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MARCH 21, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Twenty Years On: The

**Prospect**and the Iraq War

Many liberal publications supported invading Iraq. We didn't.

It's "What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?" week for American
journalists and pundits. The 20th anniversary of our calamitous
misadventure in Iraq has provided the occasion for writers to revisit
and in some cases rethink the support or opposition to the looming
invasion that they argued for on the eve of George W. Bush's
"preemptive" war.

Support for the invasion extended well beyond the neocons, of course,
winning nearly unanimous backing from such centrist and center-left
publications as

**The Washington Post**,

**The New Republic**(which at that point was effectively neocon in
foreign-policy matters, despite John Judis's opposition),

**The**

**New York Times**, and even

**The New Yorker**(despite Rick Hertzberg's opposition).

Not so at the

**Prospect**. On the eve of the September 2022 congressional vote to
authorize the Bush administration to go to war if it so chose (Bush
consigliere Karl Rove wanted to force the Democrats to go on record
before the November midterms),

****we ran an editorial urging Democrats to vote no. The

**Prospect** doesn't actually do editorials, but as the article was
co-authored and signed by both our co-editors, Bob Kuttner and Paul
Starr, and by me (then the executive editor), it came closer to being an
editorial than anything we've ever run.

We Can't Do This Without You
<[link removed]>

Here's the link <[link removed]>.
And here are some excerpts from our argument. Going to war, we wrote:

threatens to deflect our efforts from the struggle against terrorism,
jeopardize cooperation from our allies, intensify hostility in the Arab
world, and entangle us in further conflicts in the region.

The administration has made clear its determination to remove the Iraqi
regime and has issued a new statement of strategic doctrine that calls
for preemptive strikes against hostile regimes. Driven by short-term
political interests, the United States may well commit itself not just
to a second war in the Persian Gulf but to a radically changed
relationship with the world without a full debate about the long-run
implications of what we are doing.

The most eager advocates of war have suggested that the road to Baghdad
will be easy: The superiority of American forces will be overwhelming,
much of the Iraqi army may not fight and the Iraqi people will welcome
liberation from a tyrant. No doubt American forces will prevail; that is
not the question.

But if the fighting turns ugly and there are large numbers of civilian
casualties-if we have to level the very cities we say we are
liberating-American legitimacy in the eyes of the world and of the
Iraqi people will be shot. In making war against Iraq, Bush is risking
not just American lives but America's good name. It is all well and
good to say that we are invading Iraq to liberate it, but that is not
the way it looks to people elsewhere. If we run into trouble, there will
be little sympathy for us.

Once American forces defeat Hussein's army and his Baath party, we
will have eliminated the Iraqi state's capacity to maintain control of
the country and defend itself (against, for example, Iran). Because
effective state authority cannot be manufactured overnight, the American
military will have to supply it. We will have to install and defend a
new government and, in the process, we are likely to enmesh ourselves in
Iraq's ethnic and religious conflicts. Even groups that don't like
Hussein, such as the Shiites in the south, may not accept the regime we
establish.

Striking first against terrorists is plain common sense, but that is
mostly a matter for intelligence agencies and police work, not the
military. Preemptive war against the vaguely defined category of "rogue
states" is another matter. Not only does preemption violate the UN
Charter and set a dangerous precedent for other countries, it also risks
triggering wars we might otherwise avoid.

We didn't stop there. The

**Prospect** also convened a public debate in the nation's capital
before the war began, featuring Bob Kuttner and "third-way" Democrat
Bill Galston arguing against, while

**The New Republic**'s Jon Chait and someone else I don't remember
argued for. (I remember Chait because he expressed absolute certainty
that we'd find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and all but scolded
those of us who doubted that.) And since TNR

****didn't let its anti-neocon staff writer John Judis write on
foreign policy, the

**Prospect** gave him a foreign-policy column.

Here's a link
<[link removed]>
to the

**Prospect**'s yearslong coverage of the issue, beginning with our
immediate post-9/11 issue, and including a range of articles dealing
with the horrendous aftermath of the decision to go to war in Iraq. I
particularly commend the 2005 piece by Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias
demolishing the liberal hawks' backtracking argument that the invasion
was a fine idea, but undermined by the incompetence of the Bush
administration. It wasn't, wrote Sam and Matt, a fine idea.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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