Sanitization of Bush’s Iraq War Motives – Beinart’s “The Good Fight”

[Time for change]

There are certain topics in contemporary American politics that are simply unmentionable. A stolen presidential election is one such topic – which explains why this subject has been virtually blacked out by our corporate media and why only one U.S. Senator dared to formally object to the results of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.

Another forbidden subject in contemporary American politics is the motives of our leaders, especially our President, especially with respect to foreign affairs, and most especially with respect to war. That explains why Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was ridiculed so viciously and her House seat targeted, for merely questioning the motives of George W. Bush with respect to the 9-11 attacks on our country, and why Senator Richard Durbin was excoriated and received so little support from his Democratic Senate colleagues when he dared to compare our prison camps at Guantanamo Bay with Nazi prison camps.

The book that is the subject of this post is “The Good Fight – Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.” – by Peter Beinart. I became interested in this book when DeepModem Mom and Kevin Spidel posted on the DU an article by Jacob Heilbrunn in the Los Angeles Times, which claimed that Beinart’s book represented a Neocon movement within the Democratic Party. That thought scared me so much that I went right out and bought the book.

After reading the book I do not agree that it represents a Neocon movement within the Democratic Party. There are too many excellent discussions in the book that support the subtitle theme of the book – why liberals and only liberals can win the war on terror and make America great again – for me to believe that it represents anything like a Neocon movement. Those discussions involve such things as the mistakes we made in Viet Nam, serious problems with the conservative Republican approach to the Cold War and the War on Terror, serious mistakes by the Bush administration in conducting that “war”, and the need our country has for self-examination of its own motives.

But on the other hand, the book is deeply flawed in two crucial respects. One is Beinart’s failure not only to question George W. Bush’s motives regarding his decision to invade Iraq, but his eagerness to attribute to Bush nothing but good motives, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, some of which Beinart simply ignores, and some of which he presents but apparently feels doesn’t reflect on Bush’s motives. And the other serious flaw in the book, in my opinion, is the way that Beinart criticizes the position of liberals whom he vaguely characterizes as being too dovish – the second major theme of his book.

It is hard for me to imagine how someone can present so much excellent and useful discussion and then in the same book present arguments that are not only seriously flawed but also potentially quite harmful. In this post I will deal only with the former flaw. I am still working on what to say about Beinart’s criticism of those whom he considers to be excessively dovish liberals.


Why liberals and only liberals can win the war on terror and make America great again

I will start by noting some of the many excellent arguments that Beinart makes in support of the above theme – because it is those discussions that make it difficult to understand why he is so reluctant to impugn Bush’s motives and so eager to criticize liberals in the way that he does.

On why liberals came to oppose the war in Viet Nam, as well as other ‘anti-Communist’ actions

It was possible to consider liberal democracy fundamentally superior to Communism, to see the Soviet Union as a potential aggressor that the United States must contain, to believe American power essential to a better world – and still oppose the war. All it required was recognizing that since Vietnamese Communism was the product of Vietnamese nationalism, not Soviet or Chinese power, it could not be militarily contained – and its triumph did not threaten American security.

Acknowledgement of the need for restraint on American power
Beinart sees the need for restraint on American power as a necessary element in our fight against terrorism:

Since our country’s pathologies spread ever more rapidly beyond its borders, a globalized world required greater violations of national sovereignty. Yet given the extraordinary power disparity between the United States and every other nation, if America assigned itself the right to intervene in countries that posed no immediate threat, it would breed deep fear and resentment, no matter how high-minded its stated motives…. ‘The best way to advance our interests without provoking anti-American coalitions,’ wrote Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall in 2000, ‘is to work through thickening networks of alliances, international institutions, and rule-based regimes that promote global cooperation. It’s time to drop breast-beating rhetoric about being the world’s sole superpower and instead think of ourselves as first among equals, willing to play by the same rules we hold others to’….. America should not fall in love with the supposed purity of its intentions. Rather than blaming other countries for fearing that America might be corrupted by its overwhelming power, America should fear that corruption itself. And it should guard against it by giving other democracies a voice in its decisions, as it did at the dawn of the cold war.

The need for America to examine its own motives
And as a corollary to the need for restraint on American power, Beinart devotes a lot of space to discussing his opinion that we cannot simply assume that our country has good intentions and that everyone should recognize that. Rather, we must have the humility to examine our intentions and make sure that our actions reflect the good intentions that we claim:

Cold war liberals also urged Americans to believe in the anti-Communist cause… But they were equally worried about uncritical belief, a moral hubris that blinded Americans to their capacity for injustice. ‘We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,’ wrote Niebuhr. ‘We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.’ For anti-totalitarian liberals, the United States was capable of greatness, but only if it recognized its capacity for evil. And this humility underlay key aspects of Truman’s foreign policy. It made his administration more tolerant of external restraints on American power. And it produced a reluctance to force countries into lockstep with the United States…And that was a hidden source of Moscow’s weakness, and Washington’s strength.

