position confuses me. If the war isn't going well, and isn't likely to (a point Huckabee doesn't seem to dispute) then continuing the war for the nation's "honor" would seem the exact opposite of being under God. Further, might Huckabee be confusing "honor" with wrongful "pride"?

I really don't agree with either Huckabee or Paul. I disagree with Paul that it was wrong to invade Iraq; I think we made the best decision we could with the information we had at the time. I also don't agree with Huckabee that we "broke" Iraq. If Iraqis as a nation were more interested in uniting and rebuilding their country than engaging in tribal violence, we'd already have drawn down our troop level to a fraction of what it is today.

Our military did an excellent job of removing Saddam's regime from power. They earned their honor. We cannot ask our soldiers to continue to sacrifice on behalf of people who are bound and determined to kill each other. If we don't see dramatic improvements in the situation by the end of this year, we should begin a deliberate, organized withdrawal. It's high time to let the Iraqis sink or swim on their own.

Honestly, I'm surprised the debate even among Republicans is still framed in terms of either "stay the course" or "admit defeat/mistake and get out."

Huckabee's argument doesn't quite hold water. Sure, we broke it, but are we capable of fixing it?

For example, the White House is touting successes in Anbar Province, implying that we are finally beginning to get our footing. But if we take a closer look at what actually happened there, we can see Iraqis did it largely on their own, with little help from us.

The recent Sunni uprising in Anbar against al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is called "the awakening" and actually had nothing to do with our military "surge" and everything to do with heavy-handed AQI attempts to marry their members into local tribes there. This is traditional al-Qaeda modus operandi (it's worked in many other countries), so as to cement loyalties/blend seamlessly in. Except in this particular case, tribal leaders said "no way," as outsiders marrying in is against Iraqi tribal customs. The foreign born leadership of AQI (largely Egyptian) who were calling the shots on this (who appear about as ignorant of local tribal custom as we are) responded by murdering two sheiks. Naturally, revenge killings by the tribes followed, and AQI retaliated brutally, even killing children. That's when the tribes said enough and started the concerted movement to eject AQI from their midst. The effort spread along tribal lines throughout the rural provinces. Our troops were able to help the tribes by providing them arms and munitions.

So much of what we assumed going in about Iraq and its complicated social structures turned out to be totally wrong. It's hard to fix what you don't know, or won't accept. We have yet to solve the puzzle of how to force the majority Shia in Iraq to willingly share power with the minority Sunnis. There will not be stability in Iraq until that happens, and I suspect that's something that the Iraqis will also have to eventually work out for themselves.

As for our moral responsibility, how about we stand back and honestly take stock of the situation in Iraq. We broke it, but does that really mean we OWN it? I thought those Iraqis with the purple fingers own Iraq, or what's left of it. Perhaps the moral thing to do is swallow our pride and let them take their future into their own hands.

Eric,

"I think we made the best decision we could with the information we had at the time."

I know you've said this before, and I'm not looking to rehash old arguments, but you might be interested in Sidney Blumenthal's brandy new story in Salon. Here's an excerpt:

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell..."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/?source=whitelist

JohnS,

Interesting, but looking at that from a September 2002 perspective, why should Bush have believed Saddam's foreign minister delivering the same message as Saddam--even if that message was delivered "secretly" to the CIA?

I don't think this is the kind of "slam dunk" that Sid Blumenthal implies it is. I will also repeat once more that the burden of proof was never on the UN or the US to figure out whether Saddam had disarmed. It was Saddam's responsibility to *demonstrate* that he had disarmed by cooperating fully with the weapons inspectors, and he consistently refused to do so.

Admitted, it's not a "slam dunk" by 2002 standards by any means, but it certainly indicates that ALL of the info that President Bush was getting at the time did NOT point in the direction of Iraq having WMD. And Sabri's assertions back up those by defector Gen. Hussein Kame (Hussein's son-in-law) in 1995, that Iraq's WMD stockpiles were destroyed in 1991.

I do find it peculiar that Sabri's info wasn't allowed to circulate throughout the CIA, never made it into the NIE, and wasn't shared with Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The difference between Ron Paul's approach to politics and the rest of the field's approach is, in my opinion, as follows:

Pretty much every other candidate is is offering himself as essentially a big Daddy -- someone who'll protect you, provide for you, and make sure you have nothing to worry about.

Most of America, in its perpetual adolescence, are just trying to find that wonderful Daddy, who will take care of them for the next four years.

Ron Paul isn't the daddy you want. He's the parent telling you he's cutting off your allowance, and you're going to have to get up off the couch and go get a job.

