I do not understand blogger triumphalism

The Paul O’Neil book is an instructive case. President Bush has been accused by his ex-Treasury Secretary of being disengaged, over his head, and led by advisors who put political calculations over the good of the country (cough, Mars mission). Furthermore, O’Neil says that the Bush administration had made its decision to invade Iraq almost immediately after the inauguration.

Glenn Reynolds sees the issue as such:

As I understand it the big hype is that he says (1) that Bush can talk a lot in meetings; and (2) the Administration wanted to topple Saddam before 9/11.

First of all, Glenn has point (1) exactly backwards (which he later admits). O’Neil says that Bush was unengaged and unresponsive, sitting through large and small meetings without questions or comments. Reynolds’ comprehension of stories he doesn’t want to hear doesn’t give one a lot of confidence in the rest of his analysis. And, in fact, confidence is not warranted.

Re: point (2), the new right-wing story line seems to be that the Bush Administration had always been upfront about their intention to attack Iraq and depose Saddam. Hmmm.

To support this… controversial theory, Reynolds quotes from the 2000 Presidential debates:

MR. LEHRER: With Saddam Hussein, you mean?

GOV. BUSH: Yes, and —

MR. LEHRER: You could get him out of there?

GOV. BUSH: I’d like to, of course, and I presume this
administration would as well.

That’s how to keep a secret — say it out loud during the Presidential debates, and nobody will notice!

I paid pretty close attention to the debates, and I really didn’t remember Bush proposing an invasion of Iraq. Is that the way it happened? Let’s go to the transcript for the full quote:

GOV. BUSH: I’d like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. But we don’t know — there’s no inspectors now in Iraq. The coalition that was in place isn’t as strong as it used to be. He is a danger; we don’t want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it’s going to be hard to — it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.

Was Bush revealing that he intended to attack and depose Saddam Hussein? In a word, no. In this debate, candidate Bush was proposing that we use the existing coalition to contain Saddam and keep the pressure on.

Bush’s quote, if read in its entirety, shows the exact opposite of what Reynolds is trying to argue.

Bad form, that.

In January 2003, Bush was asked if his administration had been planning a war against Iraq before September 11th. Did Bush take advantage of the opportunity to mention his forethought?

“Actually, prior to September 11, we were discussing smart sanctions. We were trying to fashion a sanction regime that would make it more likely to be able to contain somebody like Saddam Hussein. After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold any water… the strategic vision of our country shifted dramatically… because we now recognize that oceans no longer protect us, that we’re vulnerable to attack. And the worst form of attack could come from somebody acquiring weapons of mass destruction and using them on the American people… I now realize the stakes. I realize the world has changed. My most important obligation is to protect the American people from further harm, and I will do that.”

If Reynolds is correct today, then Bush was lying then. (Via Tom Tomorrow, who is pretty appalled at this up-is-downism.)

Here’s Colin Powell on February 24, 2001, talking frankly about the need to invade and wipe out Saddam’s weapons:

Sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction … And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.

Umm…. well, maybe Powell was out of the loop. What about straight-shootin’, rough-ridin’ Donald Rumsfeld? He had been agitating for the deposition of Saddam for years before the election; surely he’d back up Reynolds’ assertion that the intention to invade was there before September 11th.

“The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit” of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light – through the prism of our experience on 9/11.”

Glenn later quotes a reader email:

MORE: Reader Jason Gustafson emails: “So, basically, President Bush is being accused of wanting to fight terrorism before 9/11?”

Yeah, that seems to be O’Neill’s bombshell. Just call Bush a “premature anti-terrorist,” I guess!

You see, Iraq = terrorism. Oh, sure, the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute might not think so. But do they have a blog? Didn’t think so.

I repeat: I do not understand blog triumphalism.

(I should make a pre-emptive note: no sensible person would object to the fact that the Administration had a plan to fight a war with Iraq in early 2001. To do so would only be prudent. The Pentagon makes plans to attack just about every country on Earth.

This is very different from having a plan in case of war. I hope that having dealt with this here, I won’t have to swat it down in the comments.)

UPDATE: Rick DeMent at The Rant has some related thoughts, including an excerpt from James Baker’s pre-9/11 CFR energy report about smart sanctions. His conclusions sound right to me:

Now there are two ways to look at this that seem plausible to me. The first is that the administration was planning on getting the sanctions lifted and then in the wake of 9/11 reevaluated the situation and felt that that would be a bad idea and now felt that and invasion would be a better idea in order to counter the threat of terrorism. But the only thing that really changed on the ground was the attack on American soil. To believe this notion you would have to think that the Administration sort of woke up and said to themselves, “Wow this terrorism stuff is really serious.” But this would totally contradict the notion that terrorism was a big issue to the administration before 9/11.

Another way to look at it was that the administration realized that there was no politically tenable way to way to get the Iraqi sanctions dropped now. It would look pretty bad giving Saddam the soft glove treatment as we waged our “war on terrorism”. Rather it was a perfect opportunity to do what many had thought would be the easier option even if political realities before 9/11 would not allow it; invade, whip a western style government on Iraq friendly to the US and US investment and be done with it.

It seems to me that nether one of these ideas put the administration in a particularly good light.