My Iraq mistake
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By Matt Miller
Thursday, September 2, 2010
My fellow Americans: I'm a pundit, not a president, but since it's a moment for taking stock of America's role in Iraq, I want to remind you that I blew it.
I supported the war in 2003 because I thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Along with Ken Pollack, the former Clinton national security council staffer, whose 2002 book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," was influential at the time, I believed a nuclear-armed Hussein was both inevitable and intolerable.
A lot of people -- from Bill Clinton to the German and Israeli intelligence services -- believed the same thing. But I'm skeptical of what people claim to "know" in many other areas of public life. I wasn't skeptical enough about this. I argued back then about the risks of inaction outweighing the risks of action. When I look over those columns today, from the distance of nearly eight years, they seem reasonable and serious.
Except, of course, that their premise was utterly wrong. If I'd known beforehand that Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, I would not have supported the war. I don't believe President Bush misled the country about these facts, because many other sources held the same view of Hussein's capabilities. (I don't believe Colin Powell was intentionally misleading anyone at the United Nations either, but it turned out not to be his finest hour.)
I've been struggling with what my mistake means ever since. When he was at the center of events in the Clinton years, Bob Rubin spoke often about what he called "probabilistic reasoning." You do the best you can to assign rough probabilities to the complex scenarios you face, he said, and to the likely outcomes of decisions -- and then make your call as best you can. His corollary was that you couldn't judge the quality of a decision after the fact, when more became known. You could only judge the quality of a decision based on the information available at the time.
This used to strike me as sound. I don't think so now. It may not be "fair," but, as political leaders know better than most, the quality of decisions, in every way that matters, turn on their outcome. That's why it's better to be lucky than smart. There's something depressing about the futility of human reason in all this, but also something undeniable.
“That's why it's better to be lucky than smart.”
It seems as if you’ve learned nothing. Still arrogant, still wrong. That’s your mea culpa? I used to listen to your arguments with Arianna Huffington and Robert Scheer in 2002 and 2003 and there was more to the debates than just weapons of mass destruction. The facts that Iraq wasn’t a threat and didn’t attack us were key reasons not to start an aggressive war. The reasons Cheney gave – in 1994 - for not going all the way in Bagdad during the first Iraq War in 1991, still held true. And those reasons, plus many others, were obvious to those you like to call, lucky.
The UN inspectors were searching for weapons of mass destruction before the war began and were finding none. The fact that we still went in anyway should have been a dead give-a-way to anyone not completely invested in coming to the wrong conclusion. WMD’s were a ruse and it should have been obvious to everyone. That you bought the ruse doesn’t prove that your side was smart, any more than it proves the majority of the world was lucky in opposing the war.
There were plenty of clues to anyone who looked. Those aluminum tubes that the Energy Department said would not work in a centrifuge. The fact that the Bush Administration pushed every falsehood it could about Iraq in order to get support for war, should have set off warning bells to all. Everyone knew Iraq was not involved in the 9-11 attacks. Everyone knew that the Congo was a much worse humanitarian disaster than Iraq, so it couldn’t have been about being compassionate. Everyone knew Iraq’s strength had been diminished after the sanctions, so it couldn’t be about stopping the next Hitler. The changing reasons week to week or month to month for going in were an alarm to those who listened. As one reason was knocked down, another was brought out. The independent press and the international press got it right. Amy Goodman did real reporting on the upcoming war on a weekly basis. Those news stories were available to anyone with a computer. How could any competent journalist get it so wrong?
I’m glad you’re not as confident as you once were, you shouldn’t be. I’m also glad you are chastened and have admitted a mistake. But until you can give credit to those who were right, and admit that the signs for a looming disaster were there for all to see – you still have a way to go.
On edit:
What’s most important is that you and others in the media, who were wrong, need to take away all of the lessons from this war, no matter how hard they are to swallow. Otherwise, it will happen again.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/01/matt-millers-iraq-mistake_n_702363.html#comments
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