During this presidential campaign, one consistent Republican mantra has been that "if Kerry had been President, Saddam would still be in power and blah, blah, blah...." And this got me thinking about counterfactuals, about alternative histories - what might have plausibly happened if the initial conditions had been different.
Naturally I turned to the web, but I was disappointed with what I'd found. For example, Ed Driscoll links to several pre-9/11 alternative scenarios, all of which are equally implausible to anyone that has read Richard Clarke's book. Most of the other uses of the term (or its cognate "alternate history") seem to involve alternative accounts or interpretations of what actually happened. (The works of Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore are often described in this way.)
So what kind of alternative am I thinking about? Well, consider a world in which two little things are changed. First, in the summer of 2001, Tony Blair has a heart attack. This is plausible; we know today of his heart problems. His doctors advise him to retire, and he hands over to Gordon Brown. Second, imagine that Project Anaconda had been blown open in the press with Rumsfeld's fingerprints all over it. (Anaconda really happened; it was a horribly botched operation in Afghanistan in which the military chain of command broke down completely, resulting in dozens of US Army fatalities. See Hersh's Chain of Command.)
With these changes, let's run the movie forward. 9/11 happens, and coalition forces hit Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Anaconda blows up, and although Rumsfeld doesn't resign, his relationship with the military leadership is fatally poisoned.
Now Bush and his team begin to plan for Iraq, as described in Woodward's Plan of Attack. But there's a hitch. Unlike Blair, Gordon Brown understands the caveats and codicils to the various intelligence reports, and he asks the hard questions. Hearing only unsatisfactory answers, he declines to offer Bush his unconditional support. Bush and Rumsfeld are willing to push ahead without Britain, but now Powell reaches his limit. A coalition without a single permanent member of the UN Security Council other than the USA has no credibility, he says; the damage to America's standing in the world from unilateral action would be irreparable. It's a resigning matter. Meanwhile Rumsfeld is challenged from another quarter: the Joint Chiefs refuse to sign off on a plan for military operations without adequate supplies, body armor, and training.
Faced with these obstacles, Bush realizes that he can no longer push for an early invasion of Iraq... [to be continued]
This feels like an interesting counterfactual. Would Bush have taken the time to build a coalition? What if Blix had had a year to demonstrate that there were no WMDs? How might Bush have approached the questions of Iran, of the Palestinians? Would Saddam have resigned and fled in the face of an inexorable build-up with full UN support? Fascinating to speculate.....
It wasn't "Project Anaconda." It was "Operation Anaconda." And it'd be best for you not to believe a single word Seymour Hersch says about it. After all, he's the reporter who swears, up and down, to this very day, that the US used more AC-130 gunships in Afghanistan than we actually have in our arsenal.
And the answer to your fundamental question is no, things would not have turned out differently. You seem to be under the impression that the United States invade Iraq on a whim, or that the casus belli was weak. Neither of these things is true. Any president who didn't have his head buried firmly in the sand would have exercised military force to end the terrorist regime in Iraq.
Posted by: Jeff Harrell at October 18, 2004 06:31 PMFirst, my error - Operation Anaconda, not Project Anaconda. Second, Hersh mentions in his book that he'd got the number of AC-130's wrong in the original article. Third, the reason that Hersh emphasizes Operation Anaconda is because General Wesley Clarke made a really big deal of it, including the reverberations that it caused throughout the Pentagon.
Finally, let's look at the last sentence: "Any president who didn't have his head buried firmly in the sand would have exercised military force to end the terrorist regime in Iraq." First, Iraq was not a terrorist regime, nor did it have a record of sponsoring terrorism. Yes, Saddam made a few gestures to appease the religious hotheads who might otherwise have fomented unrest under Iranian sponsorship, but otherwise he rebuffed overtures by terrorist groups like Hamas. Second, even if (BIG IF) the right thing to do was to remove Saddam, there was no reason to do it in that stupid way at that stupid time. There was no planning, no sense of reality. (See http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9927782.htm for the latest on this.) Bush could easily have waited for 12 months, which would have given him time to build a real coalition, sort out the Turkish issue, do some real planning, discover some of the intelligence blunders, and avoid the comprehensive fuck-up that he has perpetrated. Reckless impatience, even in a good cause, is not a virtue. In a bad cause, it's criminal.
Posted by: Geoff Arnold at October 18, 2004 09:35 PM