Whitewashing Iraq on the Washington Post Op-Ed Page

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Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Whitewashing Iraq on the Washington Post Op-Ed Page

Robert Kaplan, the national security correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is one of our country's anointed foreign policy geniuses. In November, 2001, he attended a secret meeting (along with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria), organized by Paul Wolfowitz, for the purpose of producing a report for President Bush on Middle East policy which, among other things, outlined all the great reasons why we should invade Iraq.

Thereafter, both Kaplan and Zakaria became two of the country's most enthusiastic pundit-advocates for invading Iraq, without ever revealing their participation in Wolfowitz's meeting (they signed confidentiality agreements not to disclose anything that was discussed). It is obviously an extremely odd situation for a "reporter" to participate with government officials in the preparation of such a report, but Kaplan told his Atlantic Monthly editors in advance and "was given approval to attend because 'everybody was in a patriotic fervor.'" None of that has impeded Kaplan's career or journalistic credibility any.

Today, this wise foreign policy analyst has an Op-Ed in The Washington Post in which he argues that the failure of the war he wanted so badly in Iraq won't fundamentally change U.S. foreign policy, but instead will lead merely to "an adjustment, not a flip-flop." Kaplan specifically claims that preemptive war on Iraq was not at all a deviation from our prior foreign policy because it was nothing more than an extension of our post-Cold War "idealistic" military interventions -- devoted towards the spreading of Good in the world -- which began with the Persian Gulf War, continued with our benevolent intervention in Yugoslavia, and merely culminated with our desire to do Good by overthrowing Saddam:

To be sure, the recent evidence that our democratic system cannot be violently exported will temper our Wilsonian principles, but it will not bury them. . . . Iraq will merely close a post-Cold War chapter in American foreign policy, one that began with the Persian Gulf War -- and with Bosnia. After the collapse of communism in 1989, idealism, the export of democracy and humanitarian interventionism were all the rage among journalists and intellectuals -- much as realism, restraint and benign dictatorship are now. . . .

The Balkan interventions, because they paid strategic dividends, appeared to justify the idealistic missionary approach to foreign policy. . . . Neoconservatives and others who had supported our actions in Bosnia and Kosovo then carried the spirit of this policy to its limits in Iraq.

See, all we were ever trying to do in Iraq was help the Iraqi people make a better life for themselves and to end oppression, so the only lesson we need to draw from all of this is that the overflowing Goodness of neoconservatives and their desire to help people just needs to be tempered a little bit by the harsh realities of a bad world. That's all: "In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough."

Snip...

The invasion of Iraq constituted a radical departure from decades-long American foreign policy doctrine governing what constitutes a justifiable war against another country. To justify the war which Kaplan wanted so eagerly, the Bush administration issued a National Security Strategy in 2002 (.pdf) which "shifted U.S. foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and containment toward a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before they attack the United States." That militaristic hubris is the doctrine which drove our invasion (and it is still in place, as the Bush administration re-affirmed it earlier this year).

Snip...

The invasion of Iraq and those who advocated it, such as Kaplan, were anything but "idealistic." They were and are nothing other than malicious warmongers who invented new "theories" to "justify" waging war on countries that didn't attack us and posed no real threat to us.

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