The need to promote economic justice and equality of opportunity in the international sphere
Beinart discusses in much detail why we need to express in words and action our concern, not just for democracy, but for justice and economic opportunity, of the world’s population – as an essential element of our “War on Terror”.

Bush…. is much less sure that defeating jihadism requires promoting equality (or at least equality of opportunity.) And that is because while today’s conservatives recognize totalitarianism’s political root causes, they still largely deny its economic ones….

Why does the right ignore this? Because for many conservatives today, like their cold war predecessors, discussing economic root causes is rationalizing. It shifts blame from the terrorists themselves, and thus threatens the quality conservatives cherish most: moral clarity…

And I have to add here that if conservatives admitted the need to promote equality of opportunity in foreign nations, they would then have to admit that the same should be done at home. And if they did that, they might have to pay more taxes.

Beinart continues:

Unfortunately, this effort to preserve America’s moral clarity about the enemy prevents America from fully fighting that enemy.… Economic development isn’t an absolute precondition for stable democracy, but it’s an enormous help.

The inconsistencies between our ‘democracy’ rhetoric and our actions

After 9/11, the government detained 1,200 foreign nationals, some for months, without charging them with crimes (almost none had committed any), without notifying their families, and without any independent judicial review. The National Security Agency has spied on thousands of Americans, in violation of a 1978 law that requires a court order to do so..…

The consequences of America’s shadow prison system have become hideously clear….operating in almost total darkness, virtually every one of these camps has produced credible allegations of torture.

Bush’s biggest mistake in his handling the “War on Terror” – failure to allow restraints on American power
Beinart isn’t shy about criticizing Bush. He just refuses to acknowledge that his (Bush’s) intentions may not have been good. His biggest criticism of Bush’s handling of the “War on Terror” involves Bush’s failure to impose any restraints on American power because of his belief that America (and he himself) is incapable of bad intentions:

George W. Bush… has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak. He has denied America’s capacity for evil, in an effort to bolster American’s faith in itself. And in the process, America has committed terrible misdeeds, which have sapped the world’s faith in us – and ultimately, our faith in ourselves.

Beinart’s strange eagerness to credit George W. Bush with good motives with respect to the Iraq war

In light of all the above, it is difficult for me to understand why Beinart gives so much credit to Bush’s intentions, and even his leadership. His statement regarding the 2004 election that “Americans … gravitated to the man (Bush) with a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had in a very long time” I found particularly disturbing and difficult to understand.

His eagerness to attribute good motives to the Bush administration’s decision to rush to war in Iraq is even more perplexing. That would seem to require both an alteration of facts and a twisting of logic – and Beinart uses both to provide an aura of good intentions to the Bush administrations decision to invade Iraq.

In the first place, Beinart appears to believe that the idea of invading Iraq never occurred to the Bush administration until the United States was attacked on 9-11:

Conservative foreign policy before 9-11 represented a partial reversion to the Taft-style isolationism of the late 1940s. America would oppose international restraints on its power, but since it had little desire to remake the world in its image, America would restrain itself. In its first eight months in office, the Bush administration repudiated the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an enforcement mechanism for the Biological Weapons Convention, and a treaty on the sale of small arms…. and ended high-level U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and disarmament talks with North Korea… Rather than projecting American power, President Bush seemed content to hoard it. That all changed when the twin towers fell.

Actually, there are two serious and related problems with the above excerpt. First, it implies that Bush’s repudiation of the above noted treaties and processes indicated a reluctance to project American power, when in fact it indicated nothing of the sort. What it really indicated was Bush’s reluctance to cooperate with the rest of the world in the search for peaceful solutions to serious international problems. And the other serious problem with the above excerpt is, contrary to Beinart’s assertions that the Bush administration had no interest in invading Iraq until after 9-11 (repeated several times in his book), it demonstrated such an interest from its very first days.


Secondly, Beinart implies that the Bush administration really believed that the Iraq invasion was necessary because of their weapons of mass destruction:

In 2002, as the Bush administration began its campaign for war, the intelligence assessments grew more confident and more alarming…. Iraq had chemical weapons in 1990, and the United States thought it had them in 2003.

Yet Beinart fails to discuss the abundant evidence that the Bush administration took every opportunity to twist intelligence reports in order to make them fit a pattern that would justify an invasion, as meticulously described by Seymour Hersh and others.


Thirdly, Beinart implies that Bush really was sincerely interested in democratizing Iraq:

As the Bush administration has rightly recognized…. America’s long-term safety requires that its clients evolve in a democratic direction, even if it means they prove less compliant….

President Bush’s campaign for Islamic democracy was not inevitable…And it has been driven by strange, unforeseen events – above all, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush’s growing democratic zeal, coming just as his primary justification for overthrowing Saddam collapsed, has struck many liberals as suspiciously convenient. But… if liberals dislike Bush’s happy democracy talk, they should consider the alternative: the pessimistic, sometimes racist, tradition that led early cold war conservatives to say America was fighting not for democracy but for Western civilization….

