Democracy, accountability, and the inevitability of failure in Iraq

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Bob Geiger is reporting on yet more proof -- this time in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released before Memorial Day -- that General Eric Shinseki was right in his pre-war assessment of how many troops would be needed in Iraq for the occupation. He suggested about "several hundred thousand soldiers" and was promptly ridiculed and worse by the warmongers, notably Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. We've known for a long time that he was right -- the neocon warmongers have been calling for more troops for a long time, after all -- but this report not only clears Shinseki but also reveals that "the Bush administration ignored critical pre-war intelligence in their rush to invade Iraq," in Bob's words. More:

The report, which the previous Republican Congress successfully kept from being produced for two years, shows that months before the Iraq invasion, the White House knew from U.S. intelligence agencies that a civil war would likely erupt after Saddam's ouster, that al-Qaeda would quickly move to exploit the American occupation and that Osama bin Laden's organization would actually gain strength globally due to Bush's action.

One may be tempted to yawn at yet more evidence of pre-war malfeasance on the part of those itching for war, from Bush on down, and there are those, like McCain, who argue that the war is what it is and that there is therefore no need to go back and examine its origins (in this sense, the pre-war period, when the case for war was being made and the military plans were being drawn up and finalized), but I would argue that the war and its origins are inseparable. The war is what it is -- or has become what it has become -- because of its origins. The war has gone horribly wrong, of course, but it has gone horribly wrong not because of what could not have been foreseen before the war but because those who started the war ignored the warnings provided to them by the intelligence community, warnings that have been proven to have been nothing if not prescient.

One could argue that the war is wrong regardless of its origins, or that it would have gone horribly wrong no matter what, but the point here is that the decisions made at the highest level leading up to the start of the war, including the "decision" to ignore the warnings, essentially made success impossible. Once those decisions were made, once the ball got rolling, it was all but inevitable -- we can now say with the benefit of hindsight and the evidence available to us -- that the war would go horribly wrong.

True, the war is what it is. Whatever its origins, the reality is what is going on Iraq right now, and it is that reality that must be dealt with -- preferably by putting an end to the war sooner rather than later. But one of the key aspects of democratic politics is accountability. Those who started the war, from Bush on down, must be held accountable for what they did. And this means they must be held accountable not just for what has happened over the course of the war, that is, the gross mismanagement of the war, but for how they took the country to war, for the decisions they made at the war's origins.

This is not just for the sake of historical accuracy. It is for the sake of American democracy.