Page 3 of 10 THE WAR OF THE
IMAGINATION, Part 1 How a war of
fantasies happened By Mark
Danner
Iraq war, 140 Americans died. In the
postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died - and
counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in
fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war,
something unnamed, unconceptualized - unplanned.
Anyone seeking to understand what has
become the central conundrum of the Iraq war - how
it is that so many highly accomplished,
experienced and intelligent officials came together
to
make such monumental, consequential, and, above
all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the
government knew very well at the time were
mistakes - must see beyond what seems to be a
simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow
it where it leads: toward the war of imagination
that senior officials decided to fight in the
spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they
clung long after reality had taken a sharply
separate turn.
In that war of imagination
victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing
a terrible power - enough to wipe out the disgrace
of September 11, 2001, and remake the threatening
world. In State of Denial, Woodward
recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush's
chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he
had supported the Iraq war:
Because Afghanistan wasn't enough.
In the conflict with radical Islam, they want to
humiliate us. And we need to humiliate them.
The American response to September 11
had essentially to be more than proportionate - on
a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan
and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was
essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a
larger message, "in order to make a point that
we're not going to live in this world that they
want for us".
Though to anyone familiar
with Kissinger's "realist" rhetoric of power and
credibility, his analysis will come as no
surprise, Gerson, the deeply religious idealist
who composed Bush's most soaring music about
"ending tyranny" and "ridding the world of evil",
seems mildly disappointed: Kissinger "viewed Iraq
purely in the context of power politics. It was
not idealism. He didn't seem to connect with
Bush's goal of promoting democracy."
Gerson, of course, was author of what
would come to be called the Bush Doctrine, a
neo-conservative paean to democracy that maintains
that "the realistic interests of America would now
be served by fidelity to American ideals,
especially democracy". Others in the
administration, however, plainly did "connect"
with Kissinger's stark realism: Rumsfeld, for
example, who Ron Suskind depicts, in The One
Percent Doctrine, struggling with other
officials in spring 2002 to cope with various
terrifying warnings of impending attacks on the
United States:
All these reports helped fuel
Rumsfeld's sense of futility as to America's
ability to stop the spread of destructive
weapons and keep them from terrorists. That
futility was the fuel that drove the plans to
invade Iraq ... as soon as possible. Cheney's
ideas about how "our reaction" would shape
behavior - whatever the evidence showed - were
expressed in an off-the-record meeting Rumsfeld
had with NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] defense chiefs in Brussels on June
6. According to an outline for his speech, the
secretary told those assembled that "absolute
proof cannot be a precondition for action".
The primary impetus for invading Iraq,
according to those attending NSC [National
Security Council] briefings on the Gulf in this
period, was to make an example of Hussein, to
create a demonstration model to guide the
behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire
destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the
authority of the United States.
In
the great, multicolored braid of reasons and
justifications leading to the Iraq war, one might
call this "the realist strand", and though the
shape of the reasoning might seem to Gerson to
stand as far from "democracy building" and "ending
tyranny" as "power politics" does from "idealism",
the distance is wholly illusory, dependent on an
ideological clarity that was never present. In
fact, the two chains of reasoning looped and
intersected, leading inexorably to a common desire
for a particular action - confronting Saddam and
Iraq - that had been the subject of the
administration's first NSC meeting, in January
2001, and that had been pushed to the fore again
by Defense Department officials in the first "war
cabinet" meeting after the September 11 attacks.
Woodward describes a report commissioned
by Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of
defense, intended to produce "the kinds of ideas
and strategy needed to deal with a crisis of the
magnitude of 9/11". After the attacks, Wolfowitz
talked to his friend Christopher DeMuth, president
of the American Enterprise Institute, who gathered
together a group of intellectuals and academics
for a series of discussions that came to be known
as "Bletchley II" (after the World War II think
tank of mathematicians