Whatever Bush’s initial motivation for taking up democracy’s banner, his sincerity is now transparent. And although he has coddled his share of dictators, his rhetoric has pressured his actions….

Hasn’t Beinart heard of the term ‘rationalization’? And doesn’t he recognize that Bush has lied about virtually everything since he became pResident? Isn’t he familiar with the “Clear Skies” initiative?


And fourthly, Beinart appears to believe that the Bush administration really meant to leave Iraq after they overthrew Saddam Hussein:

In the run-up to the Iraq war, veterans of those efforts – in the military, nongovernmental organizations, the State Department, and the CIA – urged the Bush administration to learn from their experience. They warned about the dangers of postwar chaos, the necessity of careful planning, and the importance of sufficient troops. But administration officials told them that since Iraq was a liberation, not an occupation, those lessons didn’t apply... To the Bush administration’s credit, it soon shifted course, shelving its initial plans for a quick exit.

But somehow the Iraqis weren’t fooled

Despite Beinart’s stance that the Bush administration’s motives for war were relatively pure, he does go on to admit not only that the Iraqis didn’t share that view, but that they had very good reason for their belief that the Bush administration’s actions were less than honorable:

In reality, Iraqis didn’t believe the United States had invaded with only the purest of motives. Instead, after some initial gratitude, they quickly began worrying that America intended a long, colonial stay. This was entirely predictable. Historical studies suggest that one of the keys to the success of any foreign occupation is convincing the occupied population that they will get their country back…. The great advantage of a UN-led multilateral occupation was that by its very nature, it looked less permanent. A study of Iraqi public opinion proposed handling over control to the UN…

The Bush administration in Iraq exuded a complacent confidence in American virtue, a complacency that not only blinded it to Iraqi skepticism, but kept it from proving that skepticism wrong. The White House dismissed accusations of imperialism as absurd, but it never publicly stated that it would not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. Indeed, U.S. officials suggested they might do just that. And they never took clear steps to show Iraqis that the United States was not after their oil. Instead, during the looting that followed Saddam’s fall, American troops guarded only the oil ministry…

The problem, in other words, wasn’t merely that America failed to convince Iraqis it had their best interests at heart; it’s that America did not always have Iraqis’ best interests at heart. And because American officials didn’t recognize that, they failed to quickly share power, which might have reduced the corrupting temptations of colonial rule…. It was frequently our interests that were driving decisions we were trying to impose.

In other words: Beinart admits that the Bush administration failed to give an appearance that their occupation was not meant to be permanent, by doing such things as refusing UN assistance and hinting that it might seek permanent military bases in Iraq; he admits that by, among other things, rushing to guard only the oil ministry during the initial chaos after Saddam’s fall, they gave the appearance that oil may have been a prime motive for the invasion; he admits that Bush trotted out the Democracy rationalization for the invasion only after the weapons of mass destruction argument was proven to be invalid; and he even admits that we did not always have Iraq’s best interests at heart. Yet with all that, he imputes relatively pure motives to the Bush administration with respect to their decision to invade Iraq.

And even with all that he admits, he leaves out some key issues: he fails to acknowledge the abundance of evidence that the Bush administration knew before the invasion that their weapons of mass destruction rationale was a fraud; he fails to acknowledge that an Iraq invasion was contemplated long before 9-11; and he fails to mention the highly lucrative no-bid contracts that were given to Bush administration benefactors such as Halliburton.


Why consideration of motives is important

Some may read my criticisms of Beinart for his eagerness to attribute good intentions to Bush and his administration and say, “Who cares? After all, he did appropriately criticize the Bush administration for its numerous mistakes. Isn’t that all that is important? Isn’t my insistence that Beinart refrain from attributing good motives to Bush and his administration just part of my partisan agenda?

I answer NO to all those questions. An understanding of motives IS important – both for a proper understanding of history, and for facilitating an ability to predict the future actions of the current leaders of our nation. By sweeping this issue under the rug we imperil our ability to understand what is going on around us, and therefore impair our ability to respond appropriately to prevent further damage to our country and to the world. In fact, the importance of understanding motives is lucidly illustrated by Beinart’s own words, as he explains how he was taken in by Bush’s rationalizations for invading Iraq:

I supported the (Iraq) war…. I was wrong…. I could not imagine that the Bush administration would so utterly fail to plan for the war’s aftermath….I could not see that the morality of American power relies on the limits to American power. It is a grim irony that this book’s central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most.

I admire anyone who is willing to publicly admit a big mistake – and so I admire Beinart for saying this. Yet, he appears not to have learned the central lesson of his mistake. If he had understood the motives of the Bush administration prior to the war – motives for which there was an abundance of evidence – he would have been far less likely to have been suckered into supporting the war in the first place. But by failing to learn this lesson even after writing his book, he is all the more likely to make the same mistake again – perhaps even with regard to this very same Presidential administration.