There is an excellent new book, ‘Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq,’ by Melvyn P. Leffler. I strongly recommend it. The excerpt below is the conclusion: Twenty years have passed since “shock and awe.” Twenty years have passed since the worst foreign policy decision in American history. Twenty years have passed since the arrogance, bombast and gross incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld. Twenty years have passed since the greatest journalistic failure in American history, led by
1. Will the right people read this book? It seems to me that the people most likely to read this book are the ones that already realized what and clusterf**k this was.
2. If you had a crystal ball, and could see what the world would have been like if those hanging chads in Florida had counted and Gore was president, how much of this would have been avoided? How different would the world be? (perhaps this could be a future post?)
I get heartsick readying about what really happened in Iraq—so many terrible acts done in the name of “democracy”. The events and revelations about the Abu Graib prison were enough to make me want to hide in shame. For the first time in my life I am “pro” war after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and am torn between supporting the police and despising the racism of so many obvious killings by those “in blue”. It’s a confusing time for us pacifists. The world really has turned upside down. How does one deal with a “terrorist”? Undermine the cause by treating people fairly at the start. Well, there’s my Pollyanna rant for the day. Thanks for the reminder of how we often have gotten things wrong, Steve. Now, it’s back to living with as much kindness and fairness I can muster.
The first couple of paragraphs were easy to agree with but I struggled to see his point about the weakness of our intelligence about Saddam's capabilities and intentions. Under Bush, Cheney and Company organized an explicit effort to "find" the required intelligence to justify the war. Powell was sent to UN to transmit these lies which were transparent enough that many countries could not be persuaded to follow our lead. Those that did, perhaps like those siding with Russia in the UN today, did so for self-interested reasons not an independently judged agreement on the facts.
At the core of the analysis though is the truth that Americans and their politicians forget that the attraction of freedom in many countries comes down to "freedom from America" itself. We too often do not recognize and do not admit that we support vicious dictatorships in the name of opposing the Communist threat from Russia and China. That our support for these dictatorships is usually about the control of some nation's natural resources, most often oil, but other things as well. (Firestone's rubber plantations in Vietnam were the largest in the world at the time I have read.)
A Pakistani friend of mine who grew-up in Europe, and is an American entrepreneur and US citizen, reminds me to remember how the relationship most people in the world have with America is love/hate, and that the second can be at times stronger than the first. So, hubris, as the author states clearly and accurately is really at the core of the terrible decisions made buy the Bush administration and their partners in Congress and the media..
Steve, I'm 75, the war on Vietnam was my constant companion, and dread, throughout my college years (1964 - 1968) I knew I would get my draft notice as a graduation present, and it was indeed. I knew I would never go, I didn't. From the early sixties I saw the self immolations, the bloody coups, including on Nov. 1, 1963, three weeks before the first Kennedy assassination. The whole Vietnam War enterprise was corrupt, from the 'leaders' of South Vietnam, to the Military Industrial Profiteers I lost family and friends on 9/11 but there was no doubt that invading Iraq was not justified would likely be a cosmic disaster, I knew why didn't all those in power know? The lessons of of the great Vietnam mistake should further explored and taught in colleges, and exposed in a Ken Burns type documentary series.
Thank you for the valuable book excerpt, Steve. Numerous recent articles have appeared about the 2003 Gulf War begun under false pretenses by the Bush administration (e.g., see Max Fisher's 20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/world/middleeast/iraq-war-reason.html),
but the book excerpt you cite is especially pithy.
Perhaps the author goes into the topic at great depth elsewhere in his pages, but his mention of U.S.-driven sanctions against Iraq doesn't even begin to describe the horror of what George H.W. Bush's draconian sanctions (cont'd by Pres. Bill Clinton) did to the people of that hapless country, whose dictator Saddam Hussein had been totally supported by Reagan-Bush America in its hatred of Iran throughout the 1980s.
Estimates vary, but it is seriously thought by all the major international agencies (from the UN to Amnesty to Doctors Without Borders) that our sanctions killed somewhere between 800,000 to 1.2 million INNOCENT CIVILIANS, especially infants, children and the elderly-- by depriving those already Saddam-terrorized and -traumatized people basic medicines and water filtration equipment.
I had friends at the time who were defying the sanctions and risking incarceration and heavy fines by delivering anti-diarrheal medicines, anti-biotics, etc. to relief agencies in Iraq.
It was a damned nightmare for tens of millions of ordinary Iraqis. I still cannot forgive Sec. of State Madeleine Albright for stating "we think the price is worth it" when asked by Lesley Stahl (60 Minutes, May 12, 1996) about the death of 500,000 dead Iraqi children. And that number of fatalities for young and old grew far worse over the next several years....
I quit the Republican party after we invaded Iraq. However, the direction the Republican party has gone over the past 20 years made my departure inevitable. I believed then as I do now it was a mistake that cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides. We were looking for someone to take out our rage on after 9/11 and Iraq was an easy target after Sadam Hussain threatened George H W Bush. Nobody believed there were WMDs in Iraq but when the accusations were made the war was unavoidable.
