Chutzpah

In yesterday’s WSJ, White House staffer Peter Wehner has the unmitigated gall to challenge the emergently conventional wisdom on Iraq – Chiefly that, 1) The president lied us into to war, 2) the administration pressured intelligence professionals to bias their judgments in favor of the war, 3) the failure to find WMD proves Saddam posed no threat, “imminent” or otherwise, and 4) finally, that the goal of promoting democracy in the heart of the Arab Middle East was a post-war rationalization, made up on the fly after that whole “WMD thing” didn’t pan out.

He does so by trotting out fact after tedious fact, a tactic that’s bound to drive partisan critics into spittle-flecked rage. There’s nothing really new here of course, just common sense and history lessons, so it won’t change any minds that are already closed made up, or open the eyes of the wilfully obtuse.

Wehner doesn’t deal with the next-tier critique, slightly more challenging – because it’s based on opinion rather than error – but still rebuttable: The assertation on the part of many who were on-side to begin with, but who have since developed feet of clay that, well, removing the Saddam regime was a good idea of course, but the post-war execution has been horribly bungled. This argument goes to administration competence, which was the core of the administration’s grey-head branding prior to the war. Making the counter-argument to this point is a tough thing to do for a sitting politician, because it means drawing comparisons between previous campaigns – more history, in other words – and the present. Although this is a useful approach for those who would rather weigh facts than cast aspersions, it can be a seemingly insensitive line of argument when present day soldiers are fighting and all too often dying in the field. Added to that is the fact that comparisons between wars, like comparisons in general, tend to be inherently invidious.

But, the problem with planning, even post-war planning, is that the enemy gets a vote too. This is why military planners understand going in that while planning is essential, plans are basically useless – no plan withstands contact with the foe. We can argue forever about what many have labelled the post-war occupation’s original sins, mainly the size of the invasion force, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and the failure to clamp down hard on post-kinetic phase instability in the form of looting. Size matters, and it’s certainly possible that having an occupation force of 500,000 might have prevented the rise of the insurgency, but it’s certainly not a dead solid lock that this is true. Tooth-to-tail ratios mean that we’d be have been paying a great deal more for a marginal increase in trigger pullers for one thing, while creating a greater number of targets and encouraging a lamentable state of military dependency. Nor has anyone who thinks that force ratios were inadequate explained to my satisfaction how they can simultaneously posit that rotating 135k troops into the desert every year for three years is somehow breaking the force, but that leaving 500k over there would have been the right thing to do, because the natural consequence of arguing that the Army is straining to support a rotational presence is to take a position of leaving the larger force in place for the duration.

And while it’s relatively clear now that turning several hundred thousand recently humiliated men with weapons training out into the street might have been a bad idea, it’s not at all clear how keeping the old Iraqi Army under arms and in ranks would have read in Samarah – from the point of view of the Iraqi citizenry, it had been seen as little more than a tool of brutal domestic repression. Nor is it clear that the locals would have welcomed US forces gunning their friends and neighbors down en masse immediately after the regime fell, which is how the story would no doubt have been spun. My point being that there are often hard choices to make in war, and that sometimes our only choices are revealed to be between the unpalatable and the distasteful, with final consequences are only visible in retrospect. But if the standard for evaluating great attempts in the world is perfect execution, well, we might as well go ahead and cancel all international fights, fortify the borders and hope for the best.

Still, with three elections in Iraqi hands, a (finally) functional government and an emergently potent free Iraqi Army, it’s useful to have someone raise the voice of reason. Even if it is whispering in the hurricane, perhaps.

Speaking of which, and going again to competence, how’s about that whole Katrina meme now? Well, no one came out of that mess with reputations whole and unbesmirched – problem is, the feds took their lumps up front, while the press – who still bathe themselves in self-congratulation on the way the story was woven for the American public, are only now starting to have their record examined. According to Jonah Goldberg in the NRO:

On a recent edition of Larry King Live, liberal Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, eager to put some distance between himself and the president, explained what he thinks is George Bush

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