Why did George W. Bush invade Iraq? What were the real
motives, the overarching policy decisions that drove events from
September 11 until the war began?To a large extent, we still don’t
know. But by now we do know in some detail, as Thomas Powers
carefully explains in the essays collected here, how the
administration made its case for war, using faulty intelligence to
argue that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and
posed a mounting threat to the Middle East. Once Iraq was occupied
and the weapons turned out not to exist, the case for war seemed to
disappear as well. Bit by bit the evidence–the documents suggesting
that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, the
aluminum tubes that the United States claimed were meant for
uranium enrichment, the Iraqi defector code-named Curveball who
claimed Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs–has been exposed
as unreliable, misinterpreted, “cherry-picked,” exaggerated, or
just fake.But as faulty as the intelligence was, it was always only
a pretext, a way of persuading Congress, America, and the world to
support a war that President Bush had already decided to wage. The
real question remains: Why did Bush insist on a war of choice,
refusing to accept any solution short of an American occupation of
Iraq? The answers Powers proposes to that question, which assess
the Iraq invasion as an insistence on responding to political and
cultural conflicts with military action, suggest an overarching
failure of American policy in the region that, as long as it
remains insufficiently understood and publicly debated, will make
it difficult for any president to change course.No one is better
prepared than Powers to evaluate the way the Bush administration
used intelligence to make its case for war, used the CIA for
political ends, and used arguments of secrecy to advance both its
geopolitical agenda and its claims for executive power. But beyond
the now-familiar stories of nonexistent WMDs, The Military Error
proposes a new, deeper analysis of the error of using military
force, which has succeeded primarily in generating opposition and
increasing resistance to American aims. America went into Iraq full
of bright hopes and confident ideas, but Powers argues that those
ideas, based on the ability of force to solve problems, defeat
opponents, and make friends, were largely illusions. Such
illusions, as we learned at great cost in Vietnam, die hard, but we
can make decisions about our future role in Iraq only by
understanding the errors that got us embroiled there in the first
place.
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