Why does this keep happening?
"We had to do the best we could. The problem was, the best we could do sucked."
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re thinking about war and how we always end up here. This is a big one, folks: My essay pulls lessons like teeth from Robert Draper’s To Start a War, which we also excerpt and feature a review from Michael Connolly, an Iraq War veteran. Jack Hughes covers the politics, Matt Zeller recounts the I-told-you-so nightmare of all nightmares, Frank Spring takes the broad historical view, and Jessie Daniels takes us back to the city where this all started.
Spend some time with this issue.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (forget the Alamo with the Meyerland area Democrats), read (Mark Updegrove on ranking presidents), watch (the batty Resident Alien), and listen to (Jungle’s Loving In Stereo).
But first, have I ever told you how Iraq got 100 tons of chemical weapons in 2002?
Reporting from The New York Times and the Washington Post on how our wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq got a bit squiffy—give me a break, I’m writing around the word “quagmire” here—shares a common problem of perspective. Fundamentally, we’re reading what an outside can decipher from documents and insider accounts, and from the outside an untrue assertion appears to be an untruth, a deception, a lie. Bush lied, and people died, the bumper sticker said. They knew, and they didn’t tell us. They are liars.
The assumption that those in power are out to fool us is born of Lincoln’s apocryphal aphorism, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” But what outsiders don’t get is how often insiders think they are telling the truth because they are fooling themselves.
What outsiders don’t get is how often insiders think they are telling the truth because they are fooling themselves.
In the room where it happens, political imperatives collide with educated guesses and interpretations of evidence. There is very little outright lying inside that room, just a whole lot of smart yet wildly imperfect and often morally compromised people doing what they think is right or at least what they’re told. No one sets out to make a hash of history. No one remembers that the best laid plans of mice and men lead askew howsoever laid they are with good intentions. We comfort ourselves that “they” lie, but it keeps happening, and as we’re living through history once again with an American Dunkirk, I want to know why this keeps happening.
There are places to look for the answer. We certainly have no shortage of source material. The problem is the fog of war. A veteran once told me any movie that makes battle look organized is fiction. Battle is chaos, and after reading To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by my friend Robert Draper, I think war planning might be, too.
The book describes a national security apparatus in a “post-intelligence era” in which “promiscuous speculation” and “the institutionalization of ‘outside-the-box’” thinking weaponized fear and imagination on equal footing with fact. “The catastrophic imagination,” as the Hungarian academic Frank Furedi put it, led to “the enthronement of ignorance” as national security leaders took what we didn’t know as seriously as what they did.
As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith said when weapons inspectors could not turn up any evidence of chemical or biological weapons, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Saddam Hussein couldn’t be trusted, so if he says that he destroyed his illegal weapons program in the ‘90s, then he obviously has them, and therefore by saying he doesn’t have what obviously exists, then he’s concealing them.
“Either he will come clean about his weapons,” said George W. Bush, “or there will be war.”
This absence-evidence loop-de-loop is what they told themselves in the room where it happened, according to Draper. “What these fatalistic assumptions set in motion was a high-stakes descent into circular reasoning,” he writes.
“What these fatalistic assumptions set in motion was a high-stakes descent into circular reasoning.”
Perhaps the best example of this circular reasoning in To Start a War came after Sen Dick Durbin asked for the current National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq. I mean, you’re asking us to authorize a war because Saddam has all these weapons, he told CIA Director George Tenet. So…. where’s the proof? And Tenet was like, dude, gimme three weeks.
An NIE “represents the consensus of the entire U.S. intelligence community,” writes Draper, who pegs the average time it takes to put one together anywhere from four months to over a year. The Senate had a vote to authorize the Iraq War in 19 days, which gave them enough time to summarize, not to scrutinize. “The evidentiary basis for going to war would thus be handed down in the manner of family lore, tall tales that tended to grow in the telling,” writes Draper, which is how Hussein ended up with 100 tons of chemical weapons.
The intelligence analysts crashing on the NIE had three imperatives: assume the worst about Iraq, they were going to war anyway, and the deadline was in 19 days. This was tricky when it came to Saddam’s chemical weapons, which he destroyed after not using them in the Gulf War after James Baker’s ruling in Fuck Around v. Find Out. Nothing had changed since then but the post-9/11 risk tolerance, which put analysts in a tough spot. If we’re going to war anyway because he has these weapons, how do we account for the possibility that he doesn’t?
If we’re going to war anyway because he has these weapons, how do we account for the possibility that he doesn’t?
John Landry, the CIA’s guy in charge of the chemical weapons section of the NIE, called Larry Fox, one of their top people on the subject.
“We need an estimate on the amount chemical weapons they have,” said Landry.
Fox thought about how much they estimated Saddam used to have, how fast chemical weapons degrade, and the circumstantial evidence that he was making more. He did everything but lick his finger to feel which direction the wind was blowing, but then again, he knew that.
“I’d say they have anywhere from zero to a thousand metric tons,” said Fox.
“Zero?” said Landry. “What do you mean, zero? Our assessment is that he has something.”
