I WAS AN EARLY supporter of the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Since 2003, my firsthand experiences in Iraq have shaken my faith in large-scale demonstrations of military power on land, but I cannot disavow my earlier support, because it was also based on firsthand experiences in Iraq.
To know a totalitarian regime abstractly is different from knowing it intimately. Iraq in the 1980s was so terrifying that going to Damascus from Baghdad was like coming up for liberal humanist air. People talked furtively in Syria; in Iraq, nobody breathed a syllable of opposition. The whole country was like an illuminated prison yard. I was emotionally affected. Recent events make it easy to forget just how bad Iraq was back then.
Like so many others, I believed Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and that, given the fact of his crimes against humanity, invading Iraq constituted a moral intervention of the first order. In the lead-up to the war, I wrote and said as much in different forums, best summed up in a cover story in the New Republic, "The Liberal Case for War: Saddam Is Worse Than Slobo."
Fearful of chaos, I preferred the emergence of a benevolent dictator along the lines of Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf or Egypt's Hosni Mubarak as a post-invasion, transitional figure. But my correct assumption about the danger of anarchy does not trump my wrong assumption that the invasion would lead to overall good results within a reasonable period of time. The initial preference for an enlightened despot was a hope, not a plan, because the invasion was, in any case, going to lead to a fast-moving, hard-to-steer situation.
I was partial to the prevailing wisdom. Before 9/11, maintaining the "no-fly" zone over Iraq was costing a considerable amount. It was a significant distraction for the U.S. military, and it seemed to have no end in sight. Hussein's obstruction of the work of United Nations weapons inspectors over the years indicated a presumption of guilt, especially as there were weapons' stockpiles unaccounted for, and he already had a record of using them. After 9/11, no chances could be taken.
I expected, as should anyone who supports going to war, that there would be a certain amount of bureaucratic incompetence in executing the invasion. The conflict in Kosovo in 1999 was marked by such a level of incompetence, with a NATO alliance that assumed that target lists were a legitimate subject for diplomatic committees. Still, the Clinton administration maintained a reasonable amount of political-military unity at the top, and the State and Defense departments were not at each other's throats.
