Iraq War Reflections

In July 2003 when the war was five months old I wrote a letter to a Norwegian friend, Maryanne Heimberg. She was the widow of the Foreign Minister of Norway and both she and her husband had had a large but unheralded role in the Oslo agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. At the time of this writing she was working for the Foreign Ministry and teaching diplomacy. Unfortunately for the world, she is now herself, deceased. Here's my letter in its entirety:

It was most delightful to talk with you the other day. I do hope we meet again soon whether here or in some other country.

In the meantime here is something to consider for your foreign policy interests. Most of the world is puzzled by the foreign policy endeavors of the Bush administration.

Rather than acting in concert with the rest of the world as previous administrations of both parties have done, this one favors going it alone. To cite but a few instances there was the Kyoto treaty on global warming. This administration withdrew. The ICBM treaty signed in Salt I with the then Soviet Union proved inconvenient to an ABM program long cherished by our hawks. Bush announced his unilateral decision to withdraw. And of course Gulf War II which confuses most people. Clearly, this administration has been preparing for war against Iraq for over a year and has used faulty intelligence and hyped intelligence to rationalize its pre-emptive strike (a sharp departure from US foreign policy over the last six decades at least). Even the slight nod to the UN and its weapons inspectors was only a delaying of the inevitable. Now there may be some significant price to be paid in lives and treasury for the US eagerness to go it alone, as the post-War war becomes a guerilla conflict and many former allies from NATO are unwilling now to risk their sons and daughters in a conflict neither of their making nor their prior concurrence.

How to understand all this:

I am convinced that Bush and his closest advisors simply do not give one fig about foreign policy. Nor about world opinion unless that opinion like Tony Blair’s is entirely in agreement with their actions. Well, why attack Iraq if it’s not WMD or certainly not "yellowcake" uranium?

Frankly, because it looked easy. The planners believed Iraq was a military push-over (unlike say, North Korea with its million man army and probable nuclear capability). They wanted a quick clean war to demonstrate American might and determination. It’s obvious that there was no plan for the contingencies of the occupation; even in the absence of actual human intelligence, common sense would have dictated that Iraq’s infrastructure would be threadbare and fragile after a 10 year embargo.

The Bush team appears not to have anticipated either the civil strife or the lawlessness inevitable to the toppling of a dictatorial regime despite all the evidence of history. Why go to war with Iraq when the US decided to go in?

To put the fear of (the Christian ) God into all those muslims who might think of repeating 9-11 in some form or other. But more importantly for domestic consumption. To allow Bush that moment of self-congratulation about the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, a cartoon which was intended for repetition ad nauseum on television during next year’s presidential campaign. It’s unfortunate that Bush may not get to use it as long as the guerilla action continues.

George Bush (and abetted by more sophisticated advisers) is not interested in foreign affairs. He is a man who never, on his own, traveled to Europe, say, or Russia or anywhere. He has no curiosity about those places and no passion for them. He is passionately committed to a right wing agenda for the United States of a staggering economic (and eventually) social re-ordering.

Under Bush the country is engaged in the largest transfer of wealth from the middle-class and the poor to the wealthy that has been seen before only in the latter three decades of the 19th century. Not only tax policy that favors only the rich but large deficits will force future Congresses to dismantle the social safety net that supports the less fortunate and the middle-class whether through pre-Kindergarten Head Start programs for the children of the poor or College tuition costs for the middle class or the Medicare Health program for all the elderly.

His ultra-right wing supporters will happily help to gut the Constitution of its meaningful protections of the individual rights of its citizens. At the same time Bush will load the judiciary with judges who see things their way.

A number of years ago I was acquainted with a woman then in her sixties. She was the publisher of a group of neighborhood newspapers in Massachusetts. She herself had graduated from an elite Women’s college in the thirties at a time when many of her high-school classmates went to finishing schools or secretarial schools. We met during the middle 70’s just after Nixon’s return from his opening to China and when civil rights marches and Vietnam protests were the stuff of the nightly news. Her dinner table conversation consisted of one recurrent long complaint: you just couldn’t get good servants anymore. Why her own Irish live-in cook/maid wanted more than one day off and $50 a week for salary. Imagine!

Bush would have been very comfortable with that woman and she with him.

His agenda is to create that new servant class in America. And if it takes the side-show of Iraq to keep the voters from seeing where we are headed well so be it.