What an interesting thing to juxtapose the Bush administration to Trump. Two completely different forms of malfeasance. One ideologically misinformed and incompetent and the other narcissistic and malicious. 
I was an unequivocal supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is clear now that I was also unequivocally and completely WRONG in my support, and these days I feel nothing but shame about my original views. The war made us far less safe, and the end result has not only been the needless deaths of/injuries to countless Iraqis but to American soldiers as well, not to mention an increasingly ascendant and belligerent Iran.
Its astonishing to me that, even to this day, all of my friends who are conservative are utterly unable to admit they were wrong in being carried away by the beat of the war drum. They always respond by mumbling some "but what about-ism" they've harvested from their favorite purveyor of hard right ideology. America will most certainly be tested again and one can only hope that this phenomenon of wearing partisan blinders to truth will not shared by the balance of voters. Hopefully a lesson has been learned that will last longer than the paltry 30 year span between the conclusion of our Vietnam folly and the invasion of Iraq.
Sadly, this is long overdue and a well-stated, brutally honest perspective. What a massive clusterf***k we created... and yes, we will all in some way suffer the consequences of it for many years.
It's a sad testament to a recurring phenomenon... the societal and political amnesia of only a few decades. We learned nothing from 'Nam.
I feel it is important to note that the words “Never Again” continually seem to be forgotten or misplaced, left in a draw in some basement office by the people making these fucked up decisions..
The part of this that is totally relevant to what is going on today is that Bush was President only because Ralp Nader ran as a third party candidate. He siphoned off enough votes from Gore to let Bush win Florida. Had Nader not been on the ballot in Florida Gore would have won this election and been President. With Gore as President our history and current world would be much different. There would not have been the war in Iraq. The make up of the Supreme Court would be different. No Citizens United. No nonsense about the preamble in the second amendment about the right to bear arms for militias being irrelevant. Our world would be totally different had Nader’s massive ego not propelled him to run for President because his voice needed to be heard. One person’s choice to run for President has changed our country dramatically.
We now headed towards a very similar situation. Andrew Yang wants his Forward Party on the Presidential ballot. If the Forward Party is on the ballot it will take votes away from the Dems and probably get a Republican elected. If that situation plays out and gets Trump elected, it will be on Andrew Young.
The hubris going into this war is why, after 25 years as a moderate Republican, I became an Independent. That said, as a soldier, I thought it was my duty to deploy there. When I, fully retirement eligible as a colonel, told my wife I needed to go, she broke down in tears. That ended the discussion and I never looked back. As to Don Rumsfeld...no comment. I wote about all of this in my memoir, Next Mission: US Defense Attache to France. (Out of print until May. A few ridiculously expensive copies are still out there.)
Steve, excellent as always. I have two questions:
1. Will the right people read this book? It seems to me that the people most likely to read this book are the ones that already realized what and clusterf**k this was.
2. If you had a crystal ball, and could see what the world would have been like if those hanging chads in Florida had counted and Gore was president, how much of this would have been avoided? How different would the world be? (perhaps this could be a future post?)
I get heartsick readying about what really happened in Iraq—so many terrible acts done in the name of “democracy”. The events and revelations about the Abu Graib prison were enough to make me want to hide in shame. For the first time in my life I am “pro” war after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and am torn between supporting the police and despising the racism of so many obvious killings by those “in blue”. It’s a confusing time for us pacifists. The world really has turned upside down. How does one deal with a “terrorist”? Undermine the cause by treating people fairly at the start. Well, there’s my Pollyanna rant for the day. Thanks for the reminder of how we often have gotten things wrong, Steve. Now, it’s back to living with as much kindness and fairness I can muster.
And to think I got an ad on fb just yesterday for MasterClass - President George W. Bush teaches Authentic Leadership. What a joke!
The first couple of paragraphs were easy to agree with but I struggled to see his point about the weakness of our intelligence about Saddam's capabilities and intentions. Under Bush, Cheney and Company organized an explicit effort to "find" the required intelligence to justify the war. Powell was sent to UN to transmit these lies which were transparent enough that many countries could not be persuaded to follow our lead. Those that did, perhaps like those siding with Russia in the UN today, did so for self-interested reasons not an independently judged agreement on the facts.
At the core of the analysis though is the truth that Americans and their politicians forget that the attraction of freedom in many countries comes down to "freedom from America" itself. We too often do not recognize and do not admit that we support vicious dictatorships in the name of opposing the Communist threat from Russia and China. That our support for these dictatorships is usually about the control of some nation's natural resources, most often oil, but other things as well. (Firestone's rubber plantations in Vietnam were the largest in the world at the time I have read.)
A Pakistani friend of mine who grew-up in Europe, and is an American entrepreneur and US citizen, reminds me to remember how the relationship most people in the world have with America is love/hate, and that the second can be at times stronger than the first. So, hubris, as the author states clearly and accurately is really at the core of the terrible decisions made buy the Bush administration and their partners in Congress and the media..
