Kagan and Iraq (400th Post)

I don't have much to say on what happened to New Orleans, or the tragedy of our government's handling of the disaster. That's being extensively covered in better blogs and in "reputable" media sources, and I haven't really thought anything that hasn't been written elsewhere. I do have a quick aside concerning 9/11, that wasn't really enough for a full post: I think it's safe to say that Katrina and it's resulting destruction effectively prevented Bush and his fellow Republicans from yet again cynically taking advantage of 9/11 as a political boost and justification for their policies, both foreign and domestic. Without a doubt they had just that sort of thing in mind for this year, as it's what they've done since almost the moment of the disaster. This is due largely to the fact that because of the flooding in New Orleans, most people are not thinking about 9/11 as intensely and reflectively as they have the past 3 anniversaries. If anything, the destruction has caused some people to wonder if we haven't in fact been too focused on terrorism, sacrificing our emergency preparedness for plain-old natural disasters as a result. In that sort of climate, it proved impossible for Republican politicians and their ilk to take to the airwaves; nobody was in the mood to hear it. To their credit, some Republican politicians probably weren't even in the mood to say it. And I think those Republican politicians who believed for even a moment that they could cynically use Katrina for their purposes, learned quite quickly that things were different this time.

But on to my real point. Robert Kagan, who I have considerable respect for, laments our collective lack of hindsight when it comes to the rush to war in Iraq.

"If you read even respectable journals these days, including this one, you would think that no more than six or seven people ever supported going to war in Iraq. A recent piece in The Post's Style section suggested that the war was an "idea" that President Bush "dusted off" five years after Bill Kristol and I came up with it in the Weekly Standard.That's not the way I recall it. I recall support for removing Saddam Hussein by force being pretty widespread from the late 1990s through the spring of 2003, among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, as well as neoconservatives."

He has a point. Beyond those in the administration, and right-wing hacks in the media, you'd be hard pressed to find many who will admit to completely supporting the drive to war without throwing in some caveat about how they didn't know our intelligence was faulty, that post-war planning and implementation would go so badly, they didn't anticipate an insurgency, yadda, yadda. So I don't really blame Kagan for getting a little irritated for all the 20/20 hindsight reconsiderations.

But what I get from Kagan's column is that all the support that he saw for the war was among those in his community of politicos and policy wonks. While support at that level for the war may have been somewhat less ambivalent then it would appear to be in hindsight, the fact is the war never garnered incredible support among the American public. What support it did have was as a result mostly of the exaggerations and outright falsehoods the administration peddled about Iraq's WMD capabilities. Between those on the right who supported the war no matter what 'cause George Jr. said it was a good idea, and those on the left who opposed without regard to whether the WMD claims were true or not, there was a vast majority of people who maybe leaned in one direction or the other, but gave their provisional or tacit support to the invasion. These are the people who are wondering exactly how it is that the administration could be so incompetent when it came to gathering intelligence in Iraq(or how they could so easily peddle facts they didn't know to be true or knew not to be true), and who's support for the war is rapidly fading. To these people it makes little difference what the wonks and hacks were saying in 1997, or 2001, or 2003...all that matters is what the administration said about why we had to go to war, and what's happened as a result. And that's the real story.