“Yes,” said Fox. “But there’s a 10% chance he has none.”
“That’s not very helpful for an assessment that says he has something.”
Fox got the message. When the NIE came out, the phrase “we don’t know” appeared 30 times, and 40% of its assessments had a rating of “low confidence,” including the possibilities that Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction, was planning covert attacks on the U.S. homeland, or was sharing chemical or biological weapons with al Qaeda. But the section on how much chemical weapons Iraq had contained the NIE’s “most statistically precise line,” writes Draper:
Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents—much of it added in the last year.
Or not, as it turned out, but nevertheless, that’s how Saddam Hussein went from as little as zero chemical weapons to—hey, presto!—a minimum of 100 tons with nothing more than a conversation, some quantum hypotheticals, and a bit of tapping on a keyboard. Fears gave rise to imagination that, turned into certainty, led to war. What we were told wasn’t the truth, but I’m not sure I’d call it lying.
From the outside, this all seemed obvious fake as the Bush administration shifted the pretext to an inevitable war regardless that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 or that weapons inspectors failed utterly to find any incriminating evidence. It was only on the inside of the war machine that the connections were made. They lied to themselves first and thought they were telling congress the truth. Showing how that went awry from the inside is the brilliance of Draper’s book.
It’s realpolitik according to Abbott and Costello.
This is how we get ourselves into such fine messes. It’s realpolitik according to Abbott and Costello. To Start a War is full of these stories of a nation being pulled into war by people who convinced themselves that because the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, then the evidence’s absence proved its existence.
The photograph above is the headstone of the patriarch and matriarch of the Texas Stanfords in the Stanford Cemetery in McClennan County, Texas. The Rev. Thomas Stanford dragged his family to central Texas from a pro-Union county in Arkansas to more friendly environs. We Stanfords would pop in and out from then on. A.J. Stanford left on a cattle drive to homestead in Montana or South Dakota; three generations later, I returned in a Volkswagen.
When we visited the Stanford Cemetery a few years ago, my sons and I took great amusement from the epitaph of the matriarch, Lemerles: “She hath done the best she could.” At first we snickered at the meager praise before, some time later, realizing that that was all any of us could hope for.
Now I’m not so sure I didn’t have it right the first time. When I read To Start a War, a quote from someone “involved in the production of the NIE” reminded me of my great-great-great grandmother Lemerles’ epitaph: "We had to do the best we could. The problem was, the best we could do sucked."
Jason Stanford is the NYT-best selling co-author of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this (or not)
Celebrating Christmas in August
Geeking out over OpenAI's Codex
Thinking about the White Lotus finale
Not having babies because of climate change
Not mourning the demise of “both sides” journalism
Braising chicken with coconut milk, tomato and ginger
Forgetting the Alamo with the Meyerland Area Democrats
What I’m reading
Reed Albergotti: “He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?” - What happened to this guy is such a weird mystery.
In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.
That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.
“Genuinely worrisome developments can seem ‘not so bad’ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia,” wrote Agre, who has a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an academic paper.
Carlos Sanchez: “Texas anti-vaxxers’ calls for personal freedom dismiss my nearly fatal bout with Covid” - Carlos very nearly became my only friend to die of COVID.
“You were pretty sick last year,” said a doctor at the press conference, a friend who had treated me when I was hospitalized for 10 days with Covid-19 last July. “I didn’t think you were going to make it. You almost died.”
Margaret Sullivan: “The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. The media spent two hours deciding whom to blame.” - Must-read media analysis from DC’s doyen.
If ever a big, breaking story demanded that the news media provide historical context and carefully avoid partisan blame, it’s the story of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Instead, what we largely got over the past few days was the all-too-familiar genre of “winners and losers” coverage. It’s coverage that tends to elevate and amplify punditry over news, and to assign long-lasting political ramifications to a still-developing situation.
Mark Updegrove: “Maybe Trump Wasn’t the Worst President Ever?” - Smart analysis about how presidents are ranked.
For Mr. Trump, whose administration was marked by chaos, discord and division — much of his own making — it may take longer for greater even-handedness to take hold. But will he prove, like Eisenhower and Reagan, to climb the list with time as his record inspires re-evaluation and, ultimately, absolution?
It’s not likely.
What I’m watching
I failed you, mi gente. What’s our rule about Glen Weldon? That’s right. He’s always right. And he liked Resident Alien, the sci-fi medical crime dramady that you can watch on Peacock. Did I listen? No. Do I regret it? Yes. Do I blame you all a little for not bringing this to my attention earlier? A little. Does this affect my enjoyment of this goofy show? Not at all.
What I’m listening to
Jungle’s latest album, Loving in Stereo, is really growing on me. Lotta danceable positivity here.
People, I cannot stop listening to Aerosmith’s “Cryin’” and day dreaming about using marching bands as backup.
Aimee Mann has a new album coming out. If “Suicide is Murder” is any indication, she is not at her most playful.
Just discovered Nas’ 2002 uplift, “I Can.”
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