After America's 21st century Pearl Harbor on 9/11/01, US political and military planners must have been desperate to respond to the new threat with the symbolic equivalent of a Doolittle Raid, or better yet, a Battle of Midway. The hope was that it would not only put the nation's enemies on the defensive early in the conflict and provide a deterrent to those contemplating further action, but the psychological boost it would provide to an American population humiliated by the terrorist attacks would be invaluable. The assault on Afghanistan served this purpose, along with the the purely practical and immediate necessity of dismantling the Taliban and going after Ossama Bin Laden and Al Quaida.

The quick success of the campaign and the relative lack of both domestic and foreign political opposition to it, even amongst rivals and critics of the administration, took the terrorist movement in the mideast by surprise. This, and the marginally effective international campaign targeting terrorist finances, communications and other infrastructure, soon had them on the run. Everyone knew the self-righteous ferocity the American nation was capable of when treacherously attacked, and Republican administrations have carefully cultivated the reputation, whether deserved or not, for lashing out indescriminately and viciously at the nation's perceived enemies. This, as well as the genuine sense of outrage felt world-wide at the Trade Center attacks, must have put the terrorist movement off-balance, and everyone else was eager to be our friend.

But there was no "terrorist movement", other than a loose alliance of small organizations and a genuine and widespread hatred of American policies in the middle east. The enemy had no country, no capital, no leader, no territory. There was wide support for America's enemies, but it was not concentrated in any one place that could be leveled by American firepower. Although it was recognized that the Islamic religion and Arab nationalism was a major motivation for the attack, neither Muslims nor Arabs could be demonized for it, indeed, many were our allies in the struggle or even loyal citizens of our country. To its credit, the Bush administration did not exploit racism or religious bigotry as a means of generating the public comittment it felt was necessary to carry out what appeared to be shaping up as a decades-long struggle. But there never has been a shortage of those qualities in the American psyche and regardless of the government's best efforts, it was inevitable that they would play a role.

After the initial successes in response to the September attacks, the War on Terror bogged down.
The terrorists adjusted to our tactics, and the struggle went underground, into the shadowy world of espionage and diplomacy and international finance where even victories could not always be publicized. Washington was eager to regain the initiative, to keep the enemy off balance, to strike them again before they could fully regroup. American military doctrine has always favored the war of maneuver, rather than the war of attrition. And we had the best led, trained, equipped and motivated military on the planet, perhaps of all time. The temptation must have been strong to use it. The problem was, where?

The answer was obvious: Iraq. There were many good reasons.

1) Iraq was big, one of the major and most powerful Arab/Islamic nations. America had to show the terrorists we could strike successfuly wherever we chose, whenever we chose, and could easily eliminate any source of potential support for terrorism. Afghanistan was not Arab, and it had never been very influential in international, or even regional affairs. We needed to show the terrorists that every successful attack on America and it's allies would result in the fall and occupation of an Arab capital.

2) Iraq was easy, it had been drained by the Iranian war, and militarily crushed in the first Gulf War. It was constantly being overflown by American warplanes which took pictures and bombed anti-aircraft facilities with impunity for a decade. We thoroughly understood what remained of their military and their national assets, and their economy was crippled by our embargo and Saddam's own mismanagement and brutality. The entire northern part of the country, the Kurdish lands, was essentially a prosperous and well-armed American puppet state. Iraq was no match for the US war machine and victory was assured within a few days.

3) Iraq had it coming. It had long been a troublemaker in the region, feared by all its neighbors, and it had already demonstrated its lack of respect for international borders and human life. The nation was ruled by a monster, Saddam Hussein, who brutally oppressed his people and who was recognized universally as a bloodthirsty fiend, even by middle eastern standards. His loss would be a benefit to humanity, and everyone knew it, our friends, our enemies and even the bulk of his own people. Surely we would be welcomed as liberators.

4) Iraq had access to the sea, an essential to bring in heavy military equipment without having to rely on undependable allies, and to facilitate the export of oil and place it under American control. With a stable and assured source of petroleum, the single economic weapon the Arab/Islamic world has over us would evaporate, and we could simply do as we pleased in that part of the world. We could even afford to leave, if we later chose to do so. With a modest investment, financed by Iraqi oil revenues and the American taxpayer, we could easily set up a prosperous and liberal regime in Mespotamia which would be the envy of every Mullah, tinhorn dictator and king in Al-Arabiya. Every Arab, instead of obsessing about the Palestinian issue, would now be asking himself why his country wasn't like Iraq, free and rich.

5) American military and reconstruction contractors would get rich, and Iraqi oil would flow once again into American SUVs.

6) But most important, Iraq was a geopolitical keystone. Look at a map, it borders almost every single country in the middle east. An American puppet state with our bases there would be poised to strike in any direction it chose to keep things quiet in the region, and it would control a central crossroads of the land and sea lines of communication. After the conquest there would be an American ally in the heart of the Arab world. Iraq was destined to become like the old Iran, a "stabilizing presence in the region". As for the new Iran, now our enemy, it would wake up one day with American armies on its eastern and western borders, not to mention a Yankee fleet off its coast.

To sum up, we had every reason in the world to invade Iraq. The only thing we lacked was an excuse.