He's also telling you you're going to have to figure out how to get along with people on your own, and when they get mad at you, it's partially your fault. He's telling you that life isn't always fair, and that you need to respect other people's rights and property and not have everything your own way.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that America isn't ready for him.

What does it say about the GOP that "the debate [it] needs to be having" is occuring between two distant second-tier candidates?

Applying the "you break it, you bought it" philosophy to Iraq ignores a very important question - can we even fix Iraq? This philosophy assumes America is capable of actually fixing the problem, and that by continuing to screw around in the desert we'll eventually manage to put that shattered country back together again. It doesn't address the possibility that the best chance for Iraq's successful repair could be if we wash our hands of it and just leave.

Zach, perhaps it's their second-tier status that allows them the freedom to have this debate? In order to stay in the good graces of the party elite, is McCain obligated to say that the surge is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and skewer Romney for saying it's "perhaps" the greatest thing since sliced bread? Are Paul and Huckabee allowed to have a real debate because they are outsiders (for now, anyway, in the case of Huckabee, who has some serious momentum)?

I'm still a little bit shocked that Huckabee is able to concede we messed up Iraq without getting slapped down by the administration or the punditocracy. Regardless, Pieter's question -- whether we can actually fix Iraq ourselves -- is the right one. If you believe we can, then Huckabee's position has a certain moral weight to it: we overthrew a sovereign nation's government on either mistaken or false (depending on who you listen to) pretenses and made a mess of things. We are morally obligated and honor-bound to leave the Iraqi people with something in its place.

If you believe we can't fix it, then Paul's position is the only logical one.

I must say what I don't like about Paul's argument is that he blames a "cabal" of neoconservatives for "hijacking" American foreign policy. The vast majority of both houses of Congress supported this war, the mainstream media accepted the arguments for war on the surface without in depth questioning, and the vast majority of us (the American people) supported this war at the outset. Blaming a small cabal is a very convenient way to shift blame from most of us onto a relatively small group and prevent us from examining our beliefs and motivations. Huckabee is right in one sense that Iraq is the baby of everyone who didn't oppose the war from the outset.

Zach, I'm glad to see you write that -- I had had almost the exact same thought.

JohnS wrote:

...but it certainly indicates that ALL of the info that President Bush was getting at the time did NOT point in the direction of Iraq having WMD.

I've never disputed that. It was always a matter of the preponderance of the evidence, not that *all* of the evidence pointed in the same direction. And I'll go further than that. Given Saddam's history of aggression, his status as a brutal dictator, his repeated flouting of UN Security Council resolutions, and his refusal to cooperate with the weapons inspectors, the level of certainty that he actually had WMD did not even have to be greater than 50%. Even if there were only a 1 in 3 chance that he had WMD, I think the invasion was justified.

David, you wrote: ...we overthrew a sovereign nation's government on either mistaken or false (depending on who you listen to) pretenses and made a mess of things.

Granted, Iraq was more stable under the Stalinesque rule of Saddam. But is that the sort of stability we should regret overturning? If it took a brutal dictatorship to keep a lid on tribal strife, that's hardly a desirable stability. It is, as someone once wrote, the stability of the cesspool.

DMD

I must say what I don't like about Paul's argument is that he blames a "cabal" of neoconservatives for "hijacking" American foreign policy. The vast majority of both houses of Congress supported this war, the mainstream media accepted the arguments for war on the surface without in depth questioning, and the vast majority of us (the American people) supported this war at the outset."

Pre WWI and pre WWII the U.S. gov't set up agencies to mobilize public support for war - the Committee on Public Information and the Office of War Information. After 9/11, Rumsfeld tried the same thing with his Office of Strategic Influence, but it was disbanded after word about it got out and pols freaked. Feeding alarming stories about aluminum tubes and such to reporters like Judy Miller who wrote for influential newspapers like the NY Times probably worked much more effectively anyway. (Bonus: the VP could then reference the stories he had secretly planted in the NY Times on Meet the Press to back up his WMD claims!) War critics were marginalized and top-secret info that contradicted the official WH line on Iraq WMD appears to have been suppressed. Once the major opinion makers were behind the war effort, the public followed, dragging Congress along (some all too willingly, some less so).

Eric

Given Saddam's history of aggression, his status as a brutal dictator, his repeated flouting of UN Security Council resolutions, and his refusal to cooperate with the weapons inspectors, the level of certainty that he actually had WMD did not even have to be greater than 50%. Even if there were only a 1 in 3 chance that he had WMD, I think the invasion was justified.

