How Operation Iraqi Freedom has made me more dovish — but not that much more dovish

Earlier in the week I blogged about Operation Iraqi Freedom’s effect on the international system (not much) and its effect on American foreign policy (pretty significant).  Moving from the systemic to the domestic to the individual level, this last Iraqi retrospective post asks a more solipsistic question.  How has Operation Iraqi Freedom affected me as a foreign policy writer? 

Ten years ago I supported the decision to invade Iraq.  If you’re looking for another of the many apologies that have been penned this week, don’t bother.  I offered my Iraq apology six years ago.  Looking back, I’m just grateful that I wasn’t all that influential a foreign policy pundit back in the day. 

What gnaws at me is why my analytical assessment was so wrong.  I can’t really blame this on Beltway groupthink.  Hell, at the University of Chicago, two of the leading anti-war proponents were just a floor below my office.  As I was blogging during the debates in the run-up to the war, I’d like to thjink I engaged critics frequently and in depth. 

After reading some of the self-reflections this week, however, I’m beginning to  think that my flaw was generational in nature.  John B. Judis wrote something interesting on this earlier in the week on why he was so dubious about Operation Iraq Freedom: 

I opposed the war, and didn’t listen to those who claimed to have “inside information” probably because I had come of age politically during the Vietnam War and had learned then not to trust government justifications for war. I had backed the first Bush administration’s Gulf War, but precisely because of its limited aims. Ditto the Clinton administration intervention in Kosovo. George W. Bush’s aims in Iraq were similar to American aims in South Vietnam. During those months leading up to the war, I kept having déjà vu experiences, which failed to interest my colleagues. Still, I wavered after Colin Powell’s thoroughly deceptive speech at the United Nations in February 2003, where he unveiled what he claimed was evidence of Iraqi nuclear preparations. I had to have an old friend from the anti-war days remind me again of the arguments against an invasion.

Contrast this with Operation Iraqi Freedom supporter Jonathan Chait’s recollections: 

The Gulf War took place during my freshman year in college. It was the first major American war since Vietnam, and the legacy of Vietnam cast a heavy shadow — the news was filled with dire warnings of bloody warfare, tens of thousands of U.S. deaths, uprisings across the Middle East. None of it happened. And again, through the nineties, the United States intervened in the Balkans twice under Bill Clinton, saving countless lives and disproving the fears of the skeptics, which had grown weaker but remained.

These events had conditioned me to trust the hawks, or at least, the better informed hawks. They also conditioned me unconsciously to regard wars through this frame, as relatively fast attacks without a heavy occupation phase. People tend to think the next war will be somewhat like the last. That is a failing I will try to avoid again.

Age-wise, I’m a contemporary of Chait’s and a generation younger than Judis.  Ironically, for all the Gen-Xer tropes about irony and cynicism, the foreign policy arc of our generation looked pretty damn optimistic until March 2003.  Indeed, reading the above paragraphs I can recall my attitudes about the use of force in 2002 and 2003.  America’s use of force during the 1990s — and, at the time, Operation Enduring Freedom — had been limited in scope and pretty efficient in its execution.  Furthermore, the foreign policy principals who were planning the Second Gulf War had run the first one, which, again, had gone pretty well.  So yes, I think I had a generational bias — I badly overestimated the capacities of George W. Bush’s national security and foreign policy hands. 

How does this affect my thinking about the use of force now?  I think so, but in a limited way.  I’m more leery of arguments that the overwhelming use of force will change things for the better in places like Syria or Iran.  I’m extremely leery about the creeping militarization of American foreign policy.  I think to read people I disagree with on policy — even, say, the Leveretts — with a more generous eye than I did a decade ago, because I’m less sure I’m right.   

That said, I was by and large supportive of U.S. actions in Libya, and I’ve been skeptical about the constant warnings from 2006 onwards that the United States is being pulled inexorably into a war with Iran.  So I suppose that some of that nineties optimism still resides within me about the use of force as an adjunct to American foreign policy. 

[Lest one think I’m doing this to maintain my "viability" for a foreign policy position in the federal government, let me assure you that for very good personal and professional  reasons, there is no way I’ll ever be serving the U.S. government in an foreign policy capacity in the future.  Furthermore, I’ve got about as secure a sinecure as I can find in the academy.  No, the views expressed here have nothing to do with any future career aspirations.]

In this, I’m more like Chait and less like the millenial generation that follows me.  Indeed, as Chait observed: 

I get the sense that their foreign policy worldview is dominated by the Iraq War in the same way the Boomer generation is dominated by Vietnam and the generation before them by World War II. The formative event of their adulthood is the reference point for all future conflict….

And I think if you look at the commentary leading up to the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya, you see the same pattern asserting itself. Anti-interventionists were treating it as Iraq redux, reprising every argument they wish they could have made in 2003. But Libya was not Iraq. I’d argue it was a success — not a perfect success, but a superior alternative to standing by as tens of thousands of people were massacred.

There’s hard data that the millenial generation thinks about American foreign policy differently — and given their formative experiences, I can’t say that I blame them.  Indeed, it’s just punishment for the neoconservatives that they bungled Iraq so badly that their intellectual project might die out Children of Me
n-style because they’re producing fewer and fewer young neoconservatives.  Still, while this worldview might prevent another Iraq, I do wonder whether it also constrains more limited military actions that do yield foreign polivcy gains. 

I’m definitely more risk-averse about the use of force than I used to be.  And I hope I’m more generous with those who oppose the use of force as a foreign policy tool than I was a decade ago.  Still, going forward, I’m still probably more hawkish than the median foreign policy wonk of the millenial generation.  Which, I confess, is a very weird place to be ten years after Iraq.