Kagan On Iraq: Short on Reasons

In today's Washington Post, Robert Kagan again tries to defend the position that going to war with Iraq was justified on national defense grounds. It seems that he may have abandoned his previous project of trying to argue that the administration went to war for good reasons. Which is good, since those arguments were miserable failures. His new lines seems to be, roughly, that there were good reasons to go, even if those weren't the reasons that motivated the administration. I plan to go through his case in detail, but no time now.

He's right to point out that many people who were previously either ambivalent or in favor of the war have turned against it, and he's right to point out that the administration's decision should be assessed on the basis of what we knew then, not what we know now. But he's wrong to suggest that what we knew then provided us with sufficient reason for going to war. The evidence was simply far too weak. I, like many others, briefly found myself more inclined in favor of the war than I should have been, but that was in large part because the administration's insistence that it was the right thing to do initially convinced me that my own assessments of the evidence were in error. At the time I still believed that the administration could be trusted--at least with regard to something as important as the decision to go to war. They were undoubtedly better informed than I was, many of them were smarter than me, and they just seemed so damn certain that I concluded that I must have been missing something. That, combined with my desire to eliminate Saddam for humanitarian reasons lead me to think that invading Iraq was, if not an optimal, then at least a reasonable thing to do.

Since that time I have, of course, come to realize that I should never have trusted this administration. Their certainty about the national defense case was irrational, and they never had any intention of doing the kinds of things to rebuild Iraq that would have made invasion justifiable on humanitarian grounds--even though they later adopted the humanitarian case as their own when the WMD case collapsed under scrutiny.

At any rate, Kagan's claims have to be taken with a grain of salt given the administration's pre-war propaganda campaign, which included impugning the patriotism--even the sanity--of any who opposed the war. They trumped up a case and used the power of the presidency to persuade and bully people into accepting it. To try to defend their case now by, in effect, pointing out that many people fell for their propaganda back then is loathsome in the extreme.