Seeking Lessons From Iraq. But Which Ones?
WASHINGTON – Stephen J. Hadley, who played a central role in the
decision a decade ago to go to war in Iraq, recently described the
cascade of misjudgments and inaccurate assumptions inside the Bush White
House leading up to the war as a “failure of imagination.” His
explanation of what went wrong is rife with lessons for two crises – one
in Syria, another in Iran – that President Obama confronts as he lands
in Israel on Wednesday morning.
Mr. Hadley told a small group gathered here to dissect the long-term
lessons of the Iraq war that it never occurred to him or his boss,
President George W. Bush, to ask: “What if Saddam is doing all this
deception because he actually got rid of the W.M.D. and he doesn’t want
the Iranians to know?”
Instead, the White House and the intelligence agencies leapt to the
conclusion that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader who had pursued so many
weapons of mass destruction in the past, must still be on the same
quest.
“It turns out that was the most important question in terms of the
intelligence failure that never got asked,” Mr. Hadley told a discussion
organized by the RAND Corporation and Foreign Policy magazine.
History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, Mark Twain once said,
and these days Washington is looking for the assonances. The Iraq
experience hangs over every major decision Mr. Obama’s foreign policy
team grapples with each day. It looms over the daily debate over whether
to intervene – with heavy arms or greater covert action – in Syria. And
it permeates the discussion about Iran’s nuclear progress, and
particularly over whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
has made a decision to pursue a bomb. (He has not, American
intelligence officials said again last week, though the Israelis
disagree.)
“We think about Iraq analogies all the time,'’ one senior administration
official said. “But I would be lying if I told you there was clear
agreement – even inside the administration – about what all those
lessons tell you.”
Take Syria, the administration’s current, most urgent intervention
debate. No one is talking about sending in American troops: Mr. Obama
made clear during the American and NATO intervention in Libya two years
ago that ground troops – and the occupation that follows – are off the
table.
It is likely that some of the faulty assumptions that Mr. Hadley now
acknowledges were behind the American invasion and occupation of Iraq —
that Mr. Hussein’s loyalists could be eliminated from the top of every
government institution and the country would keep functioning, or the
disastrous consequences of the disbanding of the Iraqi military — were
on Mr. Obama’s mind at the time.
But the president was willing to tip the balance in favor of the Libyan
rebels who were driving Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power, over the
objections of his former defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, who argued
that the United States had no vital national interests in Libya.
Some of Mr. Obama’s current advisers, along with many senior military
officers, make a similar argument about Syria, and say the real lesson
of Iraq is never to get involved remaking a society that the United
States neither understands nor can control.
Then there is former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and
former C.I.A. director David H. Petraeus, both of whom argued for arming
the rebels – and, as a subtext, that the Iraq experience should not
freeze the United States from using its power to tip the scales,
especially when there is hope of halting a blood bath. Another in that
camp is Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as the State Department’s
director of policy planning under Mrs. Clinton, and argued recently that
Mr. Obama “has got to find the happy medium between committing us to a
decade-long ground war and choosing not to do anything.”
So far, at least, Mr. Obama’s sense of caution – caution born not only
of the Iraq experience, but of Afghanistan — has prevailed. He was
willing to intervene in Libya because he saw a way for the United States
to make a quick, decisive difference with little risk of casualties.
“He doesn’t see that’s possible in Syria,” one of his senior military
advisers said recently. “He sees a conflict, like Iraq, where our hopes
of doing good can be overwhelmed by the reality of getting sucked into
the aftermath.”
To some veterans of the Bush administration, many of whom still insist
that the impetus to go into Iraq was right, even if the decision was
poorly executed, Mr. Obama’s hesitance suggests that he has drawn the
wrong lesson from the Iraq war.
“President Obama right now appears to be running the experiment that, if
we don't intervene’’ in Syria, “we can avoid responsibility for the
very predictable chaos that’s coming,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke
University professor who worked for Mr. Bush and Mr. Hadley.
“Then, when and if Assad falls, and the chaos that everyone has
predicted comes to pass, we will all say, ‘We told you so,’ ” Mr. Feaver
added. “And apparently the Obama administration’s position is, ‘But
we’re not responsible for it, and therefore it’s not our problem.’ ”
To which an Obama administration official responded: “It’s our problem,
but that’s different from saying we need to remake Syria. That’s the
distinction Bush missed.’’
Iran raises another set of lessons about the Iraq experience, focusing
on intelligence. Though Mr. Bush and his aides deny meddling with the
intelligence about whether Mr. Hussein had resumed his nuclear program,
the record is replete with what Walter B. Slocombe, a former senior
defense official in the Clinton administration and an adviser to the
Bush administration’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003,
calls “confirmation bias.”
The C.I.A., having missed critical nuclear developments in Pakistan and
many other nations, did not want to be caught making the same mistake
again. And Mr. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were not
exactly looking for alternative explanations, as Mr. Hadley indicated.
“The problem was that, with the Iraqi W.M.D., the policy makers wanted
bad news,” said James Dobbins of the RAND Corporation, who has held many
government posts. “They wanted to confirm that Iraq had W.M.D., and the
intelligence analysts were inclined to move in that direction anyway,”
since “it would be even worse if they predicted they didn’t have W.M.D.
and it turned out they did.”
Mr. Obama’s team, while seemingly convinced that Iran wants a weapons
capability, has stopped short of saying that any decision has been made
to take the final steps toward a weapon. And the C.I.A. and other
intelligence agencies, not wanting to repeat their most recent mistake,
have been similarly cautious.
But in their more candid moments, some of Mr. Obama’s current and former
advisers say they fear “strategic surprise,'’ the discovery that they
missed something – a hidden nuclear facility, a decision by political
leaders in Iran that they failed to pick up. In short, they fear making
the error that worried leaders most before the bitter experience of
Iraq.
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