Richard and Jonathan discuss the Iraq War (2003-2011), which not too long ago defined politics and the 24-hour news cycle in the Western world, and now has become history.

We're now witnessing the embarrassing implosion of the über-hawks in the conservative movement: John Bolton is apparently considering a presidential run on a "Bomb Iran" platform:  

Not shy about his position on a wide range of issues, would this critic-in-chief consider a run for commander-in-chief in 2012? Bolton didn’t reject the idea out of hand.

“[I]t is a very great honor that anybody would even think of asking. I’m obviously not a politician. I’ve never run for any federal elective office at all and, you know, it is something that would obviously require a great deal of effort,” he said. “What I do think, though, and what concerns me, is the lack of focus generally in the national debate about national security issues. Now, I understand the economy is in a ditch and people are concerned about it, but our adversaries overseas are not going to wait for us to get our economic house in order.”

When pressed as to whether that means he would consider a run, Bolton seemed to suggest that he might do it, at the very least to help put national security issues at the top of the debate agenda.

“In the sense that I want to make sure that not only in the Republican Party, but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States. You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that…there is a limit to what that accomplishes,” he said. “Whereas, some governor from some state in the middle of the country announces for president they get enormous coverage even if their views are utterly uninformed on major issues.”

When pressed a third time about running, he said that while “he is not going to do anything foolish,” he added, “you know, I see how the media works…you have to take that into account.”

Again, not a no.

ht: TAC 

Up until September 15, 2008, when the American political scene was thrust into a new dimension by the financial crisis, if someone had told me that George W. Bush’s successor would go on national television and unequivocally announce, “American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over,” I would have said that this would be nothing less than a political shock -- granting relief to many (including me), while enraging neocons and conservative die-hards, who’d be acrimoniously debating the matter for at least the next year.

Not too long ago, Left-liberal pranksters created a parody edition of the New York Times with the headline “IRAQ WAR ENDS,” making it clear that this policy was the Progressives’ ultimate project. In turn, it’s hard to underestimate the degree to which the development of the “conservative” blogosphere was informed and motivated by war-agitation -- many of its most prominent sites are all but unthinkable without updates from Baghdad, “Remember Munich!” polemics, and various accusations of “treason” directed at prominent liberal commentators. My old employer The American Conservative was founded, in 2002, at the point that the neocons had Iraq in their sights, and most of its energies were (and are) dedicated to opposing Republican foreign policy. For good reason.

David Frum looks back and still thinks the Iraq War was a good idea. He asks us to imagine a world where the invasion never took place.  Fair enough. 

As president, George Bush assessed his options in 2002, oil prices averaged less than $23 a barrel. These low prices had squeezed Iraq’s income and therefore Saddam Hussein’s power.

But war or no war, the price of oil would zoom upward in the 2000s. China had more than 90 times as many cars on the road in 2010 as in 1990. Chinese oil imports grew 7.5% a year, Indian oil imports only slightly less fast. Soaring oil demand from China and India pushed prices higher and higher: averaging $28 a barrel in 2003, $38 in 2004, $50 in 2005, $64 in 2007 and $91 in 2008. A surviving Saddam would have been a wealthy Saddam.

Not only wealthy, but empowered. The international sanctions regime had collapsed in the late 1990s, freeing Saddam to import more or less what he wished, potentially including the instrumentalities of war...

It seems incredible that a Saddam still in power in the 2000s, unconstrained by sanctions and enriched by Chinese and Indian oil money, would not have tried a third time. Even if Saddam had not sought to build a nuclear bomb, an additional $100 billion or so in annual oil revenues would still have paid for a lot of mischief in the Middle East.

Would Saddam have competed with Iran to fund Hamas? Would he have made common cause with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to support anti-government insurgents in Colombia? Would Iraq have offered haven to al-Qaeda terrorists escaping Afghanistan? 

Why on earth would Saddam team up with Hugo Chavez against Colombia (and why would we care if he did)?  Just because everyone who Frum classifies as “undemocratic” must be best buddies?  And al-Qaeda “terrorists” escaping Afghanistan into Iraq have to get through Iran first, which can be used as an excuse to occupy that country too, or anywhere else on earth for that matter.  Notice the circular logic.  The US goes into Afghanistan because there are terrorists there.  The terrorists may escape into Iraq, so regime change is necessary there too.  Anyone resisting in Iraq is now a terrorist, who may flee to and get funding from Syria and Iran (remember that McCain was prompted to sing "bomb, bomb Iran" by a question about Iranians helping Iraqi insurgents).  Repeat until the American people wake up or the country goes bankrupt.  

