<p>
</p>
<p>But the religious right is Bush’s real constituency, if we’re using the measure of who he owes his office too. And when he asked the religious right for an opinion, Ted Haggard told him “Cheap steel is good.” And so it came to pass.</p>
<p>Just as an aside, Chinese and Russian steel tends to be thinner than US steel for the same size pipe by outer diameter. Experienced welders and pipe fitters can tell the difference just by looking at it.</p>
<p>The religious right is ONE of his constituencies. Even if he were to strictly follow the Roveian election theory of 50%+1, he’d still need other constituents. The point is that foreign policymakers make plenty of decisions that aren’t necessarily in line with their core constituency or peripheral constituencies. The US, unfortunately, is an outlier, and any discussion of how policy is made here is somewhat different from the mean worldwide policymaking structure.</p>
<p>I’ll use another example. In South Korea, US-Korean relations are becoming increasingly strained due to the stresses of the post-Cold War era, Japan, and US troop presence in Korea itself. However, despite the wild unpopularity of the decision, Korea’s foreign policymakers decided to send troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq despite their domestic constituents warnings of political upset.</p>
<p>Foreign policymaking is an odd beast, and you can’t just look at domestic pressures.</p>
<p>But I think we can both agree that whatever drives foreign policy, in many cases it isn’t the interests of the nation as a whole.</p>
<p>I never made that assumption. I said that “nations do what’s in their interest.”</p>
<p>All that assumption says is that nation X is not going to be nation Y’s ally/trading partner/anything for nation Y’s sake. We aren’t in the US-Japan security agreement because we give a hoot about Japan per se. We formed it to balance against Russia and China. </p>
<p>No single policy will ever make everyone happy. But in understanding how nations interact, it’s a VERY safe bet that nations do things for themselves.</p>
<p>Bringing us back to Iraq, you’ve made an excellent point. We clearly didn’t invade Iraq for Iraq’s sake, because nations don’t compromise their own interests for another’s.</p>
<p>And we couldn’t have invaded Iraq for our interests as a nation, because invading Iraq was against our own best interests. We took a nation that was no immediate threat to us and turned it into a fertile terrorist-recruiting ground, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowed money, weakening our national security and long term economic prospects.</p>
<p>But obviously, it was perceived that invading Iraq would benefit some constituencies at the expense of our national interest, otherwise we wouldn’t have gone. And that answers the question of how long we’ll be there. Either till those constituencies perceive the cost benefit ratio differently, or until they lose their clout in DC.</p>
<p>conyat,</p>
<p>I disagree. Remember that we can’t look at the present and say “action X yielded outcome Y” and expect policymakers to have been fully cognizant of the progression of events before they undertook them. </p>
<p>The most commonly accepted arguments in the IR circles are:</p>
<ul>
<li> Iraq was perceived as a potentially destabilizing force in the region, and containment would not work to maintain our security and interests(realists and some neorealists)</li>
<li> Iraq was perceived as a “non-player” in the international system, and containment was, at best, a temporary solution (neoliberalists)</li>
<li> Iraq was Bush’s war (constructivists)</li>
</ul>
<p>I tend to believe that reality lies somewhere in between the liberalist and realist arguments. For one, it makes NO sense that we would have gone to Iraq for economic reasons. Even the economically weak theory driving many of the Bush administration’s choices was able to comprehend that. </p>
<p>Kenneth Pollack [made</a> the best case for war with Iraq,](<a href=“Explainers | Council on Foreign Relations”>Explainers | Council on Foreign Relations) I believe. While his argument was based on faulty intelligence (we know this now, did not necessarily know it then), he made a compelling case:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I suggest anyone interested in seeing an academic view of the situation read the article I linked. It’s a good change from the typical “he said she said” of the media and government.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t buy that Bush and the neocon thinktankers beating the drums for war just didn’t have enough foresight to predict the problems that would be unleashed if they deposed Saddam via military invasion, even given their lack of combat experience.</p>
<p>Vice President Cheney went on the record in 1992, saying that if you took out Saddam, you would then have the responsibility for running Iraq and the American casualties would not be worth it. </p>
<p><a href=“http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/192908_cheney29.html[/url]”>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/192908_cheney29.html</a></p>
<p>The argument that the administration simply didn’t have enough sense to listen to the generals who disputed the idea that it would be “cakewalk” costing “less than 100 billion” and most troops would be home in “six months” just doesn’t wash with me.</p>
<p>I never said that. You’re refuting an entirely different argument altogether.</p>
<p>Eh? Wasn’t your point that we can’t claim that just because the war benefits some constituencies at the expense of our national interest that the policy makers knew that it would, going in, and decided to proceed anyway?</p>
<p>Sorry if I misunderstood.</p>
<p>No, what I’m saying is that the administration thought like Pollack did (read the article, trust me.) Their line-of-thought was that Iraq could not be contained, and that only a war would take care of the threat that was the Hussein regime.</p>
<p>That argument would wash, I guess, except that the administration deliberately sought out faulty intelligence in order to justify the war. So the administration’s support for the war wasn’t an effect of the faulty intelligence, it was a cause. Which brings us back to the question of why they wanted the war badly enough to skew the intelligence over it.</p>
