Twenty Years On: The Prospect and the Iraq War

Today on TAP: Many liberal publications supported invading Iraq. We didn’t.

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It’s “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” week for American journalists and pundits. The 20th anniversary of our calamitous misadventure in Iraq has provided the occasion for writers to revisit and in some cases rethink the support or opposition to the looming invasion that they argued for on the eve of George W. Bush’s “preemptive” war.

Support for the invasion extended well beyond the neocons, of course, winning nearly unanimous backing from such centrist and center-left publications as The Washington Post, The New Republic (which at that point was effectively neocon in foreign-policy matters, despite John Judis’s opposition), The New York Times, and even The New Yorker (despite Rick Hertzberg’s opposition).

More from Harold Meyerson

Not so at the Prospect. On the eve of the September 2022 congressional vote to authorize the Bush administration to go to war if it so chose (Bush consigliere Karl Rove wanted to force the Democrats to go on record before the November midterms), we ran an editorial urging Democrats to vote no. The Prospect doesn’t actually do editorials, but as the article was co-authored and signed by both our co-editors, Bob Kuttner and Paul Starr, and by me (then the executive editor), it came closer to being an editorial than anything we’ve ever run.

Here’s the link. And here are some excerpts from our argument. Going to war, we wrote:

threatens to deflect our efforts from the struggle against terrorism, jeopardize cooperation from our allies, intensify hostility in the Arab world, and entangle us in further conflicts in the region.

The administration has made clear its determination to remove the Iraqi regime and has issued a new statement of strategic doctrine that calls for preemptive strikes against hostile regimes. Driven by short-term political interests, the United States may well commit itself not just to a second war in the Persian Gulf but to a radically changed relationship with the world without a full debate about the long-run implications of what we are doing.

The most eager advocates of war have suggested that the road to Baghdad will be easy: The superiority of American forces will be overwhelming, much of the Iraqi army may not fight and the Iraqi people will welcome liberation from a tyrant. No doubt American forces will prevail; that is not the question.

But if the fighting turns ugly and there are large numbers of civilian casualties—if we have to level the very cities we say we are liberating—American legitimacy in the eyes of the world and of the Iraqi people will be shot. In making war against Iraq, Bush is risking not just American lives but America’s good name. It is all well and good to say that we are invading Iraq to liberate it, but that is not the way it looks to people elsewhere. If we run into trouble, there will be little sympathy for us.

Once American forces defeat Hussein’s army and his Baath party, we will have eliminated the Iraqi state’s capacity to maintain control of the country and defend itself (against, for example, Iran). Because effective state authority cannot be manufactured overnight, the American military will have to supply it. We will have to install and defend a new government and, in the process, we are likely to enmesh ourselves in Iraq’s ethnic and religious conflicts. Even groups that don’t like Hussein, such as the Shiites in the south, may not accept the regime we establish.

Striking first against terrorists is plain common sense, but that is mostly a matter for intelligence agencies and police work, not the military. Preemptive war against the vaguely defined category of “rogue states” is another matter. Not only does preemption violate the UN Charter and set a dangerous precedent for other countries, it also risks triggering wars we might otherwise avoid.

We didn’t stop there. The Prospect also convened a public debate in the nation’s capital before the war began, featuring Bob Kuttner and “third-way” Democrat Bill Galston arguing against, while The New Republic’s Jon Chait and someone else I don’t remember argued for. (I remember Chait because he expressed absolute certainty that we’d find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and all but scolded those of us who doubted that.) And since TNR didn’t let its anti-neocon staff writer John Judis write on foreign policy, the Prospect gave him a foreign-policy column.

Here’s a link to the Prospect’s yearslong coverage of the issue, beginning with our immediate post-9/11 issue, and including a range of articles dealing with the horrendous aftermath of the decision to go to war in Iraq. I particularly commend the 2005 piece by Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias demolishing the liberal hawks’ backtracking argument that the invasion was a fine idea, but undermined by the incompetence of the Bush administration. It wasn’t, wrote Sam and Matt, a fine idea.

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