There Was No 'Smart' Way to Invade Iraq

By Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias, The American Prospect. Posted February 17, 2007.

This article is reprinted from the American Prospect.

The Incompetence Dodge

Victory, as John F. Kennedy observed, has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. Abandoning the orphan that is the Iraq War has clearly been a protracted, painful process for the liberal hawks, those intellectuals and pundits so celebrated back in 2003 for their courage in coming forward to smash liberal expectations and support the war. Long criticized by fellow liberals for failing, amid much hand-wringing and navel-gazing, to express clear regret over their original support for the war, these hawks have started to become a bit more vocal about their second thoughts.

The nature of their regret, however, is noteworthy -- and has tremendous significance for the debate over U.S. foreign policy after Iraq. Most liberal hawks are willing to admit only that they made a mistake in trusting the president and his team to administer the invasion and occupation competently. An August 29 New York Observer article featured a litany of semi-chastened hawks articulating this sentiment. "Someone wrote that you knew who the surgeon would be, so you knew what the operation would look like," said George Packer, New Yorker writer and author of the new book The Assassin's Gate. "And there's some truth to that. I was not as aware as I should have been of just how mendacious and incompetent the surgeon was going to be." The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier added, "I think that it is impossible, even for someone who supported the war, or especially for someone who did, not to feel very bitter about the way it has been conducted and the way it has been explained."

The corollary of these complaints is that the invasion and occupation could have been successful had they been planned and administered by different people. This position may have its own internal logical coherence, but in the real world, it's wrong. Though defending the competence of the Bush administration is a fool's endeavor, administrative bungling is simply not the root source of America's failure in Iraq. The alternative scenarios liberal hawks retrospectively envision for a successful administration of the war reflect blithe assumptions -- about the capabilities of the U.S. military and the prospects for nation building in polities wracked by civil conflict -- that would be shattered by a few minutes of Googling.

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values. Liberal hawk John Lloyd of the Financial Times has gone so far as to equate attacks on his support for the war with doing damage to "the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself."

It sounds alluring. But it's backward: An honest reckoning with this war's failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism's only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking. If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.

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The swath of center-left politicians and thinkers who supported the Iraq intervention -- and who are now in a position to find the incompetence dodge a seductive escape route from honest reckoning -- is wide, indeed. It includes leading Democratic politicians -- Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry -- and former Clinton administration foreign-policy hands, as well as such varied writers and intellectuals as Packer, author Paul Berman, Harvard professor and New York Times Magazine contributor Michael Ignatieff, op-ed columnists Thomas L. Friedman and Richard Cohen, then-columnist and now New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, and a gaggle of writers associated with The New Republic. The bungled-invasion line is hardly the exclusive provenance of such war supporters. Indeed, some of the leading exponents of the narrative, such as former Coalition Provisional Authority adviser Larry Diamond and James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly, opposed the war from the beginning, and, of course, the incompetence line is politically appealing for liberals. But the dodge's real significance pertains to the future of liberal interventionism after Iraq.

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Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias are Prospect staff writers.

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