Saddam would’ve probably funded Hamas though, and it’s not a coincidence that Frum only becomes cogent when writing about what he truly cares about.

A Saddam-ruled Iraq would not have been a quiet or comfortable place. And when the regime finally did end, it would have ended violently. When the U.S.-led coalition overthrew Saddam, violence erupted between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, leading to an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. Does anybody imagine that things would have gone better if the regime had ended instead with a Saddam assassination or heart attack?

Yes, because if Saddam had a heart attack Iraq would still have an army, police and intelligence agencies keeping religious maniacs of all sides from killing each other.  As John Basil Utley writes “we destroyed [Iraq’s] civil structure—its police, civil service, most of its functions of government, even schoolteachers were fired en masse.”  Saddam may have been a mass murderer, but when the US invaded there wasn’t anything resembling the civil strife that we’ve seen since 2003.  The clearest measure of “success” is how Iraqis have voted with their feet.  Over 5 percent of the population, including 40 percent of the middle class, has fled Frum’s democracy, running to such “evil rogue states” like Iran and Syria.  Many more would leave if they were able to.  Neo-cons may tell us that 60 or 70 percent of the middle class may have ended up fleeing if the US had minded its own businesses, but there’s no rational basis for such calculations.  Had the US invaded Syria, Libya or Iran in 2003, Frum could today tell us that no matter how bad things look in 2010, they surly would’ve been much worse if Qaddafi or Al-Assad had had a heart attack.

Most ideological dictatorships don't end in an inferno.  Instead, the ruling class eventually realizes that whatever ideology propelled the first generation of the regime to power-socialism, Maoism, Baathism, pan-Arabism, whatever-was a failure and their people want to be wealthy, and the way to become wealthy is by being non-belligerent and opening up markets.  That's probably the path Iraq would've taken.  Such regimes aren't guaranteed to be democracies or friends of Israel, but these shouldn't be American concerns.

I’m still not sure whether the recent Wikileaks scandal has proven the power of the Internet to bring the dark dealings of the Pentagon into the light and challenge government authority, or whether it has actually proven the impotence of “Web 2.0” vis-à-vis the state and political inertia. (Justin Raimondo has a wrap-up here; the Guardian has created an interactive map connected with the leaked documents, which can be explored here.)

I certainly didn’t need help from Wikileaks to conclude that Washington’s war aims are incoherent, that its soldiers are confused and demoralized, and that the national interest is not being served in the land of the Afghans. All of these things have been abundantly clear for years. Moreover, most of the people fascinated with the Wikileak revelations are antiwar anyway, and it’s not certain whether the conservative push-back against Afghanistan, launched by Ann Coulter and (shockingly) World Net Daily super-hawk and Christian Zionist Joseph Farah, will be much affected by the revelations, which are easy to classify as “anti-military.” (The leaked documents could even conceivably be spun as a call to expand the war into Pakistan...)

The reality is, the American public doesn’t care about the Afghan War enough for it to be an election issue. Most everyone outside deluded Weekly Standard subscribers feel in their guts that Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t going well, and that we’re taking far too long to be done with them. But with job loss and the sustained recession, Americans would rather let these concerns be muffled by the calm reassurance of “the Surge is working!” The only way Afghanistan could become a political issue would be if Obama ended both wars and the neocons and conservative movement reacted by howling about national pride and Democrat surrender monkeys. As Austin Bramwell put it recently,

Obama doesn’t really care about Afghanistan and probably sees the occupation as pointless. Still, he supports it because it keeps Afghanistan boring and therefore off the front page. Rather than order of withdrawal, in other words, Obama prefers to buy an option at $70+ billion a year that lets him pursue his domestic agenda without distraction. … [N]o President would have the courage to make Afghanistan policy based on what’s actually best for America. The paramount concern is public relations.

Obama seems incapable of confronting, 1) the bureaucratic inertia of the Pentagon, whereby Afghanistan will be fought much like Washington’s other endless wars on drugs and poverty, 2) the ideological inertia of his conservative critics, who will attack anything mildly antiwar as an insult to the troops, and 3) the largely invisible Power Elite, which is interested in Afghanistan’s mineral wealth as well as having American military bases stationed around the world.

The Imperial Presidency ain’t what it used to be.