Steve, I'm 75, the war on Vietnam was my constant companion, and dread, throughout my college years (1964 - 1968) I knew I would get my draft notice as a graduation present, and it was indeed. I knew I would never go, I didn't. From the early sixties I saw the self immolations, the bloody coups, including on Nov. 1, 1963, three weeks before the first Kennedy assassination. The whole Vietnam War enterprise was corrupt, from the 'leaders' of South Vietnam, to the Military Industrial Profiteers I lost family and friends on 9/11 but there was no doubt that invading Iraq was not justified would likely be a cosmic disaster, I knew why didn't all those in power know? The lessons of of the great Vietnam mistake should further explored and taught in colleges, and exposed in a Ken Burns type documentary series.
It was absolutely criminal on so many levels!
Thank you for the valuable book excerpt, Steve. Numerous recent articles have appeared about the 2003 Gulf War begun under false pretenses by the Bush administration (e.g., see Max Fisher's 20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/world/middleeast/iraq-war-reason.html),
but the book excerpt you cite is especially pithy.
Perhaps the author goes into the topic at great depth elsewhere in his pages, but his mention of U.S.-driven sanctions against Iraq doesn't even begin to describe the horror of what George H.W. Bush's draconian sanctions (cont'd by Pres. Bill Clinton) did to the people of that hapless country, whose dictator Saddam Hussein had been totally supported by Reagan-Bush America in its hatred of Iran throughout the 1980s.
Estimates vary, but it is seriously thought by all the major international agencies (from the UN to Amnesty to Doctors Without Borders) that our sanctions killed somewhere between 800,000 to 1.2 million INNOCENT CIVILIANS, especially infants, children and the elderly-- by depriving those already Saddam-terrorized and -traumatized people basic medicines and water filtration equipment.
I had friends at the time who were defying the sanctions and risking incarceration and heavy fines by delivering anti-diarrheal medicines, anti-biotics, etc. to relief agencies in Iraq.
It was a damned nightmare for tens of millions of ordinary Iraqis. I still cannot forgive Sec. of State Madeleine Albright for stating "we think the price is worth it" when asked by Lesley Stahl (60 Minutes, May 12, 1996) about the death of 500,000 dead Iraqi children. And that number of fatalities for young and old grew far worse over the next several years....
I quit the Republican party after we invaded Iraq. However, the direction the Republican party has gone over the past 20 years made my departure inevitable. I believed then as I do now it was a mistake that cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides. We were looking for someone to take out our rage on after 9/11 and Iraq was an easy target after Sadam Hussain threatened George H W Bush. Nobody believed there were WMDs in Iraq but when the accusations were made the war was unavoidable.
What an interesting thing to juxtapose the Bush administration to Trump. Two completely different forms of malfeasance. One ideologically misinformed and incompetent and the other narcissistic and malicious. 
Never again. Until the next time. History rhymes because we resist learning. “This is different”.
I was an unequivocal supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is clear now that I was also unequivocally and completely WRONG in my support, and these days I feel nothing but shame about my original views. The war made us far less safe, and the end result has not only been the needless deaths of/injuries to countless Iraqis but to American soldiers as well, not to mention an increasingly ascendant and belligerent Iran.
Its astonishing to me that, even to this day, all of my friends who are conservative are utterly unable to admit they were wrong in being carried away by the beat of the war drum. They always respond by mumbling some "but what about-ism" they've harvested from their favorite purveyor of hard right ideology. America will most certainly be tested again and one can only hope that this phenomenon of wearing partisan blinders to truth will not shared by the balance of voters. Hopefully a lesson has been learned that will last longer than the paltry 30 year span between the conclusion of our Vietnam folly and the invasion of Iraq.
Sadly, this is long overdue and a well-stated, brutally honest perspective. What a massive clusterf***k we created... and yes, we will all in some way suffer the consequences of it for many years.
It's a sad testament to a recurring phenomenon... the societal and political amnesia of only a few decades. We learned nothing from 'Nam.
I feel it is important to note that the words “Never Again” continually seem to be forgotten or misplaced, left in a draw in some basement office by the people making these fucked up decisions..
The part of this that is totally relevant to what is going on today is that Bush was President only because Ralp Nader ran as a third party candidate. He siphoned off enough votes from Gore to let Bush win Florida. Had Nader not been on the ballot in Florida Gore would have won this election and been President. With Gore as President our history and current world would be much different. There would not have been the war in Iraq. The make up of the Supreme Court would be different. No Citizens United. No nonsense about the preamble in the second amendment about the right to bear arms for militias being irrelevant. Our world would be totally different had Nader’s massive ego not propelled him to run for President because his voice needed to be heard. One person’s choice to run for President has changed our country dramatically.
We now headed towards a very similar situation. Andrew Yang wants his Forward Party on the Presidential ballot. If the Forward Party is on the ballot it will take votes away from the Dems and probably get a Republican elected. If that situation plays out and gets Trump elected, it will be on Andrew Young.
The hubris going into this war is why, after 25 years as a moderate Republican, I became an Independent. That said, as a soldier, I thought it was my duty to deploy there. When I, fully retirement eligible as a colonel, told my wife I needed to go, she broke down in tears. That ended the discussion and I never looked back. As to Don Rumsfeld...no comment. I wote about all of this in my memoir, Next Mission: US Defense Attache to France. (Out of print until May. A few ridiculously expensive copies are still out there.)