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Don't Put the Blame for Iraq on Bush Alone

by Moisés Naím

Financial Times
June 2, 2004

Nothing, it would seem, could have stopped the Bush administration from pursuing its long-standing plans against Saddam Hussein. But placing responsibility for the Iraq debacle solely on George W. Bush's shoulders is too simple and even potentially dangerous - too simple because it blurs the responsibilities of others who contributed to an environment in which bad new ideas were embraced just as easily as good, proved ones were shed. It is also dangerous because the conditions that facilitated this environment, namely terrorism, will not disappear. Therefore it is important to learn that whatever the threat, no government should be afforded the latitude enjoyed by the Bush administration. The media - both reporters and commentators - are prime culprits here. The promise that democracy would spread from a liberated Iraq, for example, was as poorly scrutinised as the notion advanced by the administration that the Geneva conventions did not apply to the war on terror.

It is not just that intelligence agencies were too willing to confirm "facts" their political bosses wanted to hear. Many Democrats were too frightened of appearing "soft on terror" and thus signed political and military blank cheques to an administration prone to overdrafts. Blinded by partisanship, congressional Republicans were too subservient to the White House's wishes - even when these wishes contradicted longstanding Republican values such as fiscal conservatism. Fearing irrelevance, US diplomats were too quick to accept the notion that negotiated approaches on Iraq had run their course. Some journalists were so deferential to official sources that their reports seemed almost stenographic. Further facilitating Mr Bush's failures in Iraq was the climate of opinion created by gullible newspaper comment writers and ratings-hungry talk-show hosts. Even the normally vociferous lobby of non-governmental organisations was strangely restrained. Any government allocating multi-billion dollar contracts the way the Bush administration did in Iraq would normally draw the wrath of Transparency International and other anti-corruption organisations. But in this case, the usually loud denunciations of these groups became almost whispers. Human rights groups, while expressing concern over detainees at Guantanamo Bay and some aspects of the war, appeared torn and reticent over an initiative aimed at ousting a genocidal torturer. It took the horror of torture in Abu Ghraib prison finally to eliminate such uncharacteristic lethargy.

International leaders who joined the US-led coalition were either too timid or ineffective in steering the Bush administration away from questionable decisions. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK's former ambassador to the United Nations, recently noted that "the damage to world diplomacy if America went solo was too awful to contemplate". Alas, the support of Tony Blair, British prime minister, for Mr Bush did not render the damage to international diplomacy any less awful.

Even leaders who confronted Mr Bush did so in ways that only emboldened US actions. Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder opposed Mr Bush so clumsily and in such blatant pursuit of narrow political interests that their objections to the war became too easy to ridicule and ignore. The same goes for Arab states and the Arab League in particular, whose calls for immediate elections in Iraq displayed a sudden democratic fervour that the group had never applied to any of its members.

But perhaps the ultimate enabler were the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. In the US, the shock and pain caused by the attacks fed the widespread notion that "business as usual" in American foreign policy was no longer an option. They also led to the renouncing of fundamental principles that never should have been abandoned. Many basic rights, including safeguards against indefinite detention without charges, were cast aside as obsolete notions for a nation fighting a global war on terror.

But neither the evildoers nor the war on terrorism will go away. What needs to go is the tragic alchemy that allows time-tested principles to be too easily discarded in favour of bad ideas. New approaches are surely needed. But they should not be embraced at the expense of the very principles that make wars worth fighting.