<p>Again, Pollack’s argument still works.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that I am NOT supporting Bush’s bungling of the war. I’m saying that the administration pretty clearly thought that Iraq was a threat to our security and interests. There are so many reasons why the “blood for oil” argument fails, and we have to go with security arguments instead.</p>
<p>Part of what was going on was a desire to roll the dice in an attempt to remake the middle east. There’s excellent reporting on this - See, for instance, The Assassin’s Gate – on the run up to and the early days of the war.</p>
<p>Trying to reconfigure the region was based on the view that this would improve national security. Unfortunately that view was naive. When you hit a hornet’s nest, you drive out the hornets, but can can also get sting quite seriously. This metaphor was used by a number of foreign policy experts before the war who saw the danger it would pose.</p>
<p>Just because someone believes an action will improve national security, this doesn’t mean that their belief is correct or well-founded.</p>
<p>OK, if I understand you correctly, Pollack’s argument still works because the administration wouldn’t have sought out faulty intelligence to paint Saddam as a security threat, unless they believed he really was one. That the motivation for the contrived intelligence was very uncontrived concerns about security.</p>
<p>That’s giving the administration more of the benefit of doubt than it deserves, I think. The administration could have had reasons of its own for going to war, not related to security, and still sought out contrived intelligence to justify it for security reasons.</p>
<p>An excellent analysis of the mess to come, from a good ol’ favorite, Rolling Stone, featuring commentary from the following experts:</p>
<p>Zbigniew Brzezinski
National security adviser to President Carter</p>
<p>Richard Clarke
Counterterrorism czar from 1992 to 2003</p>
<p>Nir Rosen
Author of In the Belly of the Green Bird, about Iraq?s spiral into civil war, speaking from Cairo, where he has been interviewing Iraqi refugees</p>
<p>Gen. Tony McPeak (retired)
Member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War</p>
<p>Bob Graham
Former chair, Senate Intelligence Committee</p>
<p>Chas Freeman
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War; president of the Middle East Policy Council</p>
<p>Paul Pillar
Former lead counterterrorism analyst for the CIA</p>
<p>Michael Scheuer
Former chief of the CIA?s Osama bin Laden unit; author of Imperial Hubris</p>
<p>Juan Cole
Professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13710030/leaving_iraq_the_grim_truth[/url]”>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13710030/leaving_iraq_the_grim_truth</a></p>
<p>I’ve never believed that the administration sought out faulty intelligence for the sake of seeking out faulty intelligence. Their problem was seeking out only intelligence that supported their claim.</p>
<p>One thing that people often assume is that there’s such a thing as “flawless” intelligence. There isn’t. All intelligence is flawed. What you do with it, and how you interpret it despite or because of those flaws is what’s more interesting in IR.</p>
<p>momfromme, I am not sure I buy that the main motivation was security.</p>
<p>Look at what the war has accomplished:</p>
<p>It got Americans to agree to go deeply, deeply into debt for the benefit of private contractors with ties to the administration.</p>
<p>It got Americans, even Congressmen, to accept an expansion of government and government intrusion into our lives, at the expense of civil liberties and individual privacy. </p>
<p>It has ensured continued, unquestioning support for the administration of the extremists in the religious right who believe that the end times are at hand and that unprovoked hostilities in the Middle East are necessary and desirable to bring about God’s plan. On paper, they sound like extremists that should be dismissed out of hand, but in the flesh, men like Pastor Hagee are hugely powerful, and their support greatly appreciated by the administration.</p>
<p>All of these effects were easily forseeable before the first boot hit the ground in Iraq and continue today. Some of them, like borrowing to the brink of disasdter in order to have funds in the treasury to transfer to cronies, simply would not have happened without the war.</p>
<p>The trends that can stop the war if they continue to grow:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The contractors. Some of them are already deciding they’ve had enough. They’ve made more money then they can spend in their lifetimes, and dealing with the logistics and the consequences of their people getting killed just isn’t worth it anymore. An army travels on its stomach; once these guys take their money and go home (or to Dubai), we will have a hard time continuing in Iraq even if we want to.</p></li>
<li><p>The American people insisting at the ballot box on transparency and accountability in government, and restoration of civil liberties and due process.</p></li>
<li><p>The fissure in the religious right, with some prominent evangelicals annoucing that they see their role as supporting God’s agenda rather than simply the Republican agenda. If this continues, and these evangelicals attract enough like-minded individuals, the end timers won’t be able to influence enough votes to be worth American lives.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I completely agree with you on the effects of the war and the extent to which they were forseeable, but that doesn’t mean that Bush et al didn’t think they were going to yield improvements in national security.</p>
<p>They thought it was a good idea and it was worth doing pretty much anything to sell it to the American public. But they were wrong. It was a terrible idea and flawed from the start.</p>
<p>The one effect they predicted but aren’t getting: That Bush’s reputation in the history books would be enhanced by his wartime presidency. </p>
<p>The neocon think tankers saw how positive the press was about Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War, and were surprised not to get more of the same.</p>
<p>conyat,</p>
<p>You can’t look at the present to formulate an argument about 4 years ago and the reasoning then. You have to use what information was available then.</p>
<p>I find it almost impossible to believe that the Bush administration would have gone to war had it known that it would have led to this outcome. Similarly, LBJ would not have stepped on the Vietnam pedal had he known.</p>