It's a commonplace in the public debate on Iraq today that the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction and connections to Al-Quaida in Iraq in order to manufacture a pretext to invade the country. The reasoning goes something like this, in spite of the reasons listed above suggesting the value of an attack to secure American interests, the American people and world opinion would never have sanctioned military action simply because it was geopolitically convenient for us. This may very well be true, but it does not follow that the war was a conservative conspiracy. I believe that the Bush administration sincerely believed in the Al-Quaida/Hussein connection and the WMDs and all the rest. It was dead wrong, of course, but it was sincere. What little evidence that was available seemed to hint that Iraq was involved in these activities, its past history and goals certainly corroborated the hypothesis. Iraqi diplomatic and political maneuvering certainly supported that theory, and the mechanisms in place by the United Nations to assure us otherwise, inspections and such, were not very convincing. Intelligence information was inconclusive, but certainly seemed to hint that this was so.

But with the Kissingerian mindset of the President's advisors, and their commitment to an invasion as a cure-all to our problems with the Islamist fanatics (for the reasons listed above), it was only too easy to view all the evidence with a strong bias. I know I did. Every intelligence factoid supporting this view was accepted uncritically, every item contradicting it was viewed with extreme skepticism. It is not surprising that the decision was made to invade, in fact, it was probably the wise one, given what we thought we knew at the time. It was infinitely better to invade unnecessarily than to fail to do so if it was justified. The Bush government was probably not malicious in accepting the decision, just incompetent. Not that we haven't talked ourselves into a jam like this before...remember the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the Domino Theory? I actually fell for them too, I volunteered in '67.

Ironically, it was the actions of Hussein himself, and America's own European allies that made war inevitable. The former could easily have allowed the UN inspections which would have exposed the American suspicions for the paranoid fantasies they actually were. Why he didn't will always be a mystery. Perhaps he felt that the fear of WMDs was the only thing that kept the American legions in check. Perhaps he wanted to keep his neighbors cowed with fears of poison gas and biological agents, and eventually, nukes. Perhaps he wanted to present himself to the Arab world as standing up to the Great Satan. But this is all just speculation. What is certain is that if full inspections had been agreed to by Saddam, it would have been politically impossible for the Americans to attack him.

As for the shenanigans at the UN, here I am inclined to sympathize with the Bush position. I can see why the Russians and Chinese were determined to frustrate US moves, that's their job, they feel obligated to obstruct and confound what they perceive as their major economic and political rival. For the Germans and the French to adopt this position is incomprehensible. They continued to do so even though their ignorance of Iraq's WMD was just as deep as ours was. Granted, they had substantial investments in Iraq, as well as outstanding loans. They also had troublesome Muslim minorities of their own to contend with, and a dependence on middle eastern oil greater than our own. But I am convinced that brutal self-interest was not enough to to explain their opposition to US bullying in the UN. It was motivated primarily by envy of the United States and resentment of America's recognition that Europe no longer really mattered. If they had joined in demanding that Saddam submit to immediate and unconditional inspections, or else, Hussein would have folded, and their positions of opposition to the US would have been vindicated. If Hussein had still insisted on refusing inspections, they would have joined us, or at least, secretly supported us and let us do the dirty work that had to be done and let America earn the world's condemnation, take the risks, and pay the bills. As it turned out, the latter is what eventually happened anyway.

The war was over in weeks, the American forces triumphed as expected, and Iraq's Baath party went underground, much to the glee of the citizenry. But that is where the problems for the Americans started. With predictable military genius and political ineptness, the conquering forces failed to make any plans for what they wanted to do after they'd won, and at first chaos, then an organized insurgency came to plague the American forces. This was not entirely through ignorance, critics of the administration had pointed out these planning failures way before the invasion, but they were dismissed as Liberal weakness, indecision, cowardice and treachery by the ideological cowboys in the White House.The Bush administration, guided by a cynical, but realistic, private, geopolitical calculation from the beginning, soon abandoned it for its usual public infantile rhetoric about freedom and democracy and other fantasies that only its most loyal, knuckle-dragging supporters in the American hinterlands ever took seriously. America, like every single other power throughout human history, has always guided its policy by national interest, not ideological purity. The only difference with us is that we are more inept.

Our opponents in the Arab world, having also read Mackinder and Mahan, went to work with a capacity for cruelty and savagery unprecedented since Hitler and Stalin to undermine the Pax Americana imposed on Mesopotamia. They know exactly what the Yankees are up to, and they are willing to sacrifice to the last Iraqi to put a stop to it. The Bush administration, eager to fight the war on the cheap, politically and financially, was totally unprepared to restore order, seal the borders, rebuild the country, and impose its political will. The Americans once again underestimated their enemies, both in their capacity to understand American goals and in their ability to frustrate them. As a result, the American forces get picked off one by one, and are incapable of defending themselves effectively by deploying firepower against an enemy that employs suicide bombers, human shields, hostages, fratricide and almost supernatural barbarity.

So what happens now? The American program has failed, not because it was flawed in conception,
but because it was botched in execution. The war for the Administration has become a self-justifying cycle of violence, an endless urban guerilla struggle that consumes mostly innocent civilians and which converts what few allies we have there into enemies. We are often told that if we withdrew now, the nation, perhaps the region, would collapse into chaos.

Rubbish. Isn't what we have there already?