Six years later, we still aren’t debating the Iraq war honestly

By Peter Feaver

It is the 6th anniversary of the opening salvo in Operation Iraqi Freedom. There are lots of questions raised by the war, but I want to focus on a question that may seem academic but is in fact closer to the quintessence of the policymaker’s challenge than any other: what would the world have looked like if President Bush had not decided to reenergize the challenge to Hussein which led to the Iraq war?

That is a vitally important question from a policymaking perspective, because it gets to the heart of the policymaker’s conundrum: deciding what to do under conditions of imperfect information and great uncertainty (think our current situation in Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even Iraq, still). Such decisions require thinking systematically about alternative scenarios. This kind of counter-factual analysis can quickly spin out of control, so I will stick to things we can know with some moderate degree of confidence. I start the clock not in March 2003, but whenever the Bush team decided to focus on Iraq, sometime back in 2002 (or earlier, if Woodward’s account is accurate).

What would be different? We might not, of course, have paid the horrific costs of the Iraq war — the human and financial toll. (I say "might not" instead of "would not" because the unfolding of other decision-paths might have led us back to an Iraq confrontation). Our relations with our allies might be less strained (though not free from strain since the conventional wisdom among the allies was hardening against the Afghan war well before Iraq was on the table). I am even willing to consider the possibility that we might have made far more advances against Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda/Taliban leaders in Afghanistan — though I think the left-wing blogosphere greatly exaggerates this case. And our armed forces would be considerably less strained.

Few people in the anti-Iraq war faction honestly assess the other side of the ledger. The Iraq sanctions, which were collapsing, would likely have totally collapsed and this, the Duelfer Report makes clear, would likely mean that Iraq’s WMD program would have accelerated (and so, ironically, would have started to actually match the degree of threat claimed by the Bush administration and Congressional Democrats and every other intelligence service).

We would be even more uncertain about the true condition of Iraq’s arsenal because the UN inspection regime would have remained collapsed (it was the Bush push for war that revived inspections), and we certainly would not have the unfettered access to Hussein and the Iraqi military-industrial complex that the war granted us. The Libyan WMD program would likely still be a menace — for while the negotiations that produced the Libyan deal preceded the Iraq war, it is simply implausible that they would have succeeded absent the coercive impact of the Iraq war example. The Iranian nuclear program would likely have culminated, because the 2007 NIE suggests that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003 "primarily in response to international pressure," and the only international pressure that was noteworthy was the toppling of the Iraq regime. The flowering of democracy in harsh soil — the Cedar Revolution and the Color Revolutions — I think would likely not have happened, though I am willing to hear a plausible case to the contrary.

Other events and non-events would probably have unfolded much as they did. We would still face the international financial crisis we face today; I have not read a plausible and persuasive account that blames this on the Iraq war. And I think the Bush administration also likely would have kept up all the other Global War on Terrorism activities that contributed to the surprising success of no further successful al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. homeland.

That is not a complete reckoning, of course, but it begins the kind of analysis that is missing in so much of the commentary on the Iraq war. I believe reasonable people can look at that ledger (or a more complete version of it) and conclude that the Iraq war was not worth it. I also believe reasonable people can look at that ledger and conclude that the Iraq war was a defensible gamble or even the right decision. However, I do not think that reasonable people can seriously look at that ledger and conclude, as so much of the angry-shout part of the commentariat does, that all of the evidence stacks up on only one side of the balance sheet.

Six years into this long war, it is high time we started having an honest debate about it, and that honesty requires a great deal more humility, on both sides of the debate, about the decisions that were made and the paths that were not taken.