Tommy Franks Was Right Posted by Michael Cohen

Doug Feith has a rather "interesting" op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today in which he criticizes the Bush Administration's shifting rationale for why we went to war in Iraq. In particular, Feith highlights a speech given by Bush in the Spring of 2004, which focused on America's "democratic" aspirations for Iraq, rather than the original security rationale for. Feith views this is a "communications failure."

The most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

Maybe it's just me, but this is a bizarre formulation. The focus on creating a sustainable democracy in Iraq wasn't a change in communications strategy IT WAS A DRAMATIC POLICY SHIFT! Instead of declaring in the Fall of 2003 or the Spring of 2004 that our initial (admittedly flawed) rationale for going to war in Iraq -- ensuring that Saddam couldn't develop WMD, sponsor terrorism or threaten his neighbors -- had been met, the Bush Administration completely changed the metric for success and laid the groundwork for an open-ended military commitment. Indeed, Feith never criticizes the Administration for keeping troops in Iraq for more than five years in the pursuit of an increasingly amorphous "victory" - he criticizes them for how they communicated this shift.

Of course, Feith is right that the President shifted his rationale for going to war, but he seems oblivious to the real world consequences of this shift - not on public opinion, but on our actual military and political commitments to Iraq. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

Comments

[David Tomlin]

I don't see how it was a policy shift. It was always assumed that if the only way to 'disarm' Iraq turned out to be 'regime change', then installing another strongman would not be acceptable. So the U.S. would have to try, or pretend to try, to make Iraq a democracy. This has usually been U.S. policy toward countries it has occupied for whatever reason. Woodrow Wilson occupied Haiti to keep it from becoming a German base, and this was the start of an unsuccessful democratization project that outlasted WW1 and the Wilson administration.