Dean, Iraq and Me

Last winter I was a hawk on Iraq for both humanitarian and national security reasons. I believed that given Saddam Hussein's track record, some sort of conflict was inevitable, and if we waited until he had squirmed out from under sanctions, his ability to resist an American invasion would only be greater. I also considered the sanctions themselves a morally reprehensible diplomatic weapon. Regarding weapons of mass destruction, I believed Saddam was close to possessing chemical and biological weapons, but not nuclear.

However, I never bought the alleged Saddam-al-Qaeda connection, and because I saw al-Qaeda as a larger issue, I did not want an Iraq adventure that interfered with the war against those who attacked the U.S. Furthermore, I believed that there needed to be a sound plan for what happened after the war. I doubted you'd see some ideal representative democracy; however, I thought Iraqis would be better off under a puppet controlled by Dick Cheney than the current regime. After all, Dr. Brian Borlas, my undergraduate professor for Middle East Political Systems, put it, "If Saddam Hussein is not the living incarnation of evil on the planet, he'll do." When I went to add up the total number of Saddam's post-1991 victims using Human Rights Watch stats on individual incidents, I came to 400,000 or so, though that included the probability of double-counting between missing and unidentified bodies in mass graves.

So how did I get from here to supporting Howard Dean?

If the administration had a plan for post-war Iraq, it was merely to stick Ahmed Chalabi in charge and pull out almost all our troops. The military people, of course, argued hundreds of thousands of troops would be required, but no one listened. And the administration, for all the money they spend on defense, apparently weren't willing to do the careful planning necessary to ensure their safety after the Ba'athist regime was no more. When I endorsed Dean, I mentioned the admission that Pentagon planners hadn't considered the Shi'ite factor, which everyone who knew anything about Iraq whatsoever was taking for granted. Before the war, I remember reading on Juan Cole that either Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz said there were no Muslim holy places in Iraq, meaning he must not have heard of Najaf and Karbala. I can certainly forgive that in my students, but not people planning to take over and run those places.

Then there's the war on terror. I'm not sure how we really know whether it's going well, but I don't buy the measure of whether there has been an attack on American soil, or we would have said it was going well on September 10, 2001. We do know that North Korea and Iran are probably trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard has intimate terrorist links, and North Korea relies on weapons proliferation to keep their economy afloat. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are making a comeback, and if the political system there fails to survive next year's election and its associated transfers of power, they will once again be the most powerful faction and potentially the only one capable of uniting the country. Al-Qaeda itself has been associated with terrorist attacks throughout the Islamic world, indicating that their network is expanding and adjusting to their new conditions. And given how we keep hearing about the U.S. government's lack of Arabic speakers, I can't believe the Iraq war didn't cause intelligence resources to be diverted from issues of terrorism.

In my Dean endorsement, I said, "I supported the war in Iraq, because I said I had faith that it would not hurt the war on terror and that the administration had adequately planned its aftermath. This faith was betrayed, the misjudgement terrible, the consequences horrendous." I've explained my betrayed faith, and the administration's misjudgement. In terms of foreign policy, the Bush administration has a history of egregious misjudgement - remember his first few months all his attention was on mindless sabre-rattling with China, while the Middle East was ignored? I still don't see Iraq as a lost cause, but even if the Bush administration somehow gets its act together and muddles through, it won't in my mind justify giving this crew another four years of responding to the inevitable foreign policy crises that arise.

When I originally ruled Dean out, it had a lot to do with his lack of experience. But he's actually impressed me with his learning curve, and he has top people available to deploy using the leadership skills he so clearly possesses. In the context of all the other facets that go into my decisions on who to vote for, his judgement and leadership at the helm of the experienced Democratic foreign policy establishment will be more than adequate to meet the challenges before us. It would be hard for him to do any worse.