Sunday, December 31, 2006
Iraq: What they once said
Notwithstanding the books on the right sidebar, which through today at least have not changed for almost two months, I actually have been reading. Right now, I'm in the middle of Christian Alfonsi's* very interesting Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq
Alfonsi's book does not appear from its Amazon rank to be selling well, and it is surprisingly underblogged. That is a shame, because it adds to the current debate. Perhaps it is not popular because publisher is lame. More likely, it is because it is sufficiently balanced that it is not useful to readers who are looking to reinforce their preconceptions.
The Washington Post reviewer wrote that the book suffers from "presentism," which is to see the past through contemporary assumptions. Fair enough, but that very tendency drove Alfonsi to include all sorts of great flip-flops from history. First, Mr. Waffle himself:
Perhaps the most bewildering set of views contained in the dossier [a collection of Democratic statements about Iraq assembled by Republicans during spring of 1991] were those of the Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who was quoted making three different statements before Desert Storm:
- A response to a letter from a constituent, saying Kerry voted "against giving the President immediate authority to go to war against Iraq to force it out of Kuwait, warning that a decision to go to war was rolling the dice with our future";
- A response to a second constituent letter the same week, saying Kerry "strongly and unequivocably supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Gulf";
- And third, a terse statement from Kerry blaming a computer in his office for the inconsistency.
It will be a great shame when the next presidential election rolls around, but not for all the reasons you might suspect. No, by then there will be another Democratic nominee, and then even I will tire of mocking John Kerry.
Then there was the brutal aftermath of the war, when Saddam's government brutalized the Shia and the Kurds, who rose up against him in part because they misread encouragement we were actually directing at the Ba'athists who ran Saddam's military-intelligence complex (the administration expected and perhaps desired that Saddam be overthrown by coup, rather than popular revolution). The Bush 41 administration quite famously did not rush to the aid of the Kurds and the Shia until Saddam had killed thousands of them and public opinion in the West began to demand it. Why? Because we did not want to get involved in Iraq's internal affairs. Dick Cheney was quite eloquent on the point:
On Sunday morning, April 7 [1991], Cheney appeared on the ABC News program This Week with David Brinkley. In his characteristic blunt-spoken style, Brinkley asked the secretary of defense, "Why didn't we go to Baghdad and clean it up when we had the chance?"
"Well, just as it's important, I think, for a president to know when to commit U.S. forces to combat, it's also important to know when not to commit U.S. forces to combat," Cheney replied. "I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire."
He then proceeded to ask a rapid-fire series of half a dozen questions, all of which had presumably been discussed already by the secretary and his colleagues. It was a distinctive rhetorical technique that Cheney had used throughout his political career, designed to preempt criticism by demonstrating to potential critics that they had not thought through an issue as thoroughly as Cheney and his staff had, but if they did, then any reasonable person would arrive at the same conclusion.
"Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? Wht kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular along the lines of the Ba'ath party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic?
"I do not think the United States want to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq," Cheney concluded. "I think it makes no sense at all."
All questions that remain, tragically, germane.
There is much more to embarrass just about everybody, which is probably why you haven't heard politicians or journalists citing to Alfonsi's book.
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*Yes, "Alfonsi" -- pronounced, presumably, Al-Fonzi -- does sound suspiciously like "The Fonz" in Arabic. Fortunately, the word "whoa" does not appear in the book.
2 Comments:
By 
D.E. Cloutier, at
Sun Dec 31, 11:15:00 AM:
Nobody hits the ball every time. In baseball Ty Cobb holds the record for highest career batting average with .366.
By 
, at
Sat Jan 13, 02:03:00 AM:
hey, i agree that the book is not getting the attention it deserves (for such an addictive read chock full of new behind-the-scenes action) .....but i disagree that it's as even-handed as you say, i think it's pretty anti-bush (which is a good thing!) .....does anyone else think this reads more like "The Winds of War" (for any of you geezers, like me, who can remember that t.v. mini-series!) than another boring "book about Iraq"?? it's more like an epic story...just my thought
