I follow what Tom Friedman of the New York Times, Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post and Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek write. All three are very intelligent, educated in foreign policy and politically moderate to liberal. All three supported the US preemptive war on Iraq. All three still do.
However, as a Hoagland column in today’s Albuquerque Journal reminds me, none of them objects to the lack of democracy in the formulation of the Iraq policy.
Hoagland writes, "Americans went to war in Iraq and then engaged in a retroactive argument about the wisdom and justification of what they had done as the unexpected costs of occupation and the flaw’s in the Administration’s original calculations about weapons of mass destruction became apparent."
Wow! No suggestion that the White House misled the Congress and the public in the buildup to war. No mention of White House reliance on faulty intelligence regarding WMD. Not a hint that the White House pursued this war by way of a conscious strategy of linking Iraq to alQaeda and 9/11/01. (President Bush continued to conflate Iraq and the 9/11/01 crime in his recent ABC-TV interview.)
Hoagland isn’t bothered by the possibility Americans were lied into a war. Nor does he wonder why the costs of occupation" were "unexpected."
He goes on to say,"Freeing Iraqis from a horrible tyranny that was a major force in destabilizing the Middle East was an appropriate use of American power…"
Talk about begging the question! If the aim was "freeing Iraqis," why not say so? In the beginning. (Actually, Hoagland has himself written that the war wasn’t so simple, but part of a complex, geo-political scheme.) Secondly, was Hussein’s tyranny "a major force in destabilizing the Middle East"? As major or moreso than the Saudi, Iranian, Syrian and Pakistani tyrannies? Prove it.
Thirdly, if that regime change was "an appropriate use" of our power, which regime is next?
But my concern here is how we make foreign policy, undemocratically.
In fairness, American history is all about that. The White House, State Department and corporate interests traditionally call the shots. Think "Spanish Civil War." Think "Panama Canal." Think "World War I." Think "Vietnam." (Would we have intervened in Indochina if JFK, LBJ or Nixon had asked the American people, "Should we put our young soldiers in harm’s way in order to shoulder France’s colonial burden"?)
Fact is that in our democracy, we leave the war decisions – and the death of trusting young Americans as well as innocent foreign civilians - to the Establishment.
You’d think Tom Friedman, Jim Hoagland and Fareed Zakaria might write about that. But unless I have missed something, you’d be wrong.