Yes, Saddam had a history of aggression and was a brutal dictator. Yes, he flouted U.N. resolutions, but then so does Israel. I think you meant, his refusal to co-operate *fully* with the weapons inspectors. He did allow the weapons inspectors back in, but had ongoing concerns about the American inspectors. He believed (correctly, according to Scott Ritter) that the CIA had planted paramilitary covert operatives among them. Considering that since Clinton, our stated policy concerning Saddam was "regime change," he had to be careful. He was likely just looking after his own physical safety.

But, even if I were to buy the "9/11 changed everything" argument (in Feb of 2001, Sec of State Powell said, "[Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."), there were still the warnings from the Bush I crowd who correctly predicted the awful consequences to consider. That's why I thought the invasion was't justified.

Hey, I almost forgot -- thanks for posting the quote & clip!

The most disturbing part to me is that the strongest defense offered for continuing the war boiled down to saving face (or "honor" if you want to call it that).

Also, I disagree with the implicit assumption that when you aggressively invade another country, you become a keeper that country's ultimate fate in the world. While I feel bad that the invasion didn't work out the way we hoped, it is unclear that it commits us to babysit Iraq until peace breaks out.

That being said (the above), I don't think complete withdraw is the best option right now either.

As Zach said, why is this debate relegated to second-tier candidates? If nothing else, the Paul campaign at this point in history demonstrated a deep divide in the Republican party. It is possible this divide will not go away, but will be the nucleolus of some kind of political shift.

While I feel bad that the invasion didn't work out the way we hoped, it is unclear that it commits us to babysit Iraq until peace breaks out.

"Babysitting?" That's a wee bit patronizing.

Imagine our own Civil War with superpowers attempting to referee the bloody fight the way we are in Iraq. It might be more accurate to describe what we're doing as "butting in." That also applies to the other outside actors who are trying to advance their own interests at the expense of the Iraqi people.

JohnS -- the Civil War analogy doesn't work, unless the British started it by taking out Lincoln in 1861.

Granted, Iraq was more stable under the Stalinesque rule of Saddam. But is that the sort of stability we should regret overturning? If it took a brutal dictatorship to keep a lid on tribal strife, that's hardly a desirable stability. It is, as someone once wrote, the stability of the cesspool.

Fair enough Eric, but if I may play realists' advocate, that cesspool wasn't ours to clean up, unless it was a threat to our property. Given what we now know about Saddam and WMD (which I believed and therefore supported the war) or Saddam and 9/11 (which I never believed) that cesspool wasn't the menace we thought it was.

But then we walked into it. What's the extent of our obligation to clean up a mess we greatly contributed to?

John,

If you think we are interfering in Iraq, what about Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and (historically) Germany, England, and the Ottoman Empire?

There is no way you can retreat from Iraq and leave it in a vacuum to sort out its own problems. If we could do that, we would have taken the oil and left a long time ago.

To be consistent with my former post, I would also add that even if we left Iraq, it would become someone else's proxy state.

Right now, that seems to be Iran, and that's really why we are still there, I suppose. If we were to leave and it would be annexed by Turkey, we would have let them.

DMD

the Civil War analogy doesn't work, unless the British started it by taking out Lincoln in 1861.

True. But imagine the British did just that and then attempted to impose their version of order on us after all hell broke loose.

What's the extent of our obligation to clean up a mess we greatly contributed to?

"We need to clean up our own mess" seems to me like the last-gasp rationale for arguing "stay the course" in Iraq. I'd say our obligation to Iraq is to put the interests of Iraqis ahead of our own, and allow them to work out their problems on their own with minimal interference from outsiders. I like Bill Richardson's realpolitik suggestion (interesting - he's a second tier candidate, too):

"I am convinced that only a complete withdrawal can sufficiently shift the politics of Iraq and its neighbors to break the deadlock that has been killing so many people for so long."

I should add, I don't mean we should just walk away from Iraq. Not that we could anyway, an orderly withdrawl could take years, not months. But as Wesley Clark and the Iraq Study Group have said, a regional conference with ALL the actors involved (including Iran) is crucial, and our "obligation" would be to make that conference happen. The Kurdish north will be an enormous sticking point and we will have to intensely engage Turkey to work out a solution.

Dave S

If you think we are interfering in Iraq, what about Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and (historically) Germany, England, and the Ottoman Empire?

In the post you are referring to, I also said, "That also applies to the other outside actors who are trying to advance their own interests at the expense of the Iraqi people." We're not the only ones interfering.

Interesting you brought up Germany, England, and the Ottoman Empire. Zbigniew Brzezinski has often observed that our Iraq engagement is a colonial war in a postcolonial age, putting us "on the wrong side of history."

There is no way you can retreat from Iraq and leave it in a vacuum to sort out its own problems. If we could do that, we would have taken the oil and left a long time ago.

I hope I cleared up that misconception in my previous post about our obligation with regards to a regional conference.

"We need to clean up our own mess" seems to me like the last-gasp rationale for arguing "stay the course" in Iraq.

I agree with that as well. I found it personally frustrating that was the best defense Huckabee could offer. If that's the best the conservative wing of the Republican party has to offer, then it is no wonder people are nonplussed by the conservative Republican offerings.

Iraq is a mess, and nearly any option we choose, we loose. As I have said before, we should retreat to Kurdistan and let the civil war happen, and deal with the winners afterwards. I think that would be a medium between disengagement and continued engagement. Also, the Kurds are about the only friends we have anywhere near that region. (Of course, this comes at the expense of our strained relations with Turkey).

David,

that cesspool wasn't ours to clean up, unless it was a threat to our property.

Agreed. And if we had been able to determine with a high (say, greater than 90%) degree of certainty that Saddam posed no current threat to the US or our allies, the correct decision would have been to not invade. (Although, I think we would have eventually had to deal with him anyway.)

What's the extent of our obligation to clean up a mess we greatly contributed to?

My main objection to your argument is the idea that we made or contributed to a mess in Iraq. In my opinion, Iraq is no worse off now than it was under Saddam. It's just a different kind of bad.

David,

that cesspool wasn't ours to clean up, unless it was a threat to our property.

Agreed. And if we had been able to determine with a high (say, greater than 90%) degree of certainty that Saddam posed no current threat to the US or our allies, the correct decision would have been to not invade. (Although, I think we would have eventually had to deal with him anyway.)

What's the extent of our obligation to clean up a mess we greatly contributed to?

My main objection to your argument is the idea that we made or contributed to a mess in Iraq. In my opinion, Iraq is no worse off now than it was under Saddam. It's just a different kind of bad.

Eric

And if we had been able to determine with a high (say, greater than 90%) degree of certainty that Saddam posed no current threat to the US or our allies, the correct decision would have been to not invade.

Our allies? We went to war to protect our allies? I actually believe that the answer is partly "yes," although it was not often, if ever, cited in WH rationales for the invasion (possibly because that is something that most Americans would find very disturbing). But again, probably true. Even if Iraq had nuclear weapons, as Philip Zelikow pointed out in 2002 in his comments at the Univ. of Virginia, the most direct threat was not to us, or even Europe. It was to Israel.

It was just not physically possible for Iraq to launch a long range missile attack against the continental U.S. (and please, don't anybody bring up those ridiculous drone planes). Which was why Dick Cheney constantly referenced the bogus Saddam/al-Qaeda connections and dark hints about Iraqi provided suitcases of death, full of nuclear explosives all ready to go off in Grand Central Station and such nonsense. And the idea that Saddam was a suicidal nut willing to go up against the world's largest nuclear superpower was shot down by his post-invasion behavior.

And as for all those WMD that Bush, Congress, and the majority of Americans thought were there, here's Mohammed ElBaradei of the IAEA speaking to the U.N Security Council in March of 2003:

"In conclusion, I am able to report today that, in the area of nuclear weapons -- the most lethal weapons of mass destruction -- inspections in Iraq are moving forward. One, there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related activities at any inspected sites. Second, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990. Third, there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminum tubes in question. Fourth, there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.
After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. . . . I should note that, in the past three weeks, possibly as a result of ever-increasing pressure by the international community, Iraq has been forthcoming in its co-operation, particularly with regard to the conduct of private interviews and in making available evidence that contributes to the resolution of matters of IAEA concern."

It's probably is a good thing to recall who got it right, and who got it wrong as we begin the replay of the runup to war with Iraq in Iran.

JohnS,

Yes, I do think that we should be concerned about the security of Israel--the only free society in the middle east. Furthermore, if Saddam had WMD and eventually used them on Israel, the result could very likely have been a very destructive regional war which could throw the global economy into chaos.

So, yeah, just because Saddam couldn't physically deliver WMD to US territory doesn't mean he wouldn't have been a threat to us.

Eric,

I also think we should be concerned with Israel's security, but I don't necessarily think eliminating the counterbalance (Iraq) to Israel's number one threat to regional hegemony (Iran), and throwing the entire ME into upheaval on a hunch was the best way to go about it.

Also, George Bush and Dick Cheney never said anything about sending our boys and girls over to Iraq to protect Israel, because they rightly knew that proposition would have gone over like a lead drone plane. Although saying that might (or might not) have been much more honest than the sale we were pitched. Actually, I do not recall any administration official ever making it.