Among his sins, which in some people’s eyes know no limits, George W. Bush trashed 200 years of diplomatic tradition and Reagan’s legacy by unleashing a “war of choice” as part of his plan to spread democracy everywhere, which conservatives know is imprudent behavior, as their hero would never have countenanced.
No one knows what Reagan would have done if faced with a hole in Manhattan brought about by a stateless and shadowy enemy, but we can go back and look at Bush’s options and choices, and see how imprudent they were.
At the time, it was widely believed that the war in Iraq was a war of necessity, not just by Bush, but by most leading Democrats, who were reeling with shock from 9/11, and petrified by the notion that the attackers, if armed with something more lethal than jet fuel and box-cutters, would have left not 3,000, but three million dead.
Saddam Hussein had not been involved in 9/11, but he had a long record of sheltering terrorists, a history of having built a nuclear reactor (taken out in 1982 by the Israelis, who correctly saw themselves as his target), a history of having used chemical weapons against his own people, a history of attacks without provocation or warning (Kuwait in 1990), and a grudge against the United States as a result of his being expelled.
To a people preoccupied with the failure to “connect the dots”’ on the part of its leaders, this was a collection of dots that cried out for a stringing together, and when Saddam repeatedly refused to allow in U.N. weapons inspectors, or produce proof that the weapons he once possessed had been in fact done away with, it seemed to put an exclamation point at the end of a long row of periods.
Bush has been charged with self-selecting the data, and winnowing out suppositions and evidence that Saddam did not have (at the moment) the mega-death weapons. But even with skeptical data fed in, the preponderance of opinion was still in favor of the view that he not only had the will, but the wherewithal to do serious damage.
What is the range of probability at which prudent people decide to let matters stand, as opposed to correcting them? A four-in-10 chance Saddam didn’t have weapons? Five-in-10? Six? You are the president, charged with protecting the safety of 300 million Americans. What would you prudently do in this case?
As for pre-emption, John Kennedy decided, correctly, in 1962 that the mere presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, able to strike cities up and down the U.S. eastern seaboard, with no direct threats whatever from Cuba or the Soviet Union, was a menace so dire that it merited consideration of preventive war. Prudently, he didn’t strike first, but blockaded the island, to give the Russians a chance to come to their senses, which they luckily did.
But Bush was where Kennedy would have been, if the Russians hadn’t turned back without engaging American forces. What would Kennedy have done, if given these druthers? He would have faced a choice between backing down and being the Chamberlain of the later 20th century, or of being “imprudent,” like Bush.
As for democracy-building, let us recall it was never the primary goal. Remove Saddam, and something has to come after. Bush hoped he could excise the regime, and civil society would rise and take over, but at that moment, it didn’t exist. It would take four years of trial and error; civil society would emerge from the tribes and start to sort out a democracy, not a western democracy, but one of its own time, and place.
Bush was wrong on the time, but right on his belief that Muslims could do it, and right in his belief it was good for the country and region. Reagan had the same belief on behalf of Latin America and the East Europeans, and was called a war-monger for it. He and Kennedy never came directly to blows with the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union never left a ten-mile hole in downtown Manhattan. Prudence must move with the times